Heather Graham and Aisling Chin-Yee on film industry sexism, female solidarity and their film The Rest of Us

Originally published on September 6, 2019

In Aisling Chin-Yee's debut feature The Rest of Us, which premieres tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival, the first-time director beckons audiences to take a look inside an unlikely female friendship in all of its complexity.

The Rest of Us stars Heather Graham as Cami, a children's book author and illustrator who offers up her home to her ex-husband's new wife and daughter after an unforeseeable tragedy strikes the family.

Chin-Yee and Graham joined q's Tom Power live in studio for a conversation about the film, sexism in the film industry and why they felt strongly about working together on this project.

I feel like I've spent a lot of my career being a supporting actor in the guy's story.- Heather Graham

"It's amazing to work with a female director," said Graham. "We have female producers, a female director and all-female leads. So that's an incredible opportunity just to tell a story from a female point-of-view, especially in a business that's so male-dominated. … That's cool, because I feel like I've spent a lot of my career being a supporting actor in the guy's story."

In Chin-Yee's own life and career, the Canadian filmmaker said that she's observed "this myth that women are always elbowing each other to get the one spot available" — a misconception that she suspects still persists because of a lack of authentic female relationships depicted on screen.

"I've found my female relationships and female friendships to be so strong and so supportive," said Chin-Yee. "Of course, we help each other and we prop each other up. It's also becoming more widespread, I think, within women that I work with in the industry, we're not in competition. For the most part, I think a lot of us haven't been in competition with each other."

Both Graham and Chin-Yee emphasized the importance of female solidarity as vocal supporters of the #MeToo movement.

In a 2017 op-ed for Variety, published around the time that allegations of sexual assault and harassment against Harvey Weinstein surfaced, Graham opened up about her experience with the film mogul.

"I was just really inspired by the other women coming forward and telling their storys," Graham told Power. "I was fed up with people trying to villainize these women coming forward with their harassment stories. ... You, as a woman, know you're getting sexually harassed, but can you go to the police station and say, 'Oh, well, he said we should hang out.' What are your legal recourses? Will you still be able to work in Hollywood if you become that squeaky wheel? ... All these people are finally saying, 'Maybe we shouldn't let these predators get away with this,' and it's exciting to see that justice is happening."

As one of the co-founders of AFTERMETOO, a national movement to activate change on sexual violence in Canada, Chin-Yee said that she's also started seeing a cultural shift.

"It seems like there's now a movement toward parity," said Chin-Yee. "We need to have inclusion, we need to be gender-inclusive, we need to be intersectional, have diverse film sets, have diverse people in the boardrooms... just opening it up to being a much much, much more expansive and inclusive workplace that will foster safer workplaces. And once we start in those places, then we'll some real change come."

The Rest of Us premieres tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

— Produced by Vanessa Nigro.