Category: DOCUMENTARY (page 1 of 4)

Susan’s Interview with Trailblazing Filmmaker Nina Menkes About Her New Documentary ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’

October 22, 2022 / sucity / Comments Off

Filmmaker Nina Menkes discusses her thought-provoking and illuminating documentary ‘Brainwashed: Sex- Camera-Power,’ which explores the sexual politics of cinematic shot design, showing how this visual language of cinema connects to both severe employment discrimination against women – especially in the film industry – as well as to the epidemic of sexual harassment and abuse that was exposed through the #MeToo movement.

Still from Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC.

Considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers, Nina Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals and museums. Honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an AFI Independent Filmmaker Award, a Creative Capital Award and an International Critics Award (FIPRESCI Prize).Menkes holds an MFA in Film Production from UCLA , is a directing member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a member of the faculty at California Institute of the Arts.

In our wide-ranging and eye-opening conversation over Zoom, Menkes and I discussed her thought-provoking and illuminating documentary Brainwashed: Sex- Camera-Power, which explores the sexual politics of cinematic shot design, showing how this visual language of cinema connects to both severe employment discrimination against women – especially in the film industry – as well as to the epidemic of sexual harassment and abuse that was exposed through the #MeToo movement.

This social issue documentary uses over 200 film clips from 1896 through the present and includes 23 interviews with women and non-binary industry professionals, including Julie Dash, Penelope Spheeris, Charlyne Yi, Joey Soloway, Catherine Hardwicke, Eliza Hittman, Rosanna Arquette, and Laura Mulvey.

This must-see film should be included in the curriculum for all filmmaking, screenwriting, and cinema studies students.

KOUGUELL: Let’s start with your personal background. Your mother’s parents were German Jews who fled Hitler’s genocide, settling in Jerusalem in 1933 and your father’s Austrian Jewish family perished in the concentration camps. This type of trauma, particularly for you as a first-generation American, forever remains. How does your specific background of family trauma and the violence of objectification inform your work?

MENKES: I’m so glad that you brought this up, no one else has brought it up. I happen to think it’s really key. My mother was a baby in 1933, and her parents got out of Berlin and she was raised in Jerusalem. My father’s whole family were all gassed to death. My father was taken as a child, in a secret rescue to Jerusalem in 1940. My parents got married there and later immigrated to the United States.

This experience obviously impacted my family. The fact is that they [researchers] found that trauma is transmitted via DNA, I grew up with the idea that systems of power can be corrupt, and systems of power that are supported by the majority does not mean they are right.

I grew up in a household that rejected the idea that popularity is a sign of moral greatness on a very deep level. A second important point to this, the Jews before they were murdered in the Holocaust, were objectified by the Nazis. You cannot treat another person in the way that the Jews were treated in the concentration camps if you think of them as full-on human subjects. You have to denigrate them in your own mind before you can even do these actions; this has all been extensively documented.

I’m not trying to make an equivalency between what happened in the concentration camps and sexist representation in film, there’s a big gap there. There is a certain level of intersection with the idea that objectification is not a beautiful thing, and objectification is tied to violence. Extensive research has shown that women who either consume objectifying media or self-objectify as it’s done on Instagram, every minute of the day, has been correlated to body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and higher levels of shame than those who don’t do it, and a higher acceptance of sexual harassment, and even sexual assault. This whole thing of objectification is not just fun and games.

KOUGUELL: Brainwashed stemmed from your lecture presentation “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression” which was at Sundance’s Black House in January 2018, for the launch of Gwen Wynne’s Eos World Fund. Tell me more about this and how it turned into this film.

MENKES: There are a lot of differences between the two. The lecture had 10 film clips and this film has 200, and millions of other differences. The idea was, how can we bring some of these concepts that some people in the PhD film theory world discuss, to film watchers who are not exposed to those ideas?

For those people who know my other work, it tends to be slightly towards the art film and avant-garde film direction. I certainly never thought about the audience when I made my own feature films. This documentary was about how can we prove our case and have the film be fascinating and interesting for sophisticated filmgoers, as well as some person who is not focusing on film as a profession, but a film watcher, which is kind of everybody.

That was challenging, and based on reactions, some people seem to love it. We’ve shown it in all the major film festivals and have gotten some amazing reviews, and we’ve also been attacked, and interestingly we’ve mainly been attacked by other women. People are very invested in their feelings about cinematic masterpieces.

KOUGUELL: Would you say that this lecture served as your script and/or outline for this documentary?

MENKES: The lecture is the core thing that we jumped off of but making the film I worked closely with the editor and creative producer, Cecily Rhett. In fact, I’ve been telling imdb.com to take my name down as writer. I don’t really claim to be the writer, but in a documentary film, the editor is in many ways the writer of the film. I was there for every second of the journey and participated in the decisions. There was no bona fide script as with most documentaries. Cecily had an amazing program called Dynalist, which we used to organize and structure our ideas. It was very collaborative.

Nina Menkes and Rita Hayworth. Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC. — Nina Menkes and Rita Hayworth. *Photo courtesy BrainwashedMovie LLC.*

KOUGUELL: In your own experimental narrative films, you worked with a small crew. How did that change, if at all, when working on this documentary?

MENKES: It seems like a bigger crew when you look at the credits, but each shoot didn’t have that many people. The overall project was more elaborative, in terms of making my narrative films, which I write, produce, edit, and direct.

This film was more complicated on so many levels. Regarding editing, I needed a pro editor who understood the deep issues that I am laying down here and knows me and my work and has background in commercial narrative and documentary film. I was lucky to get Cecily Rhett who had all those qualifications, I’ve known her for a long time, it was a very collaborative process.

There were a lot of people involved in the film research, and then there was the legal part, you have to clear every single clip through attorneys. There was a lot of attorney interaction and the attorney actually influenced a lot of our decisions, because he would say, ‘This clip won’t fly for fair use, you have to find another clip.’ Or he would say, ‘You need to include voice over because it won’t fly for fair use.’

The postproduction was complex, with all these film clips. There was no time code; every single picture and sound was hand matched by Jim Rosenthal, our brilliant postproduction producer.

With the score, I never worked with a composer before. It was challenging for me because I always did the sound myself on my films. Composer Sharon Farber did a genius job.

All those things made it a bigger production. A lot of the interviews were over Zoom because we were in the middle of the pandemic. For example, it was me on Zoom and a team in Atlanta when we interviewed Julie Dash.

Kouguell: How did these films that you include in your documentary, such as Orlando, LeBonheur, Daughters of the Dust, and so on inform your own work?

Menkes: I was more reassured by seeing [Agnès Varda’s] Vagabond and [Chantal Akerman’s] Jeanne Dielman (which Menkes didn’t see until after making her film Magdalena Viraga) that there was someone else out there in the world who had similar feelings.

Kouguell: During production, the Brainwashed team reached out to representatives of almost all the living directors whose work is included in the movie, including Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Denis Villeneuve among many others, to invite them for on-camera interviews. They declined the opportunity to participate.

Since the completion of this film have you heard from any of them?

MENKES: No not yet – the film is coming out on Friday.

The film will open in New York City at DCTV downtown and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Theaters Friday October 21st with a national rollout to follow.

Trailer

Learn more about the film and rescources here.

Susan’s Interview with “No Ordinary Life” Filmmaker Heather O’Neill

June 26, 2021 / sucity / Comments Off

Defining History ‘No Ordinary Life’ Interview With Documentary Filmmaker Heather O’Neill

“Cynde, Maria, Jane, Mary and Margaret took the images that defined history for their generation, yet their own stories have not been told, until now. The shifting scenes between the inhumanity and beauty they filmed, woven with their moments of humor, illustrate how they tried to cope with all they were witnessing. The wars and crises they covered produced images that can be difficult to watch, so I strived to create a balance of stories and images.” – Heather O’Neill

JUN 25, 2021

No Ordinary Life. Photo courtesy Array Films.

The feature documentary No Ordinary Life had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival during which I had the opportunity to speak with Heather O’Neill about her film and her passion to bring the lives of five extraordinary women from behind the camera to the screen.

About “No Ordinary Life”

In a field dominated by men, five pioneering photojournalists Mary Rogers, Cynde Strand, Jane Evans, Maria Fleet and Margaret Moth went to the frontlines of wars, revolutions and disasters. They made their mark by capturing some of the most iconic images from Tiananmen Square, to conflicts in Sarajevo, Iraq, Somalia and the Arab Spring uprising. In the midst of unfolding chaos, their pictures both shocked and informed the world.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Heather O’Neill is an Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She produced the feature documentary Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi, and with CNN Presents, the award-winning documentary series, Heather directed and produced more than 20 projects around the world.

KOUGUELL: One poignant theme of the film was the idea of bearing witness.

O’NEILL: The genesis behind the film is that I wanted to show the world what these women experience. So often we generally don’t think about who is behind the camera. What motivated me to become a journalist was watching the protest in Tiananmen Square, and 20 years later I would meet Cynde Strand,, who was one of the photographers who stayed the night of the crackdown; I had never imagined at a young age that it was a woman behind the camera.

I wanted to make a film that allowed the audience to be immersed in their experience; the sights and the sounds of what was coming next. These women were incredibly driven, incredibly professional and their singular job was to bear witness and go to these conflicts and uprisings and revolutions to document what was happening and that was the main driver to go into these harrowing situations.

