Aromcom: An A-Spec Short Film
Written by the AUREA News Team
Word Count: 2137
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Have you ever watched a rom-com and wished for a platonic love story? A chance meeting between two strangers at a random location that ends in a lifelong friendship, a QPR, or some other undefined-abstract-non romantic connection? Aromantic folx rarely see ourselves on screen, but Katrina Jackson (writer and director) and Catherine Bobalek (producer) are aiming to create aspec representation on the visual screen with their short film Aromcom. Aromcom is a 15 minute meet cute about two strangers who meet on vacation in Iceland, after one of them finds a lost GoPro. Merida, the character who finds the lost camera, goes through the images in hopes to reunite it with its owner, Parker. Merida develops strong platonic feelings for the stranger she’s gotten to know through a memory card and when they finally meet in person, neither of them knows where the connection may go—but they’re along for the ride!
AUREA’s News Team had the opportunity to interview both Katrina and Catherine about their experiences developing the film and the impact they hope to make. An edited version of the interview below! (Responses have been paraphrased for clarity).
Tell me a little bit about what the writing process was like for you, and why you felt compelled to tell the story of this chance encounter through the lens of a rom com?
Katrina: In Early 2021, I was at a hobby filmmakers workshop and we were doing a practice of screenwriting overnight. For one of the workshops the genres were a romcom, travel, and a detective story. To quickly put a story together I decided to base it off of personal experiences, a trip I took to Iceland in January 2018. On this trip I lost my GoPro in a glacier, drove through a blizzard, and got stuck in a small town. These became the event logistics of the plot and turned into a platonic meet cute to try and create a romcom, but used aspec characters to flip the genre on its head a little bit.
So it started off as a writing exercise, it wasn’t meant to be a film, but I really liked the story and kept it in the back of my head for the next few years. When I decided I actually did want to make it a film I met with local filmmakers in Washington D.C. and got together a small core group for a production team last year.
What does aromanticism (or the broader aromantic and asexual spectrums) mean to you and why is aromantic representation important in visual art?
Katrina: I think the great thing about aromanticism and the broader aromantic and asexual spectrums is that this community is exploring so many variations on how you can experience attraction and relationships. And there can be a lot of hand wringing about “what exactly IS my orientation? AM I queer? Am I REALLY on the aromantic or asexual spectrums? Or am I just making this up in my head, or experiencing trauma, or I just haven’t met the right person yet?” But I think that once your world is opened up to the many different ways attraction and relationships can exist, it doesn’t really MATTER if you’re 100% sure what your orientation is. Whatever your orientation is, you don’t have to follow the script of an amatonormative life if you don’t feel like that works best for you. And I think that having more aromantic representation would help more people realize that.
Catherine: I can speak on why it is important to visual art—visual art is an essential piece to how a lot of queer community has gained acceptance. The journey of being able to be more out 10, 20 years ago has largely been because of visual representation. Aromantic and aromantic spectrum experiences haven’t really had that yet, we are still in the beginning of our visibility. Visual impact isn’t always positive, but it is the first step. Visual art provides ways to represent to people things they see in themselves or their lives without them having to think so deeply about the media, through which they can reflect after. I came to my own personal experience through Bojack Horseman. The more it exists the more people can recognize that and feel a sense of a label and not alone or isolated or broken, and begin to connect to a bigger community.
Being aro and ace spec and using the split perspective, did you make the choice for characters to use microlabels, why or why not?
Katrina: There is a conversation in the film where Merida says she might be demiromantic/sexual but doesn’t really know where she might fall, and that is the only space where they talk about specific labels. The film cares more about their experiences and a lot of Parker’s struggles about sensory overwhelm and trouble making and keeping friends. It really focuses more on experiences and connection than specific identities.
Catherine: Executing split perspectives is hard! People tend not to do it and prefer to stick with one powerful story. But for a relationship it is very important to understand both sides of the perspective, how they come together and interact. The two main characters both identify on ace and aro spectrums but have very different world experiences that prevent them from interacting in a way that is free. The feelings of being closed off is very important to the story, which a split perspective allows us to show.
In your experience, what has been difficult about explaining aromantic and asexual spectrum identities to people outside of these communities? How do you hope Aromcom will impact relatability to aromantic and asexual experiences with allos?
Katrina: Personally I don’t have a whole lot of experience explaining the aromantic and asexual spectrums to people. There was one time I explained the concept of amatonormativity to a group of my friends, but there wasn’t really much difficulty beyond my usual difficulty in communicating. No one has asked me many questions about it.
