My conversation with filmmaker Sylvia Ray was eye-opening for me in so many ways. Let's start from the top: SEAWEED SNACKS (2026) is phenomenal filmmaking that is slightly dark, extremely funny, and captures a social dynamic that we too often don't see on screen: dads at a birthday party. Sylvia directed it, and the film was a product of Film Independent's Project Involve, where the SEAWEED SNACKS team was the only one with three out of 31 people with kids.

I'm seeing this from the vantage of someone who is chronically online, but the kids/no kids debate is frustrating to me. Both sides often talk about how you're living life wrong if you're on one side of it or the other. I don't feel we should look at it in such a binary way, and the show is a friendly place to talk about ways in which independent filmmaking can make living your best life easier.

In this case, as Sylvia shares, it was having kids that turned her into the dynamic filmmaker she is. SEAWEED SNACKS and her films don't exist without them and I feel so very lucky they do.

Sylvia and I talk about:

her incredible output of five films in close to five years and whether she still has that same feeling of excitement when they come out;
directing material that you didn't write;
how she got started in filmmaking and how having kids focused her vision on what she wanted to do -- directing;
finding your community, whether it's at film school or elsewhere;
how she won over friends and colleagues at top film schools;
what is the Film Independent Project Involve experience like?;
what makes a great lab and what doesn't work regarding labs and fellowship;
how she wants people to feel watching SEAWEED SNACKS and whether it's harder to find laughs than in a drama;
surrealism in the film and why it makes films so much better when used appropriately;
what makes a great short film and the distribution system for shorts;
whether she sees the growth from her previous films;
what the climate in Los Angeles is right now for shooting films;
childcare on set and the state of parenting and filmmaking;
what's next for her.

Sylvia's Indie Film Highlight: BETTER LIFE (2025) dir. by Jessica Liu; THE INHERITANCE dir. by Destinee Stewart

Memorable Quotes:

"The excitement is definitely still there. It just feels like a shared responsibility or a shared vulnerability."

"it never occurred to me that's something that I would pursue is arts or performance arts until I had my first kid actually."

"There was something really empowering about having him and my second child...it rewired my brain in a lot of different ways and made me think of how capable I am."

"The biggest life saving part of being in this career is finding my community."

"What can I do in order to get to set and work and do what I love? I look at it a little bit like a sport."

On Project Involve: "I knew their intention and they made this very clear in the beginning was that they wanted us to create community and build collaborations that would go on into the future."

"And particularly parents who are artists, I hope that it feels like that they're being seen in some way."

"When I was pitching on it, I lost my home in the fires and I think I was just really in a what is life? What is money? And then just going through all of these life can just feel surreal at times."

"Consuming a lot of shorts allowed me to feel confident that this was gonna work and play well on festivals."

Links:

Follow Sylvia On Instagram

Follow SEAWEED SNACKS On Instagram