It’s an even tougher walk into the crowded bar where Hana (Connie Shi) works than it appears as she slips her way past unruly patrons on a busy night in “The Rebirth,” having emerged from her car where the rain outside just seems to be pouring it on. Her boss doesn’t seem to know what he’s asking when he poses the question “Do you want to be here?” as a threat when she’d rather be anywhere else, but as Hana notes her request for a day off was denied and she needs the paycheck, so she soldiers on behind the bar only moments after she’s taken a pill at her friend’s instruction to eliminate an unwanted pregnancy and tries to put on a happy face as she faces the usual barrage of careless customers who will make casual passes at her as she tries to take their order or may have been a little overserved before she arrived.
A desperate moment of isolation becomes a one-woman show from its writer, director and star Shi, who cleverly fashions an action-filled allegory when Hana’s reaction to the pill can’t entirely be predicted when all she was told is that they came from “a doctor in Michigan…or a guy that knows a doctor in Michigan,” but the side effects are even more pronounced than she ever could expect. The filmmaker, who may be best known for moonlighting as Detective Yee on “Law & Order,” envisions pain as an unexpected reservoir for strength and delivers her own brand of justice during an evening that Hana won’t let anyone else forget if she has to remember it herself, being one of the countless casualties as access to abortion clinics is diminishing by the day and those in need are turning to more and more sketchy remedies.
While demonstrating certain superpowers on screen, Shi is becoming a force to be reckoned with off of it as “The Rebirth” continues a streak of highlighting issues affecting women in particular, with the 2023 comedy short “Coming” she wrote (directed by Matthew Tyler) playfully imagining a bachelorette getting a pep talk from her vulva before a date and the more dramatic 2020 short “Natural Disasters” using a threesome as a jumping off point for a young woman to recognize her true desires. With “The Rebirth” premiering this week at Tribeca as part of the Shorts: NY Off Peak program, the multihyphenate graciously took the time to talk about a wild two-night shoot from dusk till dawn in New York, finding an inspired way into what should be a national conversation and how her own health scare on set ended up giving her greater focus for the film she was making.
I worked in the bar and restaurant industry for a while when I first moved to New York, and the film is based on a story a friend had told me about a coworker of hers who had to get an abortion. She was not allowed a day off work, so ahe took the pill and had to have her abortion while serving customers at the bar all night, just running back and forth in the bathroom, bleeding out. That story just affected me, and then after Roe v. Wade was overturned, the situation got more dire and honestly, writing the script felt like a coping mechanism at the time. I felt like I needed to get something out and reimagine the story with a different kind of ending. It was cathartic to write and really cathartic to make as well.
Between this film and “Coming,” you really have found interesting ways to tackle issues affecting a lot of women. Has it been a conscious choice?
It’s something that I didn’t think about it in the making of [“The Rebirth”], but now reflecting, I realize that it is a way that I process things that I’m going through as a woman. “Coming” was about a woman coming to terms with her sexuality, a surrealist comedy with her talking vulva, and this has its supernatural elements. It almost feels like when you bring something bigger than life into it, it actually gives you a new way in to something very grounded and realistic. You can take the surreal and explore something very, very real within it.
Did you know from the start that you were going to act in this?
Yeah, I have directed stuff that I didn’t act in, but I did know that I wanted to play Hana pretty early on and in writing it, I just felt like I knew her so deeply. There were a lot of aspects to her that I took from me – my mom’s an immigrant. She was born and raised in China and beyond that, I feel like a lot of women are raised to just put your head down, work hard, don’t rock the boat, don’t question authority. I especially felt that, and it took me a very long time to start to question authority and start to come into my own, so I felt like Hana lived very close to where I lived a lot of my life. Not every character I write I feel like I need to play, but for this, it felt like an important experience for me to be able to play her.
Something I was really impressed with, given how sensitive a subject matter this is, was how much you’re able to express with so little between the interiority of your performance and the shots that leave a lot off-screen but so much can be inferred. What went into shortlisting this?
