As I prepared to interview filmmakers Bianca and Dilara Foscht, I wrote out a list of questions, mostly about their creative partnership and the practical realities of making films together. Then, with a few hours before our conversation, I decided to watch their feature, Day of a Lion.
From its opening scenes, I could not tear myself away. The tension between the two sisters, the arresting imagery, the vibrant colors, the music and sound design pulled me in. The film felt radically different from so much being made today: authentic, pure, and deeply artistic, with echoes of the fearless filmmaking before the pressures to create a money-maker.
By the time Day of a Lion ended, my original questions were irrelevant. I had filled two pages with scribbled notes and 40 new questions for the twins. I wanted to understand how they had created the world I had just experienced.
In Day of a Lion, Bianca and Dilara Foscht transform a single location into a psychological pressure cooker. The sisters co-wrote and co-directed the film and also star as Wanda and Dolly, two women drawn back to their childhood home after their father’s death, forced to confront the secrets he left behind. Bianca’s Wanda is quiet and withdrawn, while Dilara’s Dolly is flamboyant, volatile and seemingly dominant. As the story progresses, those identities begin to fracture and reverse. Watch the trailer below:
“Dolly is the volcano on the outside, but inside there is a very vulnerable puppy,” Bianca says. “Wanda looks like the puppy on the outside, but there is a volcano inside,” Dilara explains.
Their approach was partly influenced by the German tradition of the chamber play: character-driven stories developed for a limited space. The contained setting was practical for a low-budget production, but it also became essential to the story. The house is more than a backdrop. It functions as a cage, a dollhouse and, at times, a living character.
“If you find interesting characters and put them in a cage together, there are only so many walls and rooms they can escape to,” Bianca says.
Then Dilara says, “At some point, what will happen? Will they fight? Will they flee? Will they freeze? Will they kill each other?”
The film’s painterly quality reflects the sisters’ wide-ranging artistic influences. Rather than building their cinematic vocabulary entirely from other movies, they often draw from paintings, architecture, music and live performance.
“We definitely haven’t seen every movie on the planet,” Dilara says. “I would probably be terrible at movie trivia. We take inspiration from other sources.”
Bianca adds, “We grew up going to the opera house, museums and small avant-garde theaters. I think that naturally influences what we bring to the work.”
Cinematographer Marco Lamera helped translate that sensibility to the screen. Working with a RED Gemini camera and vintage Russian lenses, Lamera collaborated with the sisters on compositions that often resemble still-life paintings. Even deceptively simple images—such as carefully positioned apples—contribute to the feeling that every object in the house has been arranged with purpose.
The soundscape is equally important. The film frequently allows music to creep into a scene and then stop abruptly, leaving viewers suspended in an uncomfortable silence. Ordinary sounds—the ringing telephone, footsteps beneath a door, a cough—become psychological signals.
The telephone is especially significant. It tends to ring when Wanda is drawn back into memories of her father and the childhood trauma connected to him. No meaningful caller waits on the other end. Instead, the ringing functions as an intrusion from the past—a call from inside Wanda’s own mind.
Those silences and unexplained sounds allow the audience to participate in the story rather than simply receive information. “We were relying on smart, focused viewers,” Bianca says. “We knew all those puzzle pieces would come together.”
The music also helped establish the relationship between Wanda and Dolly before the film was complete. Composer Emiliano Ausin created the original score without initially reading the script or seeing a finished cut. Because of scheduling limitations, the Foschts described the two characters, their opposing temperaments and the emotional dynamic between them. Ausin then composed music from those descriptions.
“He based the whole score on the two sisters and how they are with each other,” Bianca says. “It became the musical theme of the movie.”
For period songs, the filmmakers collaborated with APM Music, which provided access to tracks capable of evoking the film’s classical, late-1950s atmosphere. Some songs the sisters initially hoped to use proved impossible to license, forcing them to find alternatives. The limitation ultimately improved the film. “We found songs that worked even better,” Dilara says.
