LOGLINE
& SYNOPSIS
When faced with a painful decision, a young woman learns to trust her own instincts.
Claudia spends the winter caring for her terminally-ill grandfather and upon returning from a routine medical exam, she contends with euthanizing their family dog. Her new sense of intuition in the face of mortality then determines the way she navigates an inevitable longstanding and brutal family tradition.
writer & director
ANNIKA CARLSON
Annika Carlson is a writer and director based in New York and Los Angeles. Her narrative work centers female characters within intergenerational conflict and often emphasizes legacy, femininity, and resiliance in the face of trauma. Previous credits include writing and directing the award winning short film MOTHERWOOD which premiered at the Cinemadamare Film Festival in Milan, Italy and won Best Actress and Best Film and writing and directing the short film THE HOUSEKEEPER which was selected to screen at the Venice Film Festival.
Annika holds a B.A. from UCLA in Communication and Film & Television and currently, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to filmmaking, Annika is a published poet, fiction writer, and and cooking enthusiast.
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DIRECTOR' STATEMENT
I wrote the short story that became the basis for this film while sitting next to my grandfather in the hospital. It was a way to reckon with the dissonance between his wishes for his end-of-life care and my instincts as the only woman in his life with a say. As such, the short story was riddled with questions— how would I best care for a dying man? What would I do when the time came to make a difficult decision? How would I reconcile his wishes with my own?
Making this film became my only way to find answers. I rewrote the film to process my grief, and while doing so, reconciled my relationship with the inevitability of mortality. Writing the AS WITH DOGS screenplay gave me the opportunity to further flesh out the lead character, Claudia, an extension of myself––and by proxy all the women around me––and provide her with a new, more solid ending: Claudia finds her own justification for a brutal generational practice in her family, and rather than simply following the direction of her grandfather, she proceeds with his traditional action on her own terms. Later honing the script with our producer Tiffany Hue, collaborating on the realization of Claudia with our lead actress Briza Covarrubias, and searching for an entirely new emotional layer for the score with our composer Caroline Ho, gave me a real community of women with whom I was able to further clarify what it means to be a woman grieving. We all came to agree that women encounter pain constantly. Whether it be our own biology or the world’s societal standards, we lead lives with suffering built in which makes us uniquely well-suited for level-headed decision-making in end-of-life care. And while enduring death can feel unbearable, finding and honoring female instinct and identity can be a powerful method of managing grief.
We shot this film at the same biscuit factory in Utah that my grandfather and I often frequented when I was young, and creating something entirely my own in such a personally storied space was uniquely healing. I’m therefore incredibly excited to relinquish the film to audiences; I hope that while watching, young women come to understand what I did while shooting the project— that we as women should make the effort to get in touch with and subsequently trust our instincts because they often point us in the best emotional direction.