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Raised as competitors more than kin, estranged siblings Leeza and Isabel must engage in one final game on the wobbliest of playing fields. When their cruel grandmother passes, the two half-sisters—Isabel, a freshly disgraced author, and Leeza, who is on a brief funeral leave from prison—return to their rural Oregon stomping grounds in search of a life-changing inheritance check.
That’s the pressure-cooker setup of Half Sisters, the new thriller and debut narrative feature by Portland filmmaker Devin Fei-Fan Tau.
With its Portland premiere at Clinton Street Theater on April 28 and a VOD release set for July 21, Half Sisters finds Tau working in a new direction. He’s made two feature-length documentaries—notably Who’s on Top? (2020), a George Takei-narrated film about LGBTQ Portlanders attempting to summit Mount Hood. So how did he go from an inspirational, humanist documentary to a twisting, cutthroat thriller?
“My drug is really seeing people’s eyes light up when the camera is rolling,” says Tau of his documentary passions. But the director found that “drug” also applied to finding the truth alongside his Half Sisters actors: Kristy Dawn Dinsmore (Vikings) and Sydney Winbush (Shrill).
Influenced by David Fincher’s The Game (1997) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), Half Sisters toys violently with how the well of family can be poisoned by deep-rooted prejudice and its constant denial.
“I don’t think you should say Get Out and Half Sisters in the same sentence out of respect to Jordan Peele’s amazing movie, but I do love that there are some of us filmmakers trying to thread this really fine needle,” Tau says. “How do we make a commercially viable movie but have themes and stories within it that maybe you can’t say out loud? We hide the medicine in the sugar and make it entertainment.”
These themes in Half Sisters took fuller shape when Portland screenwriter J. Alexander Johnson got hold of Joe Leone’s original spec script. Tau says Johnson’s contributions to the Half Sisters script were so valuable that they’re now working together on a futuristic sci-fi movie, The Gallery.
Without necessarily naming the concepts, Half Sisters clearly has its fun with white fragility, visually suggests the carceral pipeline that’s ensnared Leeza, and questions the powerful pull toward reconciliation (however unearned) that works its gravity on communities and families. That last point was personal for Tau and drew him toward the initial script.
“The conflicts between the two sisters are fueled by my conflicts with my two older brothers,” he says. “Because I’m gay, I always say I’m the sister, but I have a complicated relationship with them: the miscommunication of saying something one way and having it be misinterpreted, the gaslighting, the constant verbal jabs and, in my case, the physical jabs.”
Most of Half Sisters lets loose in a tony farmhouse in Silverton, Oregon. Once the hunt for the inheritance begins, Isabel and Leeza exist in a frenzied arrested development across the 300-acre property. Much to Tau’s delight, that house (found on VRBO) came prefabricated with rural thriller features: the private road, the murky pond, the pitch-dark crawlspace. It was crucial, he says, to pursue the right locations for the film, even if reaching for something aesthetically high end can be challenging.
“Not to diss indie filmmakers in Portland, but sometimes I’ve seen my colleagues and friends make compromises with locations just because that’s all we could get,” Tau says. “Like, hey, my friend has this basement, so let’s just film there. Versus, maybe your friend has a rich uncle and maybe they have a penthouse in the Pearl we could use…”
Penthousewise, the film’s few Portland scenes focus on Isabel (Dinsmore), a white memoirist who’s made her career marketing her marriage to a Black woman. The script amplifies Isabel’s “Karen-ness” to sometimes absurdist levels, Tau admits, but it’s informed by his experiences in the business world.
Having directed several dozen corporate films, sometimes for Fortune 500 companies, Tau says he’s had an upsetting front-row seat to “performative allyship.” Or “hypocrisy,” as the 47-year-old says his generation used to call it.
“I wanted to fire a warning shot to these people I’ve worked with in the past,” he says. “Like hey, you didn’t see your name this time, but look out for the next film.”
SEE IT: Half Sisters plays at the Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., 971-808-3331, cstpdx.com. 7 pm Friday, April 28. $12.