Céline Roustan
Clara and Léa get out of the city for a night – hoping to catch up and reconnect. After hours of talking, the boundaries of their friendship gets tested, taking their relationship to uncharted territories. With My Best Friend, writer/director Elina Street explores intimacy and its nuances through the events of this one night, when the nature of their bond begins to blur.
“I’ve always wondered about the limits of intimacy between friendship and romance”
What’s immediately striking in My Best Friend is the sensitive and genuine depiction of the friendship between its protagonists. The actors take center stage, and what the camera captures is the layers of their bond. “I’ve been working in the documentary realm for the past few years, and I was missing a space where I could work with actors and workshop a script. I conceptualized My Best Friend from that desire”, Street explained. “I’ve always wondered about the limits of intimacy between friendship and romance”, the filmmaker adds. These lines between friendship and romance are sometimes very clear, but when a deep intimacy is there, they can get a bit blurry. It’s this shifting of boundaries that the film chronicles, all the way to the aftermath.
As soon as Clara and Léa reunite, the camera is cleverly positioned to place us inside their friendship, and their intimacy is immediately potent. We instantly feel the depth and strength of their relationship and their closeness, not just in the way they talk and catch up, but also in the physicality of the way they move around each other. This isn’t a simple story of two friends falling in love – it’s more complex and nuanced, much like attraction itself can be. Immersed in their intimacy, we see it evolve – and how both of them deal with that – without the film ever oversensationalizing the experience or resorting to unnecessary dramatic plot twists.
I wanted to tell a story that elevated female intimacy in a way that felt sacred, safe and not performative, not through the male gaze. ” – Street on her aims for the short
“I had the opportunity to work with an amazing intimacy coordinator, Amy Northup, which I found to be the most elevating and positive collaboration”, Street shared. Since that intimacy is almost the main character in Best Friend, working with an intimacy coordinator felt paramount in conveying the situation with authenticity – for both the audience and the actors. In the lead roles, Marie Zabukovec (Clara) and Lana Boy (Léa) are incredibly compelling. The fact that the film is bilingual – shifting seamlessly between French and English – also adds an extra layer to the their bond by contributing to the protective bubble that is their friendship. From the first scene, Zabukovec and Boy instantly bring the strength of this friendship to the screen As the night progresses, it is captivating to see them both process what is going on in their individual lives, before getting to the point of this shared experience.
Ahead of its online premiere, My Best Friend made its way around the festival circuit with a premiere at the 2024 edition of BFI Flare, followed by selections at Tribeca, ShortFest and Frameline. Street is also the co-creator and director of GLAAD, Webby and Emmy-Award-winning docu-series The Lesbian Bar Project.