Webinar | How NOT to Make Films: 15 Years of Failures, Mishaps, and Lessons Learned
Last night — June 13, 2024, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. — I attended the webinar How NOT to Make Films: 15 Years of Failures, Mishaps, and Lessons Learned hosted by documentarian Adam Mazo and educator Dr. Mishy Lesser, co-founders of Upstander Project, and moderated by N. Bruce Duthu, a professor at Dartmouth. For a portion of the talk, they were joined by special guest speaker Ben Pender-Cudlip, a filmmaker and cinematographer. I appreciated how each speaker described their cultural and ancestral background before speaking so the audience could better understand their point of view. Mazo and Dr. Lesser are Ashkenazi Jewish, Duthu is from Houma Nation in Louisiana, and Pender-Cudlip has British ancestry.
Dr. Lesser and Mazo created their first film, Coexist, in 2014 to bring awareness to communities in Rwanda twenty years after a genocide. Mazo had first visited Rwanda in 2006 and returned to attend workshops. Dr. Lesser wrote a teacher’s guide to accompany the film and was initially concerned that the project did not have “impact”. Through her desire to focus on teachers and students, she discovered the Teaching Tolerance framework, now called Learn for Justice. This framework for teaching about race and racism matched her desire to teach with a film showing “the limitations and the promises of forgiveness”. From there, Dr. Lesser began getting invitations from schools across the country to show the documentary and lead discussion.
Mazo emphasized that although this film was a successful project, he “would not make that film today,” as he has come to believe he had “no right to make that film and no right to tell that story”. He regretted that he did not discuss the film with the subjects as much as he does with his current documentaries. He tried to give as much credit as possible to interpreters, although they did not want to be credited by name, and he still had the expense sheet from the trip on his desk. Dr. Lesser agreed that they would no longer make the film as the leads and would instead work more closely with genocide survivors. She referenced the book Survivors, Uncensored co-authored by Claude Gatebuke as a work created by Rwandans that has allowed students to better understand contemporary genocide.
The conversation soon turned to Dawnland, which Mazo co-directed with Pender-Cudlip. The documentary focused on the Maine Wabanaki-State Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as child welfare authorities had taken them from their families to “save them from being Indian.” Pender-Cudlip recalled screening what they thought was a nearly completed film for the communities but instead found that they had “really stepped in it”. The interviewees were angry, and one commissioner remarked, “If this is your film, I can’t support it.” The bias of the filmmakers had crept into the work, as White people received too much screen time. Removing these scenes strengthened the film, which went on to win multiple awards. Mazo recalled that he had hired a photographer for a few victorious pictures but instead had pictures of sad and angry people. From this process, he learned that he needed more touchpoints along the way, and a large group roughcut screening was a bad idea. He has since turned from a “colonial, journalistic, traditional way” of creating film that involves the subjects in the process with plenty of opportunity for private feedback.
The group continues to explore how to best work with subjects when creating documentaries. They drew inspiration from the film Subject, Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG), and a level set framework specifically for documentary filmmaking. Currently, the group is using this new knowledge while creating We Sing Nonetheless, a film about bluegrass band Nefesh Mountain that also discusses division in the Jewish community.
Besides creating documentaries and teaching guides, Upstander runs Upstander Academy. Dr. Lesser worked with the Pequot Museum and DAWG at UConn beginning in 2015. After three years of pilots in Connecticut, she brought the Academy to Boston in 2019. She mostly focuses on K-12 classroom teachers, museum professionals, and people from the National Park Service. The six-day program has expanded to a thirteen-day program thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The latest iteration is a “Faith and Land Based Upstander Academy with faith leaders in eastern Massachusetts”, as many former leaders in colonial religious institutions were enslavers and led genocides.
Pender-Cudlip, Mazo, and Dr. Lesser returned to discussing historical footage in Dawnland. They had struggled to track down the congressional hearings for the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), even contacting Senator James Abourezk who authored the act. While the senator and layers believed the hearings were not filmed, and C-Span did not yet exist, Mazo found film-in-cans footage in the NBC archive. The group was amazed to find the original statements in full form, not just sound bites. Dr. Lesser believed, “It wanted to be found. It wasn’t us… the voices wanted to be heard.”
A recent project related to Dawnland was the short film Bounty. In November 1755, Massachusetts legislature met in the council chamber of the Old State House in Boston to sign into law an act encouraging colonial settlers to hunt, capture, and kill Wabanaki and Penobscot people, offering high rewards for scalps. Around eighty laws were passed in New England, which did not end until the 1880s. Bounty seekers brough captives and human remains from Maine to the Old State House, where they were placed into tar barrels, incinerated, and buried nearby. The film is currently viewable to visitors to the Old State House in its black box theater, revealing history that was long erased.
Mazo and Dr. Lesser told a few more stories before the end of the webinar. In a more lighthearted tone, Mazo showed a picture of the car that drove him 50,000 miles in 18 months while making Dawnland. Zip ties held the bumper on, and the back door was covered in gaff tape. Dr. Lesser told of writing a letter to the Boston Globe about articles that kept putting Wabanaki people in the past tense, and an impressed reader sent a check for $10,000 to Upstander Project. Dr. Lesser also described her time in Latin America, including life in Chile during a coup d’état military takeover in 1973, and living for Ecuador for ten years to work with Indigenous people. Afterward, the viewers were introduced to Kahoot, a game I had not played before but quickly realized was a quiz style with extra points awarded for answering the question quickly. While I panicked and put in my initials (AAE) instead of my name, I did manage to snag third place: not enough for a prize, but enough to land on the podium and bewilder the gracious moderator.
This webinar lasted for two hours, and the time flew by. All three speakers plus the moderator were excellent both with prepared remarks and answering audience questions. The talks balanced serious conversation about racism and genocide with optimism and good humor. My one complaint was that the webinar was hosted on Vimeo, which does not have built-in closed captioning; fortunately, the Google Chrome live captions feature worked fairly well for speaking, although it did not pick up song lyrics. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the webinar and look forward to watching these documentaries in the future.