2006 SFJFF—The Evening Class Interview with Sirak M. Sabahat

One of the central spotlights of this year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival was the plight of the Falasha, Ethiopian Jews and Jews of Color, a topic of which I was wholly ignorant. My first exposure to this astounding historical phenomenon was Radu Mihaileanu's Live and Become, the epic closing night feature for the festival and a monumental drama about a young Ethiopian boy Schlomo from a Sudanese refugee camp who is transported to Israel as part of Operation Moses, during which 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted in 1984 to begin new lives. The film won the 2006 César for Best Original Screenplay and both the Panorama Audience Award and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2005 Berlinale.

The role of Schlomo was played by three different actors—Moshe Agazi, Moshe Abebe, and Sirak M. Sabahat—Schlomo as a child, a teenager, and a man, respectively. It was my great honor to meet with 24-year old Sirak M. Sabahat during the run of the festival. We met hat to hat at the Ninth Street Film Center. He was wearing a stovepipe and I my Makins shortbrim. After complimenting each others' hats, we sat down to talk and I have to admit it was one of the most engaging conversations I have had with anyone anywhere. I feel blessed to have met this young man.

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Michael Guillén: Congratulations on a solid strong performance in Live and Become and for its festival success. It's done very well. My understanding is it's your first main acting role in a film?

Sirak M. Sabahat: I've done a few things before I've done this film. I've done a lot of theater and t.v. but it was my biggest role. This film was very successful around the world and this film was spread among the theaters and among festivals, so I've never had this kind of attraction and this kind of relation.

MG: It's also my understanding that it's a film that speaks to your own experience. As an Ethiopian Jew, you must have been proud to be able to tell this story to the world because most of us know nothing about this.

SS: No. At the beginning when I saw the script and when I saw what the film was going to be about, I had a lot of difficulties. I had to think what I'm going to do this film. Because it was similar to my story and I had to recreate my life again, recreate the emotion that I had in the past. As you know, I did not have to do research for the film because I was the research. But also I was just one of those stories. I am just one of the thousand of stories among the Ethiopian Jews. There are many stories like me. There are many exodus stories like me. In my case I was so proud because I had the privilege to take a part in something that was huge, something that was done for the first time, something that's talking about ideas. Today, when you see, people will not sacrifice their life for an idea anymore. Or they will sacrifice their life for an idea if they are extremists. But what I'm saying is when you sacrifice your life for something good, for something that you really believe. So this film it was for me to educate also the audience but at the same time to come into contact with the audience that doesn't know anything about other people's lives and for me it was also I was educated by their response and the way they were educated by me. So I've been giving and I've been blessed to receive at the same time. It's a big privilege to be in the front of a stage and to tell the story of your community.

MG: Your exodus was with Operation Solomon?

SS: Yes.

MG: Can you speak a little bit about that? Or do you feel you need to speak about that? Has it been said for you through this film?

SS: Operation Solomon happened as you know in 1991. It was a coproduction, I would say, of the United States and Israel to save and to bring 50,000 Ethiopian Jews in three days. It was an amazing operation. In three days the Israeli government got inside Ethiopia and took the people to Israel. We didn't know that we were going to Israel. But my story and my journey started like any other Ethiopian Jew. I started to walk from my village with my family to the capital city of Ethiopia. Our journey lasted one year. Because imagine, when you're walking, you must rest at the same time. You must restore your powers. You must eat and there are sicknesses. If one of my brothers was sick, we had to stay as long as he got better so we can continue. Each time we were praying that no one would be sick but once my brother was sick and my sister too.

This journey was taking too much time and there was a shortage of food. At the same time there was a threat to our life because in Africa, as you know, slavery still exists and slavery for sex, sex slavery for ladies, we were afraid that we can be captured by those groups and to be [sold] to many fanatic people that can do whatever they like. So you have many dangers. It's not just to face starvation, to face illnesses, and to face the people who are coming in front of you. You must find a different kind of strength to survive this journey. The human body cannot adjust himself to this kind of times because it is unbelievable. So we were eating leaves. I felt like animals to stay alive. But you need something much more deeper than the leaves and than your personal thing that you drink just to keep you alive. You must have some kind of vision. You must have some kind of faith that is greater than your life itself. So we had this Jerusalem, this utopic idea that we want to be in the land of our fathers one day. You will give anything. So many people die on the way, they will sacrifice their life on the way just to reach to that point.

This journey was taking a year because my father was also the navigator, I would say. Sometimes he didn't know where he was going. We were always returning to the same place. I want to say to my Mother, "I remember this place because we have been in this place before." And my Mother warned me with her eyes, don't say anything, he's a man and a man doesn't want to have any direction from a woman at any time, at this time and that time. But when we came to Addis Ababa we were so amazed to see that we were saved by a miracle. And then the operation happened. They put us in a bus and they say you are going—not to travel, because no one knew that we are leaving Ethiopia—but I could see that people starting to throw the bread and the little money they had to the population. I said to myself, "Why those poor people would give the last thing they have to those starving people also?" So I was asking maybe we are going to some different place? But I wasn't thinking about Israel.

When we came to the airplanes, you see this big bird and you think to yourself, "Oh my God, God is here with this bird to take us to the Holy Land." Because it was the first time that we saw airplane. And to try to understand the gaps between the Ethiopian Jews and this world, you must understand there is a 400-years gap. It's like bringing someone from the 19th century to this moment exactly and explain to them something about computers. Something the mind cannot understand.

MG: It must have been terrifying!

SS: It was terrifying. We were on the plane and I was asking who was holding the plane? Everybody was asking who was holding the plane? Because how this huge thing can be in the air? I am lighter than the plane so why I cannot fly? And this heavy thing is in the air. It was a rational question. A question of discovery. When we landed to the land of Israel and they told us that we are in the land of Israel, we didn't believe that we have the opportunity that we will be in the Holy Land in our lifetime. There are moments when the excitement was enormous so people bowing down and kiss the ground.

But when I saw white people, I was so in shock because no one told me there was white Jews. So when we did this change, we did it also to save the Judaism in this world. But when I saw many of white people, I said, "Oh my God they have skin problem. Those poor people!" [Laughs.] Later on I saw a million of them. I said, "Oh my God, this disease is spreading so fast." And then I saw that maybe I have the skin problem now because I was the minority. You come from a place that you are the majority; now you become a minority. To explain to you in the best way, people in Africa—Christians for example—they don't see Jesus with blue eyes and blonde hair. They see Jesus with curly hair and big nose and big lips, the way we are in Africa. This is the way you see it, according to your image. You're describing the higher power according to your place. If you are created in this way, probably that person who created or that spiritual leaders in the skies or heaven, they must look like you in a way. This was the perception that you were raised with. This was the perception that you understand and you cannot change it. But when you come to a different society, to the new world, to Israel, everything was different. God was different, according to their eyes. The prophets were different. Things were different.

MG: The movie does a fine job of showing the tension of that realization, and then the process that Ethiopian Jews had to go through to try to adjust. For yourself, what led you then into acting? You obviously knew you had to survive. You had to learn how to do something in the Holy Land, in this new world. What led you to acting?

SS: There's two stories about these things but the first one is there was a girl that I liked in school. She was amazing. I was in love with her in secret for two years and one day I said to myself, "I must do something special for this lady." So I worked very hard and I bought a very expensive present. I returned to the school. It was recess time. I asked her to talk to her. She came. She approached me. I was trying to express my feelings but I didn't know how to do it because I still had difficulties to socialize with the new world. I said, "Okay, this present will prove my attention for you." I gave her the present. She opened the present and after five seconds she started to scream and to laugh. She disappeared faster than Superman from my place. I didn't understand what was wrong and people was laughing. One of the guys, the students, came to me, "Are you crazy? You're giving to this girl two kilos of beef?!" [Laughs.] My idea was in Africa if you're giving something like this, something valuable, something meat, it showed that you appreciate that person so much. It was an enormous thing. But for her it was, "What the hell this guy's doing? In the middle of the day he's got a two kilo gift in his pocket?" But for me it was a special gift. But after she denied those gift, I was offended. I said, "I need to do something else."