[The Making of an Icon ‘Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story’]

KOUGUELL: The camerawomen also talked about the female perspective in their work.

O’NEILL: They bristled at the question of ‘did you approach your stories differently as a woman?’ and I expected that and that’s fine. When we looked at some of their footage together, I noticed a bit of difference; there was a bit more intimacy or an instant rapport. Perhaps women are less threatening to certain subjects or in some cultures it’s more appropriate for a woman to approach another woman. I noticed a subtle difference in how they approached their filmmaking.

KOUGUELL: In an age when the media is often negatively portrayed by politicians and pundits, this film underscores the importance of storytelling.

O’NEILL: Yes. This was an untold story and that is what really drew me to it. Once I got to know these women and heard their stories collectively, I thought wow, you’ve been

told the history of your generation. I wanted to share their story. I didn’t grow up knowing super successful female photographers and in my career at CNN I would rarely see camerawomen and I felt it was a powerful story that needed to be told.

KOUGUELL: Tell me about the evolution of the project. Did you know the women beforehand?

O’NEILL: I first met Mary in Baghdad in 2006 and was struck by her tenacity and what an incredible professional and journalist she was. I worked with some of these women when I was at CNN. About four years ago I decided this would be a great story to do now. I think women’s stories are still somewhat untold and I think that’s changing, which is encouraging,

We approached all of them and talked about the footage shot and began to record their stories and developed that level of trust which is critical for a documentary director; people have to trust you to tell their story. They slowly began dropping off tapes to me. They had an incredible library of tapes, which told me that this just wasn’t an accident that someone decided to tell their story. I began the two-year process of screening the tapes along with my co-producer. The story began to come together. We interviewed with them, we filmed with them, and the scripting began.

KOUGUELL: When you planned out this documentary, did you work from an outline or any particular source material?

O’NEILL: For any documentary that I create I usually write a treatment, which you use to pitch when trying to get funding for a film. It is also my road map of where I knew I wanted to go. That was the first process, to have the story laid out in a three-to-five page treatment, and go on to do the pre-interviews with these women over Skype and over the phone, and begin to understand from their storytelling and for me, where we wanted to go with the narrative. We decided that we would weave the stories that they shot with their own backstories of behind the camera of what they were going through when they were actually filming.

KOUGUELL: Was there any reluctance from the camerawomen to speak with you?

O’NEILL: They are an incredibly humble group of women. I always wonder if it were a group of men, if it would be different. They witnessed a lot of difficult things and it was challenging at times to get them to talk about how they were feeling emotionally because there’s a little bit of guilt associated with being a journalist and being able to leave a situation where you know people can’t. They began to understand that we (the audience) have to understand their characters as human beings, too, not just journalists.

KOUGUELL: Advice for aspiring documentarians?

O’NEILL: Make your film, don’t wait for permission. If you have a story to tell, you’ll find a way to tell it. Getting this film made had its challenges. It’s a very long road and you have to be prepared to field a lot of nos. You’ll be surprised how many people want to help and be supportive.

Susan’s Interview: “Acasa, My Home” Documentary Filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc

February 2, 2021 / sucity / Comments Off

Filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc speaks candidly with Susan Kouguell about his debut feature film, “Acasa, My Home,” and how the importance of building empathy and trust with your subjects can advance the context of your story and provides insight into his writing process with co-writer Lina Vdovîi.

SUSAN KOUGUELL

JAN 29, 2021

Filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc, Photo by Alex Galmeanu

Radu Ciorniciuc’s debut feature film, Acasa, My Home, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it was honored with a Special Jury Award for Cinematography. The film has played at over 60 festivals around the world and has been nominated for the IDA Documentary Awards, European Film Awards, and Cinema Eye Honors. The film opened in the U.S. on January 15th courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber.

In the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta, an abandoned water reservoir just outside the bustling metropolis, the Enache family lived in perfect harmony with nature for two decades, sleeping in a hut on the lakeshore, catching fish barehanded, and following the rhythm of the seasons. When this area is transformed into a public national park, the nine children and their parents are forced to leave behind their unconventional life and move to the city. This is a compelling tale of an impoverished family living on the fringes of society in Romania, fighting for acceptance and their own version of freedom.

In 2012, Radu Ciorniciuc co-founded the first independent media organization in Romania – Casa Jurnalistului, a community of reporters specializing in in-depth, long-form and multimedia reporting. Since then, he has been working as a long-form writer and undercover investigative reporter. His research focuses on human rights, animal welfare and environmental issues across the globe. His investigative and reporting work was published on most of the major international media organizations in the world – Channel 4 News, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, etc. – and received national and international awards.

His journalistic work was acknowledged by Royal Television Society UK (2014), Amnesty International UK (2014), Harold Wincott Awards for Business, Economic and Financial Journalism (2016), and by other international and national prestigious institutions.

Lina Vdovîi (co-writer) is an award-winning independent long-form reporter covering migration, conflict zones, poverty, education, and social integration. In 2012, she joined the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism and, in 2014, became a fellow in the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. In 2014, she was awarded 1st place in the Feature Writing category at Premiile Superscrieri. In 2015, Lina received the distinction Young Journalist of the Year, awarded by Freedom House, Romania. Her work is published in both national outlets and international publications, such as in The Guardian, the EU Observer, Courrier International, Al-Jazeera, Transitions online, RFE/RL, Berlin Policy Journal, and Balkan Insight.

Acasa, My Home © Manifest Film, Courtesy of Zeitgeist Film

Susan Kouguell: How did you initially meet the Enache family?

Radu Ciorniciuc: It was in 2016 when we heard the Romanian government was going to give the highest environmental protection to a place that was known for the garbage that was stored there, and all the bad urban legends like people get killed in this delta. It was quite a story for me living just two streets away from there.

At first, I just wanted to report on how these authorities were going to make these places accessible to the general public. What they discovered inside was something amazing and truly valuable; a delicate and complex ecosystem where hundreds of species of birds and animals and plants found their home despite it being in one of the most polluted capitals in Europe.

For me, as a reporter, it was quite interesting. With the co-screenwriter of the film, Lina Vdovîi, we started doing interviews and one thing led to another. We met two of the boys, half-naked 400 meters from the city center with their long hair and their funny way of speaking, coming out from the bush. It was quite an image and obviously, we wanted to understand where they came from. They took us to their father, and this is where we learned that the father was quite essential to the whole project and campaign of making this is a nature park. He was working closely with all the researchers, scientists, and other journalists who would come to write or promote the place. He knew everything about the place, he was also acting as a ranger with all the poachers that would come.

We had the privilege on our first encounter to have him see us as another crew of journalists and he took us on this very well-scripted tour of his, explaining the main things of the ecosystem, acting as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe – he was very well aware of his character. Weeks passed and we kept coming back and the father asked: ‘What kind of journalists are you guys? When are you finishing your story?’ We said what’s happening here deserves more time to properly understand the context in which they were living.

Kouguell: You mentioned that in order to create a feeling of familiarity and home with the family, the camera was always shooting at the eye level of the characters and at close distances, especially when highly emotional events were taking place. How were you able to gain the family’s trust?

Ciorniciuc: This trust you build with time. It’s something that is evolving and shifting. As long as there is empathy, understanding and fairness– and this goes with every relationship– I think there are strong bridges to be built.

Kouguell: You co-wrote the film with Lina Vdovîi – please tell me about the writing process.

Ciorniciuc: We both come from a writing background; we both started working in long format, as nonfiction writers. For me it was essential in making this film to always have what I call the bible of the film, which is the treatment, the script. It was very important at different stages of the project so everyone on the project, including myself, knows what’s going on, knows the material we can show, and also clarifies our intention.

Obviously, there are many ways of making a film. Documentary has shifted in form over the years, which is a beautiful thing. There is nothing scripted in the film; I or my crew, never fed them lines.

The truth can have a lot of forms; there is the journalistic truth, artistic truth, and human truth and that can be attained with different forms.

The way we tried to direct some of the scenes, for example, the conflict scenes with the family was that we did our best in becoming mediators between the family members. We were already the people they were turning to when they were having hard times. For example, with the scene with Vali and his father, they had been struggling with each other for about three months and never talked with each other. That was understandable; I come from a patriarchal family and culture and I understand that embracing your vulnerabilities and communicating them can be seen as a sign of weakness. One day I sat with them and said, “I probably won’t be here (with you) in 10 or 20 years and you probably will, and to solve some of these issues you need to talk.” They only needed this to start expressing their frustrations that were there for years.

The way we scripted it was to imagine drawing a red line through 300 hours of footage, which is something that we had with many possibilities of telling the story, including finding an abandoned son of Gica, that exploded our story. We were two years in the making of the film when we followed that storyline. It’s great when you’re making independent documentaries because you have the liberty of following whatever you feel is important.

[Writing a Documentary Film With No Rules]

Writing helps me understand where the end of the film will be. When the written treatment was matching what we had in our rough cuts, that’s when I knew this is what we wanted to say, the things we discovered, what we considered valuable and truthful and worth sharing with the world. This is why I believe in the written process even in the conventional documentary.

Kouguell: You captured people’s intentions yet remained nonjudgmental in conveying the material even when we see how various people are not making the best choices.

