Ellie Rogers | They Found Her in a Field / 2019

secrets vs. facts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ellie Rogers (screenwriter and director) They Found Her in a Field / 2019 [6 minutes]

 

In this short narrative, a young woman, Martha (Nina Mazodier), has returned to the isolated field near her school, where she and her lesbian lover Sophia (Nia Towle) used to secretly meet.

     She muses that her school reported simply that they found Sophia’s body in the field, dead, with no explanation. Certain students who were close to her, were noted with red marks by their names so that school authorities might provide special help to these individuals.

     Martha notes that there was no red mark by her name.

     After the fact, some rumored that there had in fact been no body, yet soon after the property was sold. Why was it sold, Martha asks, if no body was found on it?

      They behaved, she observes, as if the young girl had had no secrets, but Martha knows that she was filled with secrets. She considered telling the authorities about their relationship, but she doubts whether they would have believed her, presuming as adults often do that they knew everything about her.

       Some of her classmates may still mention the incident or think about it, she imagines, as they tuck their children into their beds.

       All any one knows is that they found her body in a field. It was December. “I was the first to know,” Martha reveals as this emotionally moving short film draws to its end.

       Now that we do have this further information, we can only wonder, did the young girl feel so weighted down by her secrets that she could no longer bear it? Had she caused her own death? Or returning to that isolated spot in the field to aware her friend Martha, had some monster observed her and killed her after abusing her young body? Had there been a contretemps the girls? Had Martha been involved in Sophia’s death?

    Obviously, this short sorrowful film has no answers, reveals none of either Sophia’s or Martha’s secrets except that they were in love in a British society that did not readily accept such an expression of love.

      Young girls, they might have argued, can never be defined as lesbians, an adult designation, a decision one makes later in life. But these girls knew who they were, and perhaps that very knowledge simply weighed upon the fragile Sophia more heavily than it did on Martha, now returned in memory of her lover ten years after the fact.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).