And then I saw on the screen a boy chasing after a girl. So I thought I would have a better chance to do so on the screen. But it started in this way. And then I started to discover what is a theater, what is a cinema. I said to myself, "This is a place that you can speak in own voice, that you can express everything that you want, because people wants me to be a doctor, a lawyer, everything. Then I understand that in theater and cinema you can be all of those things. You can be whatever you want and you can influence those people and you can shape people['s] mind[s] in a good way, a good humanity. But people say to me, "You know what is acting?" I say, "What is acting?" "If you do acting in this world, you will starve the way you would starve in Ethiopia. This is the closest example." I said, "So if I'm going to choose acting, I'm going to starve the way I was starving in Ethiopia, but in the new world?" "Yes." They were trying to say to me, "Don't do this, because it's impossible." But this is my destiny. I have been survive many things. I have been seeing many things in my entire life. And my mother said you need to do things that will make you happy.

MG: And the fact that you were given an opportunity really to express your story the best way it's probably going to be expressed. I understand also that you had a lot to do with the direction, especially the scenes that had to do with Ethiopia. How was that?

SS: The director Radu Mihaileanu, he's amazing for me because you are coming to do a film in a language you don't understand. You have the music to understand when it's supposed to be this, when it's supposed to be that, but it's very courageous to do a film in a language that you don't understand. So when he came to do his film, I was trying to find my own voice in the cinema. I had difficulties. I was always typecast for Miss Scarlett part. "Whatever you say, Miss Scarlett." I didn't want to do those things because I didn't [see] myself as an actor for every part. I went to write my own plays. After I wrote my own plays, people understand that I have a different kind of talent so they started to notice.

When the director came, I said to him, "Listen, this film is very important for you and for me. After we understand that we need to do it. But in order to do this, we need to cooperate in a hard way. So I will deal with the writing in the [Ethiopian] part. I will deal with the direction with the kids, with all the children casting. Because I had experience of directing. And he understand that I have a vision and I have a mind and we was so serious that he was trusting so much because he's a very strong director, and no one open his mouth on the set when he's doing something, and no one stops. He's very tough. When people saw that I was doing, "Cut! Action!" "My God, you do?" "Yes." Because we had some kind of understanding. I want to do the best film. Not just as an actor. As a director, as a writer, as an acting coach, because this film, it's about my community so it was important for you to come and to do this exodus about different people, different lives. For me it's much more important to give the 100%. I wasn't care about … I was on the set on the days I wasn't supposed to be, I was in the shooting at the beginning. So we started to collaborate on this film because we found a similar voice, me and the director.

In the beginning it was very hard when I work with people—even though I had a reputation a little bit among the Ethiopian communities. I had to work with the kids, for example, so I was very tough with them, "I'm going to direct you. You need to do this. You need to do that." And I was working with the kids that were staying with me for a long time. Just to understand the psychology, the gesture, things that they're doing. When we were on the set, he was sitting behind a monitor directing the Ethiopian scenes. I was there to say, "Okay, you're going to do this way and you're going to do that way." He completely understand that we are on the same level and the same understanding. So he didn't tell me you shouldn't. I know because I can bring the images because I know the story, I have been living it. Maybe you got a great imagination but imagination according to real reality is something different.


MG: In terms of the acting coaching, it's my understanding that you coached the two Moshes that played your character at younger ages? You actually coordinated all three of your performances so they would align character-wise?

SS: Yes.

MG: How did you go about that? Did you make them be like you?

SS: No. The secret for me was not to try to teach them anything. Not to try to tell them you need to do this and you need to be similar. I had to see them and to learn from them because they are children. They are not actors. It was very hard to say to them, "Be like me." It's the opposite. I need to be like them because I have the ability to take the way they are and then to mix it with my way.

They were staying in my apartment for a long time. We were working about the scenes, every scene particular in acting way—you know the first scene when the mother is sending him, every aspect, what we do, the hugging part, the monologues, the dialects. I was trying to tell them, "Don't try. Just say these things from your own way." The problem is with children when you are working you cannot give too much description: "Listen, this was a day like this and you are very sad and you are like this." Children, they don't understand a lot of metaphors. You cannot speak to the children in a picture way. You must give them direct[ion]: "You are sad in this moment." That child will [be] sad in a moment because he knows what to get sad. Tell to a child you are happy; he will [be] happy in a moment. He will not ask you, "What kind of happy? Happy happy? Less happy?" [Laughs.] This work with them, I was very tough with them, when I work with all the Ethiopians, when I work with the two Schlomos. At the end of the day the result was for me when I saw them on the set, when I said "Action!" They brought everything that we work on it in my little studio, in my little apartment.

MG: They were astounding performances, all three of you.

SS: Thank you.

MG: I must single out, however, the performance of Mosche Agazai, who plays Schlomo as a child. I was impressed. He had to carry the movie to further it, to get it to where Mosche Abebe and you could take it. He did a fine job. Is this what you hope to do more of: directing and writing?

SS: I will not write if I do not have anything to say. If I will write again, I will write because I feel this is a burning issue for me. Because I want to educate the people in different ways. My hopes, my wishes for the future, I'm not a regular actor who do films and will be in the covers, all this paparazzi thing. For me cinema is a valuable place that you can use to shape and to tell stories and there is many true and heroic and amazing stories in this world. I want to do films that can influence these people. When they will go out from the cinema, I want them to debate a little bit, I want them to ask questions, I want them to feel close, I want them to be upset, I want them to have everything that I'm having as a person.

MG: That certainly happened for me with this film because I was sitting there going through that entire range of emotions. The film generated many questions. What is the situation now for Ethiopian Jews? Has it changed much? Is it still the same problem of finding a place in Israeli society? Have White Jews become any more tolerant? What is going on?

SS: As you know, if you are a minority it doesn't matter where you are, you will suffer. Not because you deserve it, because you are a minority and you have a different way of life. People [are] ignorant and they will not accept it. I had to face with a lot of racism in Israel and my community had to face with a lot of racism but racism, as we understand now, is beginning to be so common thing around the world. Here in the United States, in Europe, in Israel, it's everywhere. What I understand is this is a disease of human beings. This is a mental disease like any other disease in this world. You need treatment. You need to take the things that you need to take in order to be fine. You are sick if you are racist. Whether you are black, white, yellow, it doesn't matter. We are coming with a lot of shapes and forms.

When I was in university, I was the president of Ethiopian students. There [were] many times that student[s] were fighting against racism and one time I said, "This is enough. Stop. We need to approach different kinds of ideas." My life was saved because many good people gave their heart and soul to me. My community life was saved because a lot of good people that sacrificed, that took a danger to save us. The force of good is still the greater force in this world. Those fanatic will always say that. Those racist people will always be there. Why to put our spotlight on waste cause when you can create a better humanity with those who are with one foot forward already?

MG: Sort of like you were saying to have even survived the exodus from Ethiopia, you had to believe in something larger than yourself.

SS: Exactly.

MG: And now you're saying the same thing, that in order for all of us to survive the racism in the world, we have to believe in a better force.

SS: I'm saying don't wait for organization to change your lives. Don't wait for government to save your life. You have the responsibility to shape the things according to you. People who do not accept you now will not accept you forever. People say, yes, I after a while I accept this man because I understand differently. No. If you are not given the possibility to a human being, it doesn't matter where it is as a human being, and open your heart to him as a human being without to ask any question. He's rich, stupid, it doesn't matter, he's a human being standing in front of you. If you cannot open your heart and accept that person at the beginning so you have issues. The racist people they cannot accept me even though they can understand that what they are doing it is stupid. To ask the question of why there was people who believe in the death of other people. Why the Nazis kill 7 million Jews and why to those Nazis you still have people who continue these kind of things here in Minneapolis in Minnesota or in different [places]. What make those people to continue or to follow these crazy ideas? How can you fight those people? You will take them, you're going to make diplomats, you wait to say, "Listen. You must accept people"? If this thing doesn't come naturally, what can you do about it? So don't waste your power. Put your power in the places that can create a better humanity and not in a place that can create a barriers with human beings.

MG: In tandem with that, often the worse prejudices come from your own kind. As you've traveled around the world with this film, you've obviously met different Black communities of various Black faiths, has there been a response? Anything you can say about that?

