In the new film Nora, Portland-raised writer-producer-director Anna Campbell also stars as the title character, a woman who has moved back to her hometown, practically next door to her mother, and put her music career on the back burner to focus on her young daughter. In the meantime, her husband’s on tour, leaving her to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of both parenting and adjusting to her new environment.

It’s a familiar dilemma, one that has bedeviled (predominantly) mothers even more intensely since the COVID pandemic, this balancing act between professional goals and the awesome but sometimes soul-deadening odyssey of raising a child. It’s also no surprise that it’s one Campbell herself drew on to make Nora, a film that whisks together a nuanced character study, some delightful flights of fancy, and a level of craft and polish that are each impressive, especially for a first-time filmmaker.

With a supporting cast that ranges from Campbell’s own daughter Sophie to veteran Oscar nominee Lesley Ann Warren, she brings Nora’s somewhat stifled creativity to life in a series of imaginatively staged musical numbers. It’s a great way to show off the versatility of Campbell, a Lincoln High School grad who studied drama at Vassar College and then moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. “I loved film and television and believed they were the opportunity to speak to the masses in a way that straight theater doesn’t anymore. I had this obnoxious artistic sensibility about myself, but I knew that I wanted a broad platform,” she said during a conversation with Oregon ArtsWatch this week.

“I did okay as an actor,” Campbell says. “I mean, I made my health insurance.” What she terms “limited” success included appearances on fan-favorite series including Veronica Mars and Jane the Virgin, as well as voiceover work on the Dragon Age video game series. “I had the best moment at AT&T the other day where the nice salesperson was saying they were going home to do some gaming, and I asked what he played. It happened to be my game and he just lost it. So there’s a couple places where I turn out to be cool.”

The screenplay for Nora was in the works before COVID shut down the entertainment industry and spurred Campbell and her family to move back to Portland. But that abrupt transition also enabled her to lean in to actually making the film. “We left in 2020 and I was shooting the movie by 2021,” Campbell recalls. “We had all the COVID protocols in place, face masks and shields and testing twice a week, but people were really eager to jump in and tell a personal story. We shot the narrative pieces in 15 or 16 days, and as we were editing that, I got prepped for the music videos.”

The initial plan was that the production would hire different directors for each of the videos that take viewers inside Nora’s imagination, but Campbell ended up doing that work. “I realized I had some very strong imagery from these amazing songs that my friend Noah Harmon [of The Airborne Toxic Event] wrote for me, and that if it didn’t come from Nora, which really at the end of the day is large parts of me, it wouldn’t be telling the same story,” she says. While the narrative portions were shot at Campbell’s own home, the videos were made on stages at Coach Sarge Cine in Cornelius. And the original soundtrack for Nora should be hitting all the major music streaming services any day now.

Directing her own six-year-old daughter could have been a fraught experience, but Campbell reports it actually went smoothly once Sophie agreed to the gig. “When I first asked her if she’d do the movie with me, she said no. And so I backed off immediately. I’m never going to ‘stage mom’ this, right? But then a couple days later, I asked her why she didn’t want to do it, and she said she didn’t want everybody looking at her. Apparently I have a healthy child who doesn’t need obsessive amounts of attention, unlike her mother. So I explained that a film crew is a much smaller profile and we can control the performance, and she was like, oh, totally, I’ll do it.” It helped that she was acting against her actual mother. “So many of the scenes were based on conversations she and I had. She is this ridiculously observant, capable, intelligent little kid. And so we got to play make-believe.”

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At the other end of the experience spectrum is Warren, the most recognizable name in the cast, whose dozens of film credits include Blake Edwards’s Victor/Victoria, Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me, and Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey. “I made an offer to her agent and weirdly shortly thereafter got a yes,” Campbell says. “I was so nervous when I met her. I asked her why she said yes, and she looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘It’s a good script!’” Although Warren has only a few scenes as Nora’s mother, she makes a strong and essential impression. Campbell continues, “She was only on set for a day. I got her the nicest hotel I could and I knew I needed to take care of her, but the amount she took care of me back was ridiculous. I expected her to do the work and then go about her business, but it’s turned into a valued relationship in my life, and I’m just so, so grateful.”

Once the film was finally complete, it had its world premiere last month in San Jose at the Cinequest Festival, where it won the New Vision award. Now, it’s opening at Portland’s Living Room Theaters for a weeklong run starting April 4th. “Opening in my hometown was important to me,” says Campbell. “Then we’ll do L.A. and New York. We just confirmed D.C. We’ll see if there are a couple of other markets we can get into before figuring out what our virtual release plans will be.” She’ll be in attendance for Friday night’s screening, as well as Saturday afternoon’s and Tuesday’s. “You know, I’ll be there any time anybody wants me to be, to be honest.”