Hi Anita, could you introduce yourself in a few lines?

My name is Anita Lester. I’m a multidisciplinary artist- film, painting, music, writing-everything tends to bleed into everything else.

I studied film and majored in animation, which is where I spent a lot of my early years, working independently and with a few larger platforms. Alongside that, I made short films and a lot of narrative music videos – mostly instinctively, following story wherever it wanted to go, but rooted in mythology.

During COVID, I shifted into screenwriting, and that’s where something opened up. Since then, I’ve been moving into live action in a more intentional way. CRUMBS sits right in that space – an experiment, really, a way of testing the language and seeing how it holds.

Why did you choose film as your medium? Is it your only artistic outlet or do you have others?

I think I chose film because it gathers everything I love about storytelling into one place. It’s not my only outlet, but it’s the most complete one- an accumulative space where different languages can sit side by side.

There’s the musical landscape, the visual one, the narrative arc, and the broader sonic world that holds it all together. At the centre of it for me is storytelling – often circling some variation of the hero’s journey, and film just offers a natural, expansive container for that to unfold.

Do you have a philosophy behind your filmmaking? Or do you feel like you belong to a particular artistic movement from the present day or past? 

I don’t think I have a locked-in philosophy yet, especially when it comes to film. I’m still finding my voice there. But instinctively, I feel like something of the poetry of the world has been lost.

So if I had to locate what sits underneath what I do, it would be that – a pull back toward poetry… making and giving space to each part of the process and the people within it, really valuing what they bring.

At the same time, I think it’s about holding a very clear sense of the feeling you’re trying to create, while staying open enough to let things change along the way. That’s how I work in everything else, and I suspect film will follow a similar path.

If you could watch one film on a loop forever, what would it be? 

THE PRINCESS BRIDE

Tell us about your film that’s on T-Port. What is it about? How did you choose to tell its story? 

The film I’m sharing here is called CRUMBS . It’s loosely based on a collection of stories by Sholem Aleichem, translated as ‘Railway Stories’- which are essentially snapshots of Jewish life on a train in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe.

It wasn’t my intention to directly recreate that world, but more to find a contemporary version of that kind of transient, in-between space that felt honest to the world we live in now. And for me, there was nothing more perfect than a bakery.

Tell us about the production process on that film, what did you learn? Which parts did you enjoy? 

Being the perfectionist that I am, I found the short turnaround – about three months from idea to execution- pretty challenging. I think, in some ways, a lot was lost in not being able to properly sit with things and let them unfold.

But the process itself was incredibly collaborative. There are around fifteen characters in the film, and the cast is a mix of people I know – actors and non-actors – and others who came through auditions.

The world sits somewhere slightly heightened, almost cartoonish, but still quite soulful. It was important to me that it held onto a sense of realism, because I was also trying to capture something of a moment in time.

I learnt a lot through making it – about my visual language, my literary instincts, what felt true, what didn’t, and what was missing. But one thing that became really clear is how drawn I am to realism, to unexpected and authentic casting, and to characters that feel like they’ve emerged directly from the spaces they inhabit.