SS: The Black people here, for example, they love the film, they adore the film, because the identity problem now is the issue. Who am I? Where I'm coming from? The Blacks didn't choose to come to the United States. They were brought here. When the slavery thing started to happen, the amount of the people that arrived to the United States was a very low percent. The major[ity] of slaves went to the Carribean or to other places. They were asking themselves, "Who am I? Where I'm coming from? I want to return to search my mother or to my roots but I cannot go to my roots. I know I am Black, I know from Africa, but where in Africa?" The question of identity is relative to any of us. So the Black Americans they very much love this film. They are very supportive, feel related to the subject.

MG: So are you saying the theme of searching for identity is more important than any kind of specific racial identification? All of us are searching for identity? All of us are displaced people?

SS: Exactly. Because it's a displaced world in this moment. Look what's happening.

MG: The other day I interviewed Amos Gitaï. Do you know Amos?

SS: Yes, I know Amos. We're friends.

MG: I was struck by Amos because—between his films that I saw at this festival and your film—I feel like my mind has been popped open. We just do not get an accurate picture through our media. We are told of a conflict that we have to accept because it is all we know. Through cinema, through movies, filmmakers present a complexity to the issue that makes the issues more human. Filmmakers help Americans begin to suspect that there are Israeli and Palestinians who are not investing in this conflict. There are people all throughout Israel who are not investing in their national product through the media. I have to thank you as a person who is creating film. I agree with you 100% that cinema is a form of education. My website was inspired by Sembene. I call it The Evening Class. Because when I saw his films, they impressed me so much that I started researching him and I was struck by his statement that for African adults cinema is the evening class. That's where they go to see reflected the social and political issues that are of importance to them. That has been my focus with movies: what do I learn from a film?

SS: I have a question for you.

MG: Okay.

SS: Imagine, when there's a rumor, one slice of rumor, and in the other hand is a good thing that you did in your life. You have two things. There is a rumor and there are good things that you done. Put those things together and spread those things among your friends, what do you think will conquer the most? What do you think the most influential thing will be?

MG: The rumor.

SS: Why is that?

MG: Because I think that surprisingly the power of light has to operate enshrouded, as within a darkness, whereas the power of darkness has high visibility.

SS: Why is that? As a human, why are we attracted to that place and not to the good place? Why?

MG: I want to believe in my own faith that it's because the power of light—in order to achieve its most brilliant aspect—must constantly be challenged. It must have constant adversary. I am 52 years old and I have studied racism and classism….

SS: You look great!!

MG: Thank you, it's the hat.

SS: It's more than the hat.

MG: I have studied these things my entire life and I cannot come to any answer other than that, for some reason, it is meant to be this way or is inherent in the human animal. Perhaps conflict is archetypal and like all organic constructs, archetypes must evolve. That evolution is our human challenge. I liked what you said: that rather than getting caught up in ideology and fighting a force that you really can't win, you have to create the other world. You have to be the exponent of the other world. That's how I would answer your question. It's like a candle flame creates so much trembling shadow but it's the candle flame that is the source of both brightness and darkness. Darkness is not the source of the candle flame. We need to remember sources.

SS: They are speaking about this conflict nowadays, the conflict with Lebanon and everything that happened over there. I was seeing the media before the war happened. All the media—the newspapers and t.v., the anchors, all of them—the only question they were asking was, "Is there going to be a war?" You have a responsibility to talk about things. You have a responsibility to shape minds. The responsibility that they have is so enormous. It's like they are pushing themselves. "When are there going to be a war between Israel and Lebanon? Who's going to win? The force of Israel is this. The force of Hezbollah." You are eager to push people in a war. You are eager to take people in that position to create some interesting moment in this area but now look what happen after they been bombing, after the strike, people start to speak, "There are a lot of innocent people dying." What did you expect when you sing a war? A war is not a playing field that you go to play soccer and you will return wounded and a day after you can walk. In war you are counting those who survive, not those who are dying, and it is hypocrite for me to say and to push.


MG: What do you expect when you sing a war. That's a lovely articulation. I sing: In my mind I can't study war no more. For myself, when our President first began referencing the axis of evil and the war on terror, I decided then and there I would no longer listen to this nationalized propaganda, this hate speech. I've stopped reading newspapers and I don't watch television news because subtraction is an effort towards spirit. For me media representations are a false story. And it doesn't much matter if I forsake my duty in keeping up with these things by a daily dose of the media because I don't need to. Everyone else does. Between boldface headlines and the ubiquitous gossip on the street, I know what's going on, or what the media says is going on. When I was talking with Amos, he confirmed that these are false stories and the more you believe in them, the more you invest in them, the more you further them. I've turned to film at this stage in my life because I believe that creative energies such as your's, such as Amos', they tell me more about the potential that the world really has to offer, more potential than the media allows. I'll wrap it up here because I know you have others waiting to interview you.

SS: No. This talk is opening my mind. They can wait. On the other hand, you cannot ignore, I am not saying to ignore from those fanatic people because those racist people will come in the end of the day to harm those who are trying to create a better humanity. But the things that the media coverage is, you cannot ignore the newspaper, you cannot ignore the media because they are shaping every day a million people's lives. It's like when I was seeing t.v. the way they were presenting Israel before the war in the time of the conflict, that man with the stone, they're presenting this story of the weak against the strong, David against Goliath, and I was thinking they are so full of it because people are choosing to believe in the images they see on t.v. So my question was: people are not intelligent enough to discover themselves, to educate themselves what is truth and what is false?

MG: Or—in the movie, an image I thought was so beautiful—they show a little Ethiopian boy watching the television, transfixed. Then the camera pans around to reveal that all the other kids are behind the television set, discussing their concerns: how did the people get into the box and when are they going to come out? We each have to bolster and explore our own realities; the realities that are of importance to each of us. No one reality works for all of us. And if there's to be any examination of truth and falsehood, it must fall within the realm of this multiplicity of experience.

SS: Exactly. I will wrap it with this story. When we came to Israel, instead of going to Jerusalem they took us to the north of Israel and they put is in the hotel. I'm telling you I was so amazed by the room in the hotel because it was so clean and beautiful. The first time that I saw a toilet, I asked myself, "What is that thing?" My mother came to me and she said, "No one is going to be close to this white and beautiful thing." She saw the toilet as it was a private museum. And then I was asking, "Why is this thing in white? Why this thing is not in brown?" You've got a lot of questions. And then the first time that I saw a t.v. like those child, I waited with my friend three days to see when the people were going to sleep. [Laughs.] No one went to sleep. I see big houses, big things, and I said, "How they put those things inside?" There is a gap of 400 years. Your mind is traveling. I don't understand. You're upset. You're searching awake. When my mother saw the first time the t.v., you know what she said? She said, "We have guests inside the house." So she sent me to grocery to buy a coffee for them. I went from the house, walking to grocery, and I was thinking, "My mother doesn't understand that the people inside of the t.v., they are not guests. They are there to stay forever." [Laughs.] In her eyes when she opened the t.v. she saw people so she said, "We have guests. So go." Who am I to tell to my mother, "You are wrong. You are mistaken." Even though I know. It's been 12 years. When I came to Israel I was 12 years old. I didn't know to read and write in my personal language. In my previous life I was a hunter, in agriculture, I was a farmer. And today I do films and I speak more than five languages. I understand when people speak also about Africa, they're saying about Africa a place without possibilities but I'm saying this is a place without tools. Once you give the tools to human beings, they will do many great things and we are the proof.

MG: Well, you definitely are the proof of it and I thank you very much for the time. I think you should write your story even more, it is so rich, it has so much for all of us to hear. Just what you've said is something that we need to know here in this country where tools have been provided to us from the moment we're born and we don't know what to do with them. Thank you very much.

SS: My pleasure.