Ciorniciuc: You’re a filmmaker and you know that learning the nuance to judgment takes time and education. It’s hard not to judge some of the decisions the father made regarding the children, but understanding that those decisions come from a place that made him feel confident, that the things he was doing were for the best of his loved ones, that for me is context. It took me time to give him a break, and it took me time to accept the fact that those children were deprived of a lot of the opportunities that they should have 400 meters away from them. One judges things on how culture influences you or your family, education, community, and so on.

I think in telling a story like this one it was important for the characters to tell their story, tell their reality in how they see it. I wanted to make a film from within the family rather than about the family. This was obviously tricky because many times we had to fight with our perceptions and our own judgments.

Kouguell: It was powerful to see the footage of Charles, Prince of Wales in your film. It wasn’t just about the celebrity factor, but it put it in the context of how important this land was. How were you able to obtain the footage?

Ciorniciuc: We got it from the official news agency in Romania. We got lucky; if we actually asked the Royal House of Windsor, we would never have gotten it. It mattered to them that our core team were journalists, including myself, and we were known to them and they trusted us.

Kouguell: Has the Enache family seen the film?

Ciorniciuc: Yes. Some parts they enjoyed and some parts they were reminded of the many hard situations they have been through in the last four years. I think it had a very therapeutic effect especially on the mother who told me that after all this they are still together, she can still feel that she has a family, which is something I am very proud of. I was very nervous showing the film to the family but at the end of the day, it worked very well for the family.

Susan Kouguell, award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, is a senior contributing editor for Script Magazine, and is the author of The Savvy Screenwriter: How to Sell Your Screenplay (and Yourself) Without Selling Out! and Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays!: A comprehensive guide to crafting winning characters with film analyses and screenwriting exercises. As chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a motion picture consulting company founded in 1990, Kouguell works as a script doctor and post-production consultant with over 1,000 writers, filmmakers, executives and studios worldwide. Her extensive background includes work as story analyst and story editor for many studios, including Miramax, Paramount, and Viacom, acquisitions consultant for Warner Bros., writer on voice-over narrations for Miramax, associate producer on two features, and over a dozen feature writing assignments for independent companies. Susan teaches screenwriting at SUNY College at Purchase and is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute. Her short films are in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection and archives and were included in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Follow Susan on Twitter: @SKouguell, Facebook, and Instagram @slkfilms

Susan’s interview with “Donut King” Documentary Filmmaker Alice Gu

December 16, 2020 / sucity / Comments Off

Director, cinematographer and writer Alice Gu talks about her feature directorial debut, The Donut King, in an insightful discussion that includes DIY filmmaking, discovering the story and establishing truthful relationships with interviewees

SUSAN KOUGUELLNOV 3, 2020

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Director, cinematographer and writer Alice Gu talks about her feature directorial debut, The Donut King, in an insightful discussion that includes DIY filmmaking, discovering the story and establishing truthful relationships with interviewees.

The Donut King tells the unlikely story of Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee who arrived in America in 1975 with nothing and set out to build a multi-million-dollar empire by baking America’s favorite pastry, the donut. Ngoy soon found himself living a classic rags to riches narrative after sponsoring hundreds of visas for fellow Cambodian immigrants, helping them get on their feet in a new land by teaching them the ways of the donut business and amassing a small personal fortune. By the mid 1990’s, Cambodian-Americans owned nearly 80% of the donut industry as a result of his influence.

The Donut King is a story of tenacity, survival, redemption, and above all else, the power of the American Dream. The Donut King is executive produced by Academy Award-winner Freida Lee Mock and produced by Logan Content in association with Scott Free Productions.

ALICE GU (Director/DP/Writer) A Los Angeles native, Alice began her career as a Director of Photography, working with renowned directors Werner Herzog, Stacy Peralta, and Rory Kennedy, among others. “Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton” made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017, a documentary film lensed by Gu and directed by Academy Award-nominated director, Rory Kennedy.

KOUGUELL: I understand it was your nanny who introduced you to the concept of “Cambodian donuts” and Ted Ngoy’s story. What grabbed your attention about this story?

GU: When I read about Ted’s story there were several things that grabbed my attention—but not everything made it into the movie due to time, otherwise it would have been three hours long. First, he was a boy born in poverty in Cambodia. Second, in high school, he falls in love with the daughter of a high-ranking official and they have a whole Romeo and Juliet moment where they are forbidden to be together—he actually stabs himself three times and goes on a hunger strike and she takes pills, and they are both almost dead—and finally her parents send them off to live in the countryside.

I was only casually familiar with the atrocities that happened in Cambodia at that time. Ted escaped from that as a refugee penniless and within three years becoming a millionaire and then he lost it all and ended up destitute. His life was so topsy-turvy. Ted’s life read like a movie, like fiction. All of that appealed to me.

Also, the personal component resonated with me. I’m a child of Chinese parents who were forced to leave China with just the clothes on their back.

KOUGUELL: Tell me about the evolution of the project.

GU: This is a case of leap before you look and ignorance is bliss because if you knew how hard it was and all the challenges that would be coming your way, I think it would have been too daunting. Then I thought, I can do this, I’m a DP and I can shoot this, I can get a camera. And then taking a very much DIY approach to it.

KOUGUELL: How long was the shoot?

GU: We shot on and off over the course of eight to ten months. I would have loved to have compressed that, but it was very much DIY—when we had money and time available, we would go back and shoot this project.

KOUGUELL: When you planned out your documentary, did you work from an outline or any source material?

GU: When I met Ted—and that was meeting him over Facebook—we talked several times and he said he just wrote a book, a memoir that’s coming out in a month, and that he would give me a copy. I used that as our bible, a starting point of getting to know characters and getting familiar with everything. But, as we went along and started filming more and meeting more people, it really wasn’t just his book that we followed, we realized there was so much depth and so many other characters and substories we wanted to tell. We used Ted’s memoir as a beginning to research material and as a jumping off point, but the script itself revealed itself to us during the process.

KOUGUELL: How did you establish trust with your subjects, including Ted Ngoy and his family members and colleagues?

GU: That is a product of time. Ted was approaching 80 with nothing else to prove, nowhere to hide. He was a man in his golden years and reflecting on all the good and all the bad. When I approached him about making this documentary, I told him it’s not going to be all the good, it’s going to be warts and all—it’s going to be the good, bad and ugly and are you okay with that, and he said yes.

Over the next 12 months the trust deepened. There was a difference between our first interviews and when we filmed later; his guard was really let down. It was about having honest and true intentions yourself when making a film and that will show and reflect in your relationships and how you approach everything. The other element is persistence. You will get a lot of no’s in the beginning, like from the other characters who are in the film, and eventually after months go by, they say, “Oh, she’s still here? I guess she’s here to stay, and she’s still asking me to be interviewed.” It’s patience, persistence and really having true intentions.,

KOUGUELL: Final words to share about your project?

GU: I love documentaries and I loved them for such a long time. My editor and co-writer Carol Martori is passionate about documentaries and the art form, and we both knew early on this story is so complex and there are so many ways to tell it. There is an American dream story, there’s an immigrant story, a rags-to-riches story, a David-and-Goliath story, and a story about helping other refugees getting their start and rescuing them from refugee camps. There is also what we call the Donut Shop 2.0, the second generation. We have all of these stories, and the bigger immigrant story and history lesson, and we thought, how do we fit this all in here and not be a complete mess. It was a bit daunting.

We took inspiration from narrative. Our approach was to have a narrative structure, a narrative arc. We also wanted to do something fresh and different, and I hope that comes across, as an interesting way to tell the story.

SUSAN’S INTERVIEW: Academy Award-Nominated Producer Rosalie Varda Discusses Her Documentary Film, “Varda by Agnès,” Collaborating with Her Mother and Preserving Agnès Varda’s Legacy

November 22, 2019 / sucity / Comments Off

Susan Kouguell speaks with Academy Award-nominated producer Rosalie Varda about her new documentary film “Varda by Agnès” and collaborating with her mother Agnès Varda.

At the 2019 NYFF Rosalie Varda (Producer: “Varda by Agnes” and “Faces Places”)

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A personal note about Agnès Varda

Decades ago, when I started making short films in college, it was Agnès Varda’s work that influenced me most. Certainly, a groundbreaking female filmmaker caught my attention, but it was not just about her gender, it was about her art; her portrayal of characters in her narratives, the intimacy she conveyed in her documentaries, how she moved the camera, framed images, and captured moments of color and language—all these elements and more, deeply connected with my artistic sensibilities. Agnès made me believe I could express my voice as a filmmaker. And this was all before I even met her in person.

Over the last few years, I was very fortunate to interview and spend time with Agnès Varda at several events, including her 2017 photograph and installation exhibition at the Blum and Poe Gallery in Manhattan, at Film at Lincoln Center events, and the Locarno Film Festival in 2014 where she received the Pardo d’onore (the lifetime achievement award) during which time I was honored to be the only journalist invited to her masterclass for international students—a fortuitous event, witnessing firsthand her interactions with aspiring filmmakers, which is captured in Varda by Agnes. (There are three years-worth of masterclasses from Agnès Varda’s international travels included in this documentary.)

What always struck me during our conversations was her generosity of spirit, and specifically her pointed questions to me, which admittedly were sometimes intimidating because she had always been a personal inspiration as an artist and filmmaker.

Agnès would ask me: What did you think about the characters’ interactions and movement in the triptych in the installation?

