500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
If you are an activist, now is the time to make a film to let more people know about your cause, and if you’re a filmmaker, especially a documentary filmmaker, now is the time to become an activist. Why?
Many of us working in the visual/vision business have seen something happen in the last few years. It has changed everything about documentaries. Reality TV has become the dominant pop TV entertainment by borrowing documentary techniques. In order for a documentary to stand out today, it’s not enough for it to be informative. It has to be about something. It has to take a stand. It has to address larger issues. Or it’s toast. Bring on the meaning and speak to a tribe of people who care about your cause, or drown in the ocean of media washing up on our electronic shore. Standing out, and doing meaningful work, has never been more important than it is now.
Incubating powerful documentaries is the work of Film Independent’s 2011 Documentary Lab. This is a seven-week program giving creative feedback to Documentary Lab fellows on their works-in-progress. It happens every spring, and several of the directors and producers involved this year were kind enough to speak with me about what they’re working on.
The Light In Her Eyes promises to be a game-changer. The film covers a world rarely seen by outsiders by going inside a mosque in Damascus, where a woman is teaching the Qur’an and personal empowerment to other women. One of my first questions to the directors, Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix, was how can you put teaching the Qur’an and personal empowerment for women together in the same sentence, then alone in a film. Their answer revealed to me why more and more women are choosing Islam and joining the mosque movement throughout the Muslim world.
“There’s an entire generation of women who are becoming leaders within their Islamic communities,” Julia Meltzer said. “This is what is often referred to as the mosque movement, and it’s not just happening in Syria, it’s happening all over the Middle East.”
Laura Nix added, “I think women are choosing Islam because the mosque is a place where young people can have a voice.” In the West, “we don’t understand that in those societies there are not public places where people go and can talk about their needs and desires and expectations and hopes and dreams. The mosque offers a place for that.”
Julia Meltzer was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus in 2005-6, which was how she was introduced to Muslim culture in a way most of us Westerners never see. She’s made five award-winning documentary projects. Laura Nix, producer of The Yes Men Fix the World and many other documentaries, joins Julia in this journey into the heart of the mosque movement.
“We live in a country that has a problem with Islam,” Julia said. “There are clearly huge prejudices, huge biases, and an incredible amount of misinformation. So as filmmakers, I believe that what we’re doing is to give information about a culture so that people can change their perception.”
If you want to learn more about these issues and take action, check out the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
The Doc Lab has many other films it is nurturing, including Call Me Kuchu, which is following the fight for justice and freedom on the front lines of Africa’s gay rights movement. It has a website and it just started a funding campaign on Kickstarter.
Julia and Laura will finish The Light in Her Eyes this fall, and they’re aiming for a festival release next year.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Yadda yadda. Is that what you hear when someone is speaking? Or maybe it’s the trombone in those Charlie Brown specials. You know, when the parents or teachers talk: wah wah wah. If that’s the case, you’d suck as a documentary director.
Listening is an art. Ask any hostage negotiator, professional mediator or marriage counselor. I’ve been in the offices of a few back when Bush was president – not the hostage negotiators, just the marriage counselors. Their advice mostly is to listen to your partner complain until sap runs from your ears and your head catches on fire, and then you have to put out the fire with a cup of cold coffee and listen some more. (Note to self: I remember those marriage counseling sessions did not go so well.)
Still, there is remarkable power in telling your story. Director Heather Ross demonstrates this in her excellent film Girls on the Wall, which screened in Hollywood and will be seen on PBS stations. In the film, Heather interviews some really hard case inmates who happen to be girls. They talk about the robberies and murders they’ve committed. They tell stories of abuse and addiction. But mostly, they heal. This is the most remarkable part of the film: You become a witness to inner change, and that change is initiated by the act of storytelling. The women of the film tell their stories to Heather, and in a theater workshop they are attending in the lock up, and they are transformed into leaders, they get connected to their families, they experience emotions they’ve hitherto locked down tight.
Heather, like many good directors, becomes a catalyst for change, by simply holding listening space for the speaker. There’s a lot that goes into documentary work: stamina, an heroic undaunted strength in the face of challenge. But the biggest production skill just might be listening: You ask questions and you gotta hear what people are saying.
In Jacqueline Novogratz’ book “The Blue Sweater,” she tells the story of returning to Rwanda after the genocide and listening to survivors, sometimes for hours at a time. She witnessed how these survivors were able to move beyond a terrible inner hurt. She writes about how she empowered people just by listening to them.
On the SHELTER blog, the companion piece to a film we’re making about shelter, we’re started featuring interviews with people who are homeless or transitioning from homelessness. We’re also meeting the game-changers who are coming up with ways to address homelessness. As we do these interviews I can endorse Novogratz’ experience. Simply giving people the opportunity to talk empowers them. Why is it enough, then, just to be heard and acknowledged?
Freud figured that one out. At first, hypnosis was his preferred technique, and he soon found out that prone people were liberated from linear thought. Later, he dropped hypnosis, but kept the couch. He had discovered that talking was a powerful agent of change.
There’s a picture of Freud’s couch at the beginning of this post, and it looks pretty comfortable and kind of bohemian. If you want to see people change, and be lucky enough to get them in your film, you want to start with a comfortable couch, at least figuratively speaking. Then all you need to do is ask good questions and listen.