THE DOGWALKER—The Evening Class Interview With Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry

"Independent film" has become an amorphous and protean category that's truly hard to get one's hands on. These days, amidst the hype and spin, what constitutes an independent film? For my money there is no greater demonstration of the independent filmmaking spirit than a quiet two-character study called The Dogwalker, directed by Jacques Thelemaque and starring real-life partner Diane Gaidry as Ellie Moore, an abused young woman who flees a destructive relationship and subsequently experiences transformational adventures in healing through her conflicted friendship with a misanthropic dogwalker Betsy and the many dogs she manages. Not only was the production of The Dogwalker independently financed over an arduous eight-year period, but it is now being independently distributed, opening Friday, August 11, in the Bay Area at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and then in Los Angeles on Friday, August 25, at the Laemmle Music Hall. For anyone who loves the underlying philosophical principles of independent film, this is a film that should be supported. It's quiet, reflective, tender, and solid. Time to put your money where your mouth is.

During a recent visit to San Francisco, I had the opportunity to hook up with both Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry in the SOMA district to discuss the film.

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Michael Guillén: The Dogwalker took six years to get off the ground. That's quite a testament to the perseverance of an indie filmmaker. Why did it take so long to make your film?


Jacques Thelemaque: It probably took us closer to 8-10 years from the time we conceived it to its coming to market. That included a lot of time trying to raise money for it. I had written a script for Diane for a completely different movie but she didn't love the character I had created for her. It was a situation we were not familiar with and she said, "Why don't we write something that's a little more intimate? A little more the world we know?" She was walking dogs at the time and I was about to start walking with her, working for her. We decided to do something about dogwalking. It evolved. The initial story was much lighter in tone, not really about all the issues that eventually found their way into the film. It was going to be more about dogwalking and the crazy, zany things that go on. But that's not who I am as a writer. I started trying to find what the dogs meant to me, what they would have meant to these two characters and started looking for the issues that these characters were going to have to face. It became what it was, with a lot of help.

MG: Diane, what drew you to the script? Why was this a script you liked?


Diane Gaidry: Jacques and I have done a lot of shorts together and I love working with Jacques. We've built a strong working relationship. As Jacques was writing, we workshopped the script with Pamela [Gordon], the other actress. We'd shoot scenes. There's so many things about this project that I loved, that were so wonderful just in developing it, working with Pamela; she's such a joy to work with. Working with all the dogs that I used to take out. Jacques wrote this script with me in mind so it wasn't a huge stretch. He played to a lot of how I am naturally. Not that it's biographical or autobiographical. He's never hit me.

MG: I'm glad to hear that. That was painful to watch in the movie.

Diane: It played easily into something that I felt I could bring my energy and strength to.

MG: It's a natural performance. In terms of choice of material, it was a perfect script for both of you as actresses. Your dynamic was natural, low-key, and yet disturbing, like an ominous rumbling the whole time. I was struck by the underlying theme of the sociology of women's anger and how you used this metaphor of the dogwalkers or the dogwalking community to express that. How did you see that socialization of feminine anger?

Jacques: Diane and I had talked about it quite a bit. Anger is an issue that I have. I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of violent energy. Not dramatically so but just in the way people expressed themselves, the way they handled problems, the way people were disciplined in my family, and my friends and everything. So there's a lot of rage issues and anger issues that I'm exploring. The way I process my anger is similar to the way women process their anger, the way they're socialized to process it. They're not encouraged to go out and smack somebody if they're pissed off. They're socialized to process their anger in more complicated ways, sometimes internalize it, and that's the way that I dealt with my anger. I find the way that women deal with their anger—in general, I'm generalizing—it's much more complicated and interesting for me than the way men process their anger. I wanted to explore that a little bit.

MG: One of the film's most upsetting scenes is when Ellie arrives in Los Angeles, beaten up by her partner, and she approaches these street kids to get a little bit of pot and then they beat her up and steal her purse. I was frustrated when I watched that. I thought, "Is it them? Is it those kids processing their anger by trying to dominate and being powerful, what they think is powerful, or was she just being stupid and careless?" What I liked about your performance, Diane—and why it was such a good counterpoint to your fellow actress Pamela—was that you were so afraid. Ellie's fear, her hesitancy, is palpable. I was taught early on that disaster rides on fear and that—if you want any kind of street cred—you cannot be hesitant. You must be assertive. Ellie's character arc from this frightened individual to someone who finally had some kind of center and something to do in life was moving for me. Was that difficult for you to effect?

Diane: Ellie had fear, but it was like a deep insecurity. She had no base. She had no center. She didn't even have much of a sense of her self. It was difficult for that person to navigate in this big, scary world.

MG: Is that why she kept trying to establish relationships? I was so glad when she decided to have an apartment on her own. But up until then, I kept thinking she kept trying to find someone to lean on.

Jacques: Yeah, and that was actually a conscious point in the story we talked about as well. Ellie has no center. She would try to find it through other people and situations.

Diane: She had no confidence that she could manage on her own and, therefore, she would repeat and revictimize herself by going to what she knows.

Jacques: She has a lot of anger but she's internalized it. She's pointed it back in towards herself. She manifests stuff in the world like the boyfriend and other abusive relationships and running into this gang of guys selling drugs. Just putting herself in situations—like the guy who picks her up—where she's being victimized. But she's driving that on a certain level until she reaches the point in the story where she's just not going to do that anymore.

MG: Driving it but also weaning herself away from it.

Jacques: Slowly, yeah.

MG: Every now and then Ellie would make decisions that, as an audience member, I was like "Yes!" When she wouldn't stay with the guy because he wouldn't give her the money beforehand and she had the good sense to leave. I was pleased to see that. I've done a lot of seminar work here in San Francisco with battered women and women seeking empowerment and one of the themes that has come up a lot is this debatable one: do victims attract people who want to victimize them? Who starts it? It's like a chicken and egg thing. Who starts it and where does it come from? I was disturbed that Ellie clearly had repetitive abusive relationships. With the film are you hoping to reach an audience of similar women or make some statement about such abuse?

Diane: In the past at festivals people in the audience have come up to us afterward who either work with women who have experienced domestic violence or some women who have personally experienced it. They've said that the spirit of the film is ultimately hopeful at the end where Ellie's not Wonder Woman but she's got a little bit of a clue.

MG: What's hopeful is her basic interaction with the animals. You make reference to the "inner dog." And you make a clear distinction that the cliché that men are all dogs is unfair to dogs. The scene where the empathic or the psychic tells Ellie what the dogs think of her was interesting—and I felt she was right—that these animals would know if Ellie would be able to control them and they would mess with her a bit to test her.

Diane: That came from our own experience.

MG: That is true? That's something you have found in your dogwalking?

Diane: Animals are communicators.

Jacques: There's no secret that we actually believe in pet psychics and have used them in the past to great effect.

MG: It was an important plot point in this film. The actress who played the pet psychic, Lisa Jane Persky, can you tell me a little about her?

Diane: Yes. Lisa Jane, she came to us through our friend [John Nielsen] who played the creepy guy who picks Ellie up.

MG: He always plays creepy guys! I've seen him before in other movies.

Jacques: He's actually a great guy and, frankly, he helped cast a lot of the movie. He knows a lot of amazing actors and—whenever we were stuck—he'd say, "I know somebody! Let me call 'em!" and, boom, they were there.

Diane: Because we live in L.A. and everyone we know knows actors, we didn't want to go through a casting process, the traditional casting directorial process. Partly because I hate that process myself so I don't want to subject other people to it.

MG: It's a real cattle call.

Diane: Yeah. I think there's a lot of interesting talented people that may or may not audition well. So we know a lot of actors and we know actors who know actors. For this particular role, Jacques had written it for a close friend of ours who is not an actor but she's got this really great energy—she was a filmmaker, she was a director, she writes mostly now—and she wanted to do it but I think she was ambivalent about it.

Jacques: The demands of the shoot. You got to be there every day at 6:00 and you may sit around all day long until we can get to your scene, even though we thought we were going to get to it earlier, all that she just didn't understand it, had gone through it and was frustrated by it, and so we could see she wasn't enjoying it. We thought, "Maybe we should get a professional actress." She was cool with that completely. Lisa Jane was a friend of John's.

Diane: She came in like a day before and, yeah, she was game.


MG: And she was effective because she was slightly comic but there was also a saliency to her, you knew that she believed what she was doing. The film had a lighthearted side to balance with these deeper, darker issues. Pamela Gordon was astounding in her role as Betsy Wright and I was sorry to hear she passed a year after the making of The Dogwalker. She obviously had cancer during the making of the film?