Why do you teach Vagabond and Cleo from 5 to 7, and what did you specifically discuss with your students? Where can I see your films? Excuse me?! That gave me pause; no other filmmaker I had interviewed over the years asked me questions about my work, nor was I ever forthcoming about my own films. However, the prized interviewer pried it out of me. We talked about our respective challenges and experiences of making movies on low budgets, raising children while making films, and themes close to our heart in our past, present and future work.

I told Rosalie that the last time I spoke with Agnès one-on-one, she gave me the needed push to get back to making my own films. Rosalie smiled and nodded knowingly, “Agnès was always pushing women: “Go! Don’t be afraid. Just go and do it.”

I am forever grateful to Agnès.

Agnès Varda giving a masterclass in VARDA BY AGNÈS courtesy Janus Films

About the Documentary Varda by Agnès (Excerpts from Notes from the director Agnès Varda)

“In 1994, with a retro at the French Cinémathèque, I published a book entitled VARDA BY AGNÈS. 25 years later, the same title is given to my film made of moving images and words, with the same project: give keys about my body of work. I give my own keys, my thoughts, nothing pretentious, just keys.

The film is in two parts, two centuries. The 20th century from my first feature film LA POINTE COURTE in 1954 to the last one in 1996, ONE HUNDRED AND ONE NIGHTS. In between, I made documentaries, features, short and long. The second part starts in the 21st century, when the small digital cameras changed my approach to documentaries, from the GLEANERS AND I in 2000 to FACES PLACES, co-directed with JR in 2017. But during that time, I mostly created art installations, atypical triptychs, shacks of cinema and I kept making documentaries, such as THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS. In the middle of the two parts, there is a little reminder about my first life as a photographer. I’ve made a wide variety of films in my life.

So I need to tell you what led me to do this work for so many years. Three words are important to me: Inspiration, creation, sharing. INSPIRATION is why you make a film. The motivations, ideas, circumstances and happenstance that spark a desire and you set to work to make a film. CREATION is how you make the film. What means do you use? What structure? Alone or not alone? In colour or not in colour? Creation is a job. The third word is SHARING. You don’t make films to watch them alone, you make films to show them. An empty cinema: a filmmaker’s nightmare!”

The Interview with Producer Rosalie Varda

During the 2019 New York Film Festival (which was dedicated to Agnès Varda) I had the great pleasure to sit down over a glass of wine and speak with producer Rosalie Varda about her new documentary Varda by Agnès, which was a Main Slate selection at the Festival.

A tour de force in her own right, Academy award nominee Rosalie Varda spent 25 years as a costume designer and fashion artist before she began to produce her mother’s films full time. She once commented, chuckling: “At the age of 20, I never would have said that at 50, I’d be working for my mother.”

Susan Kouguell: You and Agnès had a very special and unique collaboration. What was it like working with your mother?

Rosalie Varda: Our collaboration was very interesting because both of us wanted to share more than just being a mother and a daughter and speaking about holidays and children. I really started working with her in 2005 on an exhibition that we co-curated together. In that experience we saw that we were able to work together. I don’t have any ego, and I know where my place is. I loved the idea of helping her to be more free to do exactly her project with no concessions and to do it really as she wanted it, which means not taking care of the production, not taking care of the money, not taking care of how it should be, but just be involved in creation because her urgency was creating. She knew at one point she would not be there anymore. She still had new projects and it was like a race of doing everything, which means we did everything.

I realized when working on getting the archives together we had done so much in ten years between when she was 80 and 90-years old. We had maybe 30 exhibitions, four catalogues, and two films.

Portrait of Agnès Varda - Courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris — Portrait of Agnès Varda – Courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris

I traveled a lot with her over the last 10 years. We shared good times; she was very easy and open-minded. I would always say yes to what she wanted to do. I was not there to judge. My job was to produce and help her. It was very rewarding to be able to see her notes she did on the street or a train and then you do it, and see it, and then it’s done and the satisfaction of that is wonderful.

On the personal side, I was happy to share time with her, talking art, music, people, seeing journalists, having a glass of wine—you know, just life. Sharing a life of not just being a daughter coming to see your mother once a week; we were seeing each other every day, working together every day. We laughed a lot. We were very good partners. She would never put me down. She would always put me in the front. She was so generous. She would always say, ‘I wouldn’t be here without you doing everything for me.’ I wanted Agnès to be more in the light and have the younger generation know her.

Faces Places

SK: I understand you were the one who initially got in touch with the artist JR.

RV: Yes. Agnès didn’t know him and neither did I. I saw his books and I called him on the telephone and said. ‘I’m the daughter of Agnès Varda and I’m calling you because I’d like you to meet my mother.’ There was a blank (silence) on the telephone. Then he said, ‘Well, I know about your mother, I would love to meet her.’ We organized a meeting. And after their meeting, Agnès and JR said to me, ‘We’d like to do a little installation,’ and I said, ‘I think it’s going to be a short film’. They said, ‘No, we don’t want to do a short film.’ I thought, OK, they are going to do a film, but they don’t want to tell me right away, and I thought, I need to find money right away. I went to a French art dealer who’s a friend of mine who gave us the first money. With this money we did the first shooting. And then I produced the film.

Agnès Varda in VARDA BY AGNÈS courtesy Janus Films

Varda by Agnès is both an introduction to her work for those not familiar with her vast body of narrative and documentaries, art installations, and photographs—and a love letter to and from Agnès.

SK: One constant in all her films is her humanity, a poignant trait that came across once again in Varda by Agnès.

RV: Yes, the film is a joyous legacy. This film to me is very important because it’s about legacy, and it’s about education on image. I think this film should be shown to students doing cinema; to discuss (elements of filmmaking), like frame, what is a frame, what is a photo, what is documentary.

SK: The film is a lesson for students without feeling like one, for example Agnès’s discussion about the tracking shots in Vagabond.

RV: Our project was not to be boring for people, it was a conversation about cinema, but it had to be cinema first. Not filming a masterclass. I’m happy you liked it.

SK: What’s next for you?

RV: A kind of documentary but I can’t talk about it yet. I’m also taking care of Agnès’s archives and I hope in the next few years to do an exhibit of her photographs and installations that will be more global. I want to be able to protect all her films; it’s what I do with my brother (Mathieu Demy) so I will continue to travel where people invite me and try to share a little bit of what Agnès had with her curiosity and her humanity — and always pushing people to do things. She would say, ‘Just stop talking about it, just do it.’ I will never forget that.

Agnès had a beautiful life; she has done so much. Agnès did a lot to the end.

Agnès Varda on the beach with birds in VARDA BY AGNÈS - Courtesy Janus Films — Agnès Varda on the beach with birds in VARDA BY AGNÈS – Courtesy Janus Films

AGNES BY VARDA TRAILER

The film opens November 22 in select cinemas in New York City, followed by a nationwide rollout.

A retrospective of Agnès Varda’s work at Film at Lincoln Center starts in December 2019.

SUSAN’S INTERVIEW WITH “63 UP” Director Michael Apted

October 25, 2019 / sucity / Comments Off

By: Susan Kouguell | October 17, 2019 8

Susan Kouguell interviews 63 UP director, Michael Apted on narrative vs documentary films, getting feedback and more!

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Michael Apted

During the 2019 New York Film Festival, I sat down with director Michael Apted to talk about his new documentary 63 UP where it is an Official Selection, as well as his wide-ranging body of work.

Since the 1960’s, Michael Apted has helmed an extensive list of feature films and documentaries. His feature films include Gorillas in the Mist, Coalminer’s Daughter, Gorky Park, Thunderheart, Nell, The World is Not Enough, Enigma, Enough, Amazing Grace, and the third installment of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treaders, and Unlocked.

Mr. Apted’s documentary credits include the Boris Grebenshikov film The Long Way Home, Incident at Oglala, Bring on the Night, Moving the Mountain, Me and Isaac Newton, Power of the Game and the official 2006 World Cup Film. Mr. Apted has also worked extensively in television, including directing episodes of HBO’s epic series Rome, the Showtime series Masters of Sex and Ray Donovan, and the Netflix series Bloodline.

The UP Anthology Documentary Series

The internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning sequels based on the original 7 UP documentary, have followed the lives of 14 Britons since the age of seven in seven-year increments.

The original 7 UP was broadcast as a one-off World in Action Special inspired by the founding editor Tim Hewat’s passionate interest in the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” and his anger at what he saw as the rigidity of social class in England. 7 UP featured the children talking about their hopes and dreams for the future. As members of the generation who would be running the country by the year 2000, what did they think they would become?

This groundbreaking documentary anthology has now reached 63 UP, gaining further illuminating insight into its premise of asking whether or not our adult lives are predetermined by earliest influences and the social class in which we are raised.

Director Michael Apted, who moved to Hollywood in the late 70s, has returned every seven years to chart the children’s progress through life. Over six decades, the films have documented the group as they became adults and entered middle-age, dealing with everything life has thrown at them in between.

63 UP

We began our interview talking about 63 UP.

Kouguell: There is nothing rehearsed in this documentary.

Apted: It has to be the first time it has ever been said or thought.

Kouguell: Did you work from a script or an outline?

Apted: Neither. I write down thoughts and look at all the episodes again just to see what I left behind or should pay more attention to.

