Ally Pankiw has directed some of your favourite shows — now she's making a leap to the big screen

Here & Queer is an interview series hosted by Peter Knegt that celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations.

It took Ally Pankiw 10 years to get her first feature film, I Used To Be Funny, off the ground. And then when the time finally came, she had less than three weeks to shoot it.

"We shot it in 18 and a half days," Toronto native Pankiw says. "Classic Canadian indie — unfortunately — in that regard. When you think of the ratio of writing and pre-production and financing and that whole dance to how long you actually get to make it, it's actually quite depressing!"

Thankfully, Pankiw has had a lot keep her busy during her downtime, particularly directing episodes of some truly exceptional TV shows. Those include Feel Good (which Pankiw directed the entire first season of), The Great, Shrill and the acclaimed "Joan is Awful" episode from the latest season of Black Mirror. We got the chance to talk to her about all of those of projects as well as I Used To Be Funny (which is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit) when she stopped by the set of Here & Queer.

You can watch the full episode below:

I Used To Be Funny is a dark dramedy set in Toronto that follows Sam (Rachel Sennott), an aspiring stand-up comedian struggling with PTSD. Pankiw says the film partially came out of how narrow she felt many films grappling with women's trauma and recovery tend to be.

"I had just seen a lot of stories that centered around violence against women or women's trauma that were very binary in the sense that either they were a revenge thriller... or they were very, very heavy dramas," she explains. "And I just always have thought that recovery lies somewhere in between. It's a lifelong process and there's lots of ups and downs and there are moments of joy and despair in it."

Pankiw said she wanted the film speak to the fact that recovery can be many different things all things at once. 

"That's where the initial idea for wanting to make the film came from," she says. "The themes are very personal to me, though the plot itself isn't."

While I Used To Be Funny is technically Pankiw's only feature film so far, she arguably made what very much feels like another one in her episode of Black Mirror. 

"That was such a great mix between sort of my TV work and my work on my own film," she says. "Because with that series, you do get to really approach it like your own little movie. So it was a really wonderful experience of getting to step into this like big machine and this like established brand, but then also get to truly make your episode your own."

Notably, Pankiw's episode "Joan is Awful" — which stars Salma Hayek alongside Pankiw's fellow Canadian Annie Murphy — feels eerily relevant given the current SAG-AFTRA strike, as it foreshadows an era of "automatically generated entertainment" using virtual actors. This interview was shot on May 25, 2023, before the episode was released and before the SAG-AFTRA strike began.