According to director April Mullen, LGBT indie flick Below Her Mouth represents a changing of the guard.

Raw and explicit, the movie, which opens Friday (February 10), chronicles an explosive fling between two Toronto women: Dallas (Erika Linder), a promiscuous roofer, and Jasmine (Natalie Krill), the faithful but frustrated fiancée of the briefly featured Rile (Sebastian Pigott). Over the course of a weekend, while Rile is away on business, the pair embark on a passionate relationship that forces Jasmine to confront the truth of her sexual identity.

Viscerally re-imagining the lesbian-seduces-supposedly-straight-girl narrative, Mullen chose to film the piece with a nearly all-female cast and crew. By adopting a women-centric approach, she believes that Below Her Mouth offers a fresh take on the classic lesbian love story.

“As a director, you just want to be truthful,” she tells the Straight on the line from shooting Wynonna Earp in Calgary. “I’ve watched films since I was really young, and every movie is either written by a man or directed by a man, and all the sex I’ve seen on-screen has been depicted through a male perspective. I have to force those ideas out of me. I have to constantly say, ‘No, that’s not actually what happens when I get turned on. That’s not what happens when I’m intimate with another person.’

“Instead, I realized that I had to look inside myself and truthfully show what the female gaze is,” she continues. “Even as I was doing my blocking early on, I found that I was doing it in a way that would be provocatively male. And I thought, ‘No, I want more eye contact, I want more subtlety, I want the scenes to be about breathing or removing an eyelash from a cheek.’ Those are the things that make an impact and make me want to be intimate with another human being.”

Although predicated on a collection of tender moments, the pair’s relationship remains insistently explicit. Asking Krill and Linder to commit to graphic sex scenes involving strap-ons, bathtubs, and various beds, Mullen attributes the leads’ dedicated performance to the natural chemistry between the actresses and the camaraderie inspired by the crew.

“The sex scenes were challenging for everyone,” she recalls, “because we wanted to do a service to women’s perspective. And that involved every single person on set being vulnerable. Natalie was required to do that, Erika was required to do that, the camera operators were required to do that—even the boom op.

“We had to have a huge amount of trust in each other. It’s a scary feeling, but we also felt very honoured, like we were part of something bigger that we were all creating together. We were proud to be able to say, ‘Hey guys, this is what it’s like for women.’ ”

Hoping that her film will inspire others to cast queer-for-queer and explore the authenticity of what happens behind the camera, Mullen is vocal about the importance of offering multiple perspectives on-screen.

“I feel like women bring a transparency to their work—whether it’s in writing or directing or in the portrayal of character. People are looking for something different now, but it’s not about the male versus the female viewpoint. It’s about all people having the freedom to tell their own story, as they themselves perceive it, in the most truthful way possible.”