I used to plot out the questions I would ask and sometimes give them clues about it, but now I don’t tell them beforehand what I want to ask them. I know some of them don’t want me.to ask certain questions and so I don’t ask those questions; I don’t want to lose them.

I also don’t see them hardly at all between the times we’re filming every seven years, so I won’t get confused by what’s happened to them otherwise it gets so complicated. I know the big issues we talk about in their life and what they’re doing in this particular point of time.

Kouguell: At what point of the process did you add the voiceover narration?

Apted: I added it during post-production; it’s the last thing I do during the last 2-3 days of dubbing. And then I polish it so it can be as up to date as possible.

Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration process with the editor.

Apted: I’ve been working with editor Kim Horton since 21 UP. I give him an outline of what we filmed. We type everything up and it’s about 100 pages. I do a rough first draft during the time I’m shooting. Then once I’ve got the major outline of them (the subjects) and I start deciding where I put them, then I mark lines through the transcript and give a rough cut of it to him. If there are problems, he’ll let me know. By the time I finish shooting, we’ve got a pretty good sense of where the subjects are.

We do a rough assembly and the film is about 40 minutes too long and then we start slashing. Then I get into the interesting parts. It’s by elimination; sometimes you do an interview and it doesn’t go well and then you’re looking at something and you go back to it and see something good, it’s to keep the big picture of it. It’s not the same order in every film.

Directing Narrative and Documentary Films

Kouguell: The many films you directed include the biographical dramas Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist. How did the UP series inform your narrative films as a director?

Apted: I think doing a documentary is one set of your muscles and doing a drama is another. You can learn from both of them — how to place material, where you build it. I learned those lessons doing both documentaries and drama. Both of them helped the other; how to keep things interesting on camera when interviewing them, the same way you keep the actor of a drama alive and not just doing it by numbers.

The dramas I do are usually character-driven. It’s very similar to doing a documentary; in a drama you’re always trying to build to something. I say to documentary directors to look at more dramas, to give it more wit so you don’t put one great thing at the beginning; structure the documentary to keep the audience’s interest.

I learned a lot in documentaries about how to cut performances in dramas and to keep the audience on their toes. It’s so interesting to me in a lot of my movies, the more documentaries I do, the more non actors I use in narrative films.

Kouguell: Words of advice to filmmakers?

Get feedback

Apted: It’s painful to have people look at your work. Better to know now than later when you see the reviews. It’s hard to get feedback. It used to drive me mad. Always show it to someone who will tell you the truth.

Rhythm

Apted: The film’s rhythm in both documentary and fiction is important. Keep the audience on their toes so they’re not quite sure what’s going to happen next. It’s that element of surprise that is important, but not bogus surprise. If you know you have five big moments in your film, spread the drama around.

63 UP opens November 27th at Film Forum in New York City, December 6th at Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles and nationwide December 13th.

INTERVIEW: Born to Be Documentary Director Tânia Cypriano

October 13, 2019 / sucity / Comments Off

By: Susan Kouguell | October 2, 2019

Susan Kouguell speaks with filmmaker Tânia Cypriano during the New York Film Festival where her powerful documentary Born to Be had its world premiere.

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“I’ve always been interested in stories related to health and the body in the context of individuals and communities.”

~ Tânia Cypriano – Director

Tania Cypriano and cinematographer Jeffrey Johnson

I had the pleasure to speak with Tânia Cypriano during the New York Film Festival where her powerful documentary Born to Be had its world premiere.

Born to Be follows the work of Dr. Jess Ting at the groundbreaking Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City—where, for the first time ever, all transgender and gender non-conforming people have access to quality transition-related health and surgical care. With extraordinary access, this feature-length documentary takes an intimate look at how one doctor’s work impacts the lives of his patients as well as how his journey from renowned plastic surgeon to pioneering gender-affirming surgeon has led to his own transformation.

ABOUT DIRECTOR AND CO-PRODUCER TANIA CYPRIANO

Tânia Cypriano has been working between the United States and her native Brazil for over twenty-five years. Her films and videos have won international awards including Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, New York AIDS Film Festival, Festival do Cinema Brasileiro de Gramado in Brazil, and Fespaco in Burkina Faso. Her first documentary Viva Eu!, which won five international awards, including Best Documentary at Joseph Papp’s Festival Latino in New York, is about the first man diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Brazil. Her television credits include working on documentaries for PBS, the History Channel, NHK in Japan, GNT in Brazil, and Channel 4 in England. Tânia has also been a grant recipient from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Soros Documentary Fund, the Jerome Foundation, Experimental Television, and the National Latino Communication Center. She has served in productions for Bill Moyers, Martin Scorsese, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. She has also co-organized film series with MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art, the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo, and the Grazer Kunstverein in Austria.

Dr. Ting (center)

KOUGUELL: Let’s talk about the creative collaborative process.

CYPRIANO: After a year of getting the hospital’s permission to film and finding funding, we started production with no sound recordist—just using mics on the cameras and for that matter no crew; it was just our cinematographer Jeffrey Johnson, our producer Michelle Koo Hayashi and myself. Michelle had a lot of creative input with me, and it was her first film. I try to include and be open to everybody’s suggestions and thoughts. I try to include and be open to everybody’s suggestions and thoughts.

With the filming, I went in with Jeff and myself often carrying all the equipment. We had no sound person in the beginning. It was the three of us or just Jeffrey alone because of the size of the rooms. It was very tough to film in such tight spaces. I was lucky to find Jeff and to work with him. It was hard to find camera people who would feel comfortable filming surgeries and exams; a lot of people are not good with seeing blood.

Dr Ting with Jordan

KOUGUELL: How much input did Dr. Ting have on the project?

CYPRIANO: Dr. Ting had quite a bit of input. He helped me gain access to both the director of the hospital and inside the hospital spaces. Sometimes Dr. Ting would meet a patient and then suggest them to us. Other times we were just there by chance. This happened with Cashmere; we were there by chance, and we were able to film her on her first consultation and follow her journey.

Devin waits for Dr. Ting pre-op

KOUGUELL: Did you work from a written outline or script?

CYPRIANO: We filmed without a script or outline. The film was shaped in the editing room. After we started editing, we did do some more filming. For example, with Devon’s story, more happened after we were already editing. We had to bring the material to the editing room and then rethink how we were structuring our acts. It totally shifted where the film was going originally. To the very last day, we had to make sure to be as accurate and open to tell this very story.

KOUGUELL: There was a poignant comfort level that you established with the patients and their families and friends.

CYPRIANO: I spent almost three years following the people in the film. I built a very tight relationship with them. I’m part of their life, too. That’s a way I also work. Once I start getting involved with personal stories it’s difficult to separate myself as a person. A lot of the material we have is because of these types of relationships.

It was important to me that everyone felt comfortable; it was important for their bodies to be part of the story. All of the patients felt very comfortable being in front of the camera. I tried to make sure that the surgeries (seen in the film) were treated in a certain manner; what we could see and not see. It was a big decision how and what to show.

For transgender people to get this healthcare is historical. Before, patients would have to be wealthy or travel great distances.

KOUGUELL: Were there any questions or subjects either Dr. Ting or the patients did not want to discuss?

CYPRIANO: Once I found the right people to be part of a project, I needed to know that we could talk about everything. They were all very open.

It was essential to me that everyone be comfortable sharing their names, their faces, and their bodies. It was important to me to follow people of different ages, ethnicities, gender, and financial backgrounds. There are those who have family support and those who don’t; there are those who have partners and those who hope their transition will bring them to one.

KOUGUELL: Looking back on this experience, what are your final thoughts?

CYPRIANO: I was overwhelmed by how many people in the film wanted to show their faces on camera and be involved in the project. They knew the importance of this film, and how historical this moment is.

Filmmaker Rodney Evans Discusses His New Documentary Vision Portraits

August 16, 2019 / sucity / Comments Off

Filmmaker Rodney Evans Discusses His New Documentary Vision Portraits

By: Susan Kouguell | August 6, 2019

Filmmaker Rodney Evans discusses his deeply personal feature-length documentary exploring how his loss of vision may impact his creative future, and what it means to be a blind or visually-impaired creative artist.

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“As a filmmaker with only twenty percent of my visual field remaining, I am forced to work in new, more collaborative ways while also being part of a long tradition of artists seeing in highly idiosyncratic ways.”

— Rodney Evans

I had the pleasure to speak with Rodney Evans following the press screening at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan and Q & A with Evans and dancer Kayla Hamilton. As it turned out, Evans and I are both MacDowell Colony fellows and even occupied the same studio during our respective residencies.

Emerging from the event into the summer heat of midtown, I found it particularly profound from a personal perspective as a writer/filmmaker, reflecting on each of the artists portrayed in the film, who not only redefined their lives with impaired vision, but redefined and discovered new ways to communicate and express themselves through their respective art-making practices with poignant beauty and vulnerability.

ABOUT RODNEY EVANS – DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR/SUBJECT

Rodney Evans

Rodney Evans is the writer/director/producer of the feature film Brother To Brother which won the Special Jury Prize in Drama at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and garnered four Independent Spirit Award nominations, including Best First Film, Best First Screenplay, Best Debut Performance for Anthony Mackie and Best Supporting Male Performance for Roger Robinson. Evans has received funding from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Program, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The NY State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Black Public Media (BPM). His second narrative feature, The Happy Sad, has played at over 30 international film festivals. Evans has taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Princeton and Swarthmore. His documentary short Persistence of Vision screened at BAMcinemaFest and Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival and won the Jury Prize at the Ann Arbor International Film Festival in 2017.

