Writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford shot the new film "Test Pattern," now available for streaming through Kino Marquee, in Austin, Texas, and she currently lives in West Philadelphia. But she misses Arkansas.
"I was born in White County. My dad was a student at Harding University at the time. I lived at the Harding campus for the first year and a half of my life. My entire extended family lives in and just outside of Little Rock. My mom was born and raised in Wrightsville. My grandfather and grandmother had a church, Faith Temple (Full Gospel Deliverance Center), that is on Broadway in Little Rock. My uncle (Dwayne Lindsey) now is the head preacher there. I'm deeply rooted in Arkansas, which makes speaking to you more special to me," she says by phone.
If she happily recalls Arkansas over the phone, "Test Pattern" deals candidly with the delicate and challenging subject of rape. Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) has just met a goofy but likable white tattoo artist named Evan (Will Brill) and is starting a budding romance with him. Her life is upended after a girl's night out leads to a stranger assaulting her.
In many previous films on the subject, sexual assault is often depicted like something out of a horror film. In "Test Pattern," the incident is only tangentially depicted, and the aftermath is disorienting. It's almost like waking from anesthesia after a painful surgery.
"I wanted to be as true to trauma as I possibly could and authentic to the experience for the victim at hand. That is what it feels like," Ford says. "When sexual violence is depicted onscreen, it tends to be over-the-top and excessive, in my opinion, because it's trying to convince people who have not experienced it that it's bad. I think it's too much. I also think there's an entertainment and shock value that does not sit well with me. I really, really tried my best to be restrained and tried to be true to the experience to PTSD effectively."
Ford's instincts seem to work. She won Best Narrative Feature at the New Orleans Film Festival, and "Test Pattern" currently has an approval rating of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. In one sequence, Renesha struggles to fill out an endless series of hospital forms while jaunty classical music plays in the background. Instead of filling a viewer with horror, there's a disturbing sense of cognitive dissonance.
"To be completely honest, it's definitely my point of view. That's how I see most of my life. One of my biggest nemeses in the world is cognitive dissonance in general. I was thinking about how absurd this situation was," she explains.
"They've been going to different hospitals. They've been doing this all day to the point where (Renesha and Evan) don't even have to communicate what to do next. It's almost like a rehearsed dance. It's a waltz, the lightness of (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's) 'Waltz of the Flowers' and the repetition. It's a piece that we all know. It feels just as mundane and jarring. It's quite polarizing. A lot of people hate it. Um, and I definitely knew I was taking a risk, but it was very consistent with what I was trying to say about this process."
The incident also takes a toll on Evan who can't understand why the two have to play a warped game of musical chairs to find a clinic with nurses qualified to administer a rape kit.
"I kept giving Will a pie chart. 'It's 35% relief that she's back, 9% insecurity because you don't know what fully happened, 10% this.' There are many competing factors that affect or cloud our decision making at any point, especially under stress. This guy does love her, but he's not fully present in mind to be able give himself to consider her. He can't hear her because he's so caught up in his own stuff," she explains.
"It's the same thing with Renesha. She's a Black woman who has her own mistrust of the institutions that are supposed to protect her. A lot of people asked me why I set it in Austin. I spent some time in Austin, but I've spent some time in two states (Missouri and Arkansas) that have some pretty crazy policies about women's sexual health and bodily autonomy."
In the film, Renesha also briefly discusses the murder of Botham Jean, a St. Lucia-born Harding alumnus who was shot and killed by off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger who mistook his apartment for her own. The accountant was only 26 years old.
"He wasn't born in America," she recalls. "Harding has such a great reputation for bringing in immigrants of color. I did a summer program at Harding when I was 16 years old. A lot of the people I interacted with were the first people I ever met who were also Black and not from America. Searcy is an interesting town in that respect, and Botham Jean's death is deeply, deeply tragic. A part of why I wanted to make the movie is because of my deep sadness and frustration with the way Black bodies are treated in America."
One intriguing aspect of "Test Pattern" is that the movie has a very different tone during its first act. If you were to end the movie before the fateful girl's night out, it plays like a romantic comedy. Ford says that's intentional.
"I love romantic comedies," she admits. "I'm not stuck up when it comes to genres and films. I love all things. One of my absolute favorite movies in the entire world is 'You've Got Mail.' It was fun for me to be able to create some of that."