DIRECTOR MOLLY MANNING WALKER AND LEAD ACTOR MIA MCKENNA-BRUCE INVITE EMPIRE TO THE PARTY — AND ITS FALLOUT — FOR THEIR ULTRA-PERSONAL HOLIDAY-RESORT TEEN DRAMA HOW TO HAVE SEX

WORDS BETH WEBB

It’s the morning after the night before. On a deserted strip of clubs in the party district of Malia, Crete, you can all but smell the vodka-laced sweat that lingers in the air as How To Have Sex’s 16-year-old lead character Tara (Mia McKenna- Bruce), still in her party dress, walks past piles of empty cups and bottles. She stops to wipe some tears from her eyes, steadies herself, and soldiers on.

It’s a bracing scene in Molly Manning Walker’s deeply personal directorial debut; a few minutes of solitary stillness following Tara’s boozy, bewildering and traumatic night out. “Some of the moments that stuck out to me the most as a teenager were [when I was] walking home,” 29-year-old Walker tells Empire when we meet in London in July. “Especially when you’re on a strip like that, where there’s rubbish everywhere and the ghosts of the party still exist.”

How To Have Sex is in many ways a ghost story for its director. The film, which won the Un Certain Regard award following its world premiere at Cannes this year, follows Tara’s formative first holiday abroad with her best friends Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), and is inspired by Walker’s own experiences. “[I was] a very different person. I had a lot of fake hair, fake eyelashes, I was covered in fake tan,” the filmmaker laughs when talking of her teenage escapades in Ibiza and Mallorca. Some of the events that unfold in the film come directly from memory, like when Tara’s new pal Badger (Shaun Thomas) receives oral sex on stage at a pool party. “I thought I’d heightened it in my head,” says Walker. Speaking with friends on a holiday years later, she discovered that she hadn’t. There were even videos of it. “I thought, ‘Wow, that must’ve had a really big impact on us at that age.’”

Yet there are more of Walker’s ghosts to be found in Tara’s story as it unfolds. The filmmaker was sexually assaulted when she was 16 while out drinking in London, her hometown. The experience — paired with the lack of conversation around that kind of experience — was a large reason why she chose to embark on this difficult journey.