The Coolest Girl in School
A short documentary by Tulasi Das
A film about perception, illness, and the liminal space between reality and fantasy.
What happened when the coolest girl in school crashed?
Isolated by illness, Noli’s artistic response was to turn to the strange objects littered through her mother’s house to create surrealist self-portraits. Sharing these pictures connected her with the outside world, and with her high school friend, film director Tulasi. This magical realist documentary brings them together in a new act of creation, as the objects which accompanied Noli for four years see her off into the next stage of her life.
Director’s statement
At school, Noli had a pink streak in her hair, safety pins in her jeans, and the admiration of boys and girls alike. I thought she was going to rule the world. Instead, she disappeared from society, confined to her bed by chronic fatigue syndrome.
Her sole form of connection with the outside world was through sharing her weird, surrealist self-portraits online, taken with the only things she had access to for a long time – the bizarre bric-a-brac antiques littered throughout her mother’s house.
The Coolest Girl in School is a film about responses to illness and what they reveal about people’s characters, whether as the person suffering or their friend.
It film builds a portrait, not only of this extraordinary person, but also the hidden world of one cut off from society, where beauty and companionship exist in strange places. With access to little human contact, the objects in Noli’s house are transformed, charged with meaning. The film surveys what is hidden behind closed doors: the assumptions, the pain, the magic. And of course, the film itself is my response to Noli’s illness. The girl I had known at school seemed free from anxiety and fear. The central question in the film asks not only Noli and me to untangle our belief structures, but also the audience as well: what happens when the coolest girl crashes and how do we each respond?
The theme of isolation – as teenagers, at odds with conventional societal expecation, and through Noli’s illness – is interwoven with a theme of connection – that we rediscover as adults, and that Noli found by sharing her art online with the outside world. Conversations about how we failed each other as teenagers run under footage of us weaving our way through the idiosyncratic home that served as Noli’s prison for half a decade, and of the various objects that kept her company during her isolation. We witness her artistic process of creation and how she connects her illness to her work.
Quietly present throughout the film, the audience gets to witness the magical properties of the strange objects as they slowly shake off the dust and come to life, as in many ways they did for Noli over those four years.
The film ends with a challenge for her to see, as she slowly emerges from her illness, what happens when she creates a final portrait for my (movie) camera.
Impact
The Coolest Girl in School focuses on themes of isolation caused particularly – but not exclusively – by illness, and the connections we need to make to counteract the forces which separate us. And it explores people’s responses to illness and what that reveals about their character.
The film aims to serve as a tool to counter the forces that separate us.
Art was a powerful connecting force for Noli, the film’s subject, and we will facilitate bed-based art workshops alongside online screenings of the film. These will be run by Noli and other disabled artists
We will create a website / online presence where people can share their art or craft created when bed-based or bed-bound, to amplify their voices and their work, and forge connections.
We will arrange screenings, online, in people’s homes, in community centres, with structured discussion afterwards aimed at exploring the themes of the film and fostering connection.
The film and this impact work will also help boost the visibility and awareness of people living with debilitating conditions, including ME / CFS / Long Covid. These are frequently misunderstood and overlooked communities, as they are often too sick to advocate for themselves, leading also to difficulty for others on how to respond to them. We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, and this is even worse for people who are house- or bed-bound due to disability and illness.
We want through this film to share one story and, from it, a multitude of stories. We hope this will lead to better understanding and greater visibility, and therefore greater investment by government and medical agencies, as well as better support from physicians, friends and family. We will forge connections and build a community around the film and its concept of art and illness.
