Indya Moore is the beating heart of Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Jim Jarmusch’s tender new film – even when that heart is aching. There is a particular kind of silence that the director has always understood and in his fourteenth film, it lingers over those who share blood, but not always understanding.The film is structured as three separate but thematically linked stories, each orbiting a different family in quiet crisis. In the first, Tom Waits plays a father whose slipperiness is almost comic, circling his grown children (Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver), one who eyes him with suspicion, the other with dutiful worry. In the second, Charlotte Rampling’s mother sits at a strained afternoon tea with her chalk-and-cheese daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) the conversation painfully polite while the words they really want to say to each other hover just out of reach. It is the third story, though, that you really want to climb into.

Indya plays Skye who returns to Paris and to her twin brother Billy (Luka Sabbat) to settle their parents’ affairs. Despite the siblings’ geographical distance, and the grief they face together, it’s their enduring bond that shows you how healing these relationships can be – if you let them. For Indya, it’s this truth or lack thereof between family members that is important to interrogate, one they’ve navigated first-hand, and one that the film helped them work through. Family, they remind us, is often the first community we ever know which is precisely why the truth we tell there matters so much.

Shana Chandra: Congrats on the film – your performance was luminous.
Indya Moore: Thank you, that means a lot to me.

SC: What I loved was the intimacy between your character, Skye, and Luka Sabbat’s character, Billy, it made me think of my own relationship with my siblings and how there’s that automatic shared understanding. I was wondering how you and Luka created that intimacy, because it’s so powerful?
IM: I think in many ways there’s a consistency to building intimacy with your co-workers. It’s really important to be humble when you’re showing up in a space and to make sure you’re accessible as a person – especially when we’re doing deep emotional work that acting demands. For me, that work demands reflection and a truthful understanding of the human experience as it relates to the character. When performing with another artist, it’s really important for both people to have the same emotional faculties available [to them], and to access those parts together. So, because Luka showed up in a way that was humble, kind, curious, grounded, and genuinely lovely, it made it easy to connect with him and build chemistry, so we could create something so emotionally tender and do it truthfully.

SC: Was there a relationship in your own life that you drew from to help inform this relationship?
IM: I do have a brother that I love very, very much. We grew up navigating so much pressure to be OK, and to be great, to be perfect – that’s how I experienced it. Not only is perfection unattainable for young, growing people, but I think your life ends up being shaped by what your parents or guardians define as the highest good for your family. And for us, that highest good was really challenging and really disciplinary, which in some ways made it a little difficult to connect. There wasn’t too much availability – the faculty that Luka and I [were able to bring to each other] in telling these stories. In a way, working with Luka helped me to understand what would’ve been healing and beneficial for my family, in terms of being able to fully connect to each other. It made me think, “Oh wow, I guess there is a way that individuals and families can learn how to be available for each other in a way that softens the pressure of growing up.”

Our parents love us so, so much and are so protective – and sometimes the pressure children experience is from what their parents really, really wanted for themselves, and maybe didn’t have. I think Father, Mother, Sister, Brother is a beautiful reflection of that experience, and it was really healing to sit down with my father, mother and brother, as a sister, and watch the film together. It brought me closer to my brother. It opened up a lot of really important conversations for us. It also reminded me that it’s really important to work consistently on the chemistry and balance of our family relationships, because you can’t just sit in the question, otherwise it’ll never get answered.

“It was really healing to sit down with my father, mother and brother, as a sister, and watch the film together.”

