Kathleen Hepburn’s ‘Perfumed Dreaming’ an ode to scent and sisters and memory
Kathleen Hepburn has a habit of mining reality for her cinematic work.
We saw it in her award-winning debut feature film, Never Steady, Never Still, which was inspired in part by her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s disease.
And we saw it in The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, the critically acclaimed indie gem she co-wrote and co-directed with Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (cəsnaʔəm, the city before the city). That film – which won an honorable mention for Best Canadian Feature Film at the venerable Toronto International Film Festival, and was acquired by ARRAY, the distribution company helmed by Golden Globes-nominated director Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) – drew inspiration from an actual experience that Tailfeathers had with a young stranger she met on a rainy day in East Vancouver – a young Indigenous woman who was bloodied, barefoot, heavily pregnant, and in desperate need of intervention.
But those films – although stirring and moving and heralded for their realism – were, for all intents and purposes, works of fiction. Which makes Perfumed Dreaming an outlier in the Vancouver filmmaker’s filmography: her first unabashed foray into documentary.
Perfumed Dreaming is a short work directed by Hepburn and produced by Jeremy Mendes from the National Film Board of Canada’s Digital Studio in Vancouver. It is arguably the most deeply personal of all of Hepburn’s screen works to date. Not only do we hear Hepburn’s voice in the film, we’re afforded an opportunity to peer into key relationships in her life: with her sister, her late mother, and her baby nephew.
The short work begins at a time of great change in the lives of Hepburn and her sister, Megan. Megan is an olfactory artist: through her company Cracher dans la Soupe Parfum, she works with scents to convey a range of emotional experiences. As Perfumed Dreaming opens, the sisters are situated in a place of joy and grief: on one hand, excited for the birth of Megan’s first child; on the other, mourning the loss of their mother, who passed during the filming of The Body Remembers.
“It was a time of change and transition and a lot of grief and a lot of different emotions going on for all of us, and I felt like I wanted to hold on to this moment and try to explore it a little bit,” says Hepburn in a recent phone interview. Megan was “developing a show while she was pregnant that was trying to deal with her memories of our mother and create these scents that are based on her imagined fantasy world. It was a really interesting series she was putting together and installing right before giving birth and I felt like it was a good opportunity to sit with her and talk about her work and talk about becoming a mother and everything else that was going on.”
Olfactory artist Megan Hepburn in a still from Perfumed Dreaming. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Perfumed Dreaming represents several significant firsts for Hepburn: her first documentary project; her first time collaborating with her sister, who trained as a painter before venturing into the olfactory arts.
“We’re fairly close but we’re also quite different,” says Hepburn. “It was nice to be able to sit with her and get a little deeper into her practice because we don’t really talk too much about it. We’re both working in the arts but we don’t talk about our own work when we’re together. It was nice to talk through some of our shared experiences in the family and also find out how we experienced our childhood a little bit differently. I think having the microphone there gave us the excuse to go further than we normally would. It was a good process for us in trying to process our feelings about the loss.”
You can watch the piece on the National Film Board of Canada’s web site or on Facebook.
While Hepburn has no intention of dedicating herself to documentary work full-time, she considers herself changed by her adventures making Perfumed Dreaming.
“I consider myself a writer-director, so the script is always very controlled on my end, and having to let go of that and try and leave things up to chance a little bit and find the story in post was a beautiful challenge,” says Hepburn. “I think if anything, I hope it will loosen up my writing work a little more and make me more open to spontaneity.”
But Perfumed Dreaming represents something else for Hepburn: the opportunity to bridge a seemingly insurmountable gap between her late mother and her new nephew, and work towards making space for grief in her own life.
“I think what’s so hard is bringing in this new generation, this baby who isn’t going to know our mother,” says Hepburn. “That’s one of the things that’s hardest to process, but I think being there for this experience and seeing my sister grow into motherhood was really beautiful, and I don’t know if I would have been as close to it had we not pushed our way into the birthing room with the camera, and forced ourselves to talk about it. If anything, it’s helped to bring my sister and I closer together.”
