Jimpa movie: Sophie Hyde on queer families, protecting her child and the marginalisation of LGBTQI stories

South Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde considers all her films to be deeply personal, that every work has things that she feels inside her.

But there is something particularly revealing about Jimpa, her film starring Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, as well as her child, Aud Mason-Hyde, as three generations of a family dealing with their relationships to each other, and with queer identity.

“I do come from a big queer family, and I am interested in ideas about gender, sexuality and identity, which do cross over all (my films).

“I was just at a point where it was a shifting time for me. My dad had died, I had a teenage child, I was grappling with how to support them, and thinking about what it is to be a parent, also to be a child of a parent.

“And thinking about the stories that we create, the mythology of our lives that we then retell.”

Jimpa started with the idea of putting a grandparent and a grandchild in a room, and for them to just talk.

The grandparent, Jim (Lithgow), is inspired by Hyde’s father, Jim Hyde, who was a prominent campaigner for LGBTQI rights and had roles in state and federal governments. He died in 2018.

The grandchild is drawing on the experiences of Mason-Hyde, 20, who like their character Frances, is trans non-binary. Colman’s character, Hannah, is partly based on Hyde but there’s also a lot of co-writer Matthew Cormack in there.

“I was with a friend the other day and she was like, ‘none of you are anything like the characters’, which was great, because people think that we’re more like them than we are. We draw on our feelings, and we draw on things like, I’m a filmmaker, Aud is a trans non-binary teenager, and dad is a gay man.

“But there are so many things about us that aren’t in there. We are all big, complex, wobbly, soft creatures and we can’t be contained in one story.”

The outline of Jimpa is a simple narrative – Hannah and husband Harry (Daniel Henshall) take Frances to Amsterdam to visit Jim, which forces Hannah to reckon with her relationship with her father and her child – but the intricacies are in all those character moments.

Scenes of Frances with Jim and his friends, survivors recalling experiences from a time when being gay was even more dangerous, and the generational gap between them when Jim refuses to accept the spectrum of sexualities.

Scenes of Hannah trying to play peacemaker, while concealing her own hurt from unreconciled feelings of abandonment from decades past when Jim left the family, and how that now informs a moment when her own child wants to break free and explore who they are outside of the family unit.

There’s a specificity to Jimpa, but a relatability to the emotions it evokes.

“We’re putting inside a film a lot of feelings – oh, my child is getting older, and I need to let them go and be in the world, but I also want to be around them, and they’re my favourite person,” Hyde said.

“So many of us live and have that. Same with our parents getting older and dying. That’s obviously a very common experience that I don’t think we get to talk about enough.”

Hyde’s father’s death in 2018 was something of a catalyst, and she and Cormack started writing Jimpa in 2019 when Mason-Hyde was much younger. But they were sceptical the film would ever get made.

“We were like, how could we possibly make this very personal film that’s set in multiple countries and requires a kind-of A-list actor? And that is a big queer family story? Who’s ever going to make that?

“So, in a way, it’s a miracle to get a film made, and a film like this with such a big cast and everything, as an independent filmmaker in Australia, it’s a miracle.”

But the financing and distribution environment continues to be challenging for queer films, Hyde said.

“I like to think, for a while, that we were moving to place where these kinds of stories were really embraced and seen much more broadly, but actually what we’ve seen over the last few years is a kind of reduction of these stories, and a kind-of pushing them back out to the sidelines again.

“It’s been really interesting being out there with other queer filmmakers and watching their films be seen but not seen in the way that maybe we were thinking, ‘maybe the moment is now’.

“You have these anomalies, you have Heated Rivalry, and you think there’s finally an embrace of a queer story in a significant way, but, for the most part, there have been cancelled TV shows and less money for queer films.

“So, you want to think in terms of progress, but these stories are marginalised, and always have been, and that doesn’t make them not important. I want to think that it gets easier, but the numbers suggest otherwise.”

The Netflix series Boots, about a closeted young gay man’s experience in the American military in the 1990s, was cancelled two months after its first season debuted, despite positive reviews. It was, however, a target of the Trump Administration – a spokesperson for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “woke garbage”.

When Netflix released its half-yearly ratings report, Boots had recorded 30.7 million views, more than the second season of Nobody Wants This, which had been released in the same month. It had more than three times as much viewership as the second season of Man on the Inside. The latter two series were picked for another instalment.

While not referring specifically to Boots, Hyde said that the marginalisation of queer stories was a political choice.

“We know as filmmakers that these things are choices, of whose films and TV shows are supported across the board, and how they get to an audience is a very considered choice.

“We are watching a time where a lot of the studios and a lot of the financiers have changed their positions and backed off from these kinds of stories. That’s not necessarily because of the audience.

“We can’t pretend that it’s just the good floats to the top. It’s a political world that we’re living in.”

Jimpa had its world premiere a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival but did not pick up American distribution until September. When it played the festival circuit in the US, especially LGBTQI ones, audiences had told Hyde that they needed this film.

“There is a relief in watching a story that isn’t nihilistic, that is about things being very loving, characters trying very hard to reach other, and is also imagining and hopeful for a future that we might all live inside, and we might work together, rather than a rejection that is dark.

“We’re all craving this feeling of coming together. How do we disagree with each other, how do we dance together? How we do find joy, how do we love really deeply through things that are tough, rather than just be blind to them.

“We have that experience of audiences really cherishing the film, really sitting inside the tenderness, and really wanting to talk about it.”

Among those audience were parents or grandparents who have someone in their lives who were going through gender identity journeys or were touched by similar stories, and Jimpa gave them a way to frame those conversations with themselves and with their families.

For Hyde, as a filmmaker and a mother working with their child, the experience of making this film reinforced her own family dynamics of always being open, in conversation and to be creatively connected.

“We’ve chosen to live in that way, to not separate those things,” she said.

Mason-Hyde is now 20 and is on that journey of exploring who they are outside of the family home, and some of the feelings that triggers for Hyde is reflected in the film.

And the protective streak that comes from being any parent, but definitely one whose child is in the public eye and will be noticed for their difference, and whose mere existence can be political.

“One of the things that we’ve always chosen as a family is to be transparent about our lives, and to be honest and to know that Aud’s experience is always politicised, and that’s by choice or not.”

As a 12-year-old, Mason-Hyde did a TEDx talk about their experience of gender, and Hyde pointed out that was in their family lineage. “My dad had the same experience of choosing to use his identity and his body in the frontline of a conversation,” she said.

But hiding Mason-Hyde or asking them not to speak publicly is not a way of protecting them.

“There are people who come after Aud, who want to have a lot of opinions and feel like for some reason that they need to talk about trans people, or kind of shout about. So, Aud has had to experience that, and that’s difficult. I don’t think not talking about it is the answer though.”

It’s more about making sure they know that no matter what the noise is outside, at home, there is only love.

“I’m the safe harbour, I am here, I love you, I love everything about you,” Hyde said. “Rather than putting my fears of how the world might treat you badly. I’m the safety net here, you can always be with me.

“Go and do all that. It could be really hard at times. But then there are people that love you, and they’re all around you.”

Jimpa is in cinemas