The movie, directed by Maya's father, Ethan, and co-starring Laura Linney, toggles between the Southern author's own controversial biography and dramatized scenes from her stories.
“Flannery O’Connor wrote about what she knew, and what she knew about was white hypocrisy,” says Maya Hawke, who plays multiple roles in the film, including the author. “What she knew how to look at was, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to fix this, but I see that there’s something deeply sick about this space that I grew up in and exist in.'”
The movie, one of the titles at the festival seeking distribution, intercuts between O’Connor’s real biography as she forged a literary career while ill with lupus and scenes from her stories, including. O’Connor, who won the National Book Award in 1972 and was put on a U.S. postage stamp in 2015, has been credited with writing tart, anti-racist parables along with deep explorations of her Catholic faith.
The revelation of her own history of racism makes O’Connor a complicated figure to mine in a modern biopic, but it didn’t deter the filmmakers. “If you don’t look at it, it doesn’t magically get better is the problem,” Ethan says. “There’s this kind of pervasive thought right now that we’re just not going to talk about things that are hurtful and angry. And then they just fester in a closet. I came to see [O’Connor] as kind of like if you were studying this beautiful tree.
The film gets at the many ways O’Connor was an outsider in Georgia in her era, as a Catholic in the Protestant South, a person with a disability due to lupus and a Northern-educated woman. “She was already a weird peacock in her own existence,” says Linney. “So, it makes sense that she would approach all of these issues the way that she did, with such verve and such a precise imagination and really by sticking her finger in a light socket.
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