Straddled between her protective and stabilizing aunt, and her schizophrenic and wild mother, a teenage girl learns to cope with the parts of her that are mad.
Emily Elizabeth Thomas
IF Featured Writer/Director Emily Elizabeth Thomas is an emerging filmmaker from Austin, Texas whose work fuses raw emotional honesty with a fiercely stylized cinematic voice. Moving fluidly between tenderness and rebellion, her films explore the psychological terrain of girlhood, womanhood, and survival through stories that are both intimate and urgent. Drawing from a distinctly punk sensibility while embracing vulnerability, Thomas challenges inherited narratives around femininity, power, and identity. Her work centers young women, beyond archetypes, represented as complicated protagonists navigating desire, instability, rage, and transformation. Through visually arresting, emotionally charged storytelling, she is building a body of work that speaks to a new generation searching for meaning, agency, and truth.
MADGiRL
MADGiRL
“I believe in radical empathy. That’s what MADGiRL offers. A love letter to madness.”
-Emily elizabeth thomasIF: What inspired you to write MADGiRL?
EET: MADGiRL came from a very personal place. I was a caregiver to my mother for nearly a decade as she struggled with neurological illness before she passed away in 2025. That experience completely transformed me. I lived in this constant tension between love and helplessness, between trying to hold someone together while quietly falling apart yourself.
IF: What conversations do you hope MADGiRL will generate?
EET: At its core, the film is about confronting the parts of ourselves society labels as “too much” — especially in girls and women. The messy parts, the emotional parts, the fractured parts. The “mad” parts.
IF: How would you describe your aesthetic language?
EET: My work always lives in contradiction. I love stories that are emotionally raw but visually lush. Beautiful but dangerous. Funny and devastating at the same time. I sometimes describe my films as emotional rodeos. They’re wild, messy, vulnerable, and a little feral.
IF: How would you describe your brand of Surrealism in MADGiRL?
EET: I’ve always been drawn to stories where beauty and terror coexist. The hallucinations aren’t just visual spectacle — they’re emotional landscapes. I want the film to feel like a cinematic descent. It begins in these soft, sunlit suburban spaces that feel almost deceptively safe, and then gradually fractures into something much more electric, dreamlike, and psychologically untethered.