On a bus late at night, a mother in pajamas and a woman leaving the bar find an unexpected moment of connection, revealing echoes in their individual struggles to reclaim their bodies.

Director Biography - Shizue Roche Adachi

SHIZUE ROCHE ADACHI (she/her) is a Japanese-American writer/director, narrative strategist, and former livestock farmer. Born in the Bay Area and buttered in the Midwest, Shizue is interested in the complicated ways people learn to care for each other and the places they call home. Exploring queer love, rural community, mixed race identity, and the domestic lives of women, Shizue’s films seek to expand and subvert dominant narratives of pleasure and belonging. Shizue holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA in directing from UCLA. She is a recipient of the Jack Nicholson Distinguished Student Director Award and the To.Get.Her Finishing Fund from Chimaera Project, which celebrates femme and nonbinary filmmakers who use film as a catalyst for social change. Her most recent short, SOFT ANIMAL, premiered at the Brooklyn Film Festival and was honored as a UCLA Director's Spotlight selection. She is currently in post production on a short film and proof of concept based on the true story of when a neighbor’s dogs killed 25 of her sheep.

Director Statement

I never thought I would make a film about sexual assault, mostly because I tend to find popular representations re-traumatizing and clichéd. But also because I had no idea how to express what felt true to me – how to capture a decade-long relationship with a feeling like an undertow I could never shake.

Last summer, while helping to care for a friend who was a new mother, I heard something familiar in her attempts to put words to her grief: “My body is no longer mine own,” she told me as her daughter suckled, “it’s a location.” This loss of agency struck me. 1 in every 6 women has been sexually assaulted. 1 in 7 women struggle with postpartum depression. And the statistics only rise for women of color. In Soft Animal, I do not mean to suggest a parallel between these two vastly different experiences, but perhaps a dance––an unexpected duet of two women learning how to reclaim their bodies as home, as whole, as self.

I am interested in joy, not pain, especially when it comes to depictions of the queer folks, survivors, and women of color I call community. Soft Animal does not salt the wound of trauma. Instead, it presents an honest portrayal of healing in all its messiness and uncertainty, where joy coexists with grief. Because, oh, what a joy we can find in these bodies. Oh, what a joy to be a soft animal.