ABOUT VISION PORTRAITS

This deeply personal feature-length documentary explores how Rodney Evans’s loss of vision may impact his creative future, and what it means to be a blind or visually-impaired creative artist. It’s a celebration of the possibilities of art created by a Manhattan photographer (John Dugdale), a Bronx-based dancer (Kayla Hamilton), a Canadian writer (Ryan Knighton) and the filmmaker himself, who each experience varying degrees of visual impairment.

Winner, Outstanding Documentary at the 2019 Frameline International Film Festival, and Official Selection at many festivals, including the 2019 SXSW Film Festival—Documentary Competition, 2019 BFI Flare London LGBTQ Film Festival, 2019 Inside Out Toronto LGBTQ Film Festival, 2019 Outfest Los Angeles Film Festival, 2019 American Black Film Festival, 2019 Sydney Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, and the 2019 Black Star Film Festival.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT—RODNEY EVANS

Vision Portraits is my personal story of going on a scientific and artistic journey to better understand the ramifications of my deteriorating vision. My aim is to come to a deeper sense of knowledge through illuminating portraits of three artists: a photographer (John Dugdale), a dancer (Kayla Hamilton) and a writer (Ryan Knighton).

The film consists of four chapters which profile each artist and also follows a medical procedure centered on the restoration of my lost vision through the use of cutting-edge technology at the Center for Vision Restoration in Berlin, Germany. The film is told from my perspective as a filmmaker who was diagnosed with a rare genetic eye condition in early 1997 called retinitis pigmentosa resulting in the loss of my peripheral vision and much of my night vision.

Kayla Hamilton

Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and has very minimal peripheral and night vision in the other due to glaucoma and iritis. She incorporates her unique perspective on the world and embodies resilience and empowerment in her solo dance piece, Nearly Sighted.

John Dugdale

Photographer slowly loses his vision at thirty-two in St. Vincent’s Hospital at the height of the AIDS epidemic due to CMV retinitis and continues to take photos with the sliver of sight that remains in one eye.

Ryan Knighton at the Moth

Ryan Knighton, a punk-rock teenager, is diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa on his 18th birthday and finds writing as his salvation through the process of going blind.

All of the artists are deeply influenced and motivated by the power of art to heal and transform.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE Q & A

PERSONAL JOURNEYS

Rodney Evans: I wanted the film to specifically focus on the ways each artist was impacted by the loss of their vision and the ways in which their creative process thrives in spite of their blindness.and also follows a medical procedure centered on the restoration of my lost vision through the use of cutting-edge technology at the Center for Vision Restoration in Berlin, Germany. The film is told from my perspective as a filmmaker who was diagnosed with a rare genetic eye condition in early 1997 called retinitis pigmentosa, resulting in the loss of my peripheral vision and much of my night vision.

The film offers a deep dive into the work of each artist and incorporates their art (photography, dance, literature and filmmaking) to provide an immersive way to experience how they “see” the world through these unique perspectives.

CINEMATIC TOOLS

Evans: We utilize rich and evocative sound design and detailed audio description channels specifically created for the visually impaired and blind community so that they have the ability to access the film.

The film includes a mixture of in-depth interviews, vérité footage of each artist’s daily experience, creative process, and exhibition/performance. Sound design, still photography, visual text, macro cinematography and subjective camera positions chronicles the experience of each artist.

There is some use of experimental POV footage to visualize some of the remnants of sight that remain for each character. This involves use of overexposure, roll outs, flares and cropping to mirror the subjective experience of these artists similar to the ways in which films like Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Nostalgia for the Light (Directed by Patricio Guzman) and filmmakers like Stan Brahkage and Leslie Thornton use abstract, subjective viewpoints to immerse the viewer deeper into the emotional experience of their central characters.

WHAT DREW RODNEY EVANS TO THE ARTISTS PORTRAYED IN THE FILM?

Evans: Ryan Knighton and I were already friends and I had already read his memoir Cockeyed, which is incredibly powerful and moving. It’s about his retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis at 18. I learned that it had been adapted into a screenplay that had gotten into the Sundance Lab, and I asked Michelle Satter at Sundance and mentioned that I had the same condition, and she was nice enough to connect us.

John is someone whose photography I knew very well; it’s beautiful, stunning. My brother’s friend dated John for 10 years. I think it was difficult for John to go back through a lot of those memories. He asked to see a film of mine, and I showed him a film about my own coming out to my own Jamaican family, and I think he was moved by how intimate that film was and how vulnerable I was in that film. I think that made him trust his story with me.

With Kayla, I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing her before. I specifically asked a colleague at Swarthmore where I teach if he knew of any women dancers of color, and he said yes. It was fortuitous timing meeting Kayla, we met on a Sunday, and I asked if I could film her rehearsal. Four days later, my DP and I went and shot at the space in the Bronx.

PLEASURE AND CHALLENGES

Kayla Hamilton: I was asking myself: If I lose 100 percent of my sight, how can I consume dance; how can I see it? How do you describe movements to someone who is not a dancer? What are the possibilities? What can that mean for a sighted person and someone who doesn’t see out of their eyesight? Challenging ways we take in movement as vision as the primary source.

Evans: Visual style, for me, one of the great pleasures and challenges was putting the viewer in the subjective position of the different ways we all see differently. When John describes his vision as the aurora borealis, and these flashes of color he gets and that he constantly has his optic nerve firing.

In the film world, because it’s a visually-based medium, if you are visually impaired, there is a stigma. I don’t know a lot of people who are ‘out’ about it, with audio descriptions there are so many ways to execute visuals through language.

One challenge is how do you create a visual language that an audience can experience? The visual language of the film came about the various ways we talked about seeing in different ways, waking up and blinking, things being abstracted and literally light and shapes, and asking how do you move around and navigate space.

VISION PORTRAITS opens in theaters August 9th in Manhattan at the Metrograph and August 23rd in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal with a national rollout to follow, courtesy of Stimulus Pictures.

To learn more about Rodney Evans, visit his website.

Susan Kouguell Interviews “Searching for Ingmar Bergman” Director Margarethe von Trotta

November 18, 2018 / sucity / Comments Off

INTERVIEW: Searching for Ingmar Bergman Director Margarethe von Trotta

By: Susan Kouguell | November 6, 2018

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“’Searching for Ingmar Bergman’ was an active but inward process. The film might appear to be an external quest, as it travels from Sweden, to Germany, Spain, and France. But the protagonists, and particularly his sons, his actresses, like Liv Ullmann, Gunnel Lindblom, Julia Dufvenius, and filmmakers of the next generation like Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, and Mia Hansen-Løve, express themselves in such a very moving and intimate way that in those encounters I found what I was looking for—a world of personal experience that resonates with the films.”
— Margarethe von Trotta

Director Margarethe von Trotta

About Searching for Ingmar Bergman

Internationally renowned director Margarethe von Trotta examines Ingmar Bergman’s life and work with a circle of his closest collaborators as well as a new generation of filmmakers. This documentary presents key components of his legacy, as it retraces themes that recurred in his life and art and journeys to the places that were central to Bergman’s creative achievements.

About Margarethe von Trotta

Born in Berlin, Margarethe von Trotta is considered one of the leaders of the New German Cinema movement. After studying Germanic and Romance languages in Munich and Paris (where she encountered the Nouvelle Vague and the films of Ingmar Bergman), von Trotta pursued a career in acting, working closely with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. Starting with her first independent directorial effort, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), von Trotta’s filmography lists numerous critically-acclaimed titles, including: Marianne & Juliane (1981), which won the Golden Lion in Venice; Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Love and Fear (1988) both of which were nominated for the Palme d’Or in Cannes; L‘africana (1990), which was nominated for the Golden Lion in Venice; Rosenstrasse (2003), which earned actor Katja Riemann the Coppa Volpi Award in Venice; and Hannah Arendt (2012), which won the German Film Award. Her first feature documentary Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018) celebrated its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and premiered in the U.S. at the 56th New York Film Festival.

The Interview

I had the great pleasure to speak with Ms. von Trotta at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan, which will be celebrating her work with a retrospective: “Margarethe von Trotta: The Political is Personal” November 2-8.

We began our discussion with talking about the theme of the retrospective—the political is personal—in her narrative films, including the powerful sibling relationship in Marianne & Juliane and how this work, as well as many of her other films, remain relevant and poignant today.

KOUGUELL: For many years I’ve taught your work in my cinema studies and screenwriting classes. The Promise (Das Versprechen) was thought-provoking to my students as a hybrid film, incorporating documentary footage within the fictional love story that was inspired by a compilation of interviews you did with people about their experiences during this time period.

VON TROTTA: There was very strong black and white documentary material for the construction of the Berlin wall, which I put in the beginning of The Promise but I could not find strong material when the wall came down. In the early 60s there were no video cameras, there was only 16mm, film and the camera people had to be very aware of what images they wanted to film; that one scene, that one image gives a whole sense of the time. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall was opened for the first night, people went there with video cameras and filmed, but I couldn’t find one image that gave the sense of the importance of that moment. So, I had to make my own.

KOUGUELL: That was interesting in terms of the idea of memory and imposing one’s own story on that historical moment.

