In Transit is a tender and thoughtful rumination on ambition, art and love. Eschewing indie movie clichés, the film offers an unhurried exploration of the lives and hopes of a small town barkeep as she enters into a tense relationship with a visiting artist. I speak with writer and star Alex Sarrigeorgiou and Director Jaclyn Bethany about their process and what drew them to the film.
Alex Sarrigeorgiou (writer/Star)
How is it to be directed acting from a script that you’ve written?
Alex Sarrigeorgiou: That’s a great question. Film is a collaborative medium, right? It’s a really amazing thing to have someone else’s eye on what you wrote, and have somebody see things in what you wrote that you didn’t even know you were doing.
Writing can be so subconscious in ways where, Jaclyn would point things out to me and I’d say, “Oh, yes. You’re right, that is in there.” Same with everybody else working on the film, you walk into a set and the production designer has done things that are above and beyond what you were picturing in your head and it’s so exciting. You just have to trust, I think. I think I was lucky that I found a collaborator in Jaclyn who I could really trust.
I think you have to let go of how things were in your head and let it become something new and something better.
Was it always your intention to write and perform but have someone else direct the film?
Alex: Yes, I think so. I’m an actor first, and I’ve directed some things. I’ve directed some shorts. But I don’t have the confidence or the experience to direct a feature. I thought there was something exciting to me about bringing somebody else on who can help me tell the story.
Early on in the film, the character of Ilse remarks to your character, Lucy, that as a bartender, she gets to be an observer of people. Do you feel that that’s central to the role of a writer, to observe and to document?
Alex: What a beautiful question. Yes, I’m somebody who will absolutely sit at a bar and creep at all the people around, and jot down what people are saying and doing. Try to guess who’s on a first date, and who’s been together for six years and it’s 100%. I think that’s where so much inspiration for any artist comes from, is people, human experience. Whether you’re in a bar, or on the beach, or wherever you are, that’s the most interesting thing you can do is watch people, I think.
In real life you’re the artist making observations but in the film you play the subject being observed. Does that speak to the introspection of the film?
Alex: I’ve been saying that this film is in a lot of ways my existential crisis split into two different people, because there’s the side of me that is like Ilse; ambitious and wants to make art that matters and that is good, and feels seen through her art and all these things. Then there’s a part of me that’s like, “Well, I also would like to enjoy my life, and lead a peaceful existence, and not always be hustling for attention or money or whatever.” Yes, I think that’s what happened there is I feel like I see myself in both these people.
There’s also a consideration of the impact of artistic observance on the subject, both in the immediate moment of how observation can change the behaviour of the subject, but also in the long term as a result of, how the subject will then subsequently self-perceive through the art when they actually come to see it. Is that something that you’re conscious of; the ethical implications of observing through art?
Alex: That’s really interesting. Part of why I started writing this script is I used to work as an art model for years as my day job. I got very used to this feeling of people looking at me, but also not really looking at me at all. It’s like they’re simultaneously paying so much attention to you and not aware of you exactly. They’re looking at your form, but they are not only looking at your form, they are capturing something about who you are in this weird way.
I can’t draw or paint to save my life, so I don’t know how they do it, but they do. I think to me there’s just something interesting in the intimacy of observing someone in that way, but also, it’s impossible to see someone without putting your own lens on them. I don’t know about the ethical implications, but I just think that’s interesting that it’s like we’re never seeing each other in this pure way. We’re seeing each other through our own eyes, or our own set of whatever’s going on in our heads.
There’s a line in the film where your character says that Ilse doesn’t know what she’s looking for artistically. She just makes marks until she finds it. How well does that describe your process when you’re working on an idea?
Alex: When I say that other people read stuff you wrote or watch stuff you made and see stuff you didn’t see…I’m like, “Whoa, you’re right. That’s totally how it is.” My writing background is in poetry. I write a lot of poetry and before I wrote many scripts, I wrote poetry and that’s 100% my approach with poetry. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m going to write something about this.” It’s like, “Well, here’s an interesting word, and here’s an image I can’t get out of my head, and somehow now they’re connected.” Afterwards I realise what it was all about.
