Photo: Art by Maren Moreno
Note: This article contains a discussion about sexual assault and its representation in media.
Maren Moreno is a filmmaker attending Evergreen whose body of work provocatively confronts societal topics. Her latest film, Revenge Angels, tells the story of Fern, a naïve college freshman whose world is completely altered after experiencing sexual assault. I had the opportunity to sit down with Maren and discuss with her Revenge Angels, her employment of film as a medium, and the themes she deals with in her artistic endeavors.
Can you describe to me what Revenge Angels is about?
“It’s a literal kind of reimagining or restructuring of the rape-revenge film, but I feel like at its core Revenge Angels is about rupturing of trauma and identity through trauma.”
“It’s about this girl who is really sweet, and really idealistic; this nice college girl that just wants to go to school, and listen to Frankie Cosmos and go to house parties, and just be a nice little indie rocker girl. But someone takes advantage of her and it crushes her whole sense of self, and so she dies and is reborn, because of both the trauma that she went through and also the fact that her community turned their backs on her. And so she loses her mind, but she finds this kind of solace and glamour in her new self.”
Revenge Angels deals a lot with sexual assault, which is a complicated subject. How do you feel about the topic’s coverage, and how did that reflect in your direction with the film?
“I enjoy some revenge films from the ‘70s, like I Spit on Your Grave, but I wanted something that provides that same kind of catharsis for me without seeing this visual of sexual assault.”
“With I Spit on Your Grave, that movie is 50/50: first half sexual assault, second half revenge, and there is a lot of really graphic, nasty stuff in that film before she goes out and kills all of them… so there’s a lot to sit through. I wanted to create something that didn’t have that and spoke to sexual abuse, physical abuse, and any sort of that interpersonal trauma, showing the aftermath, speaking to social isolation and loss of sense of self.”
“That was really my intention. Something that’s not making people sit through sexual assault, but it’s still speaking to their experience and acknowledging that it’s traumatic.”
What are some of your goals regarding your usage of film as an art?
“I don’t want to create these films that are stuck in the art world and try to be really dense and hard for the average person to watch. I want them to be very visually exciting and fun and funny, but also kind of dark and challenging and not easy for people. I think that’s good for you — to have a piece of art have you question how you feel about the world, how you feel about sexuality, how you feel about trauma, about sexual assault, about subculture, and so on.”
“I’m almost doing it as a necessity. I just want to make films that I want to see and what I feel like my friends would want to see, covering sides that I’m not seeing anywhere else.”
Earlier today I was watching a video clip of this poet named Ocean Vuong. He was talking about how he writes out of a sense of urgency to, as he stated it, ‘fill the air of language’, because language is a sort of thing everybody can access in a certain way. That urgency stems from a drive to have ‘different’ voices be heard, including his own. Do you feel like that relates to your sentiment?
“That speaks to me very much, and I think that speaks to a lot of the artistic elements that I employ.”
“[For example], what I love about pop music is I feel like it’s a shared language between all people. Within American culture, all these songs are very much a part of the fabric of the way that we live. I want to create film in the way that I feel like popular movies engage these different tropes. I want to interact with those tropes and have something for people to hold onto that’s familiar — that shared kind of film language — but then fuck with it in weird ways and ask questions and have it be something that’s familiar, but very different, because I want people to have an ‘in’ into the conversation.”
Can you speak to some of the struggles and benefits of being a student filmmaker?
“I wrote it. I edited it, I directed it, I starred in it [as Fern]. And so it’s kind of unavoidable to find a lot of yourself in it. Because I didn’t initially write the main character for me… I wanted to be the fun side character that didn’t have to do much. But I was casting a lot my peers, you know, amateur actors. I was really struggling to ask other people to do the things that I wanted this character to do.”
“I didn’t feel comfortable asking someone who wasn’t me to put their body through this or that and be so vulnerable. And so that character kind of became a part of myself.”
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The next screening of Revenge Angels will be at the Portland Unknown Film Festival on Saturday, October 12th. You can find Maren on Instagram @smallcherrylimeade or on Twitter @docuprincess
