Anu Valia's Film 'We Strangers' Got Its Start at HIFF’s Screenwriters Lab

The first thing you should know about the film “We Strangers” is that it takes place in Gary, Indiana. There’s no “Welcome to Gary” sign that pops into the frame, nor does anyone in the movie say they’re in the industrial town sitting on the southern end of Lake Michigan. But if you ask Anu Valia, an Indiana native who wrote and directed “We Strangers,” the townspeople make a strong impression.

“All the things that you think of when you think of a beautiful town, it’s because of the people,” she said. “In Gary, the people really care about each other and are really invested in each other. The people I’ve met, especially in the process of making this movie, are so invested not just in their own ambition and struggle and wanting to do well in this life, but spend such a huge chunk of their life making other people’s lives better.”

You’ll get to know Gary (and Valia by proxy) a little better when “We Strangers” has its New York premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Saturday, October 12. The film will have a second screening at HIFF on Sunday, October 13. Starring Kirby Howell-Baptiste (“The Good Place,” “Killing Eve”), “We Strangers” follows Rayelle as she takes a job as a housekeeper for unassuming suburbanites. Noticing how ignorant and bored these well-off clients are, she lies and says she can speak to the dead. Word gets around, from an earthy housewife (Maria Dizzia) to a stern working mom (Sarah Goldberg), and Ray becomes more involved with their personal lives (and lies). While trying to make a living and keep her head above water at home, Ray sees the disparity between how hard it is for her family to make a buck and how easy her clients have it with cleaner kitchens.

Though she grew up right outside Gary, jumping between the towns of Highland and Schererville as a kid, Valia said she frequented the lakeside town while her dad worked in steel mills nearby. She believes that “We Strangers” tells the story of someone who, like others from that community, is dealing with economic struggles compared to those living closer to metropolitan areas — Gary’s closest city being Chicago, Illinois, about 31 miles away. On top of that, Valia developed Ray from her own experiences over the years.

“Ray is influenced by a few people I know,” Valia said over the phone last week. “But I think the main deep crux of her is deeply linked to me. I have not lived the exact life Ray lives, but I do see the world very similarly to her, or at least I did when I started writing this.

“When you’ve worked on a movie for 10 years, the one-to-one starts to get very blurry,” she adds. “You keep the person stark as like, ‘Oh I’m taking this aspect from myself and two very specific people,’ and then you start to get blurrier and blurrier. You take from this, this, and this as life goes on, and the person changes. She becomes her own thing.”

It’s been a 10-year journey for Valia to get “We Strangers” onto a movie screen. She started writing the script in 2014 and kept touching-it-up while directing hit TV shows, including “And Just Like That…” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” Some of the script work for her film took place at the HamptonsFilm Screenwriters Lab, where selected fellows collaborate with professional writers and producers in one-on-one mentorships. Valia said she attended the workshop in 2018 — which was also her first time in the Hamptons — and championed her mentor, screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan (“Monsoon Wedding”), for going over the “We Strangers” script bit by bit.

The experience was so inspiring, Valia said, that she rewrote the entire script from page one.

“You just workshop your film, and you really work at it, and you have mentors who walk you through what’s working and what’s not working,” Valia added. “I had a mentor who cared so much and she really understood the film I was trying to do and how I was trying to tell it. Without her, I would not have the film as it is now.”

“We Strangers” represents Valia’s debut film as a writer/director. On top of her TV work, she’s also directed a few short films. One of which, “Lucia, Before and After,” earned the Short Film Jury Award for Fiction at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Whether working on a short or a feature, Valia keeps a keen eye on the project from beginning to end. She said that it wasn’t until she and her team did the sound mixing and added the score that she felt it was truly finished. And that was well after fine-tuning the script.

“I was kind-of writing two scripts at once: a script that works for the movie I wanted to make and one for a more conventional film,” she explained. “To get a nonconventional film made in America is very difficult. For being my first time I ever did it and for the first time doing something that was so esoteric was very challenging.”

Even after finishing the script, she still had to bring “We Strangers” to life in front of cameras. In fact, Valia talked about having to “unlearn” certain shooting styles that work for a fast-paced television production, but not so much for a feature film made from the heart.

“As a television director, I’d learned tools and skills to cover a scene in a way so you know you have everything you need in the edit in a very short amount of time,” she explained. “That’s very helpful as a TV director, but can have no point of view if you’re directing your own movie. My [director of photography] looked at me and was like, ‘What are you doing? This is not a TV show. Shoot this the way you want to shoot it and not how we can have everything in the edit.’”

Throughout all the struggles and time, Valia is excited to show her film to the world, and she’s grateful to HIFF for being that showcase. Whether “We Strangers” inspires or confounds audiences, she hopes it evokes a feeling from viewers.

“Cinema has images and sound and color and stuff that is working on a nonverbal level,” she said. “If you think you can explain a movie in three sentences, then why are you watching it? I really love films that, when you’re recommending a movie to a friend you say, ‘It’s hard to describe, you just have to see it.’ I aimed to make a movie about a feeling so that it could connect to people through feeling.”

Anu Valia’s narrative film “We Strangers” has its New York premiere on Saturday, October 12, at 7:45 p.m. at East Hampton Regal UA. The film screens again at the same theater on Sunday, October 13, at 11:15 a.m. For tickets and details, visit the Hamptons International Film Festival’s website at hamptonsfilmfest.org.