Glassbreaker Films: Support for Women Documentarians
Posted on January 13, 2017 at 3:38 pm
The Center for Investigative Reporting announced today the launch of Glassbreaker Films, an ambitious initiative intended to support women in documentary filmmaking. The program is made possible by a generous grant from the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation.
In its first year, Glassbreaker Films is launching three initiatives to create and support a network of women, each at distinct stages in their development as documentary filmmakers:
Featured filmmakers – Glassbreaker Films is bringing together five accomplished filmmakers to produce a documentary series about women taking control, taking power and taking chances.
Filmmakers-in-residence – A new, full-time digital video team – led by a senior digital video producer and staffed by three early-career filmmakers, each completing a 10-month residency with Glassbreaker Films – is creating short films for web and mobile audiences.
BridgeUp: Film – This educational project will provide training and mentorship in journalism and visual storytelling to a small and diverse cohort of high school girls in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Trailer: Harold and Lillian, A Hollywood Love Story
Posted on January 11, 2017 at 3:44 pm
Anyone who loves movies — and anyone who enjoys a love story — will have a wonderful time at “Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story.” It’s a love story in two sense of the word. It is the story of a deeply connected marriage of 60 years and it is the story of a love for the world of film.
You know the scene in “The Birds” with Tippi Hedren in the phone booth? And the one where all the birds are ominously perched at the playground? The movie was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but it was Harold Michelson, the storyboard artist, who imagined the way those scenes would look. He also came up with the idea for one of the most iconic shots in film history, this one:
Copyright United Artists 1969
His wife Lillian headed up research for several different studios. When the “Scarface” producers needed to know what a drug kingpin’s home looked like, they came to her. When the “Fiddler on the Roof” team needed to know what shtetl girls wore for underwear, they came to her. And she always found out.
The story of how they met and fell in love is worth a movie of its own. While they almost never received screen credit for their contributions, Dreamworks did pay tribute to their decades of essential work in “Shrek.” These characters are named Harold and Lillian in their honor.
Interview: Stephen Apkon and Marcina Hales on “Disturbing the Peace,” a Moving and Inspiring Documentary about Israelis and Palestinians Working Together
Posted on November 17, 2016 at 3:28 pm
The song from “South Pacific” gets it right. Fear, bigotry, don’t come naturally. “You have to be carefully taught.” The moving and inspiring new documentary, “Disturbing the Peace,” tells the story of people who were “carefully taught” to hate each other, Israelis and Palestinians, but have learned that they share more than they could imagine, especially when it comes to to devastating grief and a deep sense of responsibility for causing grief to others. I first saw the film at Ebertfest last spring and have not stopped thinking about it. So I was especially grateful to get a chance to speak with the filmmakers, Stephen Apkon and Marcina Hales.
The title of the film refers to the irony that the activists portrayed in the film are often arrested at their non-violent demonstrations for “disturbing the peace” when what they are trying to do is send a message of peace to stop the killing that has been going on for decades. And it is a reference to the charges filed against Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and others who have protested to make a more just world. “The really good question,” Apkon said, “is ‘Whose peace are they disturbing?’ That was a really profound one for us. And it also speaks to the idea that the first peace we need to disturb is our own and to really challenge the stories and the narratives that we accept as reality. One of the things one of the characters in the film told us that is not in the movie but he often talks about how if you want to grow up in a society with the mythology of the hero you have to create the villain. Hollywood films don’t exist without the hero and the villain and so we constantly do that within our own minds.” Hales added, “One of the narratives that we have to really pay attention to, to begin with, is the narrative of there being a hero and then a villain. I think that that is one of the ones that is predominant. You’ll see it in a narrative right here in America and all across the world.” Apkon said If you ask how those narratives get conveyed, it strikes me that it’s less in what we’re taught didactically than the soup that we swim in. I remember I was living in the region and my daughter was five years old at the time and she went off to kindergarten knowing not a word of Hebrew and some girl followed her all around the schoolyard and became her friend. And a few months into it my daughter was fluent in Hebrew. Her friend was sitting at dinner with her one night and she looks at her and said in Hebrew, ‘Who taught you to speak Hebrew?’ So my daughter, she looks at her and she said, ‘You did.’ She had no awareness of learning. She just absorbed it. So we pick up these narratives in the air that we breathe. It’s how memes are perpetuated and communicated throughout our society. ‘You can’t trust them.’ You do not know who taught you. It is all around you so it feels like the truth. It is not just in a book. It’s in our songs, it’s in our culture, it’s in what we say at the dinner table, it’s in our media.”
