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 fil