Jacques: We don't know.

Diane: It wasn't a year. It was a little more than a year after.

Jacques: However, it may have been in her system for a long time but it only became apparent because—Pamela didn't go to doctors. She lived the life she wanted to lead. She had a good time. She did a lot of work. She worked constantly in television and theater; she was a huge theater actress in L.A. But, she liked to work and she was a social animal. She loved to be out with people and doing things. She drank and smoked like a sailor and that was her life. If she didn't feel well, she just slept in. She didn't go to doctors. That's just who she was. So by the time they diagnosed her cancer, it was way far down the road.

MG: So, as far as you know, she wasn't tapping into anything she knew directly about for her performance of the cancer-ridden Betsy Wright?

Jacques: She was very fragile during the shoot.

MG: She seemed fragile.

Diane: I don't think that she was getting any kind of treatment. She didn't tell anybody. We didn't know. In fact I was at a film festival in Minneapolis with the film and Jacques called me right after I'd introduced the film and told me that Pamela was in ICU and that they didn't think she was going to make it. This was the first we'd heard of it. She passed away the next day.

MG: In retrospect I'm sure you must feel very proud that you gave Pamela this opportunity to express herself so beautifully in one final performance.

Jacques: Yeah, and given the fact that she had been working as an actress since she was a child, and regularly, she'd worked quite a bit, she'd never had a starring role in a film. It meant so much to her. When we premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival there were 600 people there, it was such an amazing experience for her.

Diane: She was a celebrity in Los Angeles. She had such a following for her theater work. We're proud but we mostly feel fortunate to have been able to work with her.

MG: For a film like yours that has had such a long successful festival run—you won Best New Feature at Cinequest back in 2002—I imagine you must be relieved and excited to finally have the film enter distribution. What did you gain from that lengthy festival run? What did that give you? Were you looking for a distributor?

Jacques: Yeah, we were looking. At first we had a traditional approach to getting this film out in the world. We wanted a big distributor to pick it up or hoped that would happen and it didn't.

MG: Who has picked it up?


Jacques: No one, actually. We've taken a very novel approach. Just as we raised money for its production, we found money for its distribution. We put together our own team of really amazing people. We know enough about how it all works that we knew what we needed to do. We had our own ideas about how it should go versus the way we see it go with a lot of independent films and we're able to test our theories now. It's an exciting process for us.

MG: You two are running the Filmmakers Alliance. Can you speak about that organization?

Jacques: Sure, it's a concept that Diane came up with one day sitting in traffic.

Diane: It's 13 years old.

Jacques: She said, "We've got to start this collective. I have this vision of how it should go." We got some people together, some friends of ours who were in the film industry, they'd maybe gone to film school, they were involved in filmmaking but not making their own films, certainly not making the kinds of films they wanted to make. We thought, let's build a little community and support each other in making anything. What can we make? What can we afford to make? What kind of tools do we have that we can share? Who has a camera, whatever, and it was very basic like that. So we all worked on one person's film. Then we all worked on another person's film.

Diane: A lot of the stuff we made early on was really silly.

Jacques: It was more like, "Let's just do this!"

Diane: But we learned so much from just continually making stuff and working with one another.

Jacques: And being involved with each others' films. I would have learned things working on your film and you would learn things working on mine. We were just productive and that attracted a lot of people. So then we had to develop a structure for dealing with all these people that were starting to join eventually—at one point we were up to 500 members—so we had to create a structure for that. We also had to think about what are we really about, especially as digital tools made it more accessible for people to make films. So we all can make films now.

Diane: In Los Angeles there's a bunch of different film organizations. Some of us are doing the same things in a way and—although as organizations we collaborate and support one another—about a year or year and a half ago I looked around and thought, "Why are we doing this? What does Filmmakers Alliance do that doesn't exist in other organizations?" What I saw is that we have a real community. It's not a networking organization and it's not an umbrella organization. It's a real community of people who support one another from concept on through distribution. Not only do we support one another by getting in there and lugging cables, but by reading one another's scripts, by challenging one another, by holding one another to a standard and not letting one another get away with the things that one can get away with if you don't share it with your peers and have people there who are talented and striving and who want to see something better in the world.

MG: So it's a truly collaborative aesthetic then that you're aiming for?

Diane: No, the collaborative and the collective is the structure, but the idea is that we nurture one another to bring out the best of what that individual has to say, what only that filmmaker can say in only the way that that filmmaker can say it. It's not like we're trying to make one another make the film that I would make or Jacques would make.

Jacques: We don't want to homogenize the aesthetic; we want to do the reverse. We want to say, "Okay, why are you making films? Why do you need to be making films? What is special about your voice? Now let's bring that forward. We're going to challenge you to bring that forward."

MG: It's intriguing because it sounds like you're in the belly of the whale. Or, maybe a better metaphor might be the sand in the oyster producing a pearl down there in Los Angeles. It's admirable. Are comparable collectives like this being done in other main filmmaking venues?

Jacques: We think maybe there's probably a couple in New York. We don't really know actually. We don't really know what's out there. We've reached out a little bit to see what's out in the world but we haven't found anything that's quite the same model. Our twin goals are to create community and to build this idea of collectivism and feeding from that energy. But also for people to be telling their own personal stories, to inject their own vision into their work. A lot of the other groups don't have those same focuses. A lot of them tend to try and help people make films better in a more traditional way, using more traditional structures, and get "successful" within the system. Even independent film organizations like IFP are like, "This is how you can create independent films that will get you a job at Paramount Classics or get your film sold at Fineline. Forget that. If that happens, fine, whatever. If you want that to happen, great, but the idea is for you to have a life for yourself as a filmmaker now today and to make the kind of films that you want to make at the level that you can make them.

MG: Do you endorse experimental filmmaking or is it primarily narratives that you're going for?

Jacques: We endorse every kind of filmmaking. Whatever it is that's organic to the filmmaker. Whatever it is that's the type of film that they want to make, the energy of the film that they want to make. We have filmmakers who are very experimental in their approach to filmmaking and some that are way more traditional, some that want to do animation, people who focus on documentaries, people that do a little of everything.

MG: I checked Filmmaker Alliance's website but it didn't have any clips. I know you've done Egg and Transaction, shorter films that have received favorable festival feedback, where can people go to see them?

Jacques: They're going to be able to eventually see them on our site. That's an interim site. We're rebuilding it. Some of them are on Google. Egg is on Google and it's on IFilm.

Diane: We need to build our links to specific members' work and also we want to have a lot more links to other organizations within Los Angeles that focus primarily on experimental work. I'm sure there's others in the country. Like there's the L.A. Film Forum, and Echo Park Film Center, and our friend Joel who lives up here runs Microcinema International, that's another great distributor of experimental shorts.

MG: Rust is your next film you're working on? Can you talk a little bit about Rust and what you're hoping for? Is it going to take another six years?

Jacques: Hopefully not. It's going to take a couple of years because we're not even going to shoot it for a while. It needs to be shot in the Fall. The look of it is very affected by the weather.

Diane: Autumn. Rust.

Jacques: We won't have it ready for this Fall so we're not going to be able to shoot until next Fall, so it's already going to take that long. But it's a much more complicated film. It's denser, more novelistic, than The Dogwalker. It's basically a famous actress on the downside of her career who goes back to a small city where she left when she was 16 years old and hasn't been back to since. She goes back for the funeral of her father who may or may not have been involved in a racially-motivated killing. She's going back to discover her own path, to reconnect with who she really is and who she was versus the fiction that she's created for herself and for others throughout her life. She takes that journey through an investigation of both her father's past—and whether or not he was truly involved in this event—and her own traumatic event when she was 16 that basically made her run away that she hasn't ever resolved and needs to come to terms with that.

MG: Are you going to be in this one, Diane?

Diane: Yeah. I'm still wearing this. [She gestures to her wedding band.]

MG: Good! I admired your acting. You're shy in person it appears but actually—even though you were shy and frightened in The Dogwalker—you have a large presence on camera so I hope to see more of your work. What do you hope for The Dogwalker? Who do you hope it's going to reach?