Hales said that one of the things they most wanted the film to do was “to actually get below the stories, the content and actually look at how it functions because it functions on a lot of levels. It functions on the individual level, just take a look at our own lives, and it functions at different levels having to do with our cities and our towns and in our political systems everywhere. So if we can see and show how it works, once you know you cannot not know, and it becomes apparent and we can look for them and actually create a different story.”
The film had its premiere at Ebertfest and was given the festival’s first-ever Ebertfest Humanitarian Award. Apkon said, “She was actually one of our first disturbers of the peace in a sense that, we were over in Israel finishing the edit and had an experience over there that we both wrote about in social media. Chaz immediately picked up on it and wrote us a letter saying, ‘When can I see this film?’ We literally finished the film around a window where Chaz could see the it. And so having her turn around and having at Ebertfest, having the courage to do that before it had been in any other festival was huge and she has really been an amazing.”
One especially affecting scene in the film is an argument, thoughtful, not heated, but reflecting real pain felt by both of them. I asked how they were able to film that very intimate conversation, which feels as though the couple is unaware of any cameras. Hales said that kind of honesty was their goal. “The idea was to get people comfortable enough to actually feel that vulnerability, that authenticity, that real conversation, and it is being able to hold that space of confidence and trust and admiration that Steve does.” The wife in that conversation was the last of the people in that film to see it, and Hales and Apkon were apprehensive about how she would respond to it. “When the film ended she was very emotional and she was really thankful that the film had been made. There was a sense of a tremendous relief in her ability to express where her angers came from, where her hurt came from. And as she talked about how her mother raised her with this hope that her children wouldn’t know an occupation and now here she is, her children are growing up that way. She wishes the same for them but understands the realities are different that they have never known a day not under occupation. And I think that’s a reality that very few can even imagine.”
Apkon said, “Two questions that come up quite often. First, ‘Is it Pro-Israeli or is it Pro-Palestinian?’ Our answer is yes. It’s pro humanity. As one person says at the end of the film, ‘Each person’s freedom and dignity is based on the other person’s.’ So we want for the other what we want for ourselves. The second thing is this question that comes up around balance people would often watch the film and they would be asking themselves especially in the first half of the film, ‘Is it balanced?’ We always look at that from our own cultural framework. For us it’s not a question of balance; it’s really the question of integration. The question is, can we integrate? Can we not look at the balance and the extreme but can we recognize our capacity for both extreme? Can we recognize as says in the film, “When we first find each other we found we have something in common, our willingness to kill people we don’t know” and she thought in essence we find that we both share the desire for peace?”
Interview: Gotham Chopra on the Audience Network Series “The Religion of Sports”
Posted on November 7, 2016 at 3:33 pm
Gotham Chopra talked to me about his new series for the Audience Network, “The Religion of Sports,” created with New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and NFL Hall of Famer Michael Strahan and premiering November 15, 2016.
Have you always been a big sports fan?
Yes, I have. I grew up in Boston Massachusetts during the 80’s and 90’s and so I’ve just always been a big Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins fan, really a diehard fan of those teams but I would say in general a lover of all sports.
It’s so different being a Red Sox fan now than it was prior to 2004. Not that I would ever go back but there was a sort of magic about that cursed existence. It created a sort of community that is very different than what it is now. They won three championships since then and they are one of those elite institutions now. They have become the Catholic Church where they were sort of the scrappy cults before then.
So what is it that makes sports so visceral and so tribal?
Yes, I think what’s unique about sports is that like religion they create a sense of community, a sense of belonging. Wrigley Field is a sacred space, like it’s a holy land. People go on pilgrimages.
So everything that we associate with religion actually happens in sports. Whereas traditionally religion requires faith and you have to believe in this and you have to do that and they have this dogma and everything, sports requires attendance. If you watch the World Series whether you are a Cleveland fan or you’re a Cubs fan, a miracle is going to happen. You just have to show up and I think that is pretty unique to sports. It is not a metaphor, it is not an allegory, it is a spiritual thing and even people who don’t aren’t even fans, they participate. That last game of the World Series people watched from all walks of life because it’s bigger than sports. That’s why I am very much a true believer. Being a fan is sort of something greater than yourself, it’s really is.
Do you think that there are cultural differences or temperament differences between say fans of baseball, football, basketball, hockey?
Yes, there definitely are. For sure it’s no different than politics, as we are watching some other holy war going on right now. If you come from different cultural backgrounds you are drawn to certain things. Part of what’s been fascinating about working on this series is I’ve been able to explore sports that I never really knew much about. So rodeo and NASCAR and stuff like that. It’s been fascinating to watch those.