VON TROTTA: And that was much more expensive, too. One thousand extras on the bridge coming from the East to the West; that was the most expensive scene I did.

Liv Ullmann (L) von Trotta (R)

KOUGUELL: You were approached by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation of Stockholm to direct Searching for Ingmar Bergman.

VON TROTTA: One of the producers who is half-Swedish, was planning for Bergman’s 100^th birthday, and she asked me to make the film since I knew Bergman personally during his time in Munich. I said in the beginning, ‘No, I can’t do that; I’m such an admirer of his, I’m so fond of him, he was such a genius, I couldn’t dare do this.’ The Bergman Foundation knew my films and asked me to make it in a very personal way; a research of one filmmaker about another filmmaker. They asked me to mainly speak about his time in Munich because nobody knows so much about this period of his life. That was the most personal side of the film.

KOUGUELL: Tell me about working with your son, Feliz Moeller, on this film.

VON TROTTA: My son is a documentary filmmaker (Forbidden Films (2014), Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess (2008) two films about the Nazi time about Nazi filmmakers, and Sympathisanten: Unser Deutscher Herbst (2018). He started as an historian and then he became a documentary filmmaker. When I said to him, I have never done a documentary, he said he would help me. That gave me more courage to do the film. He looked for all the documentary material, which I put in the film, and I did the interviews.

I was used to making narrative feature films, and I knew exactly what to do. I wrote my own scripts, I knew the scenes, the actors, how to direct it, and how to do it in advance. But in a documentary, you make it in the editing room. It becomes a film in the editing room. That was totally new for me.

KOUGUELL: So, there wasn’t much pre-planning for this film.

VON TROTTA: No there wasn’t it. When the Bergman Foundation asked me to make a very personal film, I knew immediately I wanted the scene at the seaside where I was sitting where Max Von Sydow was sitting, looking at the black sky. I knew immediately I had to start with this image.

Our conversation shifted to a personal note about my great, great aunt Therese Giehse, the late German actress whom von Trotta knew, and the connection I felt to von Trotta’s narrative films, which often have included the incorporation of actual historical events and weaving in the personal and the political lives of her characters.

VON TROTTA: Giehse was a big figure, and very courageous in her political meanings of her work. And her work with Bertolt Brecht.

KOUGUELL: You, Giehse, and Bergman shared a personal common experience—relocating to a foreign country and not necessarily by choice. Giehse was exiled from Germany during World War II.

VON TROTTA: I was stateless until my first marriage. Bergman felt stateless when he left Sweden accused of tax evasion, he felt so humiliated. Humiliation for him was always a main theme for him in his films. No one pushed him to go away from Sweden, it was his free choice.

KOUGUELL: In Searching for Ingmar Bergman, there were fascinating revelations when you visited the places of his childhood combined with the analysis of his films, and how he and his work connected with spirituality and faith, and his father who was a priest.

VON TROTTA: Before I made this documentary, I was interested in Bergman’s films as a filmmaker. I wasn’t curious about his life and his women, for me it was just about how he made his films. Then knowing that I was going to make this documentary, I read his autobiography “The Magic Lantern” and there I discovered the main points of his life. I discovered about his nurturing in his childhood. He wrote so much more about his childhood, his mother, his father, his grandmother, and much less about his wives and his children. I had the feeling he wanted to stay as a child, during his whole life.

Film Director Ingmar Bergman together with wife Kabi Laretei and son Daniel. Picture from the book “Lennart Nilsson – his best pictures”.

KOUGUELL: We see that very poignantly when you interviewed his son.

VON TROTTA: Yes, and he said, exactly that was it. When Bergman’s last wife died, he wrote in his autobiography: ‘Finally I have to go out of my children’s room, out of my playroom.” His wife also helped him stay (as) a child; she did everything for him.

KOUGUELL: Looking back at the journey of making this documentary, did it influence you as a filmmaker?

VON TROTTA: Influence? I don’t know, I’ll have to see in the films I will do. The main things which are influences you don’t even feel it at the time, it comes out when you are doing a film. I like it when it stays unconscious, that you get influences unconsciously, take them in and they come out without knowing that you have it as a treasure.

Susan Kouguell Speaks with ‘UNREST’ Documentary Director Jennifer Brea and Producer Lindsey Dryden

December 2, 2017 / sucity / Comments Off

By: Susan Kouguell | November 30, 2017

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The feature documentary Unrest is poignant and personal, and educational without being didactic. It is indeed a personal journey about Jennifer Brea and approaches a medical mystery with an examination of science and medicine that is accessible and gripping. One of the most striking elements of this documentary is that one does not need to be directly affected with ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome), to appreciate this film.

I had the opportunity to interview director Jennifer Brea via Skype and meet producer Lindsey Dryden in person. They were so generous with their time; their passion, not only about educating viewers about ME but also how the film evolved, the specifics about the writing process, collaboration, fundraising, and more, underscored their generosity of spirit.

About UNREST and Jennifer Brea

Jennifer Brea is an independent documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has an AB
from Princeton University and was a PhD student at Harvard, until sudden illness left her bedridden. In the aftermath, she rediscovered her first love, film. An activist for invisible disabilities and chronic illness, she co-founded a global advocacy network, #MEAction and is a TED Talker.

Jennifer Brea was 28 and working on her PhD at Harvard and months away from marrying the love of her life when she gets a mysterious fever that leaves her bedridden and looking for answers. Disbelieved by doctors yet determined to live, she turns her camera on herself and discovers a hidden world of millions confined to their homes and bedrooms by ME. At its core, Unrest is a love story. Together, Jen and her new husband, Omar, must find a way to build a life and fight for a cure.

‘What happens when you have a disease doctors can’t diagnose?’

Jennifer gave the highest-rated talk at the 2016 TED Summit in Banff, Canada, the first ever TED Talk about ME. It launched in January 2017 and has been viewed more that 1 million times and translated into more than 25 languages.

Awards for Unrest include a Special Jury Prize for editing (Sundance Film Festival), Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature, (River Run) Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature (Nashville Film Festival and Illuminate Award (Sheffield Doc/Fest). Unrest also has a companion VR piece which premiered at Tribeca and won the Jury Award for best VR at Sheffield/DocFest.

Brea with her husband Omar

Interview via Skype with Jennifer Brea

KOUGUELL: Tell me about your writing process for this film. How did you determine the structure for the film and did you work from any type of script or outline?

BREA: There are three layers of writing in this film: there is the actual story structure that is essentially the collaging of found words; the scripting of the dialogue from interviews or the dialogue that’s happening in scenes; and the voiceover that can be written over and over again. We didn’t have a script per se, but it started with a storyboard. I knew the structure of the film even before we started shooting.

Brea went on to discuss seeing Debora Hoffman’s multi-character documentary Long Night’s Journey Into Day and how it influenced the structure of Unrest. (Hoffman is also an executive producer of Unrest.)

BREA: I found it worked so well because rather than spending a lot of time trying to figure out who everyone was and trying to connect with them, you’ve already had the chance to really spend time with them in their specific world, before moving on.

We knew that my story was going to be the through line and glue, and figuring out what that meant took many months and iterations. The way the film works is that the stories are ordered by tragedy in a way, ordered to create a rising action and rising complication. We always asked ourselves: ‘Why is this story in the film?’ ‘Why and where is Jen in this moment in the evolution of her overall arc?’ With the other writing, I would write some very bad temp lines that editor Kim Roberts could cut to and based on what she cut, I rewrote, and once we laid down music then that would change things. As we added different layers, we kept rewriting again and again.

SK: Unrest opens up the conversation not only about ME but also patients with chronic illnesses and the response by medical practitioners without finger-pointing.

JB: I wanted to create a film that could start a broader conversation and that could reach beyond the patient community; that meant a lot of different things the way we were telling the story.

When I see documentaries that are polemic, they can play a role in mobilizing people who already agree with you and people who are already prone to be mobilized. That can be a fine goal, but for me with ‘Unrest’ and my own sensibilities, I wanted to leave some room for the audience to interpret the film and come to their own conclusions about what certain things mean or what should be done.

It’s a delicate balance. I’ve seen observational films about social issues that dip into a world and don’t give you any context, and it’s frustrating. I want to see what is actually happening; it’s not enough just to know it happens yet at the same time there can be too much taking the viewer’s hand by saying, this is what you need to think about. I didn’t want to do either. I wanted to have a point of view, which the film has, but also leaves some room for interpretation.

Ruby and Jessica

Brea and I discussed the story that takes place in Denmark and how Brea approached Per Fink, one of the subjects of the film whose vocal oppositional of the ME diagnosis offers another side of the medical debate.

BREA: We asked Per Fink: What did he think was a fair representation of himself? What is it that he truly thinks? We didn’t need to alter it or distort it; we could just have him speak for himself. That is what we tried to do in every situation to let people speak for themselves and tell what we thought was the truth about whatever everyone’s prospective was on their lives.

SK: You successfully found a balance incorporating several devices (voice-over narration, cinéma vérité, and interviews) which can be over-utilized or distracting in many documentaries. Each device you used had a reason to be there. Let’s talk about this.

JB: The question for me was how do you use it and use it intentionally and for what reason. I knew that things needed to be explained, otherwise people would get lost in a way that would detract from the film. The narration is about bringing you inside this internal space that would have been impossible to access otherwise.

