filmmakers

33. Sabaah Folayan: Everything Is Practice /  by Elaine Sheldon

Sabaah Folayan is an activist and storyteller who illuminates the humanity, resilience and beauty in the struggle of communities as they mobilize and fight for justice. She merged her dedication to human rights and a newfound passion for film with Whose Streets?, a feature documentary chronicling the experience of Ferguson community members after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Sabaah and her co-director Damon Davis are premiering Whose Streets? at Sundance 2017, but this episode’s conversation took place in October of 2015, when Sabaah was still in the depths of production and stepped away to pitch the film at Camden International Film Festival’s Points North Forum in Maine. We talk with Sabaah about moving to Ferguson, working to understand the complexities of the situation amongst a sea of sensational headlines, the unique education she had between living off the land in Hawaii and living in divergent Los Angeles neighborhoods, and the forever valuable lesson she learned as a basketball player, “Everything you do is practice for the next time you do it.” The music in this episode is off Velvet and Bone, a new album by a past MusicMaker, Stag Hare.

sabaah.jpg
 

MUSIC in this episode is off a new album titled Velvet and Bone by past She Does MusicMaker and friend, Stag Hare. Willow (formerly Zara) is the MusicMaker behind Stag Hare and was featured in Episode 22.5. Listen to and buy her music via Bandcamp and visit her website and Facebook.

“Space has been so privatized. We’ve been so socialized to be individuals and be on our own and our lives are our own little bubbles. I think that it was such a relief for people to just lock arms and say that ‘I’m feeling this too.’”

Related LINKS:

 

 

 

 

 

CLIPS used in show: 

CREDITS:

  • Produced by Sarah Ginsburg & Elaine Sheldon
  • Sound design by Billy Wirasnik
  • Illustration by Christine Cover

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26. Charlotte Cook: Look on Behalf of the Audience /  by Elaine Sheldon

Charlotte Cook is a documentary film programmer, curator, producer and co-founder of Field of Vision. Charlotte was the Director of Programming at Hot Docs film festival for four years before she left in May of 2015 to start Field of Vision, a visual journalism film unit that aims to commission 40 to 50 original episodic and individual short non-fiction films each year. Charlotte co-founded Field of Vision with Academy Award-winning director of “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras, and filmmaker and founder of Cinema Eye Honors Aj Schnack. In this episode, we talk about Charlotte’s journey to programming Hot Docs, including her time at The Times, BBC Storyville, and The Frontline Club. Charlotte also walks us through what Field of Vision is looking for and how you can be part of it.

“I’ve always hated the term gatekeeper or tastemaker or anything like that. I always say the filmmakers drive everything and I think there’s this weird misconception about that. We are always at the mercy of the filmmakers. And that was something I really always tried to get through at HotDocs, ‘It’s not your honor to screen with us, it’s the other way around.’”
— Charlotte Cook

RELATED LINKS

CLIPS USED IN SHOW

Name: Charlotte Cook

Current City: New York

Current Gig: Co-Creator and Executive Producer of Field of Vision

What are you listening to now? I find it impossible to pick favorites but the two songs that I listen to the most, because they soothe my soul, are "The Weight of My Words" a Four Tet Remix by Kings of Convenience and "Girlfriend" by Phoenix. And my favourite album of last year was Jamie xx, "In Colour."

What film/book/show/piece of media changed you? One of my roommates at university was working on an art project and became obsessed with the documentaries "Party Monster: The Shockumentary" by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and The Legend of Leigh Bowery by Charles Atlas. He would watch them everyday and I became sucked in by them while I was helping to photograph his work. They were not only my introduction to seeing how non-fiction could really speak to someone and mean so much to them, but also to documentaries that were outside of the more informative, issue films, and spoke to different subcultures and voices. It began my path of ferociously watching non-fiction.

"Fourteen Days in May" by Paul Hamann opened my eyes to the power of documentary and "Portrait of Jason" remains my favorite documentary of all time. The exploration of performance and representation of reality and storytelling is still very powerful to me.

I've always been a huge Steven Soderbergh fan. His use of color in "Out of Sight" was something that really made me fall in love with exploring how directors use visuals in storytelling. I will always pay attention to the work Kyle Cooper makes, I find it fascinating and inspiring.

Who is your career role model? I've always really admired how Ben Hammersley has navigated his career. From the diversity of ways he works, in different mediums, and being someone who is very multi-faceted. But really my role models are those who are committed to supporting, and advancing the medium or field they work in. Whether it's helping to give other people opportunities, creating discussion or building new avenues or outlets for those in their field.

