“This Triangle of Lynchian Americana” | Elizabeth Rao, The Truck
A Chinese American teenager and her boyfriend try to buy the morning after pill in post-Roe America.
Screening Sunday, May 4, as part of CFCA Shorts Program #2, “The Truck,” a short film by Elizabeth Rao, was inspired by the filmmaker’s experiences with power dynamics in small-town America — and by living between Missouri, Nashville, and Chicago, what she calls a “triangle of Lynchian Americana.”
Ahead of The Truck screening at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Rao graciously took the time to answer this year’s CCFF filmmaker questionnaire. Below, her individual responses.
How did you first become interested in filmmaking? What was your path toward directing your first film?
Blockbusters was a family tradition. We moved around a lot, and it’s one of the only sure places we could always go as a family and experience something together, and talk about it after. Sometimes I’d even get to see my dad cry. I guess I just want to create and to revel in that shared experience.
What inspired you to make the film you're bringing to the festival?
Everyday life in small-town America can become an unexpected horror film… I remember my first encounter with power dynamics… It can leave you in such a vulnerable place. Especially if the laws around you are changing, and you’re not paying that much attention, since mostly you’re just a teenager trying to get laid.
Tell us about a film that you consider a guiding influence (whether it has informed your overarching vision as a filmmaker, directly informed the title you're bringing to the festival, or both).
I’ve always had a soft spot for Haneke films… But weirdly, life and our collective experience of this moment in history has gotten way darker since I wrote The Truck… so I’m going somewhere brighter in my new screenplays. Right now, I’m finding inspiration in Mississippi Masala, loving the dad in Daddy Longlegs, and by god the dialogue in Crossing Delancey… Do the Right Thing is a constant guiding light. As is Kurosawa. Gus Van Sant. Miloš Forman. And I finally get Buñuel.
Tell us about a location that's held significance to the film you're bringing to the festival: a setting where filming took place, a geographic area that provided a source of inspiration, or another type of space that comes to mind for you in thinking about the film. What made this place so special?
Ohh, actually, there’s a pharmacy right up the street from the Music Box Theatre that inspired bits of the plot and dialogue for The Truck! I grew up in Missouri, then Nashville and then went to high school here in Chicago, so my heart will always be in this triangle of Lynchian Americana.
The theatrical experience brings us together to celebrate artistic experience and expand our horizons as human beings. Tell us about a memorable theatrical experience from your life.
In high school, my best friend brought me to a film festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I had never been to a film festival before, and I had no idea what I was getting into. It turned out to be this queer Eastern European period film. It completely blew our minds. At the same time, it hit me how the world is way bigger than any one person can imagine, and that cinema can transport us into those endless expansive possibilities...