Jacques: Basically our marketing demographic is a reflection of the type of people we want to come and see it; people who are reflective and thoughtful, who are going to respond to the emotional energy of the film. I'll honestly say I don't think Dogwalker is aesthetically challenging….

Diane: Not as to form….

Jacques: …but I think it's personal.

MG: It's very personal.

Jacques: It's an emotionally impactful film that deals with issues—without hitting people over the head—that are important issues.

MG: And subtle ones. The final image that I came away with—and why I was hoping I would get to meet your dog Loser today—is because Loser keeps showing up in the film and this means something to Ellie. Loser keeps looking to Ellie to understand that he's waiting to be claimed, and Ellie finally does claim him.


Diane: Ellie is rescued by Pamela and Loser. It's personal and it's impactful partly because it's so quiet. The way that Jacques has made the film allows the audience to be drawn in as opposed to dictating to the audience. We're also working with a lot of nonprofits in the marketing of the film. We're working with cancer relief organizations, and womens organizations, and domestic violence organizations, and of course animal rescue organizations. It's not necessarily a message film. We're not trying to tell anyone anything. But I think the film can be cathartic. I think we're all struggling. Like you say, you were taught to be confident and not show any fear; but, none of us are like that inside necessarily.

MG: And even if you are, life can still knock you down.

Diane: Yes.

MG: You have few voiceovers in the film, which I appreciated. I liked that Ellie's reactions are vague and inchoate, they're not obvious, and so the audience is forced to invest hope that Ellie will come to an understanding of herself. When Ellie does, or when the audience begins to sense that Ellie will find her path, it's very gratifying. It's a positive film that way.

Jacques: Thank you. I'm hoping people will feel that way. Our marketing person that we hired was trying to identify the audience for the film. She said, "I think this film will speak powerfully to—for lack of a better term—the healing community." And I liked that she said that. The movie is about healing for me, especially through Ellie's character. She doesn't become Superwoman. She just heals a little bit and moves a little further along in her life. I would like that to encourage other people. You don't have to become a big shot or a king pin. It's just about….

MG: Surviving. Perseverance.

Jacques: Yeah, surviving, and taking those key steps toward being at peace with yourself and the world around you.

MG: Well, I thank you both for your time. I appreciate it. The Dogwalker is a solid, lovely film. I'm glad I had the chance to watch it. I wish you luck in its independent distribution.

Jacques: Thank you very much.

Diane: Thank you.

Cross-posted on Twitch.

THE DESCENT—The Evening Class Interview With Saskia Mulder

Saskia Mulder, who hails from the Netherlands, is excitedly enjoying her first visit to Los Angeles to promote Neil Marshall's The Descent. She took time to talk to me about the film. Brought into the project via the usual casting channels, Saskia won the role of Rebecca, the "safety girl" of the film's ensemble of women.

Michael Guillén: What was it like working with the ensemble of actresses?

Saskia Mulder: Fantastic! There's something about six girls working together—it could be great but it could also be horrible—but it was so much fun. The shoot was tough and physically grueling so coming in every day at 5:00 in the morning and finding five of your new best friends; it was just really nice.

MG: My understanding is that Rebecca was supposed to be the most experienced caver among the group, the "safety girl." Did that require you to train even more than the others?

Saskia: We all trained the same. Basically, we really had a boot camp. I've never had so many bruises and walked around with that much muscle ache in my life. The training was really tough but it was good preparation for the parts, not only physically but mentally as well. We went caving. I had to learn to offroad drive. We did ab sailing. We climbed a lot. It was just really good fun to learn.

MG: Have you continued on with that? Are you still caving or climbing?

Saskia: I still climb a little bit but the caving—when we went caving I loved it so much—honestly, I really felt they were some of the best days of my life. But since seeing the film, I don't dare to go anymore. When I was doing it, I absolutely loved it but seeing the film, you kind of see all the things that could possibly go wrong and suddenly it doesn't seem like such a safe idea anymore.

MG: I think that's why they call it an extreme sport. The film was shot at the Pinewood Studios in Scotland and I understand it was a difficult, uncomfortable shoot. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Saskia: I don't think I have ever experienced such fatigue and cold in my life. Because it was in the Pinewood Studios, but, due to safety regulations basically it's almost like it's open air. It was very cold. Winters there get very cold and very wet. On top of that, the caves were always wet, so we had about six weeks of being absolutely drenched in two degrees. So after a while you're a little tired of it.

MG: I bet. During the shoot it's my understanding that Neil kept the "crawlers" hidden from each of the actresses until the moment you encountered them in the script. What was that like, not knowing what they were going to look like? And what did you think when you first saw them?


Saskia: I think it was very clever of him to do that because, not knowing something, it's almost like getting on a roller coaster [while watching other] people get off and seeing them being really freaked out. That adds to your own excitement. We were really excited the day we were going to see them because obviously we knew from the script that that was going to be the day. Neil sat us down. He said, listen girls, you're going to see a crawler. Now what I want you to do is just react as you would but stay within those parameters. And we all said, "Yeah, yeah, okay, sure" and the moment we saw one we were all at the other end of the studio within seconds because it was just sooooo scary! [Laughs.]

MG: They definitely are scary! I had to keep apologizing to this girl next to me because I kept screaming at the top of my lungs.

Saskia: That's absolutely hilarious. The creatures, they're physical theater actors, so they're real people, and the first two days between scenes they would just come up and say hi and have a chat and I couldn't talk to them! They were just so scary. I honestly the first two-three days could not look at them; but, then after a while, you look at them and these poor guys are as ice cold as we are only they're not wearing many clothes and they can't get a blanket or something because of the make-up. I kept feeling very motherly towards them, "Are you all right? Do you want a cup of tea?" [Laughs.]

MG: I assume you've been traveling with the film and that you've been in audiences where it's been shown; what's that like to register the audience response?


Saskia: It's amazing. At horror films there are such direct responses that people have, if it's a good one. We've traveled around half of Europe with the film so I've seen the film fifty thousand times but every time I love seeing the audience's reaction because I know when they're going to jump and I know when they're going to be scared. You can actually see the audience—for example, when the cave collapses, you can see the audience squirming around in their seat. It's almost as if they're in the cave themselves. When there's a lot of dust, people start coughing a lot, because the film just gets under your skin. People just get into the film and I love watching them.

MG: When I was talking to Neil the other day, I told him it was like he had created three separate horror films—the first with the car accident and the psychological repercussions of that, and then the claustrophobia of the cave, and then the all-out rampage of the crawlers—so at least one of the three's going to get to you. I can imagine how much fun it would be to watch the audience.

Saskia: I agree with that analysis.

MG: So what's next for you? I imagine The Descent is going to expose you to a large audience who will be looking to see what you do next. What are you working on now?

Saskia: I've just been working non-stop since the film. I've been really lucky. I've been doing a French film, I've been doing some in Holland, next film is another English film, then a French film. It's just been really good for me.

MG: Well, I'm glad to hear that. All six of you did such a fine job in The Descent, it's a genuinely frightening film, and I thank you for taking the time from your L.A. publicity tour to talk with me, Saskia.

Saskia: Thank you very much!

Cross-posted on Twitch. A condensed version of this interview has been published in Entertainment Today.

THE JOY OF LIFE—The Evening Class Interview With Jenni Olson

Jenni Olson summarizes her film The Joy of Life as "an unconventional blending of documentary and experimental narrative strategies, combining stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voiceover (performed by L.A.-based artist/actor Harriet 'Harry' Dodge) to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as 'suicide landmark,' and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery. The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional."

It is also a vertiginous cautionary tale on falling—not only in love but off bridges. Favorably received at its Sundance premiere, The Joy of Life has been called "thrillingly minimalist" and "gently hypnotic" by Rob Nelson of The Village Voice. "Quiet as a reflecting pool in a meditation garden," Anne Stockwell writes for The Advocate, the film "speaks to [Jenni Olson's] substance as a filmmaker and a friend."

