Before leaving Vancouver, I tie up all my loose ends, and as I speed past the Bigfoot museums and small-town attractions toward the Port Townsend Film Festival, I realize how tired I am. Part of me wonders why I go to all this trouble of trying to make movies at all. Still, another part of me has been dreaming of this moment: showing my short film, Some Girl, on the festival circuit. Before dusk, I check into my dusty waterfront motel. It’s a little depressing. I wonder if I should have...

There’s something intoxicating about the movie business—the sense that anything can happen at any moment. A conversation, a glance, a favour, and suddenly your life tilts in a new direction. It has a kind of circus energy. I enjoy the controlled chaos, the intensity. After a while, you start to see what it asks of people.

This was the summer of meeting up at the beach to talk about artificial intelligence. My good friend shakes out her towel and says she thinks she’s losing her brother to the manosphere. We decide he’s young, impressionable, and probably just looking for a way to belong. I don’t know much about the manosphere. I assume it’s those entrepreneurs-in-cars who pop up on my feed and call me a femcel. From what I gather, it’s about men falling behind in education and earning capacity, and an...