Director Taylor Garron Wants to Let People of Color Be Mediocre on Screen

“You think it’s kind of a, ‘Will they, won’t they’ rom-com,” Garron said. “But it really turns into a study on the friendship between Naomi and Sara.”

For Garron, movies about non-romantic relationships with women leads are missing from mainstream cinema, where the focus is instead placed primarily on romance. movies that focus on non-romantic relationships. “There’s other relationships in people’s lives that are so important, even more important than romantic ones,” she said. “And friendship is a big one for me.”

Filmed during quarantine, as of yet is constructed through a variety of video calls and diaries that paint a picture of a single woman learning how to deal with the unfolding pandemic by herself.

“I hope that when people watch as of yet, they take away from it this character, who is a woman of color and who is normally portrayed in a certain way, and recognize her as flawed and human, and worthy regardless,” she continued.

Diversity in film has improved, Garron said, but she believes there still remains many more characters and stories to see on screen. “Everyone deserves the right to be represented as the truly average people that most of us are,” she said. “Going forward, I would love to see women of color being entirely average, sometimes even just bad people with flaws—nothing special about them except for their story.”