Filmmaker Molly McGlynn says she hopes her latest feature, Fitting In, is “a little disruptive” in the Canadian film market.

The semi-autobiographical feature landed its Canadian premiere as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Centrepiece programme, in addition to serving as a selection in the festival’s inaugural Sloan Science on Film Showcase.

Fitting In is written and directed by McGlynn, and produced by Jennifer Weiss under the Nice Picture banner. It stars Maddie Ziegler as a teenager who is diagnosed with a rare disorder named Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, which impacts the development of reproductive organs such as the uterus, vagina and cervix, and is based on McGlynn’s own experience of receiving the diagnosis as a teenager.

“From my point of view, I don’t think there has been a Canadian film quite like this before, and I hope that it gives distributors and financiers the confidence to [see that] a story about a very specific experience can be successful,” the Montreal-born and L.A.-based writer and director tells Playback Daily.

McGlynn says she began developing the script at the Faliro House Sundance Institute Mediterranean Screenwriters Workshop in 2018 (since rebranded as the Oxbelly Screenwriters Lab), about a year after her debut feature, Mary Goes Round, premiered at TIFF. Weiss boarded the project as the producer not long after and got to work on raising finances.

While McGlynn’s personal experience is a key part of the film, she also did research to “refresh my understanding of MRKH.” To her surprise, she discovered that the syndrome is sometimes classified as intersex. “It just goes to show you how much we don’t know sometimes about our bodies,” she says.

She also consulted with intersex organizations on the character Jax, played by Ki Griffin, who themselves is intersex. “I wanted to make sure that, because that wasn’t my lived experience, that I was reflecting that as accurately as possible,” says McGlynn. “When I gave Ki the script, I said, ‘If anything in here doesn’t feel authentic, or it’s just not right, tell me,’ and they said, ‘I feel like you wrote me.’ That meant the most to me.”

Fitting In went to camera in Sudbury, Ont. in spring 2022 with funding from Telefilm Canada, the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation, and Ontario Creates. By that time Elevation Pictures was on board as the Canadian distributor, with Blue Fox Entertainment acting as the U.S. distributor and international sales agent. It was also pre-licensed by Crave and Super Écran.

The feature had its world premiere at the Austin-based festival South by Southwest earlier this year under the original title Bloody Hell. McGlynn says the name change to Fitting In was “a distributor call, ultimately.”

“We worried the original title would be confused with a genre horror … we wanted something that could be a little bit more broadly appealing,” she says. “Now that we’ve changed it, I love it. I think once you see the film, you understand why it means more than just the phrase ‘fitting in’ and it becomes more literal.”

McGlynn says the distributors are planning a fall theatrical release in the U.S. and Canada amid its Canadian festival run, with stops planned for the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Calgary International Film Festival, and the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival.

She says sharing the film with audiences has been a “vulnerable” experience, but that having a chance to show viewers “the most raw parts of yourself,” and being met with positivity, has been rewarding.

“I hope it’s the beginning of a lot [more Canadian films being] financed that come from an underrepresented point of view that might be a little bit bold,” says McGlynn.

With files from Kelly Townsend

Image courtesy of TIFF