A Chat with Keely and a Film Called ‘Roses’

Keely and I met the way half of LA seems to meet each other: at the bottom of Runyon Canyon, before sunrise, hauling camera equipment up a hill for a stranger’s short film. I had an asthma attack that morning — the air was weirdly cold — which, in hindsight, is a pretty on-brand way for me to make a new friend. She found her way into filmmaking through Tiziano, one of my friends, and through a director named Shane Hurlbutt, through a summer spent wrapping color-coded cable on a film set because someone needed hands. One of those projects turned into a night wandering LA’s metro stations with a composer named Javier, filming strangers-turned-collaborators as they rode the trains — the kind of project that only happens in this city, where someone says meet me at an apartment downtown at six, we promise we won’t murder you, and you just go. But the real heart of this episode is her film Roses — and the fact that there isn’t a single rose in it. Years ago, in college, she made an intaglio print — copper plate, acid, ink, a press — of her own face traced in different directions, with roses drawn around it. Like most art from college, it went into a box. Years later, mid-conversation with a filmmaker she’d just met — one of those rare four-hour talks where you don’t want to hang up because it feels like a spark lighting up in your chest — he saw the print on her wall and said: you should make a film out of that. So she did, slowly, over years, stitched together from three unlikely threads: the seamless match-cuts in Hozier’s Work Song music video, where one dancing couple turns into another mid-spin; the way cinematographer Mandy Walker talked about filming Elvis, treating the camera not as equipment but as a third dancer in the room; and a folder of Pinterest stills she’d collected of bodies making shapes — the space between two curved arms, the focus pulled just to a pair of hands. She cast two real dancers who were already a couple, because she wanted the chemistry to be real before the camera ever rolled. And she kept the title Roses — even though the roses never made it into the final film — because, as her composer put it when she asked whether it needed explaining: you told me it was called Roses, and I never once questioned why. Nobody does. It just is. That’s the whole soul of the project, right there in the title nobody questions. We spent a long stretch of the conversation on the thing I keep circling on this show: why does the industry keep trying to strip the human part out of art? Keely’s answer was more honest than most — she doesn’t think it’s evil, she thinks it’s situational. An executive deciding whether to fund your project doesn’t need the five-year backstory of how you got there; they need thirty seconds and a budget. But put those same people in a museum, or on a studio tour, or at a dinner table — and suddenly they crave the human detail, the accident that became the best part, the story behind the story. The backstory isn’t unimportant. It’s just being asked for in the wrong room. I still think that’s a little bit of a tragedy — that the story of why you made something only gets to exist once the selling is already done. But I loved that she didn’t let me stay simply outraged about it. She’s right. It depends on the room. Before we wrapped, she gave me the practical, unglamorous truth of being an independent filmmaker in this city right now: festival submission fees add up fast with zero guarantee of ever being seen, so instead she’s routing Roses straight to local LA screenings, letting her own community find it first. And she’s also a photographer — her series Shaken Not Stirred is showing at an event here in LA on October 17th. Thank you, Keely. Keep the door open — link’s yours whenever you want the world to find Roses. — L. Find more about Keely here Keely’s INSTA PAGE (  / lovelight.media  ) Keely’s website (https://lovelightmediaproductions.com/) https://nightnightatlauras.substack.c...