Lately I’ve been thinking of the roles we women play in our personal and professional lives: devoted partner, vacuous muse, ambitious artist, pedantic professor, sexy submissive and so on.  Some of these roles we choose but, more often, these roles are chosen for us by society’s expectations. I’ve worked for almost two decades as a professional actor. In my early years I took great pride in being established as one thing . . . excelling at one thing. There was comfort in being tucked safely in a box. I was secure and accepted within its boundaries.

As I’ve grown older, however, this box has begun to cripple me literally and figuratively.  Consequently, I am beginning to push against the walls . . . my spirit longing to explore the undefined. Women are accustomed to being labeled and controlled. And it seems we have so internalized this reality that we are often complicit in our own oppression and the oppression of other women.  It is this phenomenon, our tendency to limit ourselves and, consequently, the women around us, that we’re exploring in this film.

THE MODEL, directed by Stephanie Owens, is a female driven film (over half of our crew and cast identify as female) that is the result of this exploration. The film follows a day in the life of a successful, aging figure model who is pushed to an existential and physical breaking point during the course of a sitting. While her appearance is clinically dissected by a perfectionistic instructor, she flashes back to a relationship with an ambitious artist that mirrors her role in the art studio.  She is a mix of shapes and colors, a voiceless and accommodating muse. As the day progresses, she is forced to reckon with this crisis of identity or remain fractured and voiceless. As she wrestles against her constraints, what ripple effects could her evolution cause within her and the women around her?

- Cora Vander Broek - Actor | Writer | Producer