Scene One: Director, Writer, Producer Damon Cardasis
Where did the idea forSaturday Church come from? Was it something that you’d been planning for a long while? I ask that because of how personal the characters seemed to be, you really get a sense of who they are, like you knew them rather than them being a pastiche. It’s based on a program at a church in the West
Village here in New York called St. Luke in the Fields that I had volunteered at for a while. My mother is actually an episcopal priest in the Bronx and she has a church that is very liberal and though I know it’s not many people’s relationship in the LGBTQ community, my experience was a good one. She told me about her friend’s church that had a Saturday program for LGBTQ youth from the Christopher Pier (the famed West Village cruising area) and the surrounding areas that I really should check out. I did and was so blown away by the program that I volunteered there for a while. I got to know their social worker, who was amazing and essentially, the program was what you see in the movie. The kids would come in off the streets and they had a safe space to get food, to get social services and legal counseling, with a store
CHURCH
where they could get free clothing. The cafeteria where this all took place was a big gymnasium and there the kids would have a place to sort of perform and vogue—they’d have little competitions and things like that—really it was a place to be free to just be themselves. I was so inspired by them and I was just blown away by hearing their stories. As far as the performative element, I always knew
I liked magical realism and this young boy sort of escaping his dark reality in search of beauty. When I saw the vogueing and all the performing they did, it sort of just clicked for me. One of the things that came to me as I was watching and researching it, was that there are so many nods to other stories. It’s in some ways a modern take on theCinderella tale. I realized it when we were about to enter preproduction when we were reading it again and one of the producers said, “You realize you’ve written a fairy tale, right?” Then my boyfriend also said, “You realize you just wrote Cinderella, right?” It was not intentional, but I think because all those fairy tales are so deeply ingrained, it ended up becoming that.
I think in the end it was better not to know that
going in, because if you go in to something like this thinking you’re going to turn it into a modern Cinderella sort of Paris is Burning musical, I’m not sure it would have worked. I honestly went into it blindly and came out realizing it was a Cinderella story: The evil stepmother comes in and he goes to a ball and falls in love with a prince…It has a similar structure, which I think is interesting. As it progressed, I was hoping that for people
who aren’t familiar with this world or community, there might be a grounding and that they would feel safe in this structure. Even though they’re being introduced to different characters and in a different world, there is a familiarity to the experience of it. How you tell the story is significant, especially because of the way you portray trans characters. You don’t fall back on caricatures or resort to mocking parodies, as often is the case. There is humor in the film and yet these kids are all real, human characters. It was so important to me that it wasn’t exploitive
or felt voyeuristic in any way. For me, it’s a human story first and foremost—whatever their gender or
JANUARY 2018 JANUARY 2018 | | RAGE monthly monthly 27
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