I think scripts then for me happened the same way where I’m just exploring some stuff that’s I’m obsessing over. Then later when it all comes together, I realise, “That’s what it’s all about.” The same with acting in some ways, honestly. You’re in a moment, you’re experiencing a feeling, you’re living through a scene, and you’re not, for me at least, thinking about what it all means while you’re doing it. You’re just in it.
There’s so many stretches of the film in which dialogue takes a backseat, and there’s so much visual communication of this place, of this time, and what’s happening within the headspace of its characters. As you’re writing the screenplay, are you thinking much about the aesthetic and these quiet moments between scenes?
Alex: I think with most screenwriters pace is included in the way you shape a scene on the page. Where the way you would write an action sequence is very different to the way you would write two people looking at each other in a room for three minutes. Again, it’s an intuitive thing where it’s like you’re taking your time as you write it, and the things that are popping up in your head are little details around the room that somebody might be looking at, or little details on somebody’s face that somebody might be looking at. Yes, I think it just happens very naturally.
There’s this really interesting class dynamic between the two characters in which Ilse’s communicated to be quite bohemian and better off. Then there’s also the interesting gender dynamic with the boyfriend present who’s having his own perception of what Lucy is experiencing. Do you think this speaks to the somewhat fraught environment in which art is being made now?
Alex: Absolutely! I think class is definitely a big part of it in that, only somebody of Ilse’s background has the luxury of going through a personal crisis and thinking “Well, I’m just going to go live in a town, and figure out myself for a little while.” How amazing to be able to do that. That’s not an option that everybody has. I think there is, unfortunately, this way in which art is absolutely universal and something everybody should have access to, but also the ability to explore yourself artistically, you only have that if you have time, and you only have time if you have a certain income level or background.
The way Lucy lives her life, which she loves, is also coming out of the fact that she didn’t get the chance to finish college. All these things that she didn’t have the chance to do, like gallivant around Europe like Ilse probably did when she was in her 20s. Yes, that’s a huge factor.
Then as far as gender is concerned, I love Tom’s character in this film. I think it was really important to me that Tom is not the boyfriend that’s written off. I didn’t want him to be this character where the audience think, “Yes, whatever. Break up with that guy.” He is also going through his own thing, and the movie’s not on him as much but he is very much in transit himself and figuring things out about himself over the course of this movie. I think François did a beautiful job of portraying that in his performance also.
Jaclyn Bethany (Director/Producer)
There’s a moment where the character of Ilse is trying to describe what she has gained from Lucy as a subject, and talks about this idea of a pure, simple inspiration that cut through her instincts to overcomplicate her work. I was wondering if you related to that as an artist, and if this screenplay, when you first read it, gave you a similar sense of that inspiration.
Jaclyn Bethany: Yes, absolutely. I think, most of the film, too, is Lucy trying to get to know Ilse, or what she actually thinks or feels. I think she’s a very talented, lonely, searching woman. I think that those themes immediately stuck out to me.
As artists, as filmmakers, writers, actors, we’re always searching for something. I think that this film captures that very beautifully from both sides, and how these two women inform each other in the creation of this piece of work. I think that art imitates life. I think that that was a beautiful reason to join this project as well.
It’s an interesting situation to be in, directing a performer who also wrote the script to the film. How did that influence your process?
Jaclyn: I think one reason why they thought of me, or came to me with it is because I have experience on the other side of it; being a screenwriter who is working with a director as an actor in the film. I’ve also written, directed, and acted in projects that I’ve done myself where I’m doing all three roles. I have experience on all sides of it, and I’ve directed other people’s scripts.
