From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also show at KCRW.com.

My guest, writer, director, D. Reeds, created

community in her short, and then the feature she built from the short, which just played at Sundance

2011 this year prior. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. But we talked about this

and I met you. I mean, it's really important to you that you build a community in this. It's a city of people, isn't it?

It was, yeah, not just in the portrayal of what's happening on the screen, but just in getting the film done.

You know, for example, we really wanted to have kids from the LGBTQ community be a part of the film. And so as we're in pre-production, we got to have someone come on as an intern.

And just, you know, as we kind of made our way in finding financing, it was really about reaching out to those organizations who were representing these groups and a part of these groups who, like, helped us find the money for it and who kind of championed us all along the way.

So in that way, it feels like we're not here alone. So it's kind of comforting. And I should say the movie, of course, are talking about as Pariah.

Please let the audience know what they're going to be seeing when they see this amazing movie.

Yeah, sure. So Pariah is set in Brooklyn, New York, and it's a coming-of-age story about a teenager named Malie.

And she's middle-class family, typical teen. And, you know, she knows that she loves women, and that's not her problem, but her problem is how to be.

So basically, on the one end, she's got this openly gay, Uber-Budge best friend, and wants to be one way.

That's not her personality.

And at the opposite end, she's got her mother, wants to be super feminine.

That's not her either.

So it's about her trying to find herself and express herself in a way.

That's authentic. But it's interesting too because also we talked about this when I met you, it's a movie about a family holding secrets. It is, yeah, it's very, you know,

it's full of passive-aggressive tension and that, you know, this is a family where everybody

knows everything but pretends not to know. So it's these kind of things that fuel, you know,

how the mother Audrey tries to control Aliki's behavior in her associations.

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