by Dov Kornits
Subject Ixara Dorizac, director Rae Choi and producer Eleanor Somerville wax lyrical about their web series It Goes Like This.
7-part (x3 minute episodes) docu-series It Goes Like This, funded through Screen Queensland’s Channel Lab: ShortCuts initiative, follows indie pop artist Ixara Dorizac, barely 18 and leading her band ixaras on a regional tour, supporting popular band Grinspoon, who Ixara grew up idolising. With her grandmother Vicki’s voice often in her ear, Ixara attempts to navigate this new experience, navigating identity, sexuality and coming of age on the stage and on camera.
Rae, you made the short film Viv’s Silly Mango featuring Ixara, is that where your relationship started, and how did It Goes Like This come about?
Rae Choi: Ixara and I met back in the end of 2021, when we were casting for Viv’s Silly Mango, which is this short film that I co-wrote and produced for the ABC as part of the initiative, The Kaleidoscope Project. The short film’s about two girls who are best friends, and Ixara plays the new girl who interrupts their friendship, but then also brings them closer together. And there’s something in the character of Nikki, who Ixara played, that I very much put myself in, in terms of her feelings of being an outsider, striving to be her own person in that and also pushing against the grain in a way that she can’t quite understand why she’s doing it, but it feels really important to her. And she’s a drummer, Nikki, and that’s something that I also inserted from my own experience.
“Ixara wasn’t in our initial auditions, but we were about to do callbacks when her tape came through and so we decided to bring her in and the moment she walked through, we were like, ‘Wow, okay. This is Nikki.’ Nikki was initially scripted to be someone who’d moved here from Hong Kong and I was really torn about that because I really wanted to have a character that represented that migration journey, and that was also honouring my own family experience. But it was far more important to have someone like Ixara, who didn’t embody the experience of the character in such a specific way, but in every other way she did. She was so Nikki in the way that she carried herself and in the way that she just was as a person. So, even though I was initially pushing against having Ixara in the role, it was a learning for me in the importance of essence, and we ended up rewriting that character’s back story.
“It’s really cool to think back on the fact that we almost didn’t even cast her. And here we are… From early on, I really connected with Ixara through just who she is, but then I also very quickly discovered that her grandma Vicki is very close with her, and that’s something I really resonated with because I was very close to my grandmother growing up. And without necessarily realising it at the time, there’s something really interesting to me about how I think I was projecting my own relationship with my mother and grandmother onto Ixara. And that created in me a subconscious but very fierce protectiveness of her, which I carried throughout the shoot and that has continued ever since. So, by virtue of that, I’ve become a part of the family. Vicki calls me up about all kinds of things. I’ve been to birthdays and graduations. Ixara is family to me and that’s really how this came about.”
Rae, the vertical format, is that something that you consume yourself, any faves, and can you discuss the parameters that you applied to each episode/screenwriting? Is it very different to other approaches?
Rae Choi: “The answer to that is, I don’t really. I consume the vertical format in so much as I am on Instagram and things are presented vertically so I see them that way. I don’t actively seek it out. I don’t have TikTok.
“What I will say is that I’ve realised that I’ve been a bit of a snob in that as a filmmaker, I’ve glorified the wide, horizontal format and while this idea of doing a documentary with Ixara has sat in the back of my head, it never occurred to me that it could be vertical. But then when the opportunity came to get this funding, I remember feeling challenged by it because I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to make this vertical.’ But then I thought to myself, first of all – Ixara’s audience, her fan base, they all consume things vertically. And in this current climate of young people being online in a very live way, there’s something interesting about meeting them there, meeting our audience with where they already are. I mean, we talk about this endlessly in the industry, how there’s this saturation of content and it’s harder than ever to reach audiences – so how do you meet them where they are? It’s already hard enough to get people to see your work. And so, there’s an element of that, which I was really curious to lean into. And then for me, by nature, when I’m sensing a bias or a prejudice I hold against something, once I’ve identified that, I have this longing to really interrogate it. And so, noticing in myself that I was resistant to the idea of making something in the vertical format, I became compelled to do the very thing that I didn’t want to do, in order to understand it better and also see it as an opportunity to learn about storytelling in a different way. And there are so many things I’ve learned in the process that have felt transferrable to my other work.
“Everything I have made and am developing at the moment are all not vertical. So, this project might seem like a bit of an outlier in some respects, but it also feels very true to me in that it’s honouring my curiosity to explore how different approaches can essentially apply to a body of work more broadly.
