WWSFF 2009: How To Be Alone
Posted June 18, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman vividly recalls the conflicting waves of emotion she was flooded with during a four-year solitary stretch in her mid 30s. It was a time when it seemed like everyone was settling down to get married and have children — except her.
Initially she struggled, wondering why she couldn’t find that special person to share her time with, but once she realized that being alone didn’t necessarily translate into being lonely, she was liberated, and now looks upon that span as one of the most colourful, candid, and creative of her life.
“I think lonely is very different from being alone and I think we often confuse those concepts,” she notes.
Eventually she did meet someone. At the same time her close friend, singer/songwriter/poet Tanya Davis was enduring a painful break-up. The two began questioning why people have such a hard time being alone, and Dorfman challenged Davis to write a poem on the topic. Her ensuing words became the inspiration and auditory backbone of her short film, ‘How To Be Alone’, a musical poem about finding yourself and embracing your uniqueness and passions.
“It came out of long philosophical conversations about that theme, about the idea of being alone and what a struggle it is for most people,” she explains.
“I’ve never felt more alive than during that time of my life (when I was single), I never did more things, met more people, had more courage,” she explained. “When I did get into a relationship of course I was very happy but I really had to break up with myself in order to do that.”
The poem encourages us to embrace our alone time and celebrate our individuality, something Dorfman admits goes against the societal grain.
“We really malign people who are single, you often hear it’s a couple’s world, so if you find yourself not in a relationship there’s this feeling that there’s something wrong with (you).”
She also has an admittedly hard time figuring out the allure of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, where users put themselves in an almost perpetual state of communication with others.
“I don’t do it because I don’t want to develop that part of my brain, I want to consciously try to atrophy it, because I know what it does, it’s a constant distraction…I just can’t do it, I don’t want to do it, so I’ve chosen not to.”
In the end, however, she admits that time alone must be balanced with interaction.
“I think that at the end of the day we crave sleeping beside a warm body, and depending on the kind of relationship you’re in, it can be the greatest joy or it can feel like a sacrifice, but I really think (the secret is) striking the perfect balance of being alone and in love at the same time.”
The CFC WorldWide Short Film Festival runs from June 16-21. To purchase tickets or learn more about the fest, click here.
