bell peppper

BEDATRI CHOUDHURY: Hello, hello. Thank you for staying past your bedtimes…

 [audience laughs]

BEDATRI: …for this Q&A. Thank you so much for sticking around. My name is Bedatri, I’m a Senior Features Programmer here at the festival. And can I please welcome back on stage, Ian Bell, director, editor, producer. Alex Megaro, editor and producer. Laura Tatham, producer. And Debra McClutchy, archival producer. 

[audience cheering and clapping]

IAN BELL: And Baros, our sound mixer, is with us as well. We got a few other crew members in the crowd. We might call you out and ask you a question too, so, yeah. [indistinct]

BEDATRI: Ian, I’m thinking of source material, and I’m like… what about found footage and archival excites you? Yeah.

IAN: Yeah, first of all, Vivek Kemp is in the house. He made source material possible. We– Alex and I got to– Thank you, Vivek. 

[audience clapping]

IAN: Alex and I got to work for two plus years on an all archival series on Vice News. It was like they gave us a playground and didn’t ask too many questions, and it was a pretty nice– So we got better there. I think with… with found footage and archival there’s this ability to get to the moment and not rely on memories or on pe– you know, interviews where people can, I don’t know, people are– wanna look good in their own memories. They wanna… whatever.

 [audience laughs]

IAN: Just, memory’s flawed. And we finished this whole century in front of a lens, and we have this like, this really beautiful gift where we can go back, ‘cause so many people captured moments and preserved it for us to learn from directly. And… so yeah. I’m really drawn to experiencing it first hand. The WTO event happened in my home town. I wasn’t there, and it’s always stayed in the back of my mind. And when we found the first 400 hours, which ended up becoming 1000 hours, it felt like the moment where like– because I’d heard so many opinions about it from family and friends that were there, and whatever. From all sorts of parts of the political spectrum. And I feel like I never really understood it until I made it. And it’s like just a really great way to learn how things unfold.

BEDATRI: This brings me to my next question: Why WTO/99? Like there’s so many other [laughing] things that’s happened in this country, why this film– why this incident at that point of history?

IAN: So we started talking about it, I don’t know, eight years ago or so. Some of the discourse during 2016 seemed to have longer echoes. And concerns about trade and deindustrialization, and then rising police militarization, and being from Seattle, having some stories at the back of my mind. I had this like, this like… in– I don’t know, there’s like an itch. I thought maybe some of this stuff ran through that event. And– because I think we think of NAFTA really quickly when it comes to deindustrialization, and like the shift of the united class, the labor class away from  the Democratic party. But these things are also happening then, and I didn’t really fully understand the role of the WTO in global trade either at the time when we first started. And as we started making it, it became really apparent that like these themes that we thought were in there were really in there. And… and also like maybe we didn’t– the national conversation hadn’t fully examined why the, you know, we had so much political upheaval over the last ten years. And it was just really, I don’t know if this is the question, but just well a little fun– fun? Not fun.

 [audience laughs]

IAN: Just a thing that I thought was really interesting was like here you had the full democratic hierarchy that was like shutting down the people. And you had the labor class be very clear about what they needed out of them. And the environmental movement. And people from all walks of life being like, “This shit’s not cool,” And that [indistinct] not listening?

And so like the warnings of that shift were then and we’ve seen them kind of [indistinct]. So that’s [indistinct]

BEDATRI: And it’s interesting because this morning we screened the Amy Goodman film, and to see her back on the screen here, I was like, “Oh, she’s everywhere!”  [laughs]

 [audience laughs]

BEDATRI: But also there’s this part where Bill Clinton calls and like heckles her on air, live. So lots of echoes there. But as editors and producers, and like one thing about… like, you know, when you ask a person about their lives, their memories, it’s like finite, right? They talk about the last 50 years they’ve been alive. But with something like this, this is obviously not all the footage that ever existed on this, so as editors, you also edited the film, but also as producers it sounds like a nightmare.

 [audience laughs]

IAN:  [laughs]

BEDATRI: Because you don’t know where to stop.

LAURA TATHAM: It’s not not a nightmare.

