James Marcus Haney made his name as a filmmaker sneaking into Coachella, Glastonbury and other top music festivals by posing as press to get exclusive footage of pop stars and their performances.

That need to gate crash marquee festivals with his camera was captured in his 2014 feature documentary No Cameras Allowed. Now Haney is headed to the Toronto Film Festival with Black Sunflowers, a feature documentary about Ukrainian youth coming of age amid martial law as they move between underground raves and car racing on the home front and the brutal front lines of war against Russia.

The first images for Black Sunflowers, which will have a Sept. 11 world premiere in Toronto, has young Ukrainians facing tragedy and duty as soldiers on the front lines, while they find distraction on concert dance floors, in relationships or bonding at a local watering hole.

Working with a Ukrainian film crew, Haney captures an army truck driver who races his car down city streets back home; a young amputee soldier finding freedom on a high energy rave dance floor, despite a blade prosthesis; a young woman turning from nature photography to war photography amid the ruins of war; and still another young woman being trained to shoot a rifle as a generation of youth face compulsory military service.

Haney, in a director’s statement on the TIFF website, recalls first arriving in Ukraine as war reshaped everyday life: “I was surprised to see how much normal life carried on, despite the war. I couldn’t help but think that mainstream media is missing half of the story.”

Haney’s film joins a slew of other Ukraine war documentaries, including Roman Liubyi and Volodymyr Tykhyy’s Time Machine Maidan, which bowed at Sheffield, Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov‘s new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and Militantropos, from co-directors Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith and Simon Mozgovyi.

Black Sunflowers, with an original score by Fred Gibson (Fred Again), Brian Eno and Koloah, is produced by Pedram Rezaee, Mikayla Jean Miller, Yevhenii Zdorovylo, Samy Mosher, Eric Maldin, Volodymyr Yatsenko and Anna Yatsenko.

Alia Shawkat has been trying to star in a stoner comedy for years. She signed on to Dylan Meyer‘s The Wrong Girls during the pandemic, giving a near-instant yes after her first coffee meeting with the writer-director and with the knowledge that the project would reunite her with her The Runaways costar Kristen Stewart. The group put on a table read for investors, and secured the financing to move forward. Then Shawkat got pregnant. The actress isn’t one to let anything get in the way of a job — she points out that she shot both the second season of The Old Man and the movie Atropia during her pregnancy — but The Wrong Girls requires some specific considerations.

“There is so much weed smoking in this movie,” she says with a laugh. “Even if we could hide my pregnancy, and even though we’re not smoking real weed, you just really can’t do that.”

Shawkat paused her commitment to the film, and — fickle as the indie film industry is — the financing disappeared. “And then I had my kid, and was like, I’m back, and I look normal,” she says. “And they were able to find more money.”

Now, the long-awaited film has finally hit theaters, offering moviegoers an utter rarity: A stoner comedy about women, starring women, and helmed by a first-time female director. Here, the actress tells THR why it was worth the way.

To start, I have to imagine this is one of the more fun press tours you’ve been doing…

We’ve been doing really chill stuff. We were just hanging out with a bodega cat for awhile. All these internet shows are so funny. They’re like, say whatever you want and we’ll edit it into what we need. We did this one called, I think, Natasha Gets the Munchies, and she takes edibles and wears Google glasses and films her meals. Kristen and I met up with her at Korean barbecue, and we all just ate. She didn’t even ask us questions. It was like, do you guys like acting? It was so low-key. I was like, wow, journalism has changed.

Kristen and I trip out on it so much, because we spent our lives making film and television and we’re like, this has nothing to do with it. I feel like an old person. I’ve been looking up these formats because I’ve never heard of any of these internet shows and it’s like, they have Oprah Winfrey on.

Do you remember the first big press commitment you did?

I used to get invited to a lot of kid premieres when I was a child actor. I was at like the Inspector Gadget premiere. I remember being on a red carpet and everyone screaming my name, and I was really shocked. They were probably pronouncing my name wrong too. I looked like a little adult, with a purse and my hand on my hip. I was like, I’m a woman. I also did a TV Guide blurb when I was nine and my mom still has it at our house. I think I talked about having a cat.

Tell me about getting started on The Wrong Girls; it’s had a really long path to the screen.

Dylan wrote it 13 years ago. She always had Kristen in mind, and then years later they met and got married. Dylan was like, I sent you a script a long time ago, and Kristen was like, no you didn’t. And then she found the email, and she just didn’t respond. But it’s so hard to get anything made, and I do really trust that things will happen in their own weird, mysterious way. It all happened for the best, especially since when they first wrote those characters it was for girls in their early 20s which is such a different vibe. Now it’s about girls in their mid- to late-30s being like, we’re still doing it. My character is 36 and just deciding if I’m going to move out and have a job, which I think is so funny. I think it just works better.

Do you think that the fact that this is a stoner comedy about women played a part in making it harder to get financing, or get to the screen?