I think having that well-rounded, coming at it from every angle, perspective, really helped me work with Alex, and understand her vision, and also work with her as an actor, because at some point, the script was so beautiful and it did change. It changed in the edit. We moved things around, we cut scenes, we cut characters. I think she had to be able to also settle in as an actor, and just give the project to me as a director, which was a really great, beautiful collaboration.
Was there an objectivity you were able to bring to what is quite clearly a very personal work? But then of course, you’ve related to it very closely as well.
Jaclyn: Yes. I think that even when I’m working on my own projects that I’ve written and directed, I sometimes bring in someone else, an outside eye at the end because you get so close to the material, it’s so difficult. I think that having me with them on this process from fairly early on was helpful in terms of what it was going to turn into, because getting to know me as an artist and also me figuring out what this film was going to be, and being in that creative conversation with both Alex and C.C. and the other producers as well, really informed the process.
The pace of the film is beautifully ponderous with a wonderful eye for landscapes and intimate details within its environments. Can you tell me a little about how you planned the look and the pace of the film, and what you drew from for that?
Jaclyn: It was Sam’s, the DP, first feature. We spent maybe two weeks on Zoom -I was in New Orleans, she was in New York- going through references and building out a detailed shot list. Of course, when you get on set, some of that just goes away, but you do have this beautiful guide. I think what was very clear to me when we started thinking about the look and feel of the film was, how do you look at a piece of art? You’re not thinking about it in fragments. You’re usually thinking about it as a whole.
That perspective informed the distance, and the long takes, and the wides, and the oners that are in the film. I also think that sometimes with these types of stories, there’s an expectation that you’re going to be intense, and you’re going to be intimate, and you’re going to be handheld and in people’s faces. We have none of that, which I think allows the audience to feel what Lucy is feeling. The confusion. You can’t quite tell how either woman feels in that moment. Even the obvious references for this movie, like Carol or Portrait of a Lady on Fire, are very different, and also much bigger in scale.
This to me is not exactly a love story. It has some of that, but it’s more about these two women figuring it out, and finding a language with each other. Sam and I really thought about how to create that throughline with also these three spaces, and who was in control where, and how we could reflect that with the camera. One of the movies that I remember seeing and it made me feel something similar was Ira Sachs’ Passages, which had that ambiguous gaze on a very intense situation. I remember talking about that and thinking about that film too in relation to this.
That recalls what Laura Mulvey would always say about Jeanne Dielman and the feminist cinema of the 1970s trying to find a language to portray domestic spaces and women’s stories in a way that would be resistant to the fast paced, very Hollywood and male dominated landscape of that time. You found a really interesting approach to tension in particular, where it never feels contrived.
Jaclyn: Yes, and it could have, which is really interesting. I don’t think that I was actually super conscious of that. A lot of the films that I watch and am inspired by are Agnes Varda, and Chantal Akerman, and Barbara Loden, and these female proto-feminist filmmakers that were doing this without any overhead, per se, or trying to. I wasn’t going to this movie being like, “I’m going against the system.” I think it was just thinking about how I felt towards the story, and what we could convey and have that be a unique, unexpected female point of view.
You mentioned that the long takes, and the distance. You do have a lot of really interesting unoccupied space around your subjects in many of the shots, perhaps echoing the faraway feeling that Lucy describes in Ilse’s painting. How much freedom do you like to allow your performances to explore the spaces that you capture them in?
Jaclyn: I think setting up of those shots was pretty specific and intentional. I think that the camera is a beautiful thing because it looks like there’s a lot more space sometimes than there is. I like to think of the scenes in the studio as a dance between Ilse and Lucy, and figuring out the position of where certain things were in the space, and how that canvas creates that centre for them. Wherever that was, they were working around.
I like to think that I did allow a lot of freedom. I also think it was pretty specific in where they were supposed to stand and be, and just to create that feeling because that tension and intimacy was important to capture as the film and the scenes progressed.
In Transit premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025.
