Give Yourself A Try
Old wounds and unspoken words come to the surface
Directed by Alexander Ronsdorf
Give Yourself a Try is an intimate short film about the quiet, complicated moments that can define - or break - a friendship. After weeks of not speaking, two lifelong friends find themselves face to face in a laundromat, where unspoken tensions, past hurt, and the possibility of growing apart all come to the surface. It’s a raw, honest look at how relationships shift as life moves forward, and whether they can shift with us.
The film comes from Berlin-based filmmaker Alexander Ronsdorf, a self-taught director and writer who draws from personal experience to tell deeply human, emotionally grounded stories. “As we grow and our lives change, so do our friendships,” Ronsdorf says. “Some grow with us, while others we grow out of.”
Watch Give Yourself a Try below, followed by our conversation with Alexander about navigating friendship, personal turning points, and the inspiration behind the film.
Where did the idea for Give Yourself A Try come from, and what made an everyday space, like a laundromat, feel like the right place for this emotional moment?
The idea was born out of practicality. I was in a season of writing different shorts to become a better narrative director and writer. Train the creative muscles, y’know. It was a series called “ESSENZ” (Eng. Essence), where I tried to write shorts with one thing in mind: I want to be able to shoot this. For me, that meant one location, two actors, 5-10 pages. I wanted these shorts to feel like mundanity but special in their own way, no explosions or chases, just simple, everyday human interactions. Something a lot of people can relate to.
I had multiple ideas, but this one always bubbled to the top. I feel like the laundromat in the beginning was just an idea I had that I thought looked and felt cool. I loved the texture, hum, and constant movement of the washers. I wanted the film to feel like a snapshot of their relationship and let the location serve as the context to set the characters in. You could interpret tons into the location, monotone washer movement, class differences and so on. But it first, I just loved the texture of the place.
The name inspiration stems from the song “Give Yourself a Try” by The 1975, which is also about growing up, youth, and adulthood. I liked that and also felt that the vibe of the song fits so well into this film that we fought for a couple of months to actually get the license to use it in the outro.
The dialogue feels incredibly natural, like we’re eavesdropping on a conversation many of us have had or feared having at some point. When writing the script, did you allow room for improvisation to capture that authenticity?
Yes, in the writing process, there was always the thought in my head: “I will work this out with the actors when we get there.” That is especially helpful when you bump into a tricky section in the script again and again that you’re not really sure about. Above all, I’m not a native English speaker, so when I gave Mimi and Nyah the script, I really opened it up to them, fully trusting their instincts. “Guys, what works, what doesn’t, what would you phrase differently?”
I think if you want to work like this, you really have to align with your actors on the vision of the characters and the film as kind of guardrails, and then let it flow. I’m not standing on set correcting them on some line reading when they absolutely killed the performance. Of course, you have to know your vision and make sure it’s still there after it, but I think that’s also what I love about all of this, it’s a big collaboration.
“I wanted the film to feel like a snapshot of their relationship and let the location serve as the context to set the characters in.”
The film sits in that tender space between youth and adulthood, where friendships are tested by distance, ambition, or in fact, change. How much of this story was drawn from personal experiences or friendships you've witnessed evolve?
Friendship and growing up is something almost everyone goes through. And not every friendship survives that. I experienced similar situations when I moved around the country a couple of times, leaving one home to build another. That also means you leave a world behind, and your friendships will be put to the test. Some simply exist because you live in the same location, others don’t really depend on that.
I had to realise, as everyone does, that friendships go through phases of closeness. You will not always be super close with your teenage years bestie, and that’s okay. Yes, it is worth it to fight for a friendship and to put in the effort to make it work. But sometimes two people separate simply because they are on different paths, and that is also okay. You’ll find new friends and life partners on the way. The other does too. To accept that and have peace about it, not in a nihilistic way, but in a caring way, because yes, parting ways hurts. To me, that felt like maturing.
The emotional rhythm of the piece is so tightly focused, just two people, one conversation, but with so much history under the surface. How did you work with your actors and team on set to build that unspoken backstory and emotional weight so well?
First of all, shout out to Farbfilm Studio, BWGTBLD, and the whole NY crew that helped to make this possible, you guys are the best! I had a table read with Mimi and Nyah the week before the shoot, and we did another rehearsal one day before. That really helped to get into the rhythm of the conversation in the film.
So this was all shot in a running laundromat. We had customers coming in and out with their washing all the time, simply because we did not have the budget to close it down just for us. So that, unintentionally, felt super natural already. We looked at around 10-15 laundromats before that one, and this one needed almost no help from our art department, it was just perfectly run-down.
