Him? No! He can’t be a pedophile! He’s always been so kind! How many times have we heard some version of that statement? We are desperate to put sexual abusers squarely into one box or another. Good or bad. Abusive or nice. Pedophile or polite. It feels like some sort of self-preservation tactic; a way for us to feel like we can’t be tricked.
But the truth is, we are tricked all the time because, like everybody else, abusers are multi-faceted; they bring so many different qualities to the table. They aren’t one thing or another and therefore, we can’t feel only one way or another about them. It’s normal to have feelings of fondness and love mixed in with anger and sadness.
That’s the message that Halifax-based animator Jenna Marks is bringing to the screen with her new short film Salted. The seven-and-a-half minute piece explores how love and loss can live together in a survivor of sexual assault.
The film concept recently won Marks the $10,000 cash prize for the CBC Pitch This! Competition at the 14th annual Women in Film and Television Atlantic Making Waves Conference.
Finding inspiration
Marks began her filmmaking journey at NSCAD, with a focus on live action. While there, she got wind of a program called Hothouse—a mentorship workshop for emerging Canadian filmmakers that aims to re-imagine ways of making animation that are faster and more flexible.
“After Hothouse I was super inspired, and I started making my own animations, becoming interested in animation and looking at animation studios,” says Marks. “I sort of learned through osmosis, just being in and around people working in animation.”
Breaking out
After a stint working in the studio scene, Marks started to feel like she wasn’t advancing as much as she would have liked as a filmmaker and wanted to make a switch to be able to tell her own stories in her own way. That switch came in the form of a master’s degree from Concordia and a residency called Open Workshop in Denmark.
“I gave myself the gift of time to focus on what I wanted to do and the kind of stories I wanted to tell,” says Marks. “For the first time I had the time, space and people around me to push me to try new things that I used to be intimidated by.”
What emerged from that incubation period was Salted.
In 2018, Marks made the impossibly brave decision to come forward and report a sexual assault she had survived in her childhood. It was a secret that she had been holding onto for a long time, making her increasingly tired and angry. But coming forward to the police and the subsequent trial didn’t provide the sense of freedom that she had been hoping it would. Quite the opposite actually.
“When I came forward to the police, they wanted to protect my identity and didn’t want me to influence other people coming forward, so I was sort of silenced again,” says Marks. “And then in the courtroom, at the trial, they treated me like a witness rather than a victim; like a person this actually happened to.”
Creating Salted provided her a way to reclaim the experience and take ownership of it. And in the end, she says her work on the film helped her emotionally navigate her way through a very difficult time.
Shaped by the ocean
Marks is using the courtroom audio transcript of her testimony in her sexual assault trial as the inspiration for the audio in the film, which she will recreate in a studio. It will be set against a beach scene where a woman will tell the story of what happened to her. This contrast is what Marks is really trying to showcase.
“By using the beach, I am combining one of my favourite memories I have of my assaulter with the actual assault itself. It shows the dichotomy between love and loss,” says Marks. “In my particular experience, this is what made it so hard for me to come forward and what was one of the most painful things about it.”
The film uses metaphor in a myriad of ways; to show how we store trauma in a non-linear way, but also to make it a more welcoming experience for the viewer. There is nothing explicit. In the film, the woman is turned into a seal and chased by a whale. And everything is animated with things from the ocean, like salt, sand and seaweed.
Like many Atlantic Canadians, the ocean has played a central role in a lot of her work. But it is the core childhood memory of enjoying a day at the beach with her abuser that inspired the ocean-setting for this particular film.
“It’s a reminder that just like people, the ocean can be beautiful and calm, but also powerful and scary,” says Marks.
Releasing her story
With the $10,000 grand prize from CBC and $14,400 in-kind services from Hideout Studios, 902 Post and William F White/Sunbelt and Star Power, Marks thinks that she has just about enough funding to complete the project by February, with a potential summer 2025 release date. She is optimistic that the film will be well received by viewers and critics alike.
“I think the film is going to do well, so I’m going to work with a distributor for the first time. There are a lot of good festivals that I think it could play at because it’s a documentary, an animation, a short and a woman-led story.”
Options are always a good thing to have and Marks will look for guidance from her distributor on where and when the film will officially premiere. Halifax audiences can expect a screening in the fall of 2025 at the earliest.