If you enjoyed this post you can subscribe by email or subscribe in an RSS reader. For more information about how to subscribe, please click here.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Recently my son Dean was describing a movie he saw called “Altered States.” It came out in 1980 and starred William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who experiments with LSD while floating inside a darkened tank. As Dean talked through the movie I realized that he was telling the true story of John C. Lilly, a Harvard scientist who took LSD and developed the float tank. In a float tank you are suspended in water, in the dark, swimming in the soup of your consciousness. In that environment, Dr. Lilly said, he left his body and traveled to other universes. Going inside got him pretty far out there.
Lilly believed that dolphins were advanced beings, possibly sent from outer space or another dimension to help us. His colleagues at Harvard pretty much thought he was nuts. But, despite the controversy, certain truths of his discoveries in the dark may yet come to light.
When LSD was legal (yes, before 1966 it was legal to do scientific experiments with LSD) the elegant
movie actor Cary Grant, of all people, participated in LSD-assisted psychotherapy once a week. In his autobiography he wrote that relaxing conscious control allowed him to access dream states. “These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies … inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood.”
Enter DMT, known as the “spirit molecule.” Dr. Rick Strassman believes that this powerful psychedelic is at the root of naturally occurring psychedelic states, including psychosis and mystical experiences. He believes that when pineal gland releases DMT at 49 days after conception the event marks the entrance of the spirit into a fetus.
But before I lose you here, let’s back up a little.
Whether we think of ourselves as the human agents of higher powers or just incredible biological machines, our waking moments are pretty much ruled by one thing: A quest for dopamine. This is a chemical associated with pleasure. When your endocrine system is pumping dopamine into the bloodstream … well, in the words of James Brown, “I FEEL GOOD! Uhhh!”
So why jump out of a plane to generate thrills (and dopamine) when you can pop a pill? Why endure a 10-day silent meditation when you can do a little DMT and feel some ecstasy right now? Is the link between pharmacology and enlightenment really that simple?
Well, there could be a link altered states and healing. Roslyn Dauber is making a documentary called “Annie’s Psilocybin Therapy.” It’s about a study at UCLA. Scientists are offering psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) to terminally ill cancer patents to see if the drug helps them deal with their anxiety. Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins also have psilocybin studies. Roslyn tells me that the initial results of these studies have been very positive.
Can drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline (found in peyote) be used in a controlled way to heal people? Got to get back to you on that. But I do know that I will try a sensory deprivation float tank in the near future and will let you know how it goes, provided that I return to the body that I am using now.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Last night we finished watching “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” the great documentary directed by Martin Scorsese that aired on PBS in 2005. Watching this film has been a multi-year project. I started watching it with my wife before she was my wife. Finishing it last night closed the circle because we were married this past weekend. The film looks back at Bob Dylan’s life but it got me thinking about looking forward.
There’s an expression often heard in edit rooms: “See apple, say apple.” It refers to the practice of having the narrator talk about something and then showing that very thing. If the narrator is talking about apples, then we have to show some apples. When you extend that “see apple” concept to the whole film, your work loses depth. Example: You do a show about Donald Trump firing people and all you get is a treatise about a gigantic, throbbing ego.
Entertaining for some, superficial for all.
Then you have Bob Dylan and Scorsese. Scorsese begins his documentary with two wonderful and borderline cryptic sound bites from Dylan:
“I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey, going home somewhere, set out, I set out to find this home I had a while back and couldn’t exactly remember where it was, but I was on my way there and encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I really didn’t have any ambition at all … I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be so I’m on my way home.”
That makes me want to keep watching, just to hear Dylan’s tangled poetry. The more he weaves words, the bigger the tapestry surrounding him, the less he reveals about himself. The mystery only grows.
“No Direction Home” is traditional, but also strange, and it takes risks. Risk is important, because in documentaries, the world we once knew is over. Distribution channels have changed. Who can draw a line anymore between reality TV and documentaries? As Dylan says, we’re all on an odyssey now.
While there’s no doubt that reality TV has created greater acceptance for true stories, there’s also a flip side. The influence of reality TV has made doc filmmaking too cautious and literal.
I say we need films that are moving, unexpected and bold. I miss seeing heroic films like Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War.” I’m glad “Food, Inc.” opens on Friday. I argue for going deep. Content matters.
Some might counter-argue that going deep doesn’t monetize well. “Truth is so depressing and people want entertainment.” Well, two words: Stephen Colbert. When you enter the meta-reality of Colbert you aren’t sure if he’s a liberal playing a conservative or a conservative pretending to be liberal. This ambiguity has helped make him enormously popular. Colbert is a hybrid – and I think hybrid is where the documentaries of the future are going.
Richard Propper was a distributor on my documentary about Route 66. Now, along with filmmaker Chuck Braverman, he’s looking to the future by bringing together documentary and reality TV producers and broadcasters. The event is called the WESTDOC conference. It happens this September in Santa Monica. Want to see what the future might be like? Richard is offering a limited time discount to readers of “500 Words on Thursday.” Go to http:// www.THEWESTDOC.com and use promo code MTGWEST2009.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.
The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.
As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. 
If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.
Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. 
Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.
That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.
Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.
If you enjoyed this post you can subscribe by email or subscribe in an RSS reader. For more information about how to subscribe, please click here.