ALEX MEGARO: It’s not not a nightmare. It’s a lot of footage [laughs]. Don’t know where to stop… it’s interesting, it was… The challenge was how to structure it because when you’re presented with, you know, the largest box of Legos imaginable just dumped in front of you, you have, kind of, infinite permutations of what you can do. Ian and I talked about the structure of this for so long. At one point we were thinking like jumping in time and trying to comment, and that was a terrible idea. And once we figured out this rigid chronology that the film takes we sort of formed this larger idea of this piece as a historical artifact, and a historical artifact first. And all editing is in service of the artifact. And it was our attempt to make a film like as objectively, or as objective as one can do while still editing a feature, and yeah, just make it as truthful as possible, as we possibly could given what we had in front of us. So all editing is in service of this artifact we never take footage from three hours later, put it three hours early ‘cause the footage would match and something would be more dramatic and the drama would be heightened, so that kind of informed so many of our choices where it was really– it was in service to the chronology. And that truth was extremely important to us. But there was also, you know, a thousand hours of footage, so it was still a constant nightmare hellscape that we were going in.

But yeah, it was about telling that truth and making sure that it flowed in a very specific way. It’s about transitions, it’s not a staccato, here’s a fact, here’s a fact, here’s a fact. We want you to be able to live in it. We wanted it to work as a factual document, so you’ll walk away understanding what happened, the reasons why– what– the opinions of every side, but on a second level, an experiential piece where you get emotional truth that you might not be able to get if this were told in a different way. So even if the– all the facts being thrown at you, it’s dense, it’s a lot, but that emotional truth and the experience of living through what it’s like to be in a protest will inform the factual and vice versa. And, you know, we wanted everyone to experience what it might be like to live through a police state, but fortunately for all of us, we’re all gonna get to do that in a few months, so…

 [audience laughs]

LAURA: Yeah…

BEDATRI: [indistinct]

LAURA: Yeah, I will say definitely, you know, you were talking about like, “Oh, when do you know how to stop?” And it’s like, I don’t know, a thousand hours feels pretty good.

 [audience laughs]

LAURA: And I think, you know, part of the reason this film got made is because Ian was working with the University of Washington, and he found out that they were, for the first time, digitizing 450 hours of footage from protestors on the street. And, you know, we were the first people that had access to it, maybe much to the University of Washington’s chagrin looking back.

 [audience laughs]

LAURA: And then, you know, we had a lot of other sources coming in, right? Like you're seeing footage that Debra was able to get from the police, you’re seeing municipal footage. And I think the most amazing part of this really for me is that all of that like live on the street footage you see, all of the Channel 7 footage doesn’t technically exist in their archives. So there was like one guy basically, and he was recording on a VCR off the TV every day with the live broadcast. So when we reached out to Channel 7 we were like, “Hey, so like we’ve got a lot of footage.” You know, and it was all from this University of Washington archive, and we said, “We’d really like to use it in our film.”

And they were like, “You have that? We don’t have that footage.”

And we’re like, “Uh, okay cool. We have it. Can we pay you something for it and just like use it?”

And they were like, “Yeah okay, that seems fine.”

 [audience laughs]

LAURA: So, you know, there’s a lot of really interesting, sort of, things that happened as we go along, and I feel like Deb, you probably have a lot more to say about the archival because you had sort of a heavy lift. Like we started with this 450 hours, and then we started– sort of built out from what we were able to see, and that’s really when you came in and just got all these things we needed.

DEBRA MCCLUTCHY: Yeah, it was definitely a collaborative effort. And Noah Broch is in the audience 

 [audience clapping]

DEBRA: …who was an early archival researcher on this that set us up really well also. But yeah, it was a collaborative process, we were all pulling in material. But I did come on board and pull in even more material with– I’ve worked with the Municipal Archive in Seattle with Libby… Hopfauf is her last name. Fun last name. She’s an amazing archivist. And part of the story really is a preservation story because these video tapes that were collected by an organization called Indie Media, it was volunteer videographers and citizen journalists that were out there documenting this, and were very intentional about like documenting it in a way that you wouldn’t see in mainstream media. So all hail the archivists and the preservation people out there.