It has since gone on to win Best Outstanding Artistic Achievement at Outfest 2005 and Best U.S. Narrative Screenplay at the 2005 Newfest and has been written about evocatively by Susan Gerhard and Dennis Harvey for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

With one of the main tenents of Girish Shambu's experimental film blogathon being the availability of experimental film, I felt the recent dvd release of The Joy of Life qualified it as a perfect and timely candidate for the blogathon and I sought Jenni out for an interview.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Jenni, when I saw Joy of Life last year at the International Film Festival, I was intrigued by its experimental format. I have a question for you regarding the structure of the film. As someone who is relatively new to experimental film, I was wondering if the film was achieved through an assemble edit after the fact? Did you go into the project knowing what it was going to be?

Jenni Olson: I always knew that I wanted there to be three basic parts and elements. I wanted one part to be a first person diary format voiceover. I wanted one section of it to be some kind of archival audio and I had looked at various things for that before settling on Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his poem "The Changing Light." And then I wanted a third part to be some kind of historical documentary about San Francisco, or having to do with some topic related to San Francisco and, again, I researched a few different realms before settling on the Golden Gate Bridge. At one time I was looking at the old railroad right of ways in the city of San Francisco and another plan was looking at the history of telephone exchange names in San Francisco.

MG: So you're interested in the city's textural history?

Jenni: Particularly obscure things people aren't aware of. So, yeah, initially I wanted the film to have these three elements to it. I also ended up having this lengthy aside about the production history of Meet John Doe, which I think of as a forced part of the film, which wasn't necessarily part of my original plan. But, yeah, I always wanted it to be in three parts.

MG: Was that based on somebody's influence? Was there some other experimental filmmaker who was doing a tripartite division? Where did that come from?

Jenni: Well, two things: One is, there is a film that was very influential to me called Massillon by William E. Jones. He is a very good friend who made this film in 1991, which is about growing up gay in Ohio. It's similar in structure. The first part is a first-person—actually, he's doing the voiceover about growing up gay in Ohio—and the second part is audio of a radio broadcast of a homophobic rightwing preacher talking about "evil homosexuals", and then the third part is a look at urban planning in Santa Clarita, California. In that sense it's very similar. That was very influential, that you could accomplish that, that you could mix three very different things together, and I wanted to make a feature-length film and I wanted to tackle all these different things so that's part of why I tried to cram it all into one film.

MG: It was effective. As someone who is relatively unfamiliar with experimental film, it proved educational and intriguing. It made me start looking at more experimental pieces. You need to commend yourself for generating that kind of interest. What is it about that structure that you felt more effectively related your ideas than, let's say, a narrative feature? I'm trying to understand why your choice is to go towards experimental film rather than a narrative feature.

Jenni: I guess I just have always been far more interested in unconventional styles of filmmaking, so experimental film—whatever you call it, experimental film, hybrid filmmaking, nonconventional forms like personal documentaries—to me as a viewer and as a film critic and film historian and film programmer and film fan, I have seen so many conventional works, conventional narratives or conventional documentaries, which I love watching; I'm just not very interested in making one. I'm much more interested in the form and structure of filmmaking and just trying to do something different.

MG: I would say Joy of Life is actually more like a piece of sculpture. That's what intrigued me. Also—as we were discussing at the Persistent Vision Conference—I felt your film was the best expression of a butch dyke identity that I had ever seen and I know that at the conference there was this panel about "We Want Our Dykeback Mountain", this thirst for a lesbian crossover feature, and yet I felt that you got across more about that identity through this experimental medium. Do you think there's too much focus on narrative features?

Jenni: First of all, thank you for your complimentary comparisons. I think it's inevitable that people would want to see conventional feature-length narratives about gay life and diverse queer representations just because that's the society that we live in and primarily that's the filmmaking that we're exposed to. So it's inevitable that that's what most people are going to want. Personally, I feel like I am in all different ways much more interested in nonconventional forms or even more DIY (do it yourself) scrappy people getting their hands on a camera who have never made a movie and just have something more interesting to say. Or people who have not yet been heard from.

MG: As someone who has only recently been researching experimental film, I was surprised to discover there's actually quite a queer-associated history for this. With regard, let's say, to "experimental film" history, queer expression has been such a vital part of the development of experimental film. Kenneth Anger was some of the first stuff I ever saw. Jack Smith was some of the first I ever saw. Sadie Benning. These queer artists had a strong influence on shaping experimental film. Were you influenced by any of those people?

Jenni: Yeah, yeah, totally and that's exactly the thing: the history of experimental film and the history of gay film is the same history. If you look at much of the early experimental work, it's gay work. That comes out of a sense of being outsiders and having more interesting things to say and more interesting ways to say them. I was particularly influenced by Su Friedrich and Marlon Riggs, William Jones as I said, Sadie Benning, and also Chantal Akerman.

MG: Thinking of Joy of Life's inherent tripartite structure, I'm considering that the life of the film has likewise been tripartite. First there was the initial ramp-up and the creative process where you conceived it and you went out and shot it and in your mind pieced it together. Then it had its successful festival life, it won several awards and traveled around the country. And now it's going to go into its third life of dvd distribution where it's going to have the capacity of reaching a much larger audience. What's your feeling about that? Are you excited about that? Do you have hopes attached to a broader distribution?

Jenni: It's really exciting in terms of reaching larger audiences. Definitely, as an experimental filmmaker, I'm very aware that the kind of work that I make is going to be of interest to a smaller audience, necessarily. I do feel like I set out to make something that would be very much experimental and very much the film that I wanted to make but that would be more accessible than other experimental films, that people might actually come out of it and say, "Well, that wasn't that difficult and actually it was quite accessible." I hope that will continue to be the case with the dvd release.

MG: Does the dvd have any extra features?

Jenni: The extras on the dvd are three earlier short films that I made—Blue Diary, Sometimes and Meep Meep!

MG: I'm glad to hear that. That was going to be one of my questions: where could we find your earlier short pieces.

Jenni: Yeah, that's exciting that I'm able to get my short films out there too. And then the trailer is on there—which is all of 30 seconds long—and there's a little extra thing about the history of suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge that's an update on where that is at right now.

MG: Where are we with that right now? I know the film inspired the board for the bridge to reconsider a study on a suicide prevention rail. Do you know where they are with that?

Jenni: Right now they actually have a request for proposals for someone to do the feasibility study. It's basically the beginning of this two-year study to explore the feasibility of a barrier, which includes doing things like coming up with designs and doing wind tunnel testing and looking at the engineering and aesthetic issues and that's getting started now and that will be going on for the next couple of years. It's a long process.

MG: I know that the section of Joy of Life that explored the history of suicide with regard to the Golden Gate Bridge was in tribute to your friend Mark Finch. Has the film helped you resolve his death in any way? I know that he—in that place where people continually live—must be grateful to you for your memory of him.

Jenni: That's a nice thought. I don't know. It's been part of the process of my life, I guess. The best thing about it has been connecting with other people. I find that a lot of people will come up to me after screenings who have lost someone to suicide—not necessary off of the bridge but in whatever way—and have expressed that the film spoke to them in some way.

MG: It spoke to me in its longing. I came to San Francisco in 1975. I grew up here. I remember so many nights that I was out late and dragging myself home at dawn when the city was half-vacant and abandoned. All the thoughts that I would have at that time, I found unbelievably mirrored in the narrative voiceover of the first section of the butch dyke longing for love, which I understand was based on your own Fuck Diaries? What I felt came across in The Joy of Life—and I think you have even called it this—was a butch vulnerability that I found unique to lesbian voice that I had not heard before. Do you feel you're the main exponent of that voice.

Jenni: [Laughs.] The main exponent of butch vulnerability, I like that. As a queer film historian, it's been my experience that obviously in general LGBT people have fewer representations than the mainstream, whatever, straight people. Each sub-identity in our community suffers from not enough visibility or not enough representations of our stories. Being butch, I've been very aware that there are few films that speak to me or to my experience as a butch dyke and so that was something that was really important to me, to try to tell a story and speak to an audience, particularly a butch audience. I feel we're all hungry for representations of ourselves and our experience in a more nuanced way. You asked earlier about why this form and not a more conventional form, I do think that experimental form is uniquely able to tell a more complex story. Using the diary format was very effective in conveying an intimate experience. I would say that this is something that I was influenced by Su Friedrich, a lesbian experimental filmmaker, and Sadie Benning similarly, who will tell a very specific personal intimate story that is so much about one person's experience that it facilitates a million other people connecting to it in an experiential way, saying, "Oh, that's like me or that's exactly what my experience is like."