“The question around parameters applied to each episode or screenwriting… not really. We had a bit of a rough outline and that’s what we pitched, but that definitely was not what we followed and ended up with. It was never intended to be something we felt beholden to. We had conversations all the time within the team about what we were doing, and we decided that the best approach was just to be around and to get what we could get, and that the story would reveal itself to us as we went, and it did. And in the sense of shaping each episode and what we kept for the edit – there’s a lot of thought that went into it at a granular level, but broadly, the structure represents the highs and lows and that this is only a slice of it all. There’s also a lot there that we didn’t leave in, in part out of respect and care for Ixara and her relationships. But what we did capture and retain, I think, is a sense of honesty in her experience.”
Ixara, what’s your relationship like with Rae? What do you enjoy most about your (working) relationship?
Ixara Dorizac: Yeah, I don’t really see Rae’s relationship as a working relationship. Even though we do collaborate creatively a lot in her medium, I see her more as a mentor and a family friend. Because we both come from families and parents that have immigrated to Australia, it’s really hard to navigate and learn about yourself and understand what your place is. Being able to have someone to look up to that’s already had to deal with that and has been through those first stages of being a little bit confused, it provides a lot of comfort and I feel really grateful to be able to have Rae in my life because she helps me feel more confident in myself and… especially because on tour it’s really isolating. I know we’ve talked about that before, but with me being out of high school and having to learn how to navigate all my emotions and really learn how to regulate all of those things while learning how to be on stage and… what am I when I’m not performing? What is that? It was great to be able to talk to people without having to be this person that I’m supposed to be on stage…”
Rae Choi: “What was it like to have a camera documenting that for you?”
Ixara Dorizac: “It was in the back of my mind – I was kind of like, ‘This is great because then I can judge myself and be able to base my growth on this,’ which is a bit bad. But I was thinking that this is really awesome because then I get to watch it and be like, ‘Okay, how can I improve in five years?’ I don’t know if that makes sense.”
Rae Choi: “What I know about you is that you’re someone who is always pushing yourself and setting the bar higher and higher for yourself and so it makes sense that you kind of see all opportunities through that lens of how can I use this to improve and work on the parts of myself I want to work on.”
Ixara Dorizac: “I think it was great to have you to talk to as well because of how lonely it was and then also somebody obviously people that weren’t in the band and then also who weren’t my grandma because my grandma’s always going to be biased.
“And it was really helpful to talk to people who are creative in different areas and be able to just learn because I’m always a sponge. It’s really awesome to see your work ethic and how you guys communicate to each other and work as a team even just on this project in general, how you guys are able to navigate all of that and those conversations because even when we talked about this in the doco about avoiding conflict it was really cool to see how you guys worked as a team together because I need to learn that to apply to my own situations.”
Eleanor Somerville: “You just said ‘What am I when I’m not performing?’ And I love that…”
Ixara Dorizac: “That’s a song lyric from one of the artists that I was touring with. I just thought it was really relatable. It’s from Aleksia who we toured with after Grinspoon in September from one of her EP titles called Who Are You When You’re Not Performing? And when I listened to that on tour, I was like, ‘My gosh, she’s so right.’ She’s like, ‘Who are you?’
“Because you have this persona on stage but it’s a version of yourself… it feels like you’re almost playing a character when you’re performing and it’s hard to separate it when you get off stage and then have to talk to people but then it’s like they’re your work but it’s still your friends but it’s still like, I don’t know how they’re feeling and…”
Rae Choi: “We’ll get back on track in a sec. Now that we’re talking about this, I’m just so curious, do you recall what it was like when we first started shooting the documentary in terms of a sense of when you talk about performance on stage… that’s one level of performance, but did you feel like there was a level of performance for the camera as well because we’re around you witnessing you off stage?”
Ixara Dorizac: “It’s different because it’s you – you’re my family. Not like blood but you came to my graduation and have known me since I was 13 and I’m an adult now… well, half adult, like a kid adult. If it was a random person then I definitely would not be as open and show as much vulnerability, but because we have that history it was a lot easier for me to just exist.
“Though that day with grandma, that was really funny because I wanted to say stuff but then she kept talking and then I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I’ll just let her speak.’ And then she just fully just exposes me and I’m like, ‘Okay, grandma.’ There’s this one clip in the thing where I’m like, ‘Grandma, I’m going to get a tattoo on my face.’ And she’s like… ‘Yeah, you should get ‘I’m stupid’ on your forehead.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, great. Thank you for that one.’”
