Before Black Widow, Female Filmmaker Cate Shortland Was Already Rewriting the Rules
The debut feature that proved what women behind the camera have always known: our so-called "sensitivity" isn't a weakness. It's the whole point. (Prepared by Jadyn L.)
She’s Over the Place host Katie Chonacas sits down with the show stopping Australian director Cate Shortland about her movie Somersault. There is a kind of dismissal that women who work in the industries know all too well. People will say you are too emotional. You are too sensitive. You are too caught up in your feelings to be taken seriously in a room of people who think that being detached is the same as being professional. This is a story that has been going on for as long as Hollywood has existed, and it is completely wrong.
Cate Shortland is the empowering proof that this narrative is wrong.
(all artwork by katie seamonds)
A time before she directed Scarlett Johansson in Marvel’s ‘Black Widow,’ before she made Berlin Syndrome, which scared people at film festivals all around the world, before she made Lore, the film that was on the opposite side of the table. She made a Somersault. This movie was not made by being distant or detached, but by being truly emotionally intelligent, by really caring about a girl that the world had already given up on, and by telling a story that is honest and raw, which is something that only a filmmaker who is not afraid to feel everything can do.
This movie did not just do well. It made history.
It started with a girl whom nobody else dared writing about.
Cate Shortland was travelling between Sydney and Canberra. She was drawn to the beautiful Lake George. While she was working with kids who struggled emotionally, one girl truly stuck with her.
"It was a combination of landscape and disturbed children that was the inspiration. That's still there in the film."
This girl was behind the inspiration of a character in Somersault, a sixteen-year-old girl named Heidi who was starving for love and did not know how to find it in a safe way. Not a villain, not an antagonist, she was just a kid who was desperate for love and lacked proper guidance.
“This film is inhabited by scared people, who all want to be loved,” Shortland said. “I wanted the viewer to be intimate with them.”
Intimacy. The word is so often weaponized against women in film. As if sitting inside another person’s experience and rendering it honestly on screen were somehow less rigorous than keeping your distance.
Somersault won all thirteen awards it was nominated for at the Australian Film Institute Awards in 2004. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and the movie was made four million dollars. It was shot by hand in beyond freezing temperatures. Cate Shortland says that her producer had to push her to finish the movie, she got addicted to making it anyway. This is what happens when you love what you do and you are in tune with what you love. In the episode, she talks about how she felt during that time. It’s worth listening to her talk about it, there’s inspiration bleeding through every word.
Believe me when I say, the camera that Cate Shortland used to shoot the movie felt everything too.
She shot the movie by hand, not to make it look cool, but because the story needed it to be that way. A stylistic choice that helped control the narrative and present it in a way that couldn’t be done by what’s taught in the book.
“The camera is continually moving and reacting to the actors, it is a part of the scene rather than just sitting back and observing it. The film is not an action/drama; it is experiential.”
The camera was wildly heavy; it weighed thirty kilos. The lenses were extraordinarily long. The focus was very sharp. The crew had to work in freezing, stiff, weather. The colors in the movie were frequently combination of grays, browns, and blacks, then punctuated with bursts of red every ten to fifteen scenes. Taillights. Gloves. A heartbeat running through the film.
What “Too Sensitive” Actually Looks Like on Screen
Executive Producer Jan Chapman put it simply, “We’ve seen coming-of-age films before, but this time I thought we were in the mind of an adolescent girl.”
The main character in the movie Heidi is played by Abbie Cornish. She is a young girl who keeps moving and never gives up, even when everything is falling apart. A character very representative of resilience and determination, exactly what teenage girls are made of. “She doesn’t sit and dwell on anything,” Cornish said. “She just powers on.” Shortland saw her clearly from the start: “She is a survivor, resilient and tough-skinned. She expects to be hurt, so nothing can harm her.”
It takes a lot of time and effort to create a character like that. Cate Shortland talks about all of it in this episode; it’s gripping.
For Every Woman Who's Been Told She's Too Much
Shortland was told the script needed more drafts. She wrote them. She was told the story was too small, too interior, too female. She made it anyway, in the freezing cold, with a skeleton crew and a vision clear enough that every department head spoke about it as a shared language.
What strikes you most listening to Shortland speak isn’t just her talent — it’s her honesty. There’s no polished PR version of events, no careful deflection. She talks about being dragged “kicking and screaming” through her own debut film. She talks about the years of self-doubt, the endless rewrites, the process being as brutal as it was necessary. In an industry that rewards the performance of confidence, that kind of transparency is rare and so refreshing.
What’s even more striking is the grace with which she carries it. Because Shortland isn’t airing grievances. She’s telling the truth about what it actually takes, for anyone, but especially for women in the arts, who are so often expected to either shrink quietly or fight loudly, with very little room for anything in between. She occupies that in-between space with remarkable ease: clear-eyed about the obstacles, unsentimentally proud of the work, and completely unwilling to pretend the path was anything other than what it was.
There is so much power in women telling stories, especially the ones that aren’t written to have a perfect ending, Somersault is one of the many stand out examples.
Now available in a stunning 4K restoration, Somersault is finding a whole new generation of viewers. And this episode of She’s All Over the Place is the perfect place to start — or to return.
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Excellent 🤍✨