Recent MFA program alumni Kary Hess and Lucy Mathews Heegaard sat down together for Hess to interview Mathews Heegaard about her latest project, a documentary film called Diplophonia: A Diary of Voice Loss.
KARY: First of all, congratulations on Diplophonia being an Official Selection of the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival! How did it feel to premiere in your own hometown?
LUCY: I was stunned to receive the acceptance! Not that I didn’t believe my film was worthy, but rather I know the rate of acceptance is low and the quality of submissions is high. And this was my first time submitting to festivals with a feature-length project. So, I felt a little disbelief when I opened my acceptance email. Seeing it for the first time in theater with a sold-out, hometown audience was extraordinarily meaningful. I held my breath for the first audible reactions, and then relaxed as I witnessed audience laughs, gasps, and collective sighs at pivotal points in the story. I felt like the audience was with me at every turn.
KARY: Let’s talk about the origins of the film. Diplophonia is the diary of your journey through voice loss after Covid-19 froze one of your vocal cords. No one was sure how long it would be paralyzed or if it would even heal at all, potentially leaving you with permanent voice loss. What made you realize you had to make a film about it?
LUCY: I never intended to make this film. The process began first and foremost as my own effort to heal emotionally from what I was experiencing. When my normal speaking voice returned, but my paralysis remained, this turning point was as destabilizing to me, if not more so, as when I first lost my voice. I felt very adrift. To try to make sense of what had happened, I started listening to the voice messages I had sent others over the previous months. The film began to shape itself as I experimented with using these voice messages to create a narrative soundtrack of my experience that captured what it felt like in real-time. Listening to my own messages, I realized that even a few weeks after some events, I was already creating a different story in my head from what I had felt in the moment. I really was just trying to understand and document my true experience by creating short vignettes on key moments. The film grew organically from that process.
KARY: You’ve said that the human voice and spoken narratives are at the heart of your stories. Did losing your own voice impact the way you understand your work?
LUCY: Yes! It was the experience of losing my own voice that helped me recognize the human speaking voice as the foundation of my work. Before voice loss, I would have told you that sound, in general, was the anchoring element of my stories. And that was true. But as I was finishing up the MFA, the idea of using my voice loss story for a film project arose in workshop conversation. I vividly remember the sudden, jaw-dropping moment when I realized what should have been obvious to me all along. It’s not just any sound at the heart of my work, but the specific sound of the human speaking voice because of all the contextual information it conveys about the speaker and the story far beyond the meaning of the words being spoken.
KARY: Can you talk about the imagery you chose for the film? Your style of grainy, pixelated, layered imagery evokes a feeling of dissolution — of disintegration. Is the medium the message here?
LUCY: I love the look of 8mm film footage and shot some on an old Kodak Brownie movie camera handed down to me by my parents. The mistakes I made with the first reel I filmed, some very overexposed footage, became a grainy layer over or under almost every frame. To me, that gives the film a surreal sense of duality, like watching an old movie even as you also feel you are witnessing events in real time. The scratchy texture is important to me, too, because it evokes dissolution and decay, as you noticed. Yes, medium and message are connected.
KARY: You are primarily a sound artist who uses the medium of film, and losing your voice changed how you approached that. Can you tell us about the ways this film is partly an exploration of identity and the impact that something completely out of one’s control can have on one’s identity?
LUCY: The most deeply jarring impact of my voice loss was how invisible I felt. And disconnected from other people. I’d never understood that all the small, seemingly insignificant interactions I have during a typical day are integral to my feeling part of the larger world, to my sense of well-being, to my sense of mattering in this world. I had already been on a several year quest to investigating philosophical ideas about original self, meaning who we are before any life experiences shape us. The relationship of being heard and understood by others to my own sense of identity and worth became powerfully apparent to me during my voice loss.
KARY: Beyond your festival premiere, what do you hope Diplophonia will accomplish when it reaches the wider world?
LUCY: My biggest hope is that the film will offer support and comfort not just to those who are experiencing voice loss or communication disorders, but to anyone experiencing an unexpected loss that challenges feelings of safety, connection, and self-worth. I am working now with several organizations here in Minneapolis-St. Paul to develop a series of small, private screenings that will use the film as a vehicle for facilitated conversation. My idea is that these screenings will be an immersive, participatory art experience themselves, a deeper way to interact with the ideas in the film and in community with others.
Kary Hess is a writer, artist/designer, and filmmaker. She is the editor of Made Local magazine and a film producer and production designer. Hess’ newly released film with partner Daedalus Howell, Werewolf Serenade, (FMRL) recently premiered at AV Film Fest in Healdsburg, California.
Lucy Mathews Heegaard is a filmmaker and an interdisciplinary artist who combines writing, photography, digital collage, sound, video, and film to tell stories that are an invitation to self-reflection. Heegaard’s newly released film Diplophonia premiered at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in April.
