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

Director, actor, and writer Taylor Garron’s new film, as of yet, follows a young woman named Naomi (played by Garron) stuck quarantining in her New York City apartment in the summer of 2020. Her friend and roommate, Sara, temporarily moves to Florida to stay with family, leaving Naomi alone to navigate the pandemic.

Early on in the film, Naomi starts chatting with a guy on an online dating app and considers breaking quarantine to meet up with him. This causes friction between Naomi and Sara: Sara wants to return to New York fairly soon and doesn’t want the risk of catching COVID, but Naomi calls out Sara for going out with her hometown friends in Florida, where there’s no lockdown in place.

“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.”