When it comes to the interviews with other subjects, they are not talking head interviews. They are actually very intimate conversations with me, so it is very motivated; that is the way I’m able to connect remotely with people. What I’m asking them is not just to reveal their own lives; I’m asking them to reveal their lives for the purpose to try to understand what is happening to me. So everything is related back to me, the structure to the film.

Each of the stories has its own set tone. It’s very easy to make Ron Davis’s story a kind of science mystery story, it was easy to make Karina Hansen’s story a kind of thriller –each story had its own genre set point and that would never have worked. Trying to find a tone for each of these very different stories in order to have them feel that they were part of the same film was one of the big challenges. What made it work is that every time we were coming back to that well of the personal; the why and the intention, and the why do we need to be here question.

Script EXTRA: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker Joe Berlinger and ‘Intent to Destroy’

Jen and Omar

Final Words

JB: I started off very angry before making the film, fueling the investigation. I started over time to eventually forgive and empathize with doctors and ended up on the side of it. Doctors haven’t been given the tools and training to properly handle this illness. What doctors’ practice is from the education they receive. The system is failing fundamentally. Most people do the best they can.

I met with Lindsey Dryden at a café near the Jacob Burns Film Center; the night before she presented a Q & A following the screening of Unrest at the Burns Center.

Lindsey Dryden

ABOUT LINDSEY DRYDEN, PRODUCER

An award-winning Creative Producer and Director, and founder of Little By Little Films, Dryden began her career in British TV documentaries (BBC, Channel 4, History Channel) before moving into independent films for cinema. Her acclaimed work as a Director includes Lost and Sound (SXSW) and Close Your Eyes And Look At Me (True/False), and as a Producer Little Ones (nominated for a producing award at Underwire) and Unrest (Sundance). She makes intimate, warm and surprising films about the body and the arts, most recently for Tate’s Queer British Art exhibition. A recent Filmmaker-In-Residence at JBFC, and a Fellow of Guiding Lights, IFP and HotDocs Forum, she is also a Lecturer in Film.

KOUGUELL: How did you come to work with Jen?

DRYDEN: I’ve worked with Jen now for about 3 ½ years. My background is as a director and producer in the UK. I work often on films about the body; I’m interested in the human body, the female body, how they change and the unexpected things that can happen and how one copes with that. Jen was looking for a co-producer to work on the UK story with Jessica, the young woman in the film. She contacted various documentary organizations and festivals, and I think it was the Sheffield Documentary festival, which is our biggest documentary festival, who recommended me to her.

Jen had already done an extraordinary amount of work on her own and with a small team. She did a Kickstarter; she set out to raise $50K to make this film and raised over $200K. She realized there is a huge audience waiting for this story and so she was able to expand her team.

SK: Tell me about the filmmaking process and how the film evolved.

LD: Jen would shoot one day a month and the rest of the month she would be in bed recovering from that one day. She started using this amazing system where she could be in her bed and she could film people using Skype, so we would mount a teleprompter underneath the lens, and it would reflect Jen’s face onto the lens so when people looked at the camera they could see her; she could be anywhere in the world, and in her case, it was in bed. She started interviewing people that way.

Jen had a really strong vision for the film and the story, and the approach from the very beginning. I came on board because I saw a filmmaker who never made a film before, but she absolutely knew what she was doing and had huge skills as a director. I had a lot of faith about where the story was going and a lot of people felt the same way. Sundance came on board early on with development money. The Kickstarter campaign demonstrated to other parties that there was a real story here and that combined with Jen as a presence, she is a force that is undeniable.

Can a person with this type of disability make a film, and the answer is always yes. And it grew; Ruth Ann Harnish was one of the earliest people who gave financial support.

SK: The credit of producer can be defined in different ways. In your case, how would you define your role on this film?

LD: I would define myself as a creative producer. My role is a lot about relationships with contributors, with subjects, identifying an amazing team and crew to work with, and leading that crew when we are filming in the field, as fellow Producer Patricia E. Gillespie did with the film’s North American stories, and as Co-Producer Anne Troldtoft Hjorth did in Denmark. Then it’s leading negotiations when it comes to who we want to work with and how much we can afford, and finding good fits with Jen as a director, like editors and composers. It’s also about making special, impossible things happen, like getting a hospital to allow us to put lights, cameras and cinematographers in their therapy pool!

Also, the part that I love is the editorial shaping of the film that develops over time. There’s a constant rewriting in documentary: This is where we are, this is where we hope to be. Okay, this is where we are now, this is where we’re going to go next, and that process.

My role wasn’t particularly connected to fundraising, which people often assume is a producer’s only job. Jen is the most extraordinary fundraiser and also a producer of the film herself. My role was also about distribution strategy – that’s kind of my baby. Traditionally, you might hand over a film to a distributor when it’s finished, and they hopefully do what they say they’ll do with it, but every strand of distribution is so different and our audience is so specific and important to us, and there are political sensitivities in the countries we are campaigning in. We knew from the beginning that we didn’t want to hand over that to one company who may only specialise in one area.

We did a lot of festivals around the world and a theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco in September, and the UK in October, and now it’s on iTunes, Amazon, and it will be broadcast on PBS in January 2018. What’s so great about that is that we’ll be able to do screening parties. We can engage with audiences who are home, and connect them with other audiences in other homes, and for a film like this and a community like this, who are often bed bound or homebound, that’s very exciting.

SK: Tell me about your unique collaboration and writing process.

LD: So much we did was remote and that process is certainly challenging. We started with Emiliano Battistaanan editor in the UK, and they were editing remotely together.

Jen always had a strong vision for the stories. The stories make sense because they were always answering questions that Jen was asking about her own life and her own experience. So you have that narrative spine of Jen’s experience changing over time; her questions, her needs, her relationships shifting, those questions and needs naturally leading to the people she talked to and got close to, who became the main characters. They were in place from very early on.

The writing process happened most intensely between Jen and editor Kim Roberts, and also our amazing creative advisor and executive producer Debbie Hoffmann, who also has ME. What’s incredible about Debbie is the narrative contribution she made and support she gave Jen from the very beginning; she was the first person on board, and you can’t really beat editorial experience like that. That would involve her at home on Skype, us in our various houses, talking through the narrative, talking about cuts, giving notes and giving feedback, which is a traditional way to work but we weren’t necessarily in the same room or the same country.

Jen and Kim went to the Sundance story and edit lab and it was after that the film became something that was good, to something that was bigger than itself.

Jen’s Wall of Science

SK: Many documentaries tend to make issues black and white, which ‘Unrest’ does not do.

LD: The film isn’t about a network of doctors who want to get into people’s way; they don’t have the resources or the time to treat people appropriately. It was extremely important for ME people around the world, some are considered malingerers, and critical of doctors, they are perceived to be a pain because they are asking for help, but they are asking for support. We were extremely mindful of that particularly in the UK where it is a huge political issue; the reputation of people with ME is horrendous. So we were mindful of not making a film that could be accused of that. There are so many good people who want to do good things. It was about pointing out the issues and injustices.

Many people said why the film didn’t end on a more hopeful note. Jen’s response was that if you tidy up the film at the end and it’s optimistic, then everyone has an easy way out when actually people have to do something right now; this isn’t fixed, this isn’t over, this isn’t better. Those ways of shaping the narrative are very important; to offer understanding of why and how things are going on, because that’s how we move forward and address them.

The film and our campaign is not about saying to doctors, ‘you’re really bad.’ It’s about saying, ‘this is what harms patients, this is what help patients, and we would really like to help you get the resources to help the patients more effectively’ and that’s in the campaign.

SK: The last few weeks in particular, a great deal of media attention has been on many women speaking out not only about sexual harassment, but also about women’s voices being heard.

LD: I said at the film’s premiere and continue to say each time I introduce the film: ‘This is a moment where we need to listen, and listen to women. We need to listen to people who tell us they’re being honest, who are telling us their stories, we need to hear them, we need to take action.

SK: Your advice for documentary filmmakers and any final words of wisdom?

LD: I think it’s really important to consider ‘Unrest’ as a piece of cinema and not just a piece of advocacy. I would love if there is a homebound would-be filmmaker reading this article who feels inspired by what’s possible because it is possible. There are organizations who have been through the process with us, who know how to support and fund and resource incredible storytelling voices who don’t necessarily have a traditional experience of the world. How many people are there in the world like Jen with this tremendous talent that we haven’t seen yet? That’s what I want to spend my time with in cinema on the screen. I hope ‘Unrest’ is part of a movement that supports that.

Learn more about the film and to view Brea’s TED talk here.

Su-City Pictures East, LLC

Screenplay & Film Consulting By Susan Kouguell

Category: DOCUMENTARY (page 1 of 4)

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INTERVIEW: Born to Be Documentary Director Tânia Cypriano

Filmmaker Rodney Evans Discusses His New Documentary Vision Portraits

Filmmaker Rodney Evans Discusses His New Documentary Vision Portraits

Susan Kouguell Interviews “Searching for Ingmar Bergman” Director Margarethe von Trotta

INTERVIEW: Searching for Ingmar Bergman Director Margarethe von Trotta

About Searching for Ingmar Bergman

About Margarethe von Trotta

The Interview

Susan Kouguell Speaks with ‘UNREST’ Documentary Director Jennifer Brea and Producer Lindsey Dryden

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