“Swallow” was inspired by writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ grandmother, who was an obsessive handwasher in the 1950s. “She would go through four cakes of soap a day and 12 bottles of rubbing alcohol a week,” he says. She was eventually institutionalized, where she underwent electroshock and insulin shock therapies and a bilateral lobotomy.

“I wanted to make a film about someone who, like my grandmother, is very encased and ensconced in the gender expectations that the world she’s living in has put upon her to be an augmentation to the life of her husband, to be this happy expectant mother,” Mirabella-Davis explains.

Gender roles and expectations are especially personal themes for the director, who lived and identified as a woman named Emma Goldman (in tribute to the early 20th-century anarchist) for four years in his 20s. “Growing up, there was always something that just felt different about my gender expression,” he says.