[audience clapping]

DEBRA: Yeah. Because otherwise this story couldn't be told. There weren’t cellphones back then. People had their MiniDV cameras, their Hi8 cameras. If you have that footage right now, get it transferred immediately because there is a magnetic media crisis, and it will disintegrate if you don’t get it transferred, so I highly recommend that. But yeah, but then we pulled in stuff from international news archives, American archives, [indistinct], Seattle police department. So many places.

LAURA: Yeah.

DEBRA: And then like the University of Washington, these videographers, we had to get permission from them, so we had to reach out, and you know, really explain what we were doing, intentionality behind it, and get them on board, which was always a scary thing to do with some people. But they knew what we were doing and were very supportive, and yeah.

BEDATRI: But the sound like, you know, like Laura said, like sometimes it was like a copy of a copy, or like– it was coming in from so many different sources. How do you even like… What's the magic sauce you use…

 [crew laughs]

BEDATRI: …to make it sound uniform and like, you know, great, as we just heard.

BARBAROS KAYNAK: That was a quite puzzle to work with.

LAURA:  [laughs]

BARBAROS: But I think the one thing is very important that happened in this movie, generally it doesn’t happen, so in the credits you guys didn’t see any sound design or foley artists because there was none. So we were able to use only the source material. So there is only two places I just had to add a kind of ambience because there was none in the source material, which is like ten seconds, I would say. But rest of the hear– the things that you hear was all source material. There is no additional… sweeteners. So I guess that was the most important thing we were able to pull it from this project.

BEDATRI: Thank you. I’ll open it up to the audience, but let me give this audience question because I know it will come. Licensing fees. How–

LAURA: No! No, no, no…

BEDATRI: Listen, if I don’t ask it someone in the audience will.

LAURA: [laughs]

BEDATRI: So…

LAURA: I have yet to recover [indistinct]. Yeah no, we had to pay them. It was a really good chunk of our small budget. I will say we were really, really lucky in that, I would say, I don’t know, like 40, 45 minutes of the film is taken from the University of Washington. And bless the University of Washington, which is the only time I will say that on microphone because their licensing fees were super, super, super cheap, so that really made, sort of, that part of this accessible and affordable to us. Everyone else, however… You know, you see like some, you know, like CNN, right? You see like the, the CBC, very expensive. And  [laughs] that’s where a really good majority of our budget went. We were also really lucky in that Ian like had relationships with some folks that were on the ground there, and they were able to lay some things just straight over to us. That made up a lot of it too, and you know, we really tried to give them a fair fee so they felt like they were getting something for their contribution, but also it wasn’t like, I don’t know, $120 a second or whatever people charge, some like really eye bleeding amount. But yeah, no, that was a very, very, very, very, very high portion of our budget. And were it not for the University of Washington, it would be way more.

IAN: One thing, can I– So, the only source we could find that was really articulate about what was happening on the streets was the CBC on day one. Every other news channel was like, “I dunno what’s happening!”

[audience laughs]

IAN: And, but the CBC, what I learned is like if you are like on– just observing the thing in front of you and telling it straight, you can charge thousands of dollars a second, so good job, CBC.

 [audience laughs]

BEDATRI: This is my last question. I read your essay for Filmmaker Magazine where…

LAURA: [laughs]

BEDATRI: I do my homework! [laughs] And you talk about what just happened in LA, the National Guard in the streets, and you draw parallels between this film and what we’re living through, but… I don’t know how to frame this, but if the world this film was releasing into was a different world, do you think this film would’ve been a different film? In the way it’s perceived by the audience.

IAN: Yeah.

[audience laughs]

IAN: I mean, I think that like the, you know, LA aside, I think that like the, the economic message and like the… the message about representative democracy would’ve still resonated, but Alex says, and I’ll let him take it from here, he says the worse the world gets the better– like the better the film’s received?

[audience laughs]

ALEX: The worse the world gets, [laughs] the better the film’s received. 

[audience laughs]

ALEX: That’s basically it. I basically had said, you know, if there’s a point– throughout the year it’s been received better and better. We premiered, we worked on this for, we were editing for two, two and a half years, it premiered the week that tariffs became a talking point again. So that was really bizarre to us. That we made the most relevant movie out of nowhere.

