On Craft and Purpose: Domestic Animals in the Classroom

There's something particularly meaningful about showing your work to students who are standing exactly where you once stood.

Last week, Sandy Siquier and I had the privilege of screening our short film Domestic Animals in Guinevere Turner's Career Prep class, a course designed for senior filmmaking students navigating the transition from academic training into professional practice. The screening was followed by a conversation with the students about directing methods, collaboration, and the cinematographic choices that shaped the film.

Domestic Animals screened at Guinevere Turner’s Career Prep class.

Guinevere Turner needs little introduction. A writer, director, and actor whose career spans three decades, she co-wrote and starred in Go Fish (1994), one of the foundational works of the New Queer Cinema movement, and later co-wrote the screenplays for American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page alongside director Mary Harron. She has taught screenwriting at Columbia, UCLA, NYU, and Sarah Lawrence, and is currently a Professor of Practice in Film at Syracuse University. Her class brings working industry professionals into dialogue with students at a pivotal moment in their formation, and we were honored to be part of that.

Domestic Animals explores the dynamics of domestic and family violence through a carefully observed, intimate lens. Sandy and I made the film as a piece of engaged cinema, one where formal choices carry emotional weight, and where the camera's relationship to bodies and space is never incidental. Getting to unpack that work in front of an audience of young filmmakers on the verge of launching their own careers was a rich and generous exchange.

Thank you to Guinevere for the invitation, and to her students for the thoughtful questions and the genuine attention they brought to the screening.