Rae Choi: “How do you feel about that bit in the documentary?”
Ixara Dorizac: “I think it’s funny because some people don’t realise… Some people think that I’m always super confident and when they see my own family humbling me, then they can realise that I’m a person and it’s not like I’m living in an echo chamber of positivity. I also have things that can ground me like my family and my friends and creating stuff. So, that’s great because some people think things and jump to conclusions. And it’s like, ‘I don’t know you, you don’t know me. Calm down.’”
Rae Choi: “That’s what’s so amazing. Another point of connection I have with you is that we’re both pursuing creative things in life in a way that our families don’t quite understand and that’s a lonely thing to be doing that kind of work. We don’t come from families that are already in the creative industries or even doing anything remotely in this space that they can connect to. We have to forge that path ourselves. In a lot of ways, I wouldn’t have it any different because I think I have such a core sense of self because of it and a commitment and a conviction. I see that in you too.”
Ixara Dorizac: “I think you live and breathe art, Rae. I think all of you live and breathe art. And also, we’re both Leo Moons, so that’s cool. When you see someone else who’s just as passionate but they’re doing it in a different discipline, it’s really inspiring because I love seeing people who are ambitious and are actualising their ambition, because it makes me want to also do the same thing. So, even when I’m in your presence, I’m just like, ‘Yes! I’m hanging out with Rae. Yay. She’s locked in. I’m going to lock in too.’”
Eleanor Somerville: “I love that. That’s literally one of the reasons why I did this doco as well, because that was something that I felt when I was growing up, that I just had all this ambition and I didn’t know where to put it. And when Rae introduced me to you, I was like, ‘Who the hell is this person? She’s so crazy ambitious in the best way possible.’ I don’t think we see enough of young people trying to figure that out and feeling so scared of not knowing where they’re going or what they’re going to do or if they’re going to achieve all their goals in time.”
Rae Choi: “I think that’s very present for you, Ixara, this idea that you’re running out of time or that you won’t make it in time and that’s something that I think is interesting – that sense of urgency is so inherent to being creative because we feel like we can’t be lazy, we can’t get complacent, but then it’s also not great for mental health to carry that stress of constantly striving towards something that you don’t have complete control over. It’s a real tension point.”
Ixara, what did you think when Rae came to you with the idea for the series, or did it evolve differently?
Ixara Dorizac: “The main thing I was thinking was this – if there’s another Asian kid that wants to make music, she can just maybe find it and be able to not feel like she can’t.”
Rae Choi: “That was the first thought you had when I came to you and Vicki?”
Ixara Dorizac: “That was the first thought I had. I was just like… When I die, that means that someone can somehow be able to find enough confidence maybe, if they ever find [a series] like that. I feel like sometimes that media finds you at the right time. So, if all the dots connect, in the future, if there was a kid who comes from a family who’s immigrated to Australia or anywhere in the world, they’ll be able to find some kind of inspiration.”
Rae Choi: “That’s so interesting to me. It feels like a common thread, this idea of wanting to inspire other Asian kids, Ixara, and then also talking about an immigrant background. I feel like these are very present things for you because of the way you’re speaking to them – obviously, you and I connect on that point, but we’ve never really talked about it. It’s just a part of our lives but is it something that you think about a lot?”
Ixara Dorizac: “Yeah, I think about it all the time… but I feel like it’s ‘Show don’t tell’ with that type of stuff. I can’t be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m Asian and I’m pursuing… whatever,’ but I thought it was really cool because you’re pursuing the film industry and I want to pursue music and I love that. I love seeing ambition actualised despite upbringing, despite people around you bringing you down and just really staying strong to your sense of self and then being able to pursue what you love because I feel like you live and breathe it… You know how you feel electric when you create something? And you’re like everything around because we’re all energy and water as well – not to get all spiritual…”
Eleanor Somerville: “Do you feel that the doco evolved into something different from what you originally anticipated?”
Ixara Dorizac: “We didn’t even know that the Grinspoon thing was going to happen. So, that was really special. I just trusted Rae because I felt like anything that she had to say through media was worth saying. I feel like there’s a little kid in everybody that’s wanting to see some kind of representation somehow. Even if it’s through other disciplines… I feel like there’s a little kid in everyone that wants to see someone actually pursue it with all the risk that’s out there but still doing it. I just thought that was cool. But I definitely didn’t expect the doco to be this awesome, but that was also because of timing and all the people who have helped the project to be able to get to where it is now; just really beautiful people that support art. So that’s awesome.”
