Filmmaker and actor Katarina Zhu on making the movie Bunnylvr

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In Bunnylvr, writer-director-actor Katarina Zhu crafts a deeply intimate portrait of heartbreak, isolation, and the fragile beginnings of self-repair. In conversation Zhu opens up about the personal experiences that shaped the film, the importance of female friendship, and the quiet, often unspoken ways we learn to reconnect with others and with ourselves.

For Zhu, the emotional core of Bunnylvr came directly from lived experience. Rather than dramatizing the immediate aftermath of heartbreak, she was drawn to the quieter, more insidious decline that can follow.

“You have to sort of first reach your rock bottom, it doesn’t even come necessarily immediately after a breakup, it’s maybe in the following months or weeks that you really find yourself starting to decline.”

Rebecca, the film’s protagonist, embodies that delayed unraveling and self-isolating until she has nowhere left to turn. The film resists the urge to offer a dramatic turnaround, instead ending on something far more subtle.

“The very end of the movie is like she’s taking baby steps towards an upwards trajectory.”

While Bunnylvr contains romantic entanglements, Zhu makes it clear that the emotional center of the film lies elsewhere: in friendship.

“My friendships have been the most sustaining and life-giving forces.”

Rebecca’s relationship with Bella becomes a lifeline, It’s a dynamic rooted not just in storytelling, but in Zhu’s real-life bond with co-star Rachel Sennott.

“When I was going through breakups she was there time and again to pick me up and talk me through it.”

One of Bunnylvr’s most striking qualities is its tonal fluidity—moving between humor, darkness, and emotional vulnerability and for Zhu, this wasn’t accidental. Rather than confining the film to a single genre, she leaned into contradiction, allowing the story to reflect the unpredictability of real emotional experience.

Though Zhu always suspected she might play Rebecca, she intentionally avoided committing to that idea while writing. This mental separation gave her freedom to explore more vulnerable and specific moments.

“There were these smaller, more micro moments that I don’t know if I would have put in had I been super conscious that I was going to play the lead role.”

The result is a character who feels deeply lived-in.

In the films conclusion Zhu resists tidy endings in favor of something more honest: the idea that healing doesn’t arrive all at once, but in fragments.

“She’s taking baby steps.”

And in those steps lies the film’s quiet power.