Bird's Eye View

Rearranging the furniture: BEV meets Lena Dunham, award-winning director of Tiny Furniture

Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture

Lena Dunham is the current fancy of American independent cinema. At 24, she’s already scooped SXSW’s Best Narrative Feature Award and the New York Film Critics Society’s Next Generation Award, plus three Independent Spirit Award nominations. Her brilliantly offbeat quaterlife crisis comedy Tiny Furniture is the Closing Night film for Birds Eye View 2011.

Tiny Furniture might sound like a run-of-the-mill American coming-of-age debut: the writer-director plays the lead in her own movie about Aura, a 22-year-old graduate returning home to her artist-mother’s TriBeCa loft armed only with a film theory degree, 357 YouTube hits and her tail between her legs. In Lena’s own words, it’s about a girl in transition and the women who love her: “I set out to tell an honest story that incorporated aspects of my own life, but knew my life had parallels with many others.”

But Tiny Furniture doesn’t just offer a quick insight into Aura’s world; it exposes its every angst-filled detail, from family rows to desperate sex in a giant metal pipe. It’s bitingly, excruciatingly, disarmingly hilarious, as if Miranda July met the Inbetweeners at the slightly hazey post 3am-stage of a frat party.

And it’s personal. “Oversharing is a natural instinct for me, and something I often try and curb”, comments Lena, who describes filmmaking as “the place where your demons roam, come into the sunlight and then hopefully the sunlight kills them.” She’s relaxed about this approach, despite its potential for unflatteringly intrusive results. “I didn’t think consciously about trying to show a different kind of body (or what is, in fact, not a different kind of body—it’s a more common body type rarely seen onscreen),” she notes – “I just made choices that felt honest to who this girl is and how she inhabits her form.”

It’s an approach that might have been heightened by shooting on a small budget in her own home with her family as co-stars. But Lena turns this apparent recipe for disaster into an extraordinary family atmosphere that would have been impossible to stage. And she makes it sound easy: “My mother and sister were a delight. I expected tensions to arise but every day they brought their A game and it was such a gift… I come from a family of artists and we’re very used to being embroiled in each other’s creative processes, so making a movie as a team feels oddly natural.”

With a soaring profile and praise for Tiny Furniture coming thick and fast, the future is bright for Lena. But for now she’s got her feet on the ground, brushing off our suggestion that she might be an inspiration to aspiring filmmakers with a modest remark about not feeling wise enough to give advice. Whatever the case, Lena Dunham will certainly be the buzzword in US independent cinema for years to come.

Tiny Furniture is the Closing Night film of 2011’s Birds Eye View Film Festival, at BFI Southbank on 17 March 2011, followed by the BEV Festival Awards. Click here for more information and to book.