A model, actress, and director, Mitzi Peirone’s directorial debut premiered at Art Basel in 2015. Her directing credits include the short films “Chaosmos” and “Vesperlings.” “Braid” is her feature-length debut. Along with ConsenSys founder and CEO Joseph Lubin, she created the first Ethereum-based equity crowdsale in the history of filmmaking.

“Braid” will premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival on April 22.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

MP: “Braid” is the metaphorical nightmare journey of three heroines going into the underworld of their own self-fabricated fears, doubts, and unfulfilled ambitions. “Braid” is for everything I fear. It’s the sublime and terrifying abyss spiraling between reality and dreams, between who we are and who we want to be — the obscure, ancestral essence of ourselves, our surroundings, our mind, our actions, and desires and what happens when fantasy and reality become one.

“Braid” is what happens when we realize that everything around ourselves is exactly what we’ve imagined — reality as an extension of our thoughts, in a world where most everything is invented: society, names, jobs, philosophies, religions, geographical borders, traditions, time. We are adults playing make believe. We are the shadows of our own dreams.

This infernal wonderland the girls create keeps them trapped, just like we let our own psychological ghosts keep us prisoners of the made up worlds we strategically created for ourselves so we can stay safe in our own fabrications. This keeps us from diving into the limitless unknown, where it’s all up to us. If we believe that we have limitations, those walls will rise; if we believe we don’t, then our reality will stretch as far as our wildest dreams.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

MP: The need to figure out reality and our perception of it by myself, which was triggered by the biggest existential collapse I had experienced yet. I studied humanities my whole life but I didn’t have a true personal discovery of our own essence, and that was bugging me, so I left Italy and the comforts of my home on a quest to venture into the unknown and become my own dreams.

I had unconsciously started my hero’s journey. A few years after graduating from theater school in New York City, a perfectly disastrous series of events robbed me of everything I had built thus far: I was unfairly cut out of a movie deal after a year and a half of relentless work, my artist visa got lost, and all of a sudden I was a broke, unemployed, 23-year-old immigrant, alone in a foreign country and with thoroughly dismantled spirits.

I couldn’t leave the U.S. because I wouldn’t have been let back in, but I also had absolutely nothing here. I was in limbo and started wondering why anything happens the way it does, questioning how much control we have over our lives, and what separates us from our dreams.

I started writing out of survival: having literally nothing else going on, the paper became my sole paradise. The more I was writing, the more I was fighting and yet shaping my own destiny at the same time.

“Braid” turned into my manifesto, my legacy, my reason for living: I had gone through something and got out on the other side alive and reborn, and I wanted to give out this eureka experience, this journey back to the world — for everyone else who’s asked those same questions.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

MP: That their dreams are solid gold, and that they’re valid blueprints of their world. Imagination is the motor of existence — everything in our reality we have imagined.

And I hope that they honor those dreams and those visions rather than seeking obstacles and excuses, before it’s too late and before we have to wake up.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

MP: The comedown. Recovering from production in a healthy way, managing to cool down and take care of myself mentally and emotionally after such a long and intense ride. I mildly suffered from postpartum depression right after we wrapped. I had nostalgia of the world we had created, the rhythms and lifestyle on set, the family-like dynamic, the endless joy of creating every day — I felt a tad lost and purposeless, like I had hit such a natural high shooting the movie that I wasn’t prepared for the comedown.

So right after the shoot I flew to LA and drove up to Oregon to see the solar eclipse, went to Burning Man, and visited Yosemite for the first time. I had to annihilate myself to be able to go back to the footage refreshed and ready.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

MP: “Braid” is the first feature-length narrative film ever to be funded with an equity crowdsale using cryptocurrency. It was my first big movie and I didn’t want to compromise on its production values, but I also didn’t have any resources whatsoever. Regular crowdfunding platforms work off a system that does not reward its contributors, who are essentially just making donations.

Bigger production studios had approached me to finance the film under certain circumstances I didn’t agree with, such as simplifying and sometimes sexualizing the script. It was 2015 and I was wandering about the grounds of a music festival up in Woodstock when I met Joseph Lubin — founder of the biggest blockchain tech company in the U.S.— and joined forces to decentralize the economy of the arts by establishing a new crowdsourcing system.

Our goal was to allow for the creatives to have their freedom, while raising funds for project that would reward their investors with shares in the profits of the movie. We partnered up with WeiFund — an award-winning cryptocurrency crowdsourcing platform — along with Lubin’s business partner Dino Mark to create the first equity crowdsale for a movie using crypto, specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum. The whole process took about a year and a half.

W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at Tribeca Film Festival?

MP: I’m humbled beyond words and grateful to have the movie welcomed in such a prestigious and groundbreaking home.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

MP: Worst advice: Get more “practice” making more short films. It’s silly. If you’ve got the stomach to make a feature or whatever it is you wanna do, do it. Don’t wait. You gotta have the right amount of reckless foolishness — otherwise you’ll never start. When you’re ready, you’re ready, and by that I mean that nobody is ever ready, conditions are always impossible — you just have to make it your reason for living and it’ll get done.

Best advice: Do not listen to anyone’s advice. It is your journey and no one else’s. Your only sacred obligation is to listen to your gut.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

MP: Get comfortable with being in disagreement with others. It’s going to happen over and over, and you need to be able to hear your inner compass above the ocean of noise that will come at you every damn second.

Cherish the time on your own because that’s when you’ll train yourself to see the omens. If you have even the slightest hunch about anything at all, you gotta call it out, even if you’re contradicting what you said five minutes ago — even if you end up being totally wrong. It does not matter. All that matters is the movie — not your ego, not even the harmony of your team, quite frankly.

And use your feminine psychic superpowers of empathy and grace to your advantage.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

MP: “American Psycho” by Mary Harron. I love Bret Easton Ellis, and I adore a female director’s take on a male lead: she sees through his bullshit, narcissism, greed, and ego: I’ll never forget the threesome scene where he starts looking at himself in the mirror while having sex with two women. It couldn’t have been more accurate. Harron is actually shining a light on his insecurity. The murders remain visceral, brutal, and so nasty because they represent the “frenzy of the territorial male when his will is frustrated,” to quote Roger Ebert.