Northwestern grad is back in Chicago for an early preview of ‘Ma Belle, My Beauty,’ the movie about polyamory that won a Sundance award
Here’s filmmaker and 2016 Northwestern University graduate Marion Hill on the subject of polyamory, the theme around which her directorial feature debut spins its variations.
“People often assume polyamory means sex-focused,” she told me recently outside a coffee shop in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. “Or that it’s a desire to have multiple sexual partners. And for some people, it is. But polyamory can be more about partnership and community living and non-monogamy, and not necessarily ménage à trois.”
She pauses, then: “I wanted to showcase a relationship that wasn’t about everybody having sex together all the time.”
Voilà: “Ma Belle, My Beauty,” which Hill and friends filmed in and around her parents’ home near Anduze, France, in 2019. It premiered in the virtual 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. There, it won the audience award in the festival’s NEXT sidebar, described by the Sundance program as devoted to “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling.”
Now based in New Orleans, Hill returned to Chicago this week to introduce a preview screening of her film. “Ma Belle, My Beauty” goes into wider release Sept. 3.
Hill is 27. She identifies as queer. Hill wrote “Ma Belle, My Beauty” from the heart. It’s a story of Black American vocalist Bertie (Idella Johnson), formerly in a polyamorous relationship with Lane (Hannah Pepper) and a Frenchman, Fred (Lucien Gugnard). That was in New Orleans; in the film’s present tense, in France, musicians Bertie and Fred have married and relocated. A visit from Lane, which comes as a surprise to Bertie, is further complicated by the presence of Noa (Sivan Noam Shimon), who may not understand the appeal of polyamory but knows what and whom she likes.
Re-watching her own work, Hill said, including her short films “Bird of Prey” (2016) and the sensual, near-wordless 2018 “Goddess House” — they’ve been viewed more than five million times on YouTube and other streaming platforms — clarifies where she was in her life then.
“It’s so clear to me I was in a very specific mindset or sense of identity at the time. Every film shows what I was thinking about at the time, which is definitely not what I’m thinking about now. Each one is like a time capsule that captures who I was with, and who I was surrounded by at that specific moment in time.”
Hill shot “Ma Belle, My Beauty” in 12 days, which for a feature is very, very efficient. Her first cut ran two hours; then, as editor, she went back and trimmed out 30 minutes.
Considering the film’s micro-budget production level “the real accomplishment is that she did it, and it’s good,” says Hill’s mentor Stephen Cone, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication, Department of Radio/Television/Film.
Cone never had Hill in class as a student but he saw “Bird of Prey” and that was enough. In his Chicago-filmed 2017 feature “Princess Cyd,” writer-director Cone’s 17-year-old protagonist was female and bisexual, in full discovery mode. He wasn’t sure his script rang true. “Marion is the reason I moved forward with the project,” Cone said, “because she gave it a thumbs-up.”
Eventually Cone brought her on as assistant editor; during filming, she co-directed the central sex scene as well as a montage sequence. “Her instincts are so on-point,” he said. “She has this uncommon ability to translate an earthy, primal, sensual experience into a filmed experience.”
Editing’s one strength among many for Hill. In Chicago, after graduating from NU, she worked as an assistant manager at The Colonie, a post-production video house. “High intensity. Learned very quickly,” she said.
She didn’t stick around long. “Trump was elected, it was winter, I wasn’t very happy. I needed somewhere else.” She packed up her car and drove solo to New Orleans; while at Northwestern, she’d grown to love the city as a member of the band Phantom J and the Galactic Booty, the house band for the improv troupe Mee-Ow, which performed at New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Right now she produces content for the website of radio station WWOZ.
Hill grew up a nomad, mostly in England but all around Europe. Her parents are in banking; Marion’s older sister, now living in Singapore with her fiancee, followed their parents’ paths in finance. Marion has not.
When she came out to her parents, she told me, “I didn’t seek approval, though I do in many ways want my parents’ approval, very much. It was more this … unnamed thing that kind of dragged on for quite a few years. And then one day I came home from college with a girlfriend. They had to just sort of accept it. And they did.”
Hill’s mother was born in Saigon and, with the war in Vietnam escalating, the family fled to France. Hill’s father hails from Shropshire, England. They met as expats in California in the 1970s.
“We’re all trying to reconnect with our Vietnamese roots in our own ways,” she said of her sister and members of her extended family in France. Hill has sought out and gotten tight with the Vietnamese community in New Orleans; her next film, she said, focuses on a Vietnamese expat in Louisiana.
“Assimilating to white American culture,” she said, “was a natural instinct for my mom, which she’s still working through. Only now, we’re speaking about it out loud.” Her mother’s successful, far-flung career, she said, was built on the implicit expectation that she “not draw attention to herself for being different.”
Hill’s short films and her first feature, she said, were “resource-driven, let’s call it. Me, my friends and next to no money.” After the Chicago preview screening of “Ma Belle, My Beauty,” Hill returns to New Orleans to shoot a music video with Tank and the Bangas and Big Freedia. She’s done music videos before but this is something new.
“The producer tells me, ‘What do you want?’ And my auto-response is ‘Well, what do you have?’ And they respond with ‘No, no. What do you want?’ Creatively that’s a change for me.”
At Northwestern, she said, an otherwise rewarding education came with this asterisk: “In film school they don’t teach you how to produce a film. They teach you how to make schedules, budgets — but as far as finding investors goes, that comes later. Indie producers, they’re the ones who go to LA because it’s easier to find work there. I have a lot to learn about building a producing team, and that’s top of mind for me for the next film.”
“Ma Belle, My Beauty” got made, she said, with an initial crowdfunding campaign that netted just shy of $30,000, and the support of Hill’s New Orleans network. Most of the money came from supporters, friends and her parents’ social circle. I mention to Hill that Joel and Ethan Coen told me the same thing in 1985: They financed the teaser trailer for their first feature, “Blood Simple,” with money from their parents’ friends and associates on the University of Minnesota faculty.
“Well, that worked,” Hill said, smiling. “And in our case, we got ‘Ma Belle’ made. But I don’t think I want to do it that way again.”
Then she offered a reminder for herself, but also for young filmmakers whose first feature is still ahead of them:
“You should only ask your friends for money once.”
“Ma Belle, My Beauty” screens 9 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 3 (bar opens at 8 p.m.), KOVAL Distillery outdoor patio, 4241 N. Ravenswood Ave. The film becomes widely available Sept. 3.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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