Eleanor Somerville: “It’s interesting when you talk about trust though, because I think early on, as well, even when I would have doubts, I remember talking to Rae and she told me if we work off this built sort of trust with each other… we will always be okay. Which is so true. It doesn’t really matter what we make. As long as there’s a trust in each other to tell some sort of story, whatever it grows to be, it will be special and meaningful because we trust each other. So, it’s just really lovely hearing you say all these things. It means you can feel it.”
Rae Choi: “I love documentaries and I’ve always wanted to make one, but I think the idea of making one’s always terrified me, because of its real connection and impact on a real person and their life and the real people around them and their lives. I don’t take that lightly. The possibility of that and the risk of that. The only person I could dream of and have thought of possibly working with in this way has been you Ixara, because of the relationship that we have and the trust that we have and the sense of vulnerability and openness that you’re brave enough to share with us. It’s really special…I don’t take the responsibility of being a filmmaker lightly…especially not documentary filmmaking. I think the ethics of that are so important and I’m still figuring that out and we’ve definitely had to navigate that as well in the process and there’s many different schools of thought around it. Trust is really the main way that we could make it.”
Ixara Dorizac: “It’s exciting but super scary. But I know whatever happens it’s great…because it’s just putting stuff into the universe. I mean, it’s very natural, but what we are releasing is more than a documentary though.”
Rae Choi: “What do you mean by that?”
Ixara Dorizac: “I always think about how when you create art or release a song or you perform, what are you doing other than just that? For example, when I release a song, what am I doing other than just releasing a song? It’s providing comfort through art and helping kids be able to feel comfortable themselves and that’s why this is really special because it’s you and Eleanor being able to create a space that’s so natural for me, because watching it, I was like, ‘I’m scared. I’m so scared that it’s going to look not real,’ but it felt really authentic, and it tells a lot of the story as well about the relationship with me and my grandma and I really value that. I just think that’s really beautiful. And maybe kids will value their grandmas more.”
Rae Choi: “I think what you’re talking to is the purpose behind the work we do. Of course, we care about the quality, and making good work is what we’re all about because we’re ambitious people. But I think beneath that is why we do it and who we do it for. They’re the main drivers.”
Ixara Dorizac: “I think we subconsciously create for our past selves who never had the chance to be able to vocalise our thoughts in that moment.”
Rae Choi: “Yeah, absolutely. I feel like so much of what I’m wanting to make and driven to make is for my inner child or a past version of me that never got to see that or never got to understand that fully.”
Ixara Dorizac: “Yeah, like Viv’s Silly Mango. If I saw that shit when I was nine… because I remember when I was figuring out my sexuality, I thought being gay was a sin. So, I thought I was going to get arrested and go to jail and I was going to go to hell. I was praying every night to God. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, God. Please, I’m so sorry. I know it’s a sin, but you made me like this. So, why are you going to punish me for this?’ But if I saw Viv’s Silly Mango as a kid, that would have made me feel so assured and confident in just being who I was.”
Rae + Ixara, do you think that you will work together again?
Ixara Dorizac: “Yeah, we should do a DJ back-to-back set.”
Rae Choi: “Only if you’ll do it on vinyl.”
Ixara Dorizac: “But have you seen people who are DJing physical and then they have to carry all the shit to the gig?”
Rae Choi: “Outside of documentary, and in your vision for the future, Ixara, do you see a world where we work together in a different capacity?”
Ixara Dorizac: “Yeah, I reckon I could cut your hair instead of my grandma cutting mine.”
Rae Choi: “That’s great. I got my hair cut yesterday, but I found out when I went to my hairdresser, she’s leaving this week, so I won’t have her anymore. So maybe I can come to you.”
Ixara Dorizac: “I was thinking when I’m 25 or 30.”
Rae Choi: “Oh, I’d have to wait? Well, I do need haircuts in between, so I’ll have to find…”
Ixara Dorizac: “But I can give you a haircut anyway. I’m really good at that. My ex-girlfriend was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. It’s in my blood. It’s inside of me.”
Rae Choi: “We can do a trial.”
Ixara Dorizac: “I can cut your hair too, Eleanor, if you want.”
IT GOES LIKE THIS Part 1 is premiering July 22, 2025 on Instagram via @ixaras and @itgoeslikethis.series
