Director-photographer Sarah Bahbah in her new film, “I ____ YOU” – The Hollywood Reporter

In the recently released short film, ME YOU, photographer and music video director Sarah Bahbah looks at love through a number filter. “Three words. Eight letters,” says social media star Nailea Devora at the beginning of the short, giving two ways to describe the phrase “I Love You.” Me you with model Stevan Journey, continues to talk about the path that led her to the love story depicted in the film. “About seven distressing and 463 nights with tears soaked on the carpet of my living room, not even on my pillow, I could not get that far. More people are heartbroken than a whole. I was one of them. “

Other numbers appear everywhere. “I knew 67 days later. Who am I kidding? I was actually 9 “, says Devora, later adding that the couple,” Laved in 12 bottles of wine “.

Before making this film, Bahbah gained a following on its social media audience (with 1.1 million followers). on Instagram) for her series of cinematic, wonderful photographs depicting love stories that did not last. In one of these photo sets, entitled Fool me twice, 13 reasons why starring Alisha Boe and actor Noah Centineo (Black Adam, To All The Boys franchise) play a couple whose relationship ends, leaving Boe’s character with the realization that, “This is not a man who loved you. “This is a man who loved his need for you.” Dylan Sprouse (After we collided) also appeared in one of Bahbah’s photographic essays, This is not for you Part II.

However, Bahbah’s first short film represents a departure from those earlier works. It’s “my first healthy love story,” says Bahbah The Hollywood Reporter. “For the last seven years I have been writing strictly from a place of pain and suffering and I have really leaned on my art as a way out to heal my experiences and my wounds.”

The new film is the result of a change in her life. “Last year, I started dating this handsome, honest, kind, affectionate man and I developed a very intimate love relationship and I felt quite healthy. “I wanted to be able to challenge myself to write from a place of love and not pain,” says the director-photographer.

Bahbah says she wrote the script by hand in a diary in a park in Los Angeles, the city she calls home. Many of the lines he wrote turned out to include numbers, a specific way of examining and calculating the vulnerable cases of the heart. “I basically landed on a bunch of numbers,” he says. He describes the general idea of ​​the film as wanting to condense the ambivalence of wanting to say “I love you” at first but fearing that it will be rejected. I call it the exposure of the heart. “

says Devora ΘΡ attracted her to make the film because “I always appreciated and loved cinema and I always dreamed of being a part of it in any capacity, but growing up in Texas and living under certain conditions seemed unattainable. When Sarah approached me and told me about this work, I was ecstatic. I have always been a big fan of her work and her storytelling. “She is a brilliant and empowering woman in this field.”

The photographer-director shot the entire short shot in two half-day shots in January at a baroque mansion known in wedding rentals as Palisades Villa. Complete post-production in two weeks.

Bahbah – who recently signed with M88 and UNCMMN for representation, and has previously directed three music videos for Kygo – was represented by an art gallery a few years ago. But in 2017 she adopted a different model in which she deals directly with the fans of her work through her Instagram account.

“I started representing myself and just circulating signed limited edition prints and they started to do very well,” says Bahbah. Specifically, he introduced what he calls a “pay what they can” pricing scale from $ 50 to $ 300 for prints. “I recognized that I had a lot of low-income fans who were students and they were studying and many of the requests I received were: ‘Can you make your art more accessible?’ I really want it on my wall “. “That was my solution – to give more people the opportunity to collect my art,” said Bahbah, who is of Palestinian and Jordanian descent and grew up in Australia.

For ME YOU, Bahbah took snapshots of the film from which it made limited edition prints, which sold out for a week. “I do open releases for a week and then, by the end of the week, it has been limited,” she says of her sales model. In the near future, he also hopes to develop a TV show.

Bahbah – who also runs a creative agency, Possy – says the most satisfying part of making her short film was that “I managed to challenge myself and grow as an artist because when you lean on pain and pain it’s too much tedious to create art. I ended up coming out of this feeling much healthier and not so exhausted obviously. “I felt quite down to earth and that’s new to me.”