What is a tool you can't live without? Notebook and Pen. I write by hand, every day, for various reasons. I still find nothing more useful, productive or cathartic.

How do you take your coffee/tea? Milky, two sugars in both, which is sacrilegious for most of my fellow British people.

CREDITS:

  • Produced by Sarah Ginsburg & Elaine Sheldon
  • Sound design by Billy Wirasnik
  • Illustration by Christine Cover

MUSIC: in this episode is by Alexandria Hall of tooth ache. Listen and purchase her music on bandcamp! 

 

Featured songs: Skin, Lazarus, Sediment, Guilt, Wild Horses, Not Even The Moon, Body Heat

Featured songs: Skin, Lazarus, Sediment, Guilt, Wild Horses, Not Even The Moon, Body Heat

6. Lina Srivastava: Hashtags Don’t Make Change /  by Elaine Sheldon

Lina Srivastava is an impact strategist who combines media, technology, art and storytelling for social transformation. She has assisted filmmakers (“Born Into Brothels,” “Inocente,” “Who is Dayani Cristal”) in positioning their media to have meaningful impact. She also provides design consultation to social impact organizations, including UNESCO, the World Bank and UNICEF.  She practiced law for four years, before transitioning to the social impact field. She shares how she has helped filmmakers create impact campaigns to make real change, including providing clean water for a community in Honduras. Whether you are plugged into the impact metrics conversation, or feel alienated by it, this episode is for you. Lina breaks down how to catalyze and amplify social impact through creative media and warns of pitfalls she sees in the industry, shattering unrealistic expectations and pressure put on filmmakers to make change. 

“Newsworthiness, in terms of documentary, is a really good standard. But a higher standard is ethics and accuracy. And when you’re thinking about social impact documentary, I go that step further in saying, if I’m documenting a particular social issue, I’m going to have to figure out what I can do. Some people think that documentarians are aligned with journalists, and you shouldn’t interfere. I don’t come out of that tradition. I’m an activist, I’m like, ‘We have to do something. We can’t just hijack somebody’s story.’”
— Lina Srivastava

RELATED LINKS

Lina on Twitter

Regarding Humanity on Facebook

Lina’s Blog

Lina's Current Projects: Priya’s Shakti, Who Is Dayani Cristal?, Traveling While Black.

Lina curated list on MIT’s Docubase

Lina on Huffington Post

Name: Lina Srivastava

Current City: New York

What are you listening to now? Radio Gladys Palmera, The Avener, and Cassandra Wilson are in rotation right now.

What film/book/show/piece of media changed you? This is a hard question to answer because there have been so many. When I was in grade school, we used to be assigned Newbery Award winning books. I especially remember A Wrinkle in Time, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, and The Westing Game. They were mind-expanding, sparking a young and active imagination. As I grew up, Things Fall Apart, 100 Years of Solitude, and Pride and Prejudice did. In the past few years or so, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, Nicole Krauss, Hilary Mantel, Nayyirah Waheed, Colum McCann, and Aleksander Hemon have all opened my eyes. So did the film The Act of Killing. And of course Who Is Dayani Cristal?

Who is your career role model? Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as the Director of R&D at MoMA. A pioneer and innovator who stands above the crowd in a (male-dominated) field of pioneers and innovators.

What is a tool you can't live without? My cell phone. Pure and simple.

How do you drink/take your coffee/tea? Hot, milk and sugar

What's your spirit animal? Butterfly

CREDITS

PRODUCED by Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg

SOUND DESIGN by Billy Wirasnik

MUSIC FEATURED IN SHOW: 

Learn about our featured MusicMaker, Ana Karina DaCosta, here.

The Derevolutions: 

  • I Feel A Goo World

  • Automate Your Soul

  • Take it to the Hoop

  • Living in the Not World

  • Crazy Janey

28 Degrees Taurus:

  • From Part to Part, All the Stars in Your Eyes, Hearts Were Made

  • Off album Underwater Love Sequences EP: Circle & Cross

  • Off album How Do You Like Your Love: Moments, Phases & Timing

  • Off album Mirrors & Gates: Heart Attack

CLIPS FEATURED IN SHOW:

5. Kara Oehler: Being Really Internetty /  by Elaine Sheldon

It’s difficult to sum up what Kara Oehler does in a single title. The process quickly turns into a hyphenated chain of words--documentarian-radio producer-tech founder-interactive media producer-entrepreneur-academic. We chatted with the co-founder of Zeega and GoPop--the latter which was recently acquired by Buzzfeed--about her early influences, growing up in the woods of Indiana, starting communities like UnionDocs Collaborative Studio and metaLAB at Harvard, living out of her car to document Main Streets across America, and being a female in the tech and startup world. Come along for the ride, it’s a lot of fun.