Aromcom isn’t a film that’s meant to be Aromanticism 101. Other than one instance where Merida corrects her friends that she’s experiencing a squish, not a crush, the film doesn’t really define any terms or explain what the aromantic and asexual spectrums are, nor is it about a character discovering their sexual/romantic identity. The purpose is less for explaining these experiences to allos, it’s more to provide a hopeful wish-fulfillment story for a-spec people and anyone who craves deep, platonic connection, in the same way that romcoms do for people who crave romantic connection. So basically, it’s more for us than for them. But the film doesn’t use a huge number of terms and microlabels, so I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to follow for those unfamiliar with the aromantic and asexual spectrums.
Catherine: I actually kinda disagree with that Katrina, I think the film is just as much for allos as it is for the community. You can explain terminology (I have a lot of experience doing this) and it usually requires a lot of follow ups. I commonly use a bread/food analogy, I actually have a whole short film on that. In the car on a family road trip with a queer family member, they didn’t know what alloromantic/sexual meant! Awareness of terms is one thing, but I think the idea that we are constructing something using the familiar notes of a romcom genre, but deconstructing it to ace and aro experiences outside of just words, creates feelings and leads to conversations. It’s very relatable to allos, more so than just explaining definitions because we aren’t looking to be the dictionary anymore. This is as much for allos because they can understand the main character’s experiences as it is framed through a genre that they are very familiar with.
How do you see Aromcom having an impact on the LGBTQ+ community, particularly for people of color?
Katrina: Ultimately when people watch Aromcom, I’m hoping there’ll be people of various races, ages, genders, and queer identities who can see themselves in the characters and enjoy the story. I think intersectionality is always important when trying to create representation for an identity, and obviously we can’t represent every facet of the community in one 15-minute film, but I do I want more than just white people to feel represented by this film, so one of my goals when going through the casting process was to ideally have at least two of the four characters played by people of color. I didn’t write any of the characters to be any specific race, though obviously since this story was written by a white American woman, that’s more or less the perspective that’s initially on the page. So I’m going to be relying a bit on my actors to bring their own experiences to the table and their own interpretations of these characters to level it up beyond what I was able to provide as the writer. We had several dozen talented actors in the DC area submit to audition for these characters, and I’m very pleased with the cast of four we ended up with, two of which are Black actors, playing the supporting character Trey and the lead character Parker. Parker is the character who I wrote to be most like me, and out of all these people who auditioned, the actor who resonated the most with the emotions of this character based on me was a young black man, so he’s a completely different age, race, and gender than I am, and I’m really excited to see what we end up with on-screen with this character who is so similar and so different from me. If Aromcom goes really well, I keep having in the back of my mind that I’d love to write a sequel. And at that point I’ll have a deeper understanding of these characters through the lens of our actors, so I’d love to write a story that explores how things like race and neurodivergence impact Merida’s and Parker’s friendship.
Catherine: What was really exciting for me when Katrina presented the film to me, is that she's having an intimacy coordinator on set. She believes in creating safe spaces for people and making sure that people are going to be respected and heard. And that was a really fun and really hard part of the casting process as well. We want to have inclusion and representation in this, but we also want to have people who are going to be able to share and bring their own voices and their own thoughts. Sometimes directors hold on very tight to their vision, and they're not great at listening. And Katrina is not that—she's doing a really fantastic job of having everyone's thoughts incorporated to bring those representations, because even in the LGBTQ+ community, people of color are not as representative as they should be. Just in general, I think that, especially as we are forming the new ace-aro community out in the world, that we still need to see more representation in that so it doesn't have to be a catch up later, it is a part of the process from the beginning.
In which character(s) do you see yourself the most in and why?
Katrina: There are aspects of myself in both of the main characters as their stories are based off of my own personal experiences, particularly being neurodivergent. Merida has a science background, I am not an engineer but I used to be a video producer at NASA and I have a masters in space studies. Both of us have a bit of confusion about what exactly we identify as, it’s somewhere in the gray area of the spectrum.
Parker and I both share sensory overwhelm, trouble making and keeping friends, and frustration finding people to travel and experience things with.
Catherine: I see myself in both Parker and Merida. With Merida, we both share possible micro label identities, which is nice to relate. I’ve had some negative experiences from close friends coming out as ace, so I understand Parker’s defensiveness and walls that are built.
When and where will people be able to view Aromcom?
Currently our plan is to shoot the film in January then have the film completed by next Pride month in June, and have at least one in-person screening in the DC area. We will submit it to a few festivals, and post it on YouTube so that the global a-spec community can watch it for free,
If you are looking to learn more about Aromcom or are wanting to stay updated, check out their crowdfunding page and their instagram @aromcomfilm! They are seeking to raise $10,000 to cover the costs of production of the film.