One of the episodes is about a Scottish football league. The two city teams in Glasgow the Celtic and Rangers, one which is predominantly Catholic in terms of their fan base and one one predominantly Protestant. In this country let’s there are big rivalries but when you go to a place like that they say, “Wait, hold on, first let us talk about the Crusades, then let’s talk about the Reformation.” You have to go back several centuries to understand the roots of this rivalry. So that certainly has its different cultural complexion than what we necessarily see here.
That being said, there are also certain things that are very similar across all sports, not just from the fans’ perspective but from the athlete’s perspective.
What makes somebody a great athlete?
First of all, certainly they have a gifts, physical gifts, athletic gifts. I’ve been fortunate to work with Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady and David Ortiz, some of the most leading athletes in their respective sports, and I can see there is a competitiveness, there is a commitment, there is a discipline, there is a ambition to be the greatest that I think definitely unites the people at the top. Oftentimes you see with the best athletes that they are not the most physically gifted. There are guys who are and girls who are physically stronger, faster or that are more athletic or whatever but for whatever reason these ones that are so committed to their craft, the ones who are so disciplined no matter the consequence, that is what puts them over the top. And again to sort of spiritualize it there is a sort of almost like a martial arts discipline, even if you watch sort of Kobe Bryant go through a practice by himself it’s a monk in a monastery. I mean there is a routine there that is spiritual that I think is really admirable for me.
What were some of the biggest technological and production challenges of making this series?
We’ve been fortunate and a lot of credit goes to my executive producing partners, Michael Strahan and Tom Brady, you have guys like that who can help you get access but getting access both with athletes and but also in leagues can be very challenging. How do you get on the track at the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR? Great storytelling depends on characters and in this case access and so that can be an incredible challenge. I think even once you get it because these are, even these more niche sports are so covered to death.
All of these athletes are used to cameras in their faces so trying to get something unique and true out of them can be challenging. And I think what I’ve been lucky about is that we tried to make this series less about just getting the biggest names in sports and instead it is very much about the culture around sports, and finding great fans around which you could tell their stories, those tend to be people who want to share their stories, who want to speak about why this thing is so important to them, that’s an incredible benefit.
Tell me about your project with David Ortiz.
I’ve been working with him all summer pretty much chronicling his last season. It’s a series for ESPN and they have run a number of digital shorts. I just drop in with him for 48 hours at a pivotal time in the season, so like opening day or his last series against the Yankees, stuff like that and just be with him as he was going through that.
And the greatest thing about the athletes especially at that level is like they physically can’t do it anymore even though David had an amazing year but they have to sort of give up something that they love as much as they ever did. I’m a filmmaker, you are a writer, we can kind of keep on doing this and get better at it and get passionate about it over and over again, pretty much for as long as we live. With athletes — I don’t even think David is 40 years old. They have to give it up and then what? And so I think it is fortunate to sort of be able to sort of chronicle a little bit of that over the last few months.
What have you learned about how people show their enthusiasm for teams and athletes?
People practice their faith in a lot of different ways. Attendance is probably the most common one but then of course the bigger the league the more difficult it is. It is super expensive to go to some of these games. Actually what I love is like going to the local dirt track in South Carolina on a Wednesday night. It’s the equivalent of going to the community church as opposed to sort of traveling to the Vatican, right? And you see people practicing their faith really at the grassroots level and so it’s inexpensive, it’s accessible, you can go touch the cars, you can really be a part of it, feel the dirt and again I’m not speaking in metaphors. You have to wash your clothes like eight times to get that dirt out once you come back from the race. So I think at the local level like our baseball episode is at the minor league level where the line between the athlete and the fan is a lot more blurred I guess that it necessarily is at the highest level, the professional level and I think for me to sort of be able to see the faith practiced at that level was pretty inspiring.
And superstition — when the Red Sox were in the World Series I couldn’t watch in a room I had to stand outside of my house and watch through the window holding my favorite baseball bat. There’s not a sports fan alive who doesn’t have some version of that, who wears only this jersey or eats only that food. The bigger the game, the bigger the superstition.
Some fan activities are totally ritualistic and the amazing thing about sports. There is a stereotype associated with the fans who paint their faces, that they come from a sort of economic class but I’ve seen deans of major universities do the same thing. You know they are the most sort of academic, intellectual people but then when they enter into this realm suddenly this tribe thing takes over and again they’re sitting side-by-side with people that they have nothing else in common with. I’ve not lived in Boston for years, like for actually more than half of my life, but I still go back every season, I try to go to an opening day or I go to a game or whatever and literally as I’m sitting there and listening, especially in like a political climate like this election, you listen to what people are talking about, I have nothing in common with these people except for this shared devotion to this thing and I think that’s a good thing. It’s fascinating to me, that sort of sense of belonging really cuts across everything.