“To start a genre, and to form a community, you have to make up all the words for it. There are a lot of words like that, interactive documentary is one. There was point where that combination of words had no search results on Google. But then you start writing about it, talking about it at conferences and then it becomes a genre.”
— Kara Oehler, co-founder of Zeega & GoPop

RELATED LINKS

Kara on Twitter

Buzzfeed Acquires Go-Pop

Zeega Storytelling Platform

Union Docs Collaborative

Mapping Main Street Interactive Documentary

Kara’s Audio Documentaries: Third Coast Festival 

Matter VC 

Kara as “Woman Celebrates 4th Year Of Weaning Self Off Facebook“ via The Onion

How to Pronounce GIF

Who is your career role model? I've got an incredible group of passionate friends and family who are all doing amazing work. I get inspiration from them every day. And my parents.

What is a tool you can't live without? I love my Sound Devices 722. I've had it since 2005 and it creates the most beautiful recordings. And this winter, my LL Bean duck boots have been clutch.

How do you take your coffee? At home: french press, black. At a fancy coffee shop: latte.

What's your spirit animal? Llamacorn (Llama + Unicorn)

Name: Kara Oehler

Current City: Brooklyn, NY

Date of Birth: 1978

What are you listening to now? I'm loving the Radiotopia podcasts, Gimlet podcasts, and Invisibilia. I find out about new releases from Other Music's email list and listen to a lot of WFMU.

What film/book/show/piece of media changed you? I'm a huge admirer of South African artist William Kentridge. The first piece I saw of his was a work called Black Box / Chambre Noir. It was a study for his artistic direction of a staging of the opera The Magic Flute, employing charcoal drawings, mechanical moving puppets and projections within a black box. He used this medium to tell the story of the Herero genocide in Namibia under German colonial rule in the early 1900s. The piece completely took me by surprise. I sat in front of it for a couple hours and wept. In 2010, I interviewed Kentridge and asked him about approaching subjects like genocide or apartheid in this way. Here's what he said:

“To be human at all is to say, we need to forget a huge amount. But hold on to a tiny amount. But there’s some band between remembering and forgetting in which we can survive and exist. And I suppose the drawings in one sense take that narrow band and move within it and say, this is the band within human experience.”

I think it’s often the job of storytelling to try and find that band - that entry point for people to be able to take in information and question their own role as a witness or participant, or to just simply connect with a stranger's story. And this is something that Kentridge does with so much thought, emotion and skill.

CREDITS

PRODUCED by Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg

SOUND DESIGN by Billy Wirasnik

CLIPS FEATURED IN SHOW:

Suzuki Method 

This American Life #277, Apology 

Korva Coleman (NPR)

“And I Walked” Third Coast

2008 Presidential Debate 

1. Katja Blichfeld: I'm A Functional Stoner With A Vimeo Deal /  by Elaine Sheldon

Katja Blichfeld is the brains behind Vimeo’s popular new web series “High Maintenance," which features New Yorkers in all their strange glory. Katja and her husband write, direct and produce the show and they recently were awarded a 2015 Writers Guild Award for their episode "Rachel." But Katja's first love was casting. In 2014, she won an Emmy for her casting on 30 Rock. But success didn't happen overnight for Katja. In this interview, she shares the ups and downs--and all the delightful moments in between--of her journey. 

UPDATE: High Maintenance has been picked up by HBO!

“Me following my intuition and me following my instincts has never not paid off. I feel like I’ve lived four complete lives in my 35 years. It’s been a lot of my major life decisions, but they’ve always been very driven from what’s in my heart, and they’ve always paid off.”
— Katja Blichfeld, creator of High Maintenance

RELATED LINKS

HM on Vimeo 

HM Website

HM Episode "Rachel" featuring Katja

Katja’s blog

Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces of 2013

Current City: Brooklyn, NY

DOB: 1978

What are you listening to right now? Marc Maron's WTF podcast - the Jenny Slate episode

What piece of media opened your eyes? Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film "Festen"

Who is your career role model? I'm still kind of looking for one!

What is a tool you can't live without? My Vitamix blender

How do you take your coffee? Black

Who is your spirit animal? RuPaul Charles

CREDITS

PRODUCED by Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg

SOUND DESIGN by Billy Wirasnik