[audience laughs]

ALEX: And then yeah, as the year’s gone on we’re screening more, people are embracing this more. Recently [laughs] we won an award, and I said to Ian, “That’s not a good sign for the world.”

[audience laughing]

ALEX: Like oh shit. Yeah, so if we get more accolades, watch out and start buying some body armor, I guess.

LAURA: [indistinct] It was never our intention to be this relevant. [laughs] Like at all.

BEDATRI: Questions from the audience. Yes.

PERSON 1: I wonder how many people in this audience were at one of the WTO protests.

IAN: A few.

PERSON 1: Where’s the DC? [indistinct]

IAN: You were at the DC one for the–

PERSON 1: Yeah. I was in the noodle puppet (?). Anyway. Thank you guys so much. I love what you said about the archive and how and like making the film [indistinct] to that and a historical document. It’s so rare and beautiful, and all the work with the archive [indistinct]. I think it’s so, yeah so important, and rare as well. I mean, it was for me just shocking the– to see that imagination and creativity in those protests [indistinct] this is more of a comment, sorry. Look at how we’re doing– how we’re acting now, and we’re– we’re just little, little moles with our heads in the ground. It’s insanity that we’ve forgotten how to do these things. We were so good at that. I think it’s interesting [indistinct] so I’m just curious a bit about that. About how you felt editing this film, because you could’ve gone all these different directions. Yeah, I’m kind of curious about– and also your own personal lives as activists and media, and how do you, yeah where does [indistinct]

IAN: Uh…

[audience laughs]

IAN: I’ll just take the, “Why 9/11?” part of that question. The easiest part. We, well we didn’t know how to end it, to be honest. We finished the four days, and so– we finished the four days first, and then we thought, we gotta have an opening, we gotta have an ending. And the opening… Alex and I talked a lot about how like maybe– it’s almost like you have like a little like graduate seminar in like trade policy and the history of global economic pacts, and so it’s up to everyone in this room individually if we did that okay or not.

And so that was our attempt to sort of like set the stage and give you a little bit of– just enough to give you the stakes of why people protested. And then we just, you know, we obviously watched a lot, we didn’t just watch footage and listen to interviews from that, we kept listening, we kept– and we read a bunch of books. It kept coming up. People would say, “9/11 happened and we didn’t know what to do.” Or some people would say, “I didn’t feel… I didn’t know how to feel about the thing. It wasn’t appropriate to do the thing.” Other groups were very clear expressing like they felt more surveilled. There was more like the power coming down on them. And so there wasn’t– everyone's experiences that we were reading about were different, but there was like a unifying theme of like this thing happened and we should– we don’t know. And so, and there was all that energy, and we sort of just felt like it’s kind of a natural conclusion. We spoke with people who, you know, professors who study this thing [indistinct]. We just try to get an input to really get an understanding of where it went and maybe how it dissipated. So that’s where we landed. Just like the bulk of them, we just try to do them as it was.

PERSON 1: Were you guys able to get money for taking this to different places?

IAN: No. We recently just got turned down for a big grant.

LAURA: [laughs]

[audience laughs]

IAN: They were like, “Who needs this?”

[audience laughs]

IAN: “Unity?” [laughs] “Fighting the power?”

BEDATRI: Yes in the back.

PERSON 2: Could you talk a little bit about going through that thousand hours of footage? When you were approaching this project, were there turning points and things you were already looking for as high water marks in the protests? And then, what were moments that surprised you going through the footage that ended up becoming critical moments in the final product?

ALEX: So far as going through it, if you know the Charlie Day conspiracy board meme…

[audience laughs]

ALEX: …that was pretty much our brains. It’s still my brain, unfortunately. So that’s what that experience was. But I think we went in, as Ian mentioned, there were, you know, we saw these parallels that could be there, that we would hope to find, but the way we approached this is we have no voice over, we have no interviews, we have no crutch to lean on. So if it’s not in the footage we can’t really discuss it in the film. 

