Edinburgh International Film Festival interview: Paris Zarcilla, director of Raging Grace

Our film critic Alistair Harkness interviews writer/director Paris Zarcilla about his new socially conscious British horror, Raging Grace.

When Paris Zarcilla was a kid growing up in London, his mum, a Filipino immigrant, would sometimes take him to work. “She was a cleaner and a nanny when she first arrived in the UK,” he says. “She was actually a teacher, but she couldn’t get any jobs relating to that and the jobs she did get oftentimes spilled into our family life, which meant taking me or my brother along with her because there was no other way of being able to look after us.”

It was not a pleasant experience. The micro and macro aggressions his mum endured from the people whose houses she cleaned left her feeling uncomfortable in ways she couldn’t articulate to her son: “You often see your mum as the most powerful being in the universe and all of that kind of gets stripped away when you see someone talk to your mother in a way that is completely condescending. It's a strange thing to see as a kid.”

Zarcilla is the writer/director of Raging Grace, a stylish, socially conscious British horror that feeds these experiences into a contemporary story of an undocumented Filipino cleaner and her daughter who get more than they bargained for when a seemingly lucrative offer to clean the country mansion of a barrister’s dying uncle (Scottish actor David Hayman) gives them first-hand experience of old colonial power reborn.

The film goes to some pretty wild places, but it’s most potent in the Parasite-style opening scenes, which are drawn directly from Zarcilla’s own childhood and feature the main character, Joy (Max Eigenmann), swallowing down every one of her many employers’ patronising sleights so as not to draw attention to the fact that she’s also sneaking her mischievous daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) into their well-appointed homes as she works.

“She’s an intimate part of these homes, but at the same time exists on the periphery of society,” says Zarcilla of Joy. “She’s someone who’s expected to blend into the background and that’s often what cleaners, NHS workers and nannies are. They’re these invisible pillars of society that have an enormous impact, but we often don't see them or don't want to see them. That’s the basis for the whole film.”

When I meet Zarcilla over Zoom he’s jet-lagged having just flown back to London from New York, where Raging Grace closed the Asian American International Film Festival. In recent months he’s been on a whirlwind tour with the film, winning the Grand Jury Prize and best debut at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas and becoming a favourite at genre festivals in Switzerland and Montreal.

The next stop is Edinburgh for its UK premiere. It has, he says, been a bit of a 180-turn from the bubble of making it and, before that, the prolonged period of enforced introspection that inspired it. “I started writing it during the height of the pandemic back in 2020,” he elaborates. “I sort of began to realise I didn't know who I was. I had this idea of who I was, but I didn't actually understand why I was doing anything.”

Paris Zarcilla, the writer and director of Raging Grace

Zarcilla studied animation at university, tried working in visual effects for a while, then moved over to music videos and commercials, only really going down the filmmaking route after taking some time out to figure out what he really wanted to do. But having grown up with immigrant parents who encouraged him and his siblings to work hard, keep their heads down and assimilate, he realised during the pandemic how much of his Filipino heritage he’d rejected, which he found both embarrassing and painful.

“This was all happening at a time when there was the rise of Asian hate both in the US and in the UK, which was compounded by the fact that we had an NHS that was really struggling, but at the forefront of it there were Filipino nurses and doctors who, for whatever reason, were dying the most.”

He felt a lot of anger boiling up inside him and the only way he could exorcise it was to write a horror film, using the genre as a vehicle to sneak in some pointed social commentary about the contemporary immigrant experience and the legacy of colonialism.

One of the smartest ways he does the latter is by repurposing The White Man’s Burden, Rudyard Kipling’s despicable, imperialistic poem about the Philippine-American war. In Raging Grace, specific lines become ironic chapter headings, allowing Zarcilla to tease out the film’s colonial subtexts and rob the words of their power. He says he only discovered the poem’s Filipino connection while researching the film, which was a strange experience given how much he’d loved Disney’s adaptation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book when he was younger.

“I’d sing Bare Necessities and watch Mowgli come of age, but it just made me realise that someone who could write something so disgusting could also write the book that inspired the songs I was singing along to. I found that juxtaposition absurdly funny in a really dark way, so there was no way I couldn’t use the poem in the film.

“The whole film challenges that poem,” he adds.

Zarcilla has conceived Raging Grace as the first part of a thematically linked trilogy he’s calling ‘The Rage Trilogy’. He’s ten pages away from finishing the script for the next instalment. “It’s called Domestic” he says. “It’s an unlikely heist story about a young Filipino couple in ‘90s London who, while running a café, plan rescue missions to help domestic workers escape their abusive employers. Crazily enough, it’s based on a true story about my parents, who did this back in the 90s when they ran a café. I had no clue.”

It wasn’t until researching Raging Grace that his mother told him about these women.

“I was like, ‘How did you never tell me this?’ And she said, ‘We didn’t think it was important enough to say anything.’

“But to know that my parents, who were already struggling with the jobs that they had, on top of raising three kids in a hostile environment, still had the time to go out and help these women just blew my mind.”

Raging Grace screens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 21 & 22 August. For more information and tickets, visit: https://www.eif.co.uk/edinburgh-international-film-festival