"At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card or some platitude, the breakthrough for me as a writer was being as personal as I possibly could be," says filmmaker David Gutnik. "Working from that place, not censoring, and being as truthful and honest and sensitive as I could possibly be."

His debut film Materna, which he co-wrote with Assol Abdullina and Jade Eshete who also star in the film, was born from that intimate space.

"The three of us were separately going through personal struggles," he says of the film's genesis. "I was in a vulnerable moment of my life and I was looking to try to deal more honestly with the stuff that was coming up for me. I was looking for collaborators to do that with. I took an acting class and I connected with the teacher and she asked me to sit in on a conservatory class, and Jade was in that class. We started having these conversations about what was going on with our lives."

They soon connected with Abdullina and discovered there were "various echoes on themes during our conversations and we connected through our pain."

"We were children of immigrants and New Yorkers, so there was a lot that brought us together," he says. "We didn’t know what the form would be when we started writing. Over the course of the making of the film and our writing process, the pieces started to come together and told us what it wanted to be." 

At the core of their shared experience was the influence of motherhood and their maternal figures. "We were each struggling with this very raw subject matter and aching to confront the material." 

The result is a psychological portrait of four women (played by Abdullina, Eshete, Kate Lyn Sheil, and Lindsay Burdge), whose lives are bound together by an incident on the New York City subway. While the women are radically different from one another, separated by race, culture, religion and class, they are connected by the complexities of motherhood. When they face a threat on the New York City subway, their shared isolation suddenly becomes a shared connection. 

The film, now on VOD, was awarded Best Actress (Abdullina) and Best Cinematography at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, where Gutnik was also nominated for Best New Director.

When it came to selecting the NYC subway as the meeting point for the women's stories to intersect, Gutnik says, "The train is very much the central nervous system and the heartbeat of the city. We wanted to tell these separate stories and looked for a container where these people could realistically cross paths in a public space."

Gutnik was inspired by a tracking shot in the 1987 film Wings of Desire, in which angels (and the audience) can hear other people’s thoughts. "I remember watching that shot and thinking, 'Wow, this is what cinema is all about. About being able to live in the skin of another person and see life through another’s perspective, even if for a brief moment.'"

In Materna, it's the train that is the unifying factor for the characters who are dealing with the same struggles unbeknownst to each other. "The film was contrasting extremely private and isolated spaces with this very public space where people are smashed together with strangers. It felt right."

The writing process was fairly quick according to Gutnik. Together he, Abdullina and Eshete had a lot of conversations about the characters as they found the structure of each story and the film as a whole. Each actress would go off and write her character's story in the film and then tossed the script back to Gutnik as they continued to crack the dramatic spine of each story. 

"Once we cracked the dramatic spine of the different stories, then it was all about writing the hard stuff. Talking, crying, writing. Rinse and repeat."

They started writing in April 2019 and began shooting in September. "We made it in a very non-traditional way. We broke up the film into four sections and we wrote it as we were shooting. The process was pretty unique to the project."

A process he says wouldn't have happened without the right collaborators. 

"Doing it with the right people is important. The partnerships I made with my co-writers and producers were incredibly supportive. Those choices to work with those people were the bedrock of the experience. Finding the right fit is important. It’s just as important professionally as it is when we’re dating people in our personal life."

As for his advice for aspiring writers and filmmakers who are itching to tell their stories, Gutnik says; Just do it. 

"Don’t wait. We didn't wait in development hell. We went out and made it on a shoestring budget. We knew the actors we wanted to work with. It was very much ‘point and shoot’. I think not waiting for permission to make it was key. There are no excuses not to make it. If you really want to make something, you’ll do it."