Fortunately for us, these parallels were so much greater and more apparent than we could have hoped to make this what it was. And… I think we just kept finding these opportunities to comment in ways we never would have anticipated. Such as the– on day two, you see the news reporter walk around the street, and there’s someone who just happened to be following him as he’s going around being a dick to people, and you can see in real time how the media is reporting on something verses the reality on the ground, which is just something we never could have anticipated, but was just like a gift that fell to us. You can see the media lying outright, and saying like, “They have no idea why they’re here!” To a guy saying, “They’re not telling all of you why we’re here.”

So it– we can show the purposeful media disinformation campaign. That was one of the big things that we could’ve dreamed of showing, and we just found amazing matching footage. It’s a testament to how many people went out there with intentionality with the way they were shooting. Because you had to make the choice to bring a camcorder to an event like this. Which is not to look down on anyone who’s filming something now with their camera phone. It’s just a different style of going about it. They went with this intentionality, and they went with a mission, and because these archives were preserved for 20+ years, we can see the fruits of that mission.

And, you know, maybe it took some time to fall into our hands, but I just feel fortunate that we were able to tell these stories, draw these parallels, show the lies that were told about this event and how it was portrayed in the media. And also show that this shit’s been going on way longer than everyone is telling you. Like Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere, and the seeds were planted a long time ago. Everyone wants you to think this creeping fascism just showed up, but you see it here, and that was a very important thing for us. As Ian mentioned too, like this didn’t pop out of thin air, this was going on for a long time. It was happening before this. This just became an– we saw it in our eyes as a hinge point in American history and activist history, and a much more important hinge point than I think the larger media wants all of us to believe. Maybe that answered the question. I don’t know.

[audience clapping]

IAN: If it’s alright, before we do like a final applause, if you guys wanna applause,

[audience laughing]

IAN: can I get the other crew members down? Gavin and Noah and Steve. Just like come join us for a final hurrah.

[audience cheering and clapping]

IAN: Oh yeah, Maggie! Maggie. Are you in the room? Yeah! I’ve never met Maggie.

[audience laughs]

IAN: [indistinct] 

[audience cheering and clapping]

LAURA: Oh my god, that’s such a great question! Thank you for asking. [laughs] So, you are producing my film. I love you. This will be– so if you wanna watch this again and just spend another almost two hours living in this… this will be at DCTV for one week. It’ll be three showings a day staring on December 5th. Our opening night moderator is going to be Amy Goodman, who we see in the film.

[audience cheering and clapping]

LAURA: So ya’ll should come out for that. And also we have like a lot of “No WTO” buttons. So please, everyone, if you want one, come up to me as you’re leaving. I will give you one.

IAN: And I’ll say one thing. This is super lame and not very Seattle of me, but like if you want to vote for us for the audience award that’d be kind of cool? We’re not like– people don’t like giving us awards sometimes, so…

[audience clapping]

BEDATRI: Thank you everyone. Good night. And the way you vote is… read the instructions on your tickets.

JAIE LAPLANTE: Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

[audience clapping]

JAIE: Who’s feeling in the holiday spirit tonight? Awesome, awesome. I love it. The vibe, the electricity out there was amazing. My name is Jaie Laplante, I’m the artistic director of DOC NYC, and welcome to our 16th edition and our centerpiece screening of The Merchants of Joy [indistinct]

[audience cheering and clapping]

JAIE: I can’t tell you, I’ve been so excited for this screening for weeks, and it’s finally here. Actually, years because I first met Celia a couple of years ago, she told me about this project, and I’m so excited to bring her up in a couple of minutes, but before I do, I’d just like to make a couple of announcements. I’d like to thank our sponsors. First of all, our major sponsors of the festival are Apple Original Films and HBO Documentary Films. Our supporting sponsors are

National Geographic Documentary Films and Netflix, as well as our leading media sponsor, Thirteen. Our major media sponsor is Variety, and our supporting media sponsor is Indie Wire. 

One thing that’s very important. Voting is very important in New York, and we have an audience award at this festival. So I’d like all of you to participate in voting after the screening. You can find the instructions on your ticket stubs, both printed and electronic, and you can vote all the way up until November 22nd, which is the end of the in-person festival. Just a couple of days afterwards. 

