Sophie Hyde’s latest movie, Jimpa, began as a sort of wish fulfillment. Based on her life experiences, the film — opening this week in limited release — tells the story of Hannah (Olivia Colman), mother to nonbinary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde, Sophie’s real-life child), as she and Frances journey to Amsterdam to visit Frances’s grandpa Jim (John Lithgow, also set to play Dumbledore in the upcoming Harry Potter series). During the visit, Frances confesses that they want to stay in Amsterdam with “Jimpa,” prompting Hannah to re-evaluate her relationship with both her queer child and her queer parent.
Drawn from her own life, Hyde crafted Jimpa out of a desire to see her own child, Mason-Hyde, and her gay father be able to communicate about tough questions regarding sexuality and gender. This hard but necessary intergenerational dialogue is on full display in Jimpa, which features a number of conversations between Jim, an HIV-positive man who only survived thanks to the community activism amid the AIDS crisis, and Frances, whose nonbinary identity sometimes flummoxes and confounds their grandfather.
While some of the conversations in Jimpa can be tense and wince-inducing, the film depicts a nontraditional family looking to make room for all kinds. “That was the impulse to make the film, to put them in a room together, and then it kind of grew into this big family drama,” Hyde tells Them.
Meanwhile, the film’s themes also resonated with its star, Colman, who tells Them that she has never felt comfortable with rigid gender roles, including in her own marriage. “I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female,” she says. “I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man.”
In a Zoom interview with Them, Hyde and Colman spoke about capturing the legacy of the AIDS crisis onscreen, Colman’s love for queer storytelling, and why Hyde wanted to give the film a distinctly intracommunity feel.
Mark de Blok / Kino Lorber
Sophie, I know that Jimpa is very much based on your own life experience. When did you start to approach the material of your own life as the subject of a film?
Sophie Hyde: Two-pronged answer. My dad died in 2018, and he was like Jim in the film; a very eccentric, very provocative man, openly gay, an AIDS activist and health worker, and very publicly queer. I always knew him as someone who kind of put his body on the line and didn’t have much choice about whether he was political, but kind of went with it.
