Still Life explores coming-of-age love and loss
For Oakland Filmmaker Lauren Shapiro, the road from concept to seeing her feature-length film Still Life on a movie theater screen has been a long one, spanning decades, but worth the wait. She wanted to make this film about her own coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of her mother’s battle with cancer since the events in the film happened, beginning in late 1999. But it wasn’t until the 2020 pandemic struck that she really set the ball in motion. Along the way, she gained filmmaking knowledge and experience and made new lifelong friends, including Alameda High School alumnus Anika Jensen, who stars in the film. Still Life will debut at its first film festival, the San Francisco IndieFest, on Saturday, February 7.
A coming-of-age story
Still Life is set in the Bay Area in 1999 and centers on Dafne, a teen whose mother is battling leukemia. Over several months on the eve of the new millennium, Dafne juggles school, ballet, a nascent romance, and the everyday rhythms of youth—all while living with the pall of fear and grief that her mother’s illness casts over her life. As the year turns and her mother’s condition worsens, Dafne stands between childhood and adulthood, and between having someone who loves her and losing that person. When her mother dies, Dafne is alone in liminal space—grown but still growing, alive but changed.
Birthing a film
Shapiro filmed Still Life in 2024 during Jensen’s gap year between graduating from Alameda High School and starting at UC Irvine, then filmed pick-up shots during spring break of 2025. In between, rough-cut editing began in earnest. “As soon as my Kickstarter was successful, I reached out to (film editor) Ellie Vanderlip whom I had worked with before,” she said. “I went through all the footage, selected my favorite takes, and added lots of notes. She put it all together over months of us sitting next to each other and trying things out. We started in January and worked through August.”
Film festivals allowed Shapiro to submit Still Life for consideration even before she had finished sound editing, so she began submitting as soon as the rough cut was done in August. “Waiting to hear back was excruciating because I had poured so much time and heart into this project, and my hope is for it to reach a wider audience,” Shapiro said. “I had been told that acceptance into a film festival is an important first step. When I wasn’t sure if I was going to be accepted into any festival, it was crushing. But I started to explore other pathways, like connecting with [organizations] for motherless daughters and learning how to contact sales agents and distributors directly, which was empowering. I’m glad I did that because now I have other paths that I’m excited to pursue in parallel.
“Still, when I found out I got accepted, it was huge, because it’s what I had been working and hoping for, for so long. One of the festival programmers explained that once you get into one festival, it can open other doors. All you need is one person to give you a chance. San Francisco Indie Fest has given us the opportunity, so I’m grateful.”
Preparing for the first film festival
Acceptance to the SF IndieFest on December 12 was galvanizing. Suddenly, Shapiro had to finish the sound editing to meet the festival’s January 20 final submission deadline. Unfortunately, she was short on funds.
She posted a GoFundMe but also turned to her good friend, Claire Slattery, owner of Improv Central on Central Avenue, which had a space suitable for a small film screening: “I held two small, private screenings at the end of December as a fundraiser, and with the money raised, was able to start the sound editing,” Shapiro said.
The Alameda screenings gave her a chance to connect with people she’d known throughout her life. “I had people from all different parts of my life in the audience,” she said. “I had my mentor from when I was in college who wrote me a letter for graduate school. I had friends from elementary school. I had a friend who lived the story with me, and I hadn’t seen her practically since the story ended.”
Shapiro was thankful for the opportunity the film provided to express her gratitude to this lifetime of friends and family. “This is kind of dark, but my mom died at 47. My grandma died at 46. My cousin died at 45, and I’m about to turn 42,” she said. “I hope that I live a really long life, but we just never know. I was grateful for this chance to reconnect with all these important people and tell them how much they mean to me and what a difference they made.”
Shapiro’s sense of mortality has sharpened her focus: “I made a pact with myself that I was not going to settle. I became crystal clear about my vision and got a lot of practice articulating and advocating for it. I hope that skill transfers to other domains in my life.”
Alameda actors
Like Shapiro, Jensen feels she learned life lessons from the experience. “It was hard work,” she recalled. “Some days when we were filming in Walnut Creek, it was 100 degrees. One day, we filmed until about 4 in the morning. But it was really fun. Like any theater production, it’s a temporary community that you build, and it becomes a strong community because you’re closely involved with each other every day, working to create something. That combination of it being hard but fun made me believe that work can be fulfilling, that it doesn’t have to be inherently unpleasant.”
Regarding whether she wants to continue working as an actress, Jensen noted, “Acting in a film was always my dream, so I worked hard to get to that point. Now that I’ve achieved that, I’m exploring other interests that I haven’t dived into as much and feeling inspired in other directions. But I do miss it. I like acting a lot.”
Several students who were living in Alameda at the time of the filming, including Ella Banchieri, Katie Walker, and Avril Jensen, were cast in minor roles or as extras, along with Foodbank Players actor Aaron Bruce. Six Alameda Ballet Academy (ABA) students play students at Dafne’s ballet school, and Jensen’s mother, an ABA instructor, plays Dafne’s ballet teacher.
Festival debut
Still Life officially debuts at the San Francisco IndieFest on February 7 at 3:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theater. Tickets are available online. Shapiro and Jensen will be available after the film for a question-and-answer discussion. If you can’t attend in person, streaming tickets are available as well, so you may view the film on your device February 5-15. Both in-person and streaming viewers are eligible to vote for audience awards.
Contributing writer Karin K. Jensen covers boards and commissions for the Alameda Post. Contact her via [email protected]. Her writing is collected at https://linktr.ee/karinkjensen and https://alamedapost.com/Karin-K-Jensen.
