Jes talks it up with Simone LeClaire! 

Simone LeClaire is a woman filmmaker and a white queer person who has lived her life across vastly different Minnesotan cultures, feeling simultaneously odd and at home in all of them. In her pleasure-based, feminist, and anticapitalist filmmaking practice, Simone is guided by how film might facilitate healing, and how to keep creative processes healthy, truthful, and abundant. Her work most often centers on femme characters and relationships, and is highly curious about internal processes, quiet revelations, and self-reconciliation. Simone also repeatedly draws on imagery of the natural world to create peacefulness with her work. Her films tend to actively integrate both her own autobiography and the impacts of genuine, transformative collaboration, with finished films reflecting the presence of both.

With editing a central part of her filmmaking practice, Simone is the director/editor of seven narrative shorts, which have received awards and screened at over fifty film festivals around the country; currently in post-production of her debut feature, Sunflower Man, a documentary about transience, flowers, and a man living with schizo affective disorder; and collaboratively developing her first narrative feature, a heart-centered exploration of Minnesotan landscape, racialized identity, and female friendship. She currently makes her home in Minneapolis.

Learn more about Simone here.

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Theme music by Jes Reyes.

Original recording date: September 29, 2021