We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lily Malm. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lily below.

Lily, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

“Scent of Marigold” is a deeply personal screenplay inspired by true events. Set during the “Zero Tolerance Policy” in 2018, the feature is centered around a Mexican immigrant turned border guard who becomes torn between her Americanization and the unexpected bond she forms with a child separated from her father at the height of the border crisis.

The story came to really matter to me during the pandemic, when I was almost deported myself. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones. The aftermath of what happened to everyone else, however – including the thousand children still separated from their parents to this day – quickly faded from the headlines as if their deportations never even happened. It infuriated me. That’s when I started interviewing family reunification specialists, immigration attorneys and family members of immigrants-turned-border patrol officers to dramatize the essence of what happened as authentically and respectfully as possible. It’s been one of the most eyeopening experiences of my life, especially as a white screenwriter.

Telling a story about a topic as emotionally charged and politicized as the U.S-Mexico border crisis is not easy. My friend Laila Matuk, who hopped on a rewrite with me, was an incredible guide as we paved our way through each new draft to find the humanity in each character regardless of their political stance. We didn’t want it to be black-and-white; we wanted nuance. We wanted to humanize a systemic issue. In other words, we wanted to tell a story about family.

Lily, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a Los Angeles-based lesbian screenwriter from Gothenburg, Sweden. Aside from working in talent management at ATN Entertainment, I am a recipient of Diverse Women in Media Forum’s Emerging Content Creators Scholarship and hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting. My work focuses primarily on dramatic themes with political undertones that capture the nuances of the female experience.

I first fell in love with screenwriting after watching Graham Moore’s film “The Imitation Game”, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. There was something electric about the way Moore used match cuts and razor sharp dialogue in his script that completely blew me away. I needed to understand it. What the cogs were and how they functioned. Cut to nine years later, and my walls are full of color-coded index cards and sluglines. I’ve never lost my passion for it.

Trying to break into Hollywood as an emerging writer is a serious time commitment that requires a ton of sacrifices, including a regular sleeping pattern, a social life and dating. As an LGBTQ+ immigrant, most doors are also slammed shut in your face before you even get a chance to crack them open (although, on the bright side, it teaches you to be scrappy). This year has been quite pivotal for me after “Scent of Marigold” made it into the Top 5 finalist round in Final Draft’s Big Break Screenwriting Contest out of nearly 16,000 entries and won the Grand Prize for Best Feature Drama at the Big Apple Film Festival in New York City. The immigration-themed feature spec also made it into the 30th Austin Film Festival, Launch Pad Feature Competition, ScreenCraft Drama Competition and was the fourth highest ranked drama feature on the global platform Coverfly, where it also made The Red List.

Although political undertones always tend to find a way into my writing, my other works are mostly LGBTQ-themed romantic dramedies. One of them, an hourlong pilot called “Apostles of Sex” (also known as the last show you want to watch with your parents) is centered around a virtuous nun forced to resist her sexual temptations when the arrival of a provocative flapper triggers a domino effect of lesbianism at a Catholic convent in the heat of the Roaring Twenties, and was recently selected as a Pilotpalooza finalist. I love to write nuanced characters that dramatize the depths of human psychology, particularly from the point of view of gay women struggling with internalized homophobia. Though I was raised in a traditionally Nordic setting free from religious indoctrination, I’ve dated women who in the past had been subjected to conversation therapy. Today, whenever I write, I write with women like them in mind.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I was flat broke during the months leading up to the pandemic, mostly due to the discrimination you face in the job market as a first generation immigrant, and it got to a point where I had to steal food from the other tenants in my house share to have something to eat. Looking back at it now, although I’m not proud of it, it taught me a lot about resilience. While I was lucky enough to get a job in post-production just a few weeks before Covid-19 hit the states, it still didn’t cure me of my depression. It was a really lonely time for me, as I’m sure it was for a lot of people. Moving across the world by myself to a place where I didn’t know anyone was a massive risk I took, and the stakes really caught up with me during the lockdown.

But I kept writing.

Writing has been a constant presence in a changing life. I’ve gone through about a million ups and downs since emigrating to the states – I’ve made friends, lost friends, fallen in love, fallen out of love, won awards, and even been hit by a car – yet my passion for writing has always stayed the same. It’s the first thing on my mind when I wake up, and the last thing on my mind before I go to sleep. It’s kept me going, no matter what has happened. Screenwriting is the reason I’m still here.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Great question! I internalized what I now think of as a quite toxic lesson when I was in film school. I’ve spent a lot of time around other queer writers, and in recent years there’s been a ton of backlash against movies and TV shows that portray gay trauma on screen. And I see why there’s a pushback – ever since we first started seeing ourselves represented, the narratives Hollywood gave us were movies like Brokeback Mountain, Dallas Buyers Club and Carol, all of which portray gay characters in the closet who suffer in one way or another. And while those stories are important, I do see why my fellow queers would rather watch a drag race.

With that said, however, homophobia is real. And it is heavy. And if I can’t write about my experiences with it from a place of uncensored honesty because it’s no longer okay to portray homophobia on screen, then what’s the point of art? Would people rather have me bite my tongue and walk on eggshells than express how I feel? The past year has been a massive unlearning experience where I, thanks to my current screenwriting lab, have learned to channel all the internalized homophobia I didn’t even realize I was still carrying through writing. And I don’t care about being a perfectionist as much anymore – well, to an extent – but I do care about getting the truth onto the page. And you know what? I feel empowered.

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lily-malm-1bb19a188/
• Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm14911452/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_2_nm_6_q_lily%2520mal

Image Credits
The two pictures from Group Labs Fest / Bad Pitch Writers Lab were taken by Josh Fingerhut.