DETROIT — Anna Baumgarten has been living with her movie "Disfluency" for going on six years, and now she's finally letting it out into the world.

"I've been saying for awhile, 'I love this movie, it needs to get out of my house,'" says Baumgarten, the Commerce Township-raised director, who makes her feature film debut with the Metro Detroit-filmed coming-of-age drama. "Disfluency" opened at MJR Theaters in Troy, Waterford Township and Brighton on Jan. 24, in addition to its arrival on paid video-on-demand platforms.

Baumgarten likens the experience to raising a child and then letting them out into the world, on their own, for the first time. "I'm having a hard time letting go of that hand," she says, during an interview in Ann Arbor earlier this month, a day before her movie screened at the Michigan Theater. "Not that I don't want to, but it's like, 'I hope you do OK out there!'"

"Disfluency" — the title refers to disruptions in our speech patterns, the "uhs" or "ums" with which we pepper our language, and links them, on a larger level, to how we conduct ourselves in society — tells the story of Jane (Libe Barer), who comes home to her parents' Metro Detroit lake house for the summer after flunking her final college class. She's trying to have a carefree summer with friends, but she's haunted by the traumatic sexual assault that derailed her senior year at school.

Baumgarten, a 31-year-old University of Michigan graduate, based the story of "Disfluency" on her own personal experience. She filmed it in Commerce Township in summer 2019 — it's based on a short film she wrote and produced in 2018 — and she has been touring with it for several years, showing it to audiences on college campuses, leading up to last weekend's release.

Those campus screenings have been powerful, Baumgarten says, as she connects with other survivors of sexual violence.

"I was trying to figure out what would make me feel better, and what it really did was connecting with other survivors," she says. "That has been the most rewarding thing to come out of this. Every time I screen the movie, somebody discloses to me. You meet people, and you just have to look at each other, and you know."

Baumgarten's filmmaking journey began when she was a child in Commerce Township, the second youngest of four siblings. Early on she wanted to be an author, and then an actress, and filmmaking was a way to bundle her love of various forms of storytelling.

She went to a Catholic school for grades K-8, and says she was raised in a somewhat sheltered household, where there were restrictions on what she could watch. Even at 18, she says she was grounded for watching "A Clockwork Orange."

"SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Powerpuff Girls" were OK — she's fan of both to this day — and she says watching "Kiki's Delivery Service" at an early age was a bit of a game changer.

"I was pretty young when I saw it, but I could just tell that there was something different about it," says Baumgarten of Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 animated film about a young witch who moves to a new city and starts a delivery service alongside her trusty cat. "I was naturally drawn to it, it was different than all the Disney princess movies. And I wanted to be a witch that got to be 11 years old and fly to a new town."

After graduating from Walled Lake Central High School, Baumgarten went to the University of Michigan, just like her parents and her two older siblings before her. There she enrolled in the film studies program, where she developed a community of like-minded friends and artists, and her eyes were opened to movies like John Waters' "Pink Flamingos," movies she never would have been allowed to watch growing up.

After graduation she left town — like Kiki — and moved to Los Angeles, where she's lived for almost 10 years.

She made the "Disfluency" short film there — she brought her friend, Laura Holliday, on to direct — and she took it to a number of film festivals, including the Cleveland International Film Festival. The short caught the attention of indie filmmaker Jim Cummings ("Thunder Road"), who accepted Baumgarten into his Short to Feature Film Lab, with the goal of turning "Disfluency" into a feature length film.

Cummings says he was drawn to "Disfluency" because of the connections it makes between language and our behavior. "It shines a spotlight on how discomfort in English is expressed and makes an audience understand how we talk to each other in a neat way," says Cummings, whose Short to Film lab has produced eight feature films.

"I hope Anna will continue to do what she's doing by growing to larger productions and expanding her team to continue to tell super intimate stories about finding our shared humanity," says Cummings, who is one of "Disfluency's" executive producers. "She's doing a hell of a job of it already."

Baumgarten shot "Disfluency" over 18 days in summer 2019 in and around her hometown. The neighborhood Creamy Freeze makes several appearances, and a local veterinarian's office doubles as a police station.

Her parents pitched in on the shoot, "and I don't know if people choose to do the most personal things with the most personal people for their first big thing a lot," Baumgarten says, "but it was really cathartic for my family to help me. In their Midwest Catholic way of not being able to talk about it, they literally helped me tell my story. And that was very healing for me, and I think for them, too."

"Disfluency" was finished in 2021, and Baumgarten took it on the regional film fest circuit, where it won awards at more than a dozen festivals. It has received positive marks from critics — it currently sits at a 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and in November Baumgarten and her partners inked a deal with distributor Buffalo 8, which is handling the film's release.

Now she's finally beginning to envision a life after "Disfluency."

In addition to a couple of different scripts she's working on, she also has life plans that will bring her closer to home. She's purchased a house in Ferndale, and going forward, she hopes to split her time between California and Michigan.

She expects family to be a major theme of her work, just as it is in her personal life.

"My family means the world to me, and I want to be with them," says Baumgarten.

"My work is in L.A., but my heart is here."

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'DISFLUENCY'

No MPA rating (language, adult themes)

Running time: 1:37

How to watch: Now on PVOD

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