In the past, obviously, it was always dudes in the lead of movies like this and the women were just used as the sexual jokes. Like oh, you embarrassed yourself in front of the hot girl. I think maybe it took this long to even be like, can you imagine girls who smoke weed? I will say that Point Grey, Seth Rogen’s company, was always attached. They had a good sense that this was a rad script. Dylan has been an on-set writer with Seth on a lot of his projects, she was an in-house comedian of sorts. To me, this movie seems like a million-dollar idea. We’ll see how well it does, but the sad truth is it’s just hard to get movies about women, and directed by women, made. You read the numbers now and somehow those numbers have even gone down, which is always nice as we move forward into this weird fascism.

The last three movies you’ve been in — this, Atropia from Hailey Gates, and Blink Twice from Zoe Kravitz — have all been directed by women.

I feel really lucky that I did those, and they were all really good friends of mine. It’s really not easy for a first-time female director to get money to make a feature. I’m happy to be part of these and be able to help get them made in any way I can.

You bring up a good point about movies that are about women, in addition to directed by women; looking ahead to this season’s Oscars hopefuls, so many are male-focused stories.

There actually are a lot of rad movies coming out this year directed by women, but the question is who are they willing to put all their money behind? You have The Invite, you have Camp Miasma, these are really well-made movies, but who are they going to bet on? They’re like, it’s Chris Nolan all the way. And I get it! It’s a very big, commercial movie. But it’s part of why we have to look at awards differently. We’re lying to everybody by being like, they just got a phone call, people love the movie! It’s like, no, they have a whole team who are pushing for them and spending a lot of money to get these nominations.

Kristen, of course, also had her directorial debut recently; have you guys been circling each other since you were both in The Runaways?

We didn’t share much screen time. She was Joan Jett and I was a Glorified Extra. My character was an entertainment lawyer and was like, I don’t want to be involved [with the biopic]. They told me that on set, and that I couldn’t say anything in the movie. I was just there to hang out. But there’s lots of cute photos of me and Kristen together in a band, which is fun. All the girls on the movie would hang out and smoke weed and have a fun time, but Kristen and I were young and awkward and in different stages of life. We’d see each other throughout the years just from being actresses, and every time we’d be like, we gotta do this more. And then this movie felt like we were just hanging out and then capturing that on camera. We’d be doing something funny off-camera and Dylan would be like, what are you guys doing, keep doing that on camera. At the end of the movie we have that dance to Celine Dion, we didn’t prep anything, we just made it up.

How did the aforementioned fake weed treat you?

On one of the first days we did a scene with a Bongatron, and I did get a little high by accident. The fake weed is just weed without the THC, but if you smoke enough of it. I was kind of paranoid because I hadn’t been smoking in awhile since I had my kid. It was just enough where I was like, I’m not sober, and I’m at work. I asked Kristen if she felt anything and she said no, but just to go with it. And she was right. And I sobered up by lunch. And we’re in a stoner comedy! I leaned in.

You’ve been doing comedy for decades, but I’m curious if you learned anything from working with Kate McKinnon on this movie.

I truly think she’s one of the greatest comedians of our time. You could just tell she has a million ideas at all times. You just have to tell her to go and she’ll blast off. She has a scene where she says “Fuck me in my ass” 20 different ways. It’s on the blooper reel. We were all a little intimidated by her and just like, thanks for being in our movie.

Do you keep a proverbial rolodex of people you want to work with?

When I see a new movie, I’ll send it to my agents and ask about the person. Especially foreign filmmakers. I saw this film from Colombia, A Poet, and I was able to have a Zoom with the director. Obviously, the PT Andersons and the Scorseses of the world, it’s like, obviously I’d like to work with them. But at the same time I feel like my lane is more working with cool new filmmakers and women. There’s a lot of big actresses who don’t work with female directors, and I have a hard time believing that it’s on accident. It’s like, you have to actively avoid it. They’re trying to not work with female filmmakers. I genuinely believe we need to start building up female directors, there are so many who have made so many movies and they still have a hard time getting money. Kelly Reichardt should not have a hard time getting a movie made. She’s one of the best we have, and if she was a man she would have no problem.

If she was a man, she would be Paul Thomas Anderson.

Exactly. She would be. And she would be respected in that way. To pretend this issue isn’t real is crazy. I have this mix of desires, to be in bigger movies, but I don’t need to be in huge movies. I just want opportunities to play bolder characters, people who go through some crazy stuff.

Do you have a desire to go back onstage?

I do. It’s really hard and the hours are nuts and you get paid no money. It’s hard to live off. I’m hoping to make enough money this year to be able to do another play.

Your play, You Got Older, really set the Cherry Lane Theater on a path to being the cool downtown theater.

I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but I do feel like there’s a lot of stuff in my work where everyone’s like, that was the first one. Arrested Development was an early Netflix production. Search Party produced a lot of really great talent, John Early and John Reynolds both have movies this year. Honestly, if that show hadn’t gotten re-released on Netflix it would have disappeared. I did a TV show when I was young that still can’t get the rights on Disney because all the music is really well-known 60’s music. It’s called State of Grace. I’m dying to get it on streaming.