MG: I came upon that overarching insight when I was reading the diaries of Anaïs Nin. She would write about some memory and I would find myself drifting off in thought recalling one of my own memories. Her reveries guided me into my own. The more personal and exact you can get as a writer, it morphs over into a universal field where more people can relate to it. The more honest and genuine you are about your own personal self, the better you speak to a larger audience.

Jenni: Exactly. Also, using the first person format was something that felt intentional and significant. Just looking at things like Gide's The Immmoralist or Thomas Mann's Death In Venice or The Sorrows of Young Werther—which is referenced in the film—those are first person letters, epistolary novels—I love that word—where you're having the author speaking the first person through a character. It enables you to have that experience, that intimate vulnerability. It's also really hard to do it in a way that's artistically interesting and doesn't come off as cheap melodrama. [Laughs.]

MG: Within experimental film I imagine there are sub-genres. In reading some of the critical reception to Joy of Life some people were likening your work unto city symphonies. However, I got the sense you were patterning yourself after landscape studies?

Jenni: Both. It's interesting. I talk about the genre of landscape filmmaking, which is mainly James Benning. The thing about it is that, his work in particular is very challenging. A lot of his films are like, here's a three-minute static shot of an empty field and you're hearing the wind blow. And now here's another one. And here's another one for 90 minutes. It's an amazing experience and it's mesmerizing and all these different things but it's also very challenging. I felt I wanted to do something that—I like the experience of seeing a very static shot for a long duration and being very present and having a deep sense of being there; but, I wasn't interested in challenging the audience quite that much. I guess the other thing that I felt was going on for me in shooting and wanting to make a landscape film is more in line with a symphony of the city, which is this underlying feeling of being a documentarian and wanting to capture what the city looks like before it changes or as it's changing. Even though ostensibly the first part is this butch narrative, it is also simultaneously a documentary about the face of San Francisco. I actually just finished making a shot list, an edited shot list, or I should say an annotated shot list indicating all of the shots that are not there anymore or locations that have changed or been torn down. Like Anna's Danish Cookies at 18th and Guerrero is gone now.

MG: You could go wiggy doing that! I do that too since I've been here since '75. The constant malleability of the storefronts that becomes a kind of—it's like changing weather or something—and one's biography leans right into it. I do understand exactly what you're talking about. It's an ephemerality of surface that also implies an ephemerality of psyche. When you're out filming, my understanding is you have a cinematographer who's actually doing the camera work?

Jenni: Most of Joy of Life was shot by my friend Sophie Constantinou and my working method—if you will—is to make lists of shots that I want and then we would go out, in the mornings mainly, very early in the morning and drive around and try to accomplish my shot list. Mostly, I had very specific compositions in mind. I'd say, I want it straight on with that thing up in the corner and the street right there.

MG: Would you actually look through the camera to secure the shot?

Jenni: Yeah, so I can say that's exactly what I want. But other times Sophie would say, well, how about, what if, I don't know if that'll look right, how about we put the camera here, or what if we do this? She's a very accomplished cinematographer and it's more than just pushing a button. The film looks amazing if I do say so.

MG: Absolutely. The film looks beautiful. Which leads me to ask, you actually shot on 16mm. Was there a reason why you didn't go the popular route of filming digital?

Jenni: Yeah, I mean just the visual quality of 16mm. The whole film has for me a melancholic and nostalgic feel, and a very analog feel in this digital age, in all kinds of ways. My working method [was] this zen-like intent that I had with this whole thing of slowing down and paying attention to what's going on in the world. So shooting on 16mm was … there was something very organic about that.

MG: What you were saying a little bit earlier about the static long shots, I've been challenged a lot through the films of Tsai Ming-Liang who frequently uses long shots, or even Amos Gitaï has these very long shots, where both are conscious of what you're saying: they want an audience member to be patient enough to allow a certain understanding to come through the images. I like that you say zen-like because it is a feeling of rapt meditative attention. You've been involved in queer cinema in many different ways over the years beginning originally as the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, then shifting on to Planet Out and Popcorn Q, and now you're involved in Wolfe Video, which is a distribution line. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Jenni: Just to clarify, I was the founder of the Minneapolis Gay and Lesbian Film Festival back in 1985-86, which actually sadly bit the dust last year for lack of sponsorship money after 18 years, which is a pretty sad comment on gay festivals today. Then I was one of the co-founders of PlanetOut.com and Popcorn Q and then I was also the co-director of Frameline for a couple of years with Mark Finch before I was with PlanetOut. Now I'm with Wolfe Video, I'm director of e-commerce and consumer marketing, which basically means I help them sell dvds. Wolfe is the largest exclusive LGBT film distributor in North America. We release at least one title a month on dvd as well as doing theatrical and festival bookings.

MG: I was looking at the site earlier today and it looks challenging and competitive. I commend you for getting your hands on it early to promote this queer market.

Jenni: It's a wonderful company to work for and continuing my championing of queer cinema. I continue to do other things during my copious spare time. I had a book that came out last year called the Queer Movie Poster Book and I'm on the advisory board of the Legacy Project, which is a partnership that's between Outfest L.A. and the U.C.L.A. film archives which is dedicated to LGBT film preservation and that's my other passion.

MG: Yes, I regret missing your workshop on archival preservation at the Persistent Vision Conference. I had thought it was being taped and then I found out afterwards it wasn't and I was so irritated.

Jenni: No archiving of the archiving panel, sadly.

MG: In terms of experimental filmmakers who are operating today, some have crossed over into mainstream somewhat—I consider you one of those—Apichatpong Weeraskathul's—Joe's—work, are you familiar with his work? Do you like what he does?

Jenni: Oh yeah. Tropical Malady is amazing. I have to applaud Strand Releasing particularly because they released Tropical Malady. They also are doing the dvd release of The Joy of Life. But they over the years have been very committed to experimental and innovative work and getting it out there. These films don't actually make loads of money at the box office.

MG: I didn't realize it was Strand that was actually releasing The Joy of Life. I interact with Bill McLeod over at Strand in helping them promote their titles. I thought it was Frameline Distribution who was distributing your film.

Jenni: Frameline is the non-theatrical educational distributor and they sublicense to the dvd . . . well, I guess Strand is helping them with their home video line and so all of the Frameline titles are being released on dvd through Strand Releasing. So Bill deals with all the theatrical and Strand has a different publicist in L.A., Steven Seller, who does all their dvd releases.

MG: I anticipate that the dvd release of The Joy of Life is going to reach a wide audience who has probably never quite seen a film like this before. Just as it wowed people at the festivals who are more film-literate and educated, I think you're going to reach a whole new audience. So I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I'm excited about the dvd release. I'm looking forward to having my own copy and hopefully at that time you'll sign it for me?

Jenni: [Chuckling.] Absolutely. I would love to. Yeah, it's exciting. People can put it on their Netflix queues. It's even on Blockbuster online, which was surprising to me.

MG: Oh, I meant to ask you one final thing. I understand you're working on a film called Eureka? What's Eureka about?

Jenni: It's similar in style to The Joy of Life. It's a landscape film with voiceover looking at the history of the street design of San Francisco, going back and looking at some of the decisions about how the urban planning was done in the city in the early days as well as, no doubt, I'll fit some adventures of the butch dyke in San Francisco in there.

MG: So when can we expect to see that?

Jenni: [Laughs.] Oh God. It will be a few years, let's just say. It took me almost 10 years to make The Joy of Life. It's difficult doing the fund raising and pulling it all together while having a fulltime job and a wife and two kids and various other interests.

MG: Well, I admire that you do all of that and thanks again, Jenni, for taking the time to talk with me.

Jenni: Thank you, Michael.

Cross-posted at Twitch.

08/07/06 UPDATE: Via Dave Hudson at the Greencine Daily, Jenni has also been interviewed recently by Offscreen's Ryan Didick, who focuses on her curatorial artistry.