Sebastien Tobler: Telling Stories Through a Global Lens
By Marian Cook
Sebastien Tobler (left) with fellow Stowe Story Labs participants Nina-Marie Gardner, Pamela Winfrey, and Kari Wolf (left to right) at the First Annual Vermont Film and Music Festival during tenth annual June Stowe Narrative Lab.
Switzerland, Philippines, Poland, Indonesia, Thailand, United Kingdom, Washington, DC.—these are all places Writer, Director, and Stowe Story Labs alum Sebastien Tobler has lived.
“My dad worked for the Swiss embassy as a diplomat, so every five years we would move around. And every time we moved to a new place, we had to learn the language, learn the culture—that stuff was fun. The hard stuff was making new friends–leaving old ones behind,” Sebastien explained.
Putting the roaming behind him, Sebastien has set roots in LA, where he lives with his wife and son. He also just wrapped on This Time, a feature he wrote and directed. It was produced by fellow Stowe alum Theresa Chiu. The story is about two long lost high school sweethearts who unexpectedly reunite in Los Angeles 23 years after being separated in Jakarta by the 1998 riots. His travels as a kid have colored his worldview and stories, and he knows it.
“It has influenced everything. I always think of the global implications. So, a lot of that feeds into my work. I tackle themes about change, movement, the trauma of abrupt goodbyes, constantly rebuilding.”
He continued, “For This Time, my hope is that it’s an immersive experience for the audience—that they relate to the characters and the emotions of the moments on screen so that they feel a sense of presence. Perhaps, a few months later, they look back and question if it was their own feelings, their own memory, or a film they watched.”
His journey to filmmaking was just as sinuous, carrying a sense of nostalgia as his films do. He’d always loved film since watching The Red Balloon (1956) at the age of seven. “It was the first time I felt the emotional impact of cinema,” he said, but it wasn’t until 2010 or so that he consciously decided he wanted to make movies.
He started off in banking and he was miserable. All he wanted to do was travel, but he couldn’t. So to quell his wanderlust, he started writing about his experiences as a kid and it eventually turned into a blog, which turned into him picking up a camera and filming his travels, teaching himself how to shoot and edit.
By then, he had met his then girlfriend and now wife, Tara, who was going to film school, and she asked him to help on set. This introduced him to a whole community of filmmakers and landed him his current Director of Photography.
And so for the last twelve years, Sebastien has been writing, directing, and building his community of filmmakers, including through Stowe. He’d always known and heard about the Labs whether through word-of-mouth or the writing community on Twitter, but it wasn’t until 2021 that he decided to apply and bring This Time to the 2022 June Lab.
“There was this strong sense of community before the Lab even started. I never felt lost or a sense of hierarchy like I do with a lot of other labs and competitions. The best part, though, was how everybody will talk to you—the mentors, the leadership. There's this perpetual mix and sharing of ideas. Even the Davids are heavily involved and that's huge because it’s rare to have founders engaged with attendees from the very beginning until way after the lab is over.”
Sebastien continued, “So I think that's really special—the community, accessibility, and willingness to help and lift each other up. I think there’s this hunger for mentorship, the prestige of having a big name mentor, but over the years I've found that a community is much more important. They’re going to lift you up and bring you much further along the way. And by the time you make it, it's you and your community that's breaking in together. We’re going to work together in some capacity throughout our careers, so you might as well build those relationships early.”
Sebastien is now in post-production for This Time, but is already gearing up for his next projects which mesh the dreaminess of Wong Kar-Wai’s films and the passage of time of Richard Linklater’s films. You can support This Time here.
Marian Cook is a former journalist, Stowe Story Labs staff member, and current USC student pursuing an MFA in directing. She’s been published over a dozen times, covering topics from local news to federal healthcare legislation. Although she loves the world of journalism, having done documentaries on a range of topics from plastic surgery to segregation in the church, her real passion lies in narrative film. She one day hopes to be a writer-director and tell strong, female-led stories, especially that of Latinas. When she’s not filming, she likes to explore, listen to blues and jazz, brush up on her French, and absorb everything science fiction related. Learn more at http://mariandcook.weebly.com/. At Stowe Story Labs, Marian assists with all aspects of operations, writes for the newsletter, and assists with research and writing to support fundraising and communications about programs.
