Gaby Dellal world premiered Park Avenue at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and watched her audience do the one thing she had most hoped for: laugh in all the right places at a mother who is anything but easy to love.
If it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t stick. Move on and make another.
A Title That Lies
The film stars Fiona Shaw as Kit, a deluxe, acid-tongued Manhattan mother dying of cancer who would rather do it quietly and alone, and Katherine Waterston as her estranged daughter Charlotte, who has spent her adult life wrangling cattle on a Canadian ranch. Fleeing a controlling husband, Charlotte abandons the ranch and lands, unannounced, back in her childhood Park Avenue apartment. Over a fraught six weeks the two of them circle each other, reopening old wounds and a shared, faintly absurd infatuation with the building’s handsome doorman, until Charlotte finally extracts the buried truths that shaped her, not yet knowing she is living through the last weeks of her mother’s life.
Here’s the stance worth drawing out, and it starts with the title. The film is called Park Avenue, yet it opens far from it, on a sprawling Western expanse (written as Saskatchewan, shot in Colorado) where Charlotte rides a horse away from a man calling her name. That gap between the title and the territory is the film’s whole emotional architecture. Park Avenue isn’t really a setting; it’s the inheritance Charlotte spent her life running from, the lies, the lineage, the impossible mother. Naming the film after the thing she fled insists that you never actually leave it. You can become a cowgirl on the far side of the continent and the apartment still holds the deed to your wounds.
The Collapse Back Home
Which is why the structure has to fold back, geographically and emotionally, into a New York hospital room. The daughter who has to ask her mother for a hug at the start ends up cradling that same mother in a fetal position as she dies, the roles fully inverted, the runaway returned. Dellal’s own origin for the story is the key that unlocks it. She wrote Park Avenue after befriending a dying stranger named Kit whom she met walking dogs in Central Park; they walked together for two years until Kit passed, and Dellal harbored a private fantasy that this woman lived on Park Avenue and would leave her the apartment, that she was, in some way, Kit’s daughter. So the film is a daughter’s wish and its impossibility at once: the longing to be chosen, to inherit, to get the truth and the embrace before the parent is gone, set against the cancer that makes the clock real. The cowgirl exile and the Park Avenue inheritance aren’t opposites. They’re the two halves of every adult child’s bond with a difficult parent, the need to flee and the need to be claimed. The film belongs in conversation with two works Dellal doesn’t name: Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, the great reckoning between a severe mother and a resentful daughter trapped together, and James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment, which braids a cancer-stricken mother-daughter bond out of cutting humor and grief.
Why Kit Has to Be Funny
That humor is not decoration. The reason Fiona Shaw’s severity has to land as comedy, the cutting lines that delighted Santa Barbara rather than alienating it, is that laughter is how a daughter survives a mother like Kit. You laugh at the blade or you bleed. Dellal knew the writing was severe enough that it required an actor with the dexterity and charm to deliver it without losing the room, and Shaw, whom critics have called one of the great characters in recent cinema, does exactly that. So the film quietly argues that reconciliation isn’t forgiveness or neat resolution. It’s just proximity before the end, six weeks in the same rooms, the truth finally said, the embrace finally given, none of which undoes the old lies or stops the dying that is already underway.
The Cowboy in the City
Dellal’s touchstones make the cowgirl conceit feel inevitable.
She cites John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy as a formative film, praising its use of camera and frame, and its central image (a cowboy adrift in New York City) is precisely the duality Charlotte embodies, the rancher loose in the world of Park Avenue. She names Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the seminal reason she wanted a cowboy in the film at all, and Midnight Express as an early obsession. She also speaks with real love about Andrea Arnold, whose Fish Tank and Bird she admires precisely because Arnold works in a register opposite to her own, and about the theater-trained directors like Mike Nichols and Sidney Lumet whose actor-first instincts she shares. Dellal came to directing through acting and motherhood: a theater actress until her late twenties, she started writing once children made touring impossible, and a partner insisted that no one else could realize her sensibility, so she had to direct it herself. Park Avenue took roughly seven years to write. Her method is to push a script alone until she hits a wall, then bring in a collaborator to bounce against; here she wanted an American voice and found it in co-writer Tina Alexis Allen, the two of them swapping and rewriting each other’s scenes across different towns and countries until it cohered.
Make It, Move On
A great deal of the conversation is refreshingly practical about the business, because for an independent the business is inescapable. The New York Film Festival passed on the film, which Dellal found a touch absurd given that it is literally set on Park Avenue, and Santa Barbara became the premiere instead, the same festival that hosted her previous feature. Getting a movie made at all, she says, is mostly tenacity and a refusal to be wounded by the rejection that arrives again and again: actors who won’t read for months, agents who get in the way, trial and error without end. Dellal is candid that she is actively hunting distribution in a bleak market where, as she puts it, no one goes to the cinema anymore, and that she chose her sales company not for its pedigree but for sheer enthusiasm, the team that most clearly got the movie. She has lived the other end of this too. Her 2015 film 3 Generations, about a teenager wanting to transition, was acquired by Harvey Weinstein (now a convicted figure) after a bidding war; she credits his editing notes as genuinely sharp even as the release grew troubled and a dispute over casting a cisgender actor in the lead clouded its rollout. Running underneath all of it is the reality she states plainly.
Every filmmaker, especially women, gets four or five years between projects.
You finish a film, resolve to apply everything you learned, and by the time the next one claws its way to a greenlight, years later, you’ve half forgotten the lessons. Her advice to her younger self is the title of the episode made personal: enjoy the process itself, the actors and the sets and the edit, then release it into the world without clinging to who champions it or whether it sticks. And if it doesn’t, you simply move on and make another.