Mika and I went through quite a process to find the right way to shoot this. I arrived in NY with the vision to shoot this very puristically, camera on sticks, static, wide angles, etc. But when we were in the laundromat to shotlist the script, Mika pointed out that that might not be the right approach. We agreed that this needed something different, something that fit the energy of the characters and their conflict. Sometimes you have a specific idea in mind while writing, and the moment you step into the location, you realise that it will not fit. So I threw my old vision out, and we worked it out from scratch. We basically freed the camera, and Mika flowed with the action and characters, and we used way tighter lenses. I blocked the scene in a way that the actresses, especially Mimi, would run around quite a lot, and that created a really beautiful and wild look.
We also took quite long takes, which is a tricky thing to do shooting on 35mm and being limited to a certain amount of rolls. I think that process gave the film a super natural look and made the characters and interaction way more approachable and close to the viewer.
There’s no clear resolution in the film, just a quiet, emotional honesty that we are left with afterwards. What did you want audiences to sit with after watching this moment between the two friends? And why was it important to highlight the uncertainty and change that inevitably comes with growing apart?
Yes, that’s right, and I played with multiple ideas of how the film could end. Most of my other ideas had a less open ending. The main feedback I got about the film was: “I would have loved to see more,” and to me, that is a good thing. Because this film is just a glimpse into these characters’ lives, and I didn’t want to over-tell the story, but rather leave that last page blank for the viewer to fill in their heads.
And I do feel, at least in my opinion, that the film carries that glimmer of hope that Mya and Tess’s friendship is maturing beyond that, into a new level. What I wanted the viewer to see is the potential, the possibility that friendships can grow with you as your life changes. They don’t always do, but they can.
Can you tell us more about being a self-taught director who’s built a voice outside traditional film school routes? How do you think that shaped your approach to telling stories like this one, and is there a creative freedom or perspective that comes from that path?
I believe the main thing you learn when you’re self-taught is that you have to create your own opportunities to learn new things. You graduate from YouTube University on the way and quickly jump into the commercial world, shoot for real-world clients, most of the time, creative experimentation is no part of that. Clients rarely take a leap of faith with a project; you’d much rather take the safe route. I get it, nobody wants to fail, there is money on the line, c’mon. And as a commercial director with no experience in narrative work, nobody slides into your DMs and asks you to write a 7-minute scene, stage it out, and shoot it. To be brutally honest, most of the time, you just send cool-looking models from left to right in front of a camera.
Where a film school can be an amazing creative environment and a “safe space” for creative experimentation, the commercial world can be kind of the opposite. With social media and everything, because of the pressure of the competition, every piece has to be perfect, enhance your reel, fit in with the crowd, create a new commercial opportunity, and so on. That cocktail can kill your creative experimentation, because, as the word says, you’re just trying new things, and risk mistakes and failure as part of that. That’s why I love passion projects: you can try tons of new things and say what you want to say. I feel like one passion project says ten times more about a director than ten commercials. So with this project, I did not try to be perfect but rather take a leap of faith and make a step into the narrative world, as someone who has almost no experience with that.
I feel my years of experience in the commercial world, and the tools and flexibility you learn, definitely helped me to approach this a bit differently than having a kind of rigid way of “this is how you shoot narrative.” I feel the non-traditional route is less predictable and scarier at times, because you have to find the way yourself, but I love it, and I would not do anything differently.
What’s next for you?
The biggest thing that’s next for me is becoming a great dad. We’ve got a 4-month-old daughter now, which is the best thing ever, better than every film project combined. That’s where a lot of focus is right now.
Next to my everyday commercial filmmaking life, I’m constantly thinking about and developing new short ideas, implementing what I’ve learned from Give Yourself a Try. The next thing I would love to do is shoot some sort of comedy. I have multiple scripts in the pipeline for that, and if God allows, we’ll shoot one towards the end of the year, so stay tuned. I’m not stressing myself too much. I’m playing the long game: growing, learning, and evolving. Just trying to become a better filmmaker and storyteller than I was before. Year by year. I still want to do films in my fifties and sixties, and as a German proverb says: “Gut Ding will Weile haben” (Good things take time).
Alexander Ronsdorf
Director
Alexander Ronsdorf
Writer
Laurent Arber
Producer
Dan Blackwell
Producer
Jeffrey Schroeder
Producer
Jakob Preischl
Producer
Mimi Ryder
Key Cast
"Tess"
Nyah Juliano
Key Cast
"Mia"