iWoman’s mission is to uplift filmmakers’ voices so their women-centered stories are heard globally. At the 2024 Off Page Film Festival, iWoman presented the TrailblazHER Award to the film with a women-led team whose message resonated with the mission of iWomanTV. This year’s recipient, Julie Rostock, is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh and the writer and director of the short film, Joan.
Rostock’s film is a modern take on a seventeenth century ballad commonly referred to as “The Daemon Lover.” Francis James Child, who was a scholar and collector of old English and Scottish ballads, collected eight versions of the story; however, hundreds have been in print since its initial publication. The main character in the original ballad is James Harris, a man who will lure a married woman away from her family. In different variations he is seen as a human man, a ghost, and even a cloven-footed demon.
Rostock’s interpretation is centered around a woman who wakes up on what she thinks is her wedding day. As the film progresses, the audience figures out she is repeating this day over and over, searching for the man she is supposed to marry. Eventually, she meets a man who seems to have supernatural control over her, keeping her unaware that she is living in a time loop of her life.
As a young student, Rostock wanted to take this story and translate it into a younger character who might experience the feeling of needing to put yourself in a hopeful or expectant position like many young people do when they are trying to figure out their next steps in life.
The film was funded by a $1,000 grant from the Horror Studies Working Group at Pitt. Rostock was able to work with a lot of other students as her talent and crew. She said many of them were women, something that was important to her when translating her script to screen.
Rostock iterated the importance of women in behind the scenes roles, not just being represented on screen. She says, “I think we've seen it a lot of times with films that have come out that are like these sort of blockbuster feminist films, where maybe it's sort of clear that there were a lot of men behind the scenes because it can feel sort of like surface level for women who have lived experience in being a woman to see a film made about being a woman by men.”
Horror author Shirley Jackson has been an influential woman throughout Rostock’s interest in filmmaking. Jackson’s version of “The Daemon Lover” was the first iteration of the story Rostock ever read. She says she can connect to Jackson’s style of writing, who often authors stories about women into the everyday domestic life encountering unsettling or supernatural situations.
Because of Rostock’s commitment to telling this unique story through her own female lens, Joan is the recipient of this year’s iWoman TrailblazHER Award! An exclusive interview with writer and director Julie Rostock is now available on watch.iwoman.tv.
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