When Annapurna Sriram began her acting career, the roles she was offered rarely resembled the campy, colourful characters she grew up idolizing. Giulietta Masina’s “tragic clown” in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria acted as her guiding light for dream roles, but the parts she encountered as a working actor felt “painfully boring” in comparison. “You can be the doctor, or you can be the girl in a headscarf,” she recalls being told. “It felt that much more limiting for me as an artist, and so I really wanted to write something where I could play a fun, playful bimbo,” or as she coins her character, “the Brigitte Bardot for South Asian people.”

As a moviegoer, the feeling was much the same. Her lifelong love of cult cinema like Gregg Araki’s Nowhere and Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader left her asking where the modern take on the fun, campy movies she grew up loving was. That combination of professional frustration and cinematic longing sparked the idea for Fucktoys, her fantastical and queer dark-comedy having it’s Alberta premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival this September. The film is her answer to both gaps: the lack of roles she craved as a performer, and the absence of the exuberant, chaotic cinema she loves watching.

Her film is a lush, 16mm reimagining of the Major Arcana Tarot told through the story of AP (Annapurna Sriram), a hopelessly optimistic ingenue seeking salvation from a curse. When a tarot reader floating in a swamp tells her the curse can be lifted for $1000 and the sacrifice of a baby lamb, she sets out to make that money the only way she knows how: scootering her way into the night, and into the uncouth underbelly of Trashtown, a dystopian collage of humid industrial landscapes and pink cotton candy skies.

After years of developing the script, her producer pushed her toward directing the film herself. At first, Sriram resisted, “it’s hard to feel confident to step into a leadership role like that when you spend most of your life asking for permission,” but during the isolation of the pandemic, she immersed herself in storyboarding, test shoots, and building everything from costumes to colour palettes.

The result is a riotous, campy, feminist film that Sriram proudly situates in a movement she describes as “camp cinema by girls for girls, and for [everyone].” For her, this kind of filmmaking is inseparable from the idea of the female gaze. “There’s this innate sense of aesthetic and style and taste that we’re honing as part of our gender,” she says. “That translates into film in this beautiful picture because we’re constantly making ourselves look beautiful as part of the performance of being a woman.”

That ethos shaped not only the film’s look but also the environment on set. She wanted her cast to feel just as excited about the world they were building as she was. “I wanted first of all, everyone to feel hot and to look hot in my movie,” she says. “That was my finisher: if an actor put on a costume, I asked, ‘do you feel hot?’” and if the answer was no, adjustments were made until they felt confident. “The actor feeling hot to me is one of the most important things as a director, because if your actor feels hot, then they're gonna deliver the best performance.”

Her philosophy around making space for the roles she would be excited for extended to casting the film’s love interest. The role began as a “chaotic punk hot heartthrob” in the tradition of Johnny Depp in Cry-Baby or Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy. But when it came time to cast, Sriram says, “I felt like it was hard for me to empathize with a cis male character. I felt kind of like as a culture, we’ve just moved past feeling sorry for that degenerate punk boy.” Instead, she opened auditions to women and nonbinary actors without changing a word of the script. That’s how Sadie Scott joined the project. “They had this really great balance of being young and innocent… and also this swagger of a brooding heartthrob. They were just stunning to look at and very hungry. They really loved the role.”

Sriram and Scott’s characters pulls from the lore around the tarot deck, with her own character on the Fool’s journey, Scott as her “ride or die, twin flame,” the Hanged Man, Big Freedia as the Magician and even their moped doubling as the Chariot they use to traverse the setting of Trashtown. Rooted in the “neglected Americana wastelands” from her Southern upbringing, but filtered through layers of Disney magic, the film is set in a world that feels like “Peewee's Big Adventure, but it's a little more French New Wave.”

Beneath the candy-coloured surface, however, Fucktoys offers a critique of our capitalist culture. “To me, [capitalism] is the curse,” says Sriram. “That is the structure of our life that we have no control over.” The relationship between her characters and navigating the exploitation of capitalism, proved to be fertile ground for the core conflict in her film. “I think that in a lot of ways, we're all whores to capitalism,” she says with a laugh.

As we finish our call, I ask about her favourite tarot cards to pull, she names the Moon (“because it has two dogs”) and the Ace of Cups. “That’s a really good one. That’s an overflow of wealth and success.” For Fucktoys, it’s certainly in the cards: abundance, possibility, and joy overflowing beyond the limits of the screen.

Fucktoys will have its Alberta premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival on September 26. There will be a second screening at the Chinook Cineplex on September 28. Tickets are available at www.ciffcalgary.ca.

Annapurna Sriram’s Dream Role Didn’t Exist, So She Created It

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