Director Sophie Hyde’s new film Jimpa is an engrossing story that subtly touches on many different themes in a refreshing way.
Hyde has made her mark as a director. Her breakout film came in 2013, 52 Tuesdays explored the journey of a child dealing with a parent’s gender transition. She followed that up with 2019’s Animals, and adaptation of the Emma Jane Unsworth novel of the same name, and her third film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande starred Emma Thompson. She’s also been behind acclaimed TV series F*!#ing Adelaide and The Hunting.
With Jimpa, Hyde draws from her own life and stories from her own family, creating a dramatic narrative about different generations, sexuality, gender, family committments and finding freedom.
In Jimpa Olivia Colman plays Hannah. When she was young her father came out as gay to the family, and he later moved away to live in Amsterdam. Hannah and her husband head to the Netherlands to catch up with her father, in tow in thier non-binary child Frances. Her father Jim never liked the idea of being called a Grandpa, instead he dubbed himself Jimpa.
During the visit, Frances decides to stay with him for a year, only to begin questioning some of his attitudes and values as generational differences surface.
John Lithgow plays Jimpa, while the director’s own actor offspring Aud Mason-Hyde plays Frances. Also in the cast is Kate Box as Hannah’s sister Emily, while Daniel Henshall plays husband Harry.
Sophie Hyde and Aud-Mason Hyde spoke to Graeme Watson about making the film and how the story has been received so far, ahead of its Australian opening.
Sophie Hyde explained that she began writing the film in 2019 during the covid pandemic, not long after her own father had passed away.
“I started to write the film in 2019 just after my Dad had died, and and I had this kind of compulsive like, this urge to kind of to be able to put a grandchild and grandfather, who were both exploring queerness, and being in the public eye, and being politicised, but also finding the incredible part of queerness.” Hyde said of the inspiration for the film.
“I longed to put them in a conversation with each other, and so there was this big impulse to write that down.” she said.
Of particular interest to Hyde was the character of Hannah, the middle generation, trapped between caring for an ageing parent, and also having a child of her own to be guiding through life.
“I think we thought it would become more obviously fictionalised, but it became kind of more and more important to just be like, ‘Okay, no, here we are. We’re talking about things and we’re not hiding'”. Hyde said of the story that very closely resembles the experiences of her own family.
The intergenerational story is not between two generations but three, and embed in the tale is a sharing of queer history and experience. Jimpa has fought for gay liberation, and as a HIV positive man has battled through the years of the AIDS epidemic and political apathy. Frances, as a young queer person faces a different world and new challenges.
Aud Mason-Hyde says they really wanted to address that young queer people are often missing out on their own history.
“As happened so often with marginalised communities or histories that don’t really serve the status quo or the system, they’re obscured from us.
“I think queer youth is so often robbed of our histories because we’re not taught them in schools, and we don’t make that that much work about queer history, ultimately there’s only so many LGBT films made every year.
“So it’s really important actually to create community spaces where we can talk amongst generations of our community, because we won’t know otherwise.
“There’s so many people who who are just barely able to discover their own queerness or the right words to describe the way they feel. We have so few points of access into our communities. Particularly if you’re from regional areas. It’s important, we need to be having these conversations.” Aud Mason-Hyde said.
The film is set in Amsterdam, and the director explains that she chose the location for many different reasons, one of which was its history with the AIDS movement.
“I definitely wanted to choose somewhere away from Australia, because my actual dad was still in Australia, and that didn’t feel like we were exploring the idea of separation between parent and child, quite enough.
“Amsterdam has an incredible LGBT history and and also a kind of AIDS activism history. That was really a strong draw card. I remember that my dad used to go quite a lot for AIDS conferences, and so that was a thing.”
Refreshingly the non-binary character of Frances is presented simply as a non-binary person, it’s not about a struggle with their gender identity, they already know who they are, they’re confident and assured in themselves.
“We spent a lot of time discussing how we would discuss Frances’ identity and and how that would come up, particularly between Jim and Frances, but also between Hannah and Frances.” Aud Mason-Hyde shared, noting they were some of the most reworked scenes on the project.
“I think it’s such an individual experience. It’s very collective in one way, in the sense that like so many of us feel non-binary, or feel gender fluid, or feel gender non conforming. I think it’s a much more common experience than then maybe we talk about, but I also think that there are no two non-binary or gender non-conforming people who have the same experience. We’re not a monolith.”
For Sophie Hyde an important element was to include that despite the different generations having awkward conversations navigating language around gender and sexuality, it was clearly shown that Frances is loved by her family.
“It’s really important to us to have a trans character on screen that was deeply loved by their family, even if there was, you know, conversation that was bit awkward, at times rude, but was deeply loved.” Hyde said.
Jimpa is screening now in cinemas across Australia.
