To Mom With Love

Directing Yara Shahidi and her mother, Keri, made for one of the most intellectually stimulating shoot days I’ve had to date.

24 Comments
May 22, 2018Los Angeles, USA

This one was a joy to direct, and probably one of the most intellectually stimulating shoot days I’ve had to date. Yara Shahidi (if you don’t know her, get to know her) and her mother, Keri, are so in sync from their breadth of reading to their guilty pleasure snacks to their vocabularies, that we could be as organic as we liked – even with the limitation of shooting on film. Instead of short takes of scripted dialogue, I gave stimulus on topics like the evolving role of motherhood from generation to generation, followed my personal opinion, off they went: these two well-spoken women of substance and humour, riffing on complex subject matter as a means of demonstrating the reality of their relationship. Not just talking about it. The flipside of such luxury was that I ended up with over 45 minutes of solid, useable dialogue, which I then had to cut down to 2 minutes. So that sucked. In the best possible way.

Director MARGARET ZHANG

DOP RYAN MARIE HELFANT

Producer SAMANTHA OLIVER BENNETTS

Hair NAI’VASHA JOHNSON // Make-up EMILY CHENG

Styling JASON BOLDEN //Sound BEDE BENJAMIN-KORPORAAL

About

Margaret Zhang 章凝 is an Australian-born-Chinese filmmaker, photographer, consultant and writer based between New York and Shanghai. Since establishing her website in 2009, Zhang has gone on to work with global brands including CHANEL, Swarovski, YEEZY, Bulgari, Gucci, MATCHES, Under Armour, and Louis Vuitton in a wide range of capacities both in front of and behind the camera, while completing her Bachelor of Commerce/Bachelor of Laws at The University of Sydney. Zhang’s directing, photography, and styling has been employed by the likes of VOGUE, L’Officiel, Harper’s BAZAAR, NOWNESS, and ELLE internationally. She has been listed in Forbes Asia’s 30Under30 and TimeOut’s 40Under40, and her work has been recognized as shaping the international fashion industry by the Business of Fashion BoF500 Index for four consecutive years. CNN has identified Zhang as a leading fashion photographer in Asia and ELLE named her the region’s most influential digital voice. She went on to be the first Asian face to cover ELLE Australia. In 2016, she co-founded BACKGROUND, a global consultancy for which she specialises in Western-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-Western cultural bridging for a range of luxury, lifestyle, and brand initiatives. In 2017, she exhibited a series of 39 unseen photographic works as a solo show in Sydney, and premiered her first short film – a 15-minute exploration of her visceral relationship with classical music on both performance and abstract planes – to critical acclaim. In 2018, co-curated the first annual FOREFRONT Summit focused on inter-industry problem-solving at all scales of business. From this king summit, Zhang developed FOREFRONT+ – a round table series of candid conversations covering subject matters of universal concern. In 2019, THE FACE Magazine engaged Zhang as Creative-Director-at-Large for Asia for its relaunch. Zhang is currently working on her first feature film.