Day of a Lion was made for under $100,000 and filmed over 13 days in Vancouver.
At that scale, reshoots were not an option. The filmmakers had access to the location for a limited period, and every scene had to be completed within the original schedule. That pressure required extensive preparation, rapid problem-solving, and occasional improvisation.
The final confrontation between Wanda and Dolly changed as the actors became increasingly immersed in the scene. Dilara’s scripted monologue evolved into a rush of improvised, emotionally tangled words. Some lines later required repair in postproduction because the intensity caused her to stumble over them.
The dinner scene also departed from the page. With only about an hour available to capture multiple setups, the performers preserved the scene’s dramatic purpose while loosening their adherence to the exact dialogue.
“The subtext stayed the same,” Dilara says, “but word-wise, we went off the text because there was simply no time.”
Because Day of a Lion explores abuse, repression and a destructive family dynamic, viewers often assume the story must have emerged directly from the filmmakers’ lives. The Foschts say it did not.
They describe their upbringing and their relationship with each other as positive. Their interest came instead from the speculative power of storytelling: the question of “what if?”
“Sometimes people who haven’t experienced something are drawn to it because they are intrigued by what they don’t have,” Bianca says.
Although the performances feel intensely personal, Bianca avoids substituting real people or specific painful memories from her own life. She believes repeatedly manipulating an authentic relationship for a role can distort the way an actor later views that person.
“I try to stay away from replicating something from my personal life,” she says. “I want to tap into something truthful within the imaginary circumstances.”
To support that process, the sisters developed a detailed history for Wanda, Dolly and their father—much of which never appears directly in the screenplay. They decided when he died, how he died and what occurred inside the family before the story begins. That unseen biography gives weight to the film’s mysteries without resolving every one of them.
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Among the film’s most effective qualities is its refusal to explain everything. Clues appear through dialogue, props, sounds and character behavior, but the film leaves room for conflicting interpretations. The final knock at the door, for example, has prompted viewers to imagine numerous possibilities: Dolly’s return, the arrival of Wanda’s lover, the impossible reappearance of their father or evidence that the entire story has unfolded in an unstable reality.
The filmmakers each formed their own interpretation, but they deliberately chose not to impose one on the audience.
“We have heard so many endings,” Bianca says. “We love that. Everyone can have their own.”
That ambiguity places Day of a Lion within a tradition of psychologically charged chamber dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Rear Window, Psycho and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Yet the Foschts had not seen What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? before making their film. They watched it only after audiences repeatedly noted similarities between the stories’ volatile sisters.
For the twins, the accidental connection is evidence that artists can arrive at related ideas through completely different paths.
The sisters’ next project, Oma, moves from contained psychological drama into psychological horror. They describe its tone as what might happen if Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, had made Shutter Island. The film will use surrealism to explore motherhood and the role of women in society, unfolding in an intentionally ambiguous time and place.
Unlike the dialogue-driven Day of a Lion, Oma will rely far more heavily on images, behavior and what remains unspoken. “This time, I wanted to explore something completely different,” Bianca says. “As few words as possible.”
The project remains in development and financing, with plans to film in Europe. New collaborators, including a different cinematographer and production design team, will inevitably shape its appearance. The Foschts are not interested in forcing a recognizable visual signature onto every film. They believe style should emerge organically from the characters and story.
“Because we are the same people, we will probably bring a certain curiosity and sensibility to the storytelling,” Bianca says. “But the story and the characters should always come first.”
Guided by instinct, curiosity and a shared creative flame, Bianca and Dilara have forged a cinematic language all their own with Day of a Lion. And with Oma now taking shape, they are poised to carry that fire into the next chapter of their filmmaking journey.
Day of a Lion is available now on Prime Video and Apple TV. The film has also been acquired for international distribution.
Amy Pais-Richer is a published author, screenwriter, and former advertising creative director.