A lot of thought went into the shot listing. We had an incredible DP, Cece Chan and because I was directing and acting, I really knew that prep was super important, so we had a lot of rehearsals and we had access to the bar ahead of time, which was really great, so we could really be in the space and imagine everything and where it would live. [Cece and I] were also sending tons of references back and forth. There’s this one shot from “Raw” by Julia Ducournau when [the main character] is first entering a party and it’s just following her and it’s so shaky and you really feel like you’re in this cramped space. I remember sending that to Cece and we [agreed], we need the visual language of the film to mirror [this character’s] experience throughout the whole thing. That felt like the first piece to us knowing how we wanted to do it visually.
Was it fun leaning into the genre nature of this?
Yeah, and honestly, I feel like a big piece of that in post was actually the score and the throat singing from the indigenous artist, Charlotte Qamaniq. When we reached out to her and she was excited to throat sing for the score, we were so excited and it felt like it brought a whole different dimension to the film – the supernatural elements, the rawness and closeness to body that are in it. Our composer Matthew Tyler worked with all of the samples that Charlotte Qamaniq sent us, and it’s largely built around her throat singing, but there are other elements of it too. It was a lot of trial and error, but it was also really fun to explore and she gave us a lot to play with. It was really, really fun.
From what I understand, this was shot across two nights in New York. Is it interesting to have a day in between shoots to think about it?
Interesting is a great word. One of our producers, Stephanie Bonner actually co-owns and co-manages a few bars around the city with her husband, so we got the bar through them and they [said], “You can shoot in the bar, but only when it’s closed,” so that meant we were shooting overnight and our call times were like one or two in the morning. The funny thing about overnights is they’re definitely challenging, but they also bring together the cast and crew in a different kind of way be because everyone’s really in it together. Nobody else in the city is awake. And so there’s something special about the community it creates.
I had such an incredible team, Cece, the producers, and everybody that really showed up and were ready to work, so we made it happen. The first night it also rained and that made it rough with loading in, so we were starting off an an hour-and-a-half behind, but then we got those really beautiful water droplets on the car exterior, which was worth it in the end. Also, I broke out in hives the second night.
Oh no!
It was unexpected, but I powered through. And it was also pretty close to us wrapping, so when we finished, I just went straight to urgent care. I was fine, but I realized when you’re doing that kind of indie filmmaking with limited budget and time, and you’re just going, going, going, my response to stress is just to problem solve and keep going, which almost mirrored [the story of] “The Rebirth” in a way because my body then reacted on behalf of me and by the end of the film, I [thought] my body is telling me something and my mind was not even aware and in a weird way I was like, “This is meta. I like this.”
As soon as you said that, I thought you turned your pain into a superpower like Hana. When you come to something like this as an actor and you’re directing yourself and you get to the end of the process, is it interesting to shape your performance after the fact?
Yeah, because I edited the film too and all the rehearsing before shooting was really crucial because then we could play around and really explore the dynamics between the different characters, especially with Hana and the manager played by Mickey Breitenstein. That was crucial because on the day, because of the rain and everything else, I barely had any time to watch playback, so most of the time we were just shooting, we were trying different things and then moving on. I was just hoping that it worked. I did have other collaborators on set and I could turn to them and be like, “Did that one seem different from the first one?” And my script supervisor Mitzi would say, “I think that was what you wanted,” and we’d just move on. In the edit, it was really interesting to piece it all together. It felt like solving a puzzle. There were some things while watching it back where I would watch myself and [think] “I think I was trying to do this, but it read like this.”
But no matter what, when you’re making a film, it always takes on a life of its own once you’re in post-production and ultimately I’m really proud of what we made. As an actor, especially with the self-taping [for auditions], I’m actually very used to looking at myself and in the edit, I would be sending cuts to the producers, so it was never just me having to make the choice. I had a really great team around me I could trust.
What’s it like to get to this point with it and getting ready to share it with audiences?
It is so exciting. We’re a New York-based team and we shot at a bar in the Upper East Side, so Tribeca was always the pie in the sky hope for the premiere, but you never make assumptions when you submit to a festival like this. It’s just a dream and we’re really excited and running around and trying to prepare, but also really trying to stay grounded and just enjoy and celebrate.
“The Rebirth” will screen at Tribeca Festival on June 6th as part of the Shorts: NY Off-Peak program at 5 pm at the Indeed Theater at Spring Studios, June 14th at 8:30 pm at AMC 19th St East 6 and June 15th at 8:30 pm at the Shorts Theater at Spring Studios.