SC: You’re so right. We talk so much about working on chemistry with our lovers, but we rarely think about it in terms of our family dynamics, which of course, we should. In the film, Skye conveys so much feeling without saying anything. It’s remarkable to watch. How did you manage to harness that?
IM: Jim [Jarmusch] did a really, really good job of giving us as much information as possible with the way that he made the film. I didn’t really need to fill in any gaps with my imagination – all I had to do was step into the story. And to think of it not as a performance of falsehood, but as a portal into another reality. It’s not about actually convincing myself to lie about the environment that I’m in – it’s about interfacing with the truth of what it would feel like for me, Indya, to step into the portal of this world. The reason why I say ‘portal’ is because acting in different films reminds me of the multiverse. I’m like, “Wow, this is probably what it’s like to see ourselves in the multiverse – experiencing different perspectives of what our lives could’ve been had we grown up in a different place, with a different background, or a different set of circumstances to the one’s we’re living in our immediate reality.” It’s not time travel, it’s inter-dimensional travel. This is the first time that I’ve been able to conceptualise my work as an actor stepping into a portal, as opposed to an actor stepping into an environment that I’m convincing myself is real.

SC: Why is this film so important to you?
IM: We are under spiritual attack. All of humanity. The most unfortunate part is that we are doing it to each other. The reason why it’s such a spiritual attack is because I’m seeing so many different forms of violence that are keeping souls from expressing themselves and their internal world outside of itself. Whether someone’s spiritual truth is to migrate for a better life, or to express something that is not palatable to other people but nevertheless is their truth – as with trans people – everybody’s path is meant to figure out what it means for them. There are people high up who are teaching us how to exploit each other, how to block each other from accessing ourselves, in the name of love, in the name of freedom. And Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, I think, in a very simple way, brings us back to the importance of gratitude. And I think the gratitude of humanity begins in our immediate families.

Those of us who work the hardest in creating stability in our families, work the hardest in developing principles and morals rooted in respect – in respect for autonomy – and in helping children take responsibility for their mistakes, and be honest. I think these are core values and principles that are incredibly important for all of humanity, and when we practice them in the intimacy of the first communities we’re born into in this world, they reverberate outward. You take those principles and morals and bring them to your friendships and to strangers. And when you come into power – if you do, for whatever reason – it’s incredibly important to be able to repeat that with the people that you have power over.

“We are under spiritual attack. All of humanity.”

SC: If Father, Mother, Sister, Brother poses a question, what would it be?
IM: I think the film presents the question: where is it that our love begins? Where is it that we begin loving? Does it end in death, does it end when our parents die, when our siblings pass away? Does it end we experience contention in our relationships because we’re masking? In our culture and our society, we frown upon people who don’t mask. Why must we perform another personality for others to accept us? How do we gain the interest to acquire tools to unpack and unblock what is keeping us from being able to live sincerely, and respect those who do so?

People who are transphobic or transmisogynist, or don’t believe that trans women are women, are agitated by the experience of our humanity. And yet those people don’t approach with curiosity what they don’t understand. They approach with a preconceived agenda, determined to prove that this person’s existence is malicious, out of bad faith, without question. All it does is create more contention. It harms people who just want to live in the sincerest way that helps them love. Those who try to cast trans people as not living authentically – that our experiences or realities aren’t true – are the very ones demanding that we perform, to pretend to be something that we’re not, even while they’re accusing us of pretending. It’s so irrational and hurtful. I’ve been fighting for my internal life.

“Those who try to cast trans people as not living authentically… are the very ones demanding that we perform, to pretend to be something that we’re not, even while they’re accusing us of pretending. It’s so irrational and hurtful.”

SC: You must be exhausted.
IM: Of course. I’m on the verge of tears just talking about it. But it’s so important for me to understand the behaviour of the people who try to hurt me – without understanding mine, without understanding me. It allows me to have more compassion for their fears or whatever it is they are worried about, but it also allows me to create a perimeter around the violence. It helps me to put the violence in a box and keep it from being able to hurt me in a spiritual way. It’s that pursuit of curiosity that allows me to learn the psychology of people. You can learn so much about people through your everyday relationships with them, if you’re actually paying attention to your present. In the study of people, in the hurt that I’ve caused and the hurt and the harm that I’ve experienced, I always look at the root: where did it come from? That not only helps me have compassion for people, but it helps me quarantine it. That stops it from hurting me, because I understand it. And if people would offer that same curiosity to trans people, they would not be afraid of us – they would not be affected by us. So, I think Father, Mother, Sister, Brother provided a launchpad for these depths of reflection.