What’s your superpower? That was the question GG Hawkins was asked while attending New York’s Gotham Film & Media Institute.
What that meant, she reasoned, “is, ‘What is your special set of skills or unique thing that you have access to?’” Because that’s what you can use for your first film without waiting for studio approval.
Looking around, Hawkins realized that she was lucky enough to have two superpowers. The first, she explained “is a small group of people that I had made a bunch of sketches and shorts with, who I love working with and just totally jive with.”
That’s not uncommon for aspiring filmmakers, but her second superpower is a little more distinctive. “My stepdad lived on an island in Panama for 16 years, and my brother was born there, and I grew up going to Panama and Costa Rica because I have a bunch of family there, and I was like, ‘Oh, I know this place really well, and I have a big community there, and it’s beautiful. What if I made a movie there?’”
Combined, those superpowers come together in her debut feature, I Really Love My Husband. The queer relationship parable, starring Madison Lanesey, Travis Quentin Young, and Arta Gee as a messy throuple, receives its world premiere at this year’s South by Southwest.
But don’t let the jet-setting tropical location fool you. This was still hardscrabble indie filmmaking influenced heavily by the DIY attitude of mumblecore, with its concentration on relationships, sex, and the unexpected pitfalls of adult relationships.
While filming in Panama sounds idyllic, the beachfront location came with its own problems. First, Hawkins had a narrow window before the rainy season began, and the crew wouldn’t be able to do pickups after the storms “because the house where we were shooting was about to be sold, and who knows if we would be able to use it in the future?”
There was the positive that Panama has a very developed film industry, with recent productions there including The Suicide Squad and multiple seasons of different international spinoffs of Survivor, and Hawkins praised the Panama Film Commission for “helping us like puzzle together everything.”
The downside was that the production centers are over 10 hours from the small island on which they were filming. Hey, you want to film in paradise, you have to make a few allowances, as Hawkins had to explain to her director of photography, Ryan Thomas, when he asked about the gear truck for the production. “I was like, ‘What do you mean, truck? And he’s like, ‘Well, the truck for the gear,’ and I was like, ’There are no roads on this island.’ And he was like, ‘What? No roads?’ I’m like, ‘Literally, you walk everywhere.’”
It’s not just that there were no roads, but every location meant traversing loose sand, dodging palm tree roots, and evading sand crabs. “That’s where the indie creativity comes into play,” Hawkins said. “We finally discovered that these thick wheeled wagons that fold down and they work on sand. … So it was a lot of puzzle solving like that, which was exciting.”
For Hawkins, that speaks to the one superpower that every indie filmmaker shares: ingenuity. She said, “I genuinely believe we’re going to be entering this new age of indie film, because we know that the industry is changing, and there are so many things outside of our control. It’s really important for filmmakers to be greenlighting themselves and not be waiting for permission.”
I Really Love My Husband
Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.
