Anna and Nat Segal have spent the last 2 years filming for their movie Finding the Line. Currently in Melbourne they are working hard to get the movie completed and submitted to film festivals, organising premieres and trying to balance working at Toasta food truck to pay the bills. I met up with Anna this week in Melbourne to find out how things are going with the movie.
Not completely happy with the first edit, they are now working with Fran Derham, producer of surf movie First Love. Seeing Nat and Anna’s struggles as similar as to what she experienced during her first film, Fran has come on board and connected them with new editor Sarah Edwards who has re-edited and completed a 15 minute short version of the film which has recently been accepted into 5 film festivals. “Seeing how much effort went into making the short version, it’s daunting,” Anna tells me, “now we have another couple of weeks to complete the 45 minute version.”
Anna and Nat in Whistler 2 days before starting the first shoot almost 2 years ago.
Based on fear, it was filmed in Australia, BC, Chamonix and Alaska. The idea of what fear was developed and morphed throughout the process and they discovered that fear manifests in many ways, not just for self preservation, which was the basis of Nat’s fear. Anna was struggling with the fear of failure and judgement “I was so eager to prove myself and so scared of failing that I would often put my body on the line when I shouldn’t have” resulting in injuries.
Learning a lot about themselves as well as film making, they both tried to be as honest as they could to the camera. “As extreme athletes we’ve learnt to hide our fears. We didn’t even realise that we were doing it until we were searching for clips of us freaking out, and couldn’t find many. We just keep it together even though we were struggling inside.”
Anna’s favourite segment of the film was in Chamonix because she was really out of her comfort zone. She’d never been to the big mountain/ski mountaineering mecca and hadn’t experienced that intensity, “Everything revolves around that in Chamonix and I just felt like a complete rookie, but I felt like that was one place where I rose to the challenge. I had to put in a lot of effort and I feel I got a lot out of it, I learnt a lot there.”
Alaska was hard but at the same time a really amazing experience for the girls. “We had one week in a heli and didn’t have the best conditions. Trying to manage filming while heli skiing is really tough because you only have so much heli time and when conditions aren’t good and you’re flying around trying to find lines, it’s stressful.”
The film has been life consuming for Anna and Nat, constantly talking about it whenever they’re together, which is quite regularly since they’re staying with their parents in Richmond and at times working side by side in a food truck. Making toasties to pay for the movie, Anna is finding it hard to balance it all, “you want to put all of your energy into what you want to achieve, but then you’ve got to pay the rent.”
With a busy few months ahead organising screenings in North America, they’re excited to be working with She Jumps who will be organising screenings of their film around the US on 20th January, International Women’s Ski and Snowboard Day.
With minimal plans for the winter, Anna is excited to get back to Whistler for a screening at the Whistler Film Festival on December 3, being joined by Nat a few weeks later. “I’m excited to leave it open and see what’s going to happen. Sometimes booking yourself back to back seems like a good idea, but then other opportunities come up that you can’t take. Last year was so scheduled with back to back filming it was full on. I want to ski lots of pillows of pow and work towards my mountaineering skills.”
