Victoria writer-director Ana de Lara was a confident athlete back in her day, one who excelled in a variety of sports.
Basketball was always one of her favourites, and she dreamed of being the first woman to play in the NBA. She was short, by her own admission, but she was quick, and was a good ball handler.
“When I was growing up, we had a basketball court across from our house, and there would be nightly games,” said de Lara, adding she never really played until she went to Northridge Elementary school in the Colquitz area. “I was probably in Grade 5. At some point, I just figured out I could play. And from that point on, my dream was to be the first girl in the NBA.”
Her mother, who was born and raised in the Philippines, cared little for what de Lara could do on the court, and tried to dissuade her daughter from pursuing athletics. “Women are not supposed to play sports [in Filipino culture]. It is very traditional.”
De Lara rebelled, and continued to play sports year-round, which made her mother resort to scare tactics to curb such activities once and for all. She told de Lara that if she continued playing sports, she was going to turn into a boy. “I honestly thought I was going to grow a penis,” said de Lara, laughing at the memory.
At the time, de Lara was a grade-schooler who was prone to taking her mother’s word as gospel. But when the penis didn’t materialize, she knew her mother was lying. But why did she feel the need to lie?
That was a question de Lara, 54, attempted to answer with her new short film, Good Girls Don’t, which premières at 11:30 tonight on CBC’s Canadian Reflections program.
The penis story, much like de Lara’s desire to play basketball professionally, are key aspects of de Lara’s semi-fictional film about a Filipina-Canadian hardwood hopeful — 10-year-old Marilou, played to perfection by Vancouver actor Evryle Ebora. Jesus also makes a cameo, which adds a surreal touch, but the overall tone of the 13-minute Good Girls Don’t is more heartfelt than humorous.
De Lara entered the performing arts after her NBA dream fizzled out. She started out as an actor, and had NBA-like aspirations for her stage and screen career. “That was sort of my dream, but when I came out of theatre school in the late ’80s, I discovered that there weren’t really a lot of opportunities for people of colour.”
She landed a variety of small acting jobs in Canada and the U.S. before hitting a wall around the mid-1990s. Her résumé has a gap of about 10 years when she didn’t do much on the acting front.
De Lara battled an aggressive form of lupus when she was 25, and stepped out of the limelight to raise her daughter around the same time, before things began looking up. After moving back to Victoria from Los Angeles in 2011, she took a job teaching improv. De Lara eventually turned to directing at 40.
“The first films that I made ended up winning some awards, I think that sort of encouraged me to sort of say: ‘Hey, people like what you’re doing.’ But it’s one of those things. The arts is kind of funny, because it’s not like a regular job, where you can actually make a living at it.”
She moved into her current role as a writer-director-producer after winning a pitch competition at the Whistler Film Festival in 2016. She competed before a live audience against four other filmmaking hopefuls, eventually securing in-kind funding for what would go on to become Good Girls Don’t. “The award gave me a bit of cash, but the most valuable thing was in-kind services. With the prestige of the [MPPIA Short Film Award], people wanted to work on the film. My production designer, for example, worked with the art director on Deadpool, so I had a crew of people who worked at a higher level.”
An in-progress cut was screened to strong reviews at the Whistler Film Festival in 2017, but de Lara (whose father, Godofredo Bartulabac, was dying of cancer at the time) wasn’t satisfied with it. She continued to tweak it, before considering it complete in 2018.
The film went on to compete at festivals in Britain and the United States as an independent film. CBC has since purchased it, and will air the film tonight for the first time, after which it will be available for viewing on the CBC Gem platform.
The film has played to thousands of people at this point, but de Lara has given up trying to pinpoint its core audience.
“We thought our audience would be female, a girl-power kind of thing. But then I went to some of the festivals and it was the guys that were coming up to me saying: ‘That was hilarious.’ Women would come up to me and they could relate to it, but the men were like: ‘Oh my god, that was hilarious.’ That surprised me.”
ON SCREEN
What: Good Girls Don’t
Where: CBC TV
When: Tonight, 11:30 p.m.
