While Miranda July’s new film Kajillionaire spins a tale as old as time itself—that of the outsider on a journey to find their true family—the way in which the story unspools is far from simple. To begin with, its protagonist Old Dolio technically already has a family: her flesh-and-blood parents, a pair of low-level grifters whose lack of affection has left her emotionally detached and visibly repressed. Following a chance encounter with a woman at an airport, however, Old Dolio’s world slowly begins to open up. To tell any more, though, would be to spoil the film’s miraculous surprises.
Even with the finer details left out, it’s a story of self-discovery that will feel instantly familiar to queer audiences—and one that immediately resonated with the emerging British filmmaker Mollie Mills. After being introduced to July and the project by a mutual friend earlier this year, Mills organically set about developing a series of three minute-long shorts in response to Kajillionaire’s offbeat ode to the strange, amorphous beauty of queer love, premiering on Vogue today.
“When I first spoke to Miranda, I shared that the film had reminded me of being a kid, nicking cutlery from motorway services with my dad, so in that sense, it resonated with me quite directly,” says Mills of her initial response to Kajillionaire. “But beyond that, it spoke to the sort of tender microcosm of family life, the stamina and the delicacy of that family hustle—but also of queerness, too.”
Touch
The three shorts are each devoted to a different facet of the queer experience Mills identified in Kajillionaire: from the power of touch, to the thrill of the shared future those touches promise, to the mutable nature of queer families more generally. Her eclectic cast features spoken word poet and activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal and the painter Eliza Douglas, alongside less familiar faces from Mills’s family; “in the chosen sense,” of course. Against the whir and gentle clatter of a film reel, Mills’s cast candidly discusses their unique interpretations of love and family, as decorative scratches and playful annotations swirl around them and talking heads are intercut with exploding fireworks, shifting seamlessly between the intimate and the epic.
July’s work as a visual and performance artist has always been interactive and community-oriented, but even so, she describes seeing the films for the first time earlier this week as an overwhelming experience. “When I received these three movies, I clicked on them not really knowing what to expect and was immediately in tears,” says July. “Mollie responded to Kajillionaire’s themes in such a delicate way, drawing them into real life.”
Future
Part of what touched July so deeply was seeing the way in which Mills’s rag-tag cast of characters explore the semantics of the typical language of family, and how it relates to the words used to both express and delegitimize queer love across the political spectrum. “I was watching with a non-binary eight-year-old and they said ‘I’ve never seen anything like that that’s not a book.’ Which I thought was a good point—often these queer values are put into words, but words don’t always help us. Gender should not always have to be named and verbalized and that was one of my goals with Kajillionaire. Melanie doesn’t need Old Dolio’s gender articulated or categorized.”
Family
As Evan Rachel Wood’s mesmerizing performance in Kajillionaire makes clear, attempting to define gender within rigid parameters is pointless; and as Mills’s shorts in response to Kajillionaire also show, the way in which queer love is expressed through words will never stop evolving. Yet whether through the internal journey of self-realization Old Dolio experiences, or the endearingly messy expressions of love articulated by Mills’s cast, the accidents we make along the way to forging genuine human connections are something all of us can relate to—even if the specificity with which both July and Mills commit this to film feels so searingly true to the queer viewer.
“So many of us are re-parented in essence by the queer community. We find solace in one another, freedom to be in ways we can’t always be with our biological families, for joy and for survival,” Mills concludes. “It does feel particularly poignant in this landscape: to hold one another, to think of the kind of world we want to live in, and to remind ourselves—and whoever else might need it—that we are here.”