Emily Alyn Lind was seven years old when her first feature screened at a major film festival.
“I didn’t go,” says the now-24-year-old over Zoom from Nova Scotia. The actress wears a toasty-looking fur hat and sits cross-legged on the floor, the Canadian road traffic muffling her voice slightly. “But I had the experience of working with auteur filmmakers. We shot in Montreal, and everyone was extremely creative. People would drink at lunch. I loved staying up late. It just felt like the best thing in the world.”
The New York-born star is talking about Gaspar Noé’s surrealist art film Enter the Void, which premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Lind, a child actress born to producer and assistant director John Lind and actress Barbara Alyn Woods, has only ever known showbiz, but Argentine filmmaker Noé was her first taste of international cinema — and it’s a shoot that is etched in her memory. “I was able to sit in a trailer for hours and converse with women in their mid-50s about relationship problems at nine [years old], you know?” she says about growing up in the industry. “That’s what my environment was, so I didn’t really know anything else. I just knew people in all shapes and forms, and I think I found myself trying to be a chameleon and match whatever entity sought to contain me.”