So we have a lot of special people in the audience tonight, but first I wanna thank Amazon for their amazing sponsorship of this screening. This is a Prime Original film, and I’m so delighted to bring out director and producer, Celia Aniskovich.

[audience cheering and clapping]

JAIE: Who’s really in the Christmas Spirit. 

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA ANISKOVICH: Okay, so I did write a speech down because I have cried about fifteen times today, so I’m gonna try to not cry right now. Thank you all for being here tonight. For those who know me well, you know just how many times over the last three years, and yes it took three years to make this film, it felt like this film might never get made. Many of the people responsible for the countless Christmas miracles that it took to get to this night are here. I would like to start by thanking them. Epic Magazine, Boat Rocker, Artists Equity, Amazon, our core crew: Carrie, Zoe, Vera. Yes.

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: And my endlessly forgiving family: Joe, Goose, mom, dad, Emmy…

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: …for not just understanding why I had to miss every single holiday in order to make this film, 

[audience laughs]

CELIA: but also encouraging me to bet on myself and keep going. Even when everyone else was telling me that I was crazy. This is not a celebrity biopic, it’s not a true crime drama, and therefore it’s the kind of film that doesn’t get made much these days, let alone find distribution. It is not lost on me that there are probably countless filmmakers in this room who have tried to get films like this made and not succeeded. To them I’d like to say, “Keep going.”

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: [indistinct] Now, The Merchants of Joy is a story about the people who build the magic the rest of us take for granted. They are the true heroes of Christmas. Each December while we rush through the city, they turn sidewalks into forests, they work through cold, exhaustion, and uncertainty all to give strangers a small piece of wonder. In a culture so often defined by crisis division and spectacle, I hope The Merchants of Joy reminds you that joy is not naive. Joy is brave. It’s a way of insisting on our shared humanity. It’s something we can all make for each other again and again even when the world gives us every reason not to. This film is a love letter. To the tree families featured in the film who will be seeing it tonight beside all of you for the very first time. To the city of New York, the greatest city in the world.

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: And to the quiet, stubborn belief that joy still matters. I hope for the next 90 minutes you feel that joy. Finally, this is the only time a live audience will get to see this film before it arrives on Amazon in December, so I’d like to give you all a little extra piece of Christmas magic to take with you by sharing a secret that Big Greg shared with me while we were making this film. And when the lights come up, and you step back onto the streets of New York, I hope you carry this profound yet simple idea in your heart for all of your days. “Anyone can be Santa any day they choose.”

[audience laughs]

[audience cheering and clapping]

JAIE: Please stick around after the screening. We’ll have Celia back up here to have a conversation and the Q&A. So for now, please enjoy The Merchants of Joy.

[audience cheering and clapping]

—————————————————————————————————————

Q&A

JAIE: Director and producer, Celia Aniskovich! She’s bypassing the stairs, I love that. Oh, I feel like I just got the first Christmas present of the year!

CELIA: Thank you.

JAIE: Do you feel the same way?

[audience cheering and clapping]

JAIE: What a gift this movie is, and I, I really feel it could only be made by someone with a deep love of Christmas. Guessing, just wild shot in the dark. But how did your– how did you love of Christmas sustain this project and, you know, make this project what it is, through all– what you experienced.

CELIA: So I will answer that. If you don’t mind, can I call out some people before we do–

JAIE: Of course, of course.

CELIA: Okay, I wanna call out two groups of people. Anyone who worked on the film in any capacity, could you please stand? There are a lot of you here tonight.

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA:  [indistinct] I don’t see [indistinct]. You worked on the film, come on! Go ahead. Thank you all. Okay. And now the people you all want to see, can our tree families please stand?

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: Okay. To answer the Christmas question I have to start by saying I’m the eldest daughter. And for all the eldest daughters in the room, you will know how hard it is to say this, but the reason this film happened, really, is because of my mother.

[audience laughs]

CELIA: And because she was the first of about 25 people within 24 hours after the article got published in Epic Magazine who sent me the article and said, “This seems like all of the things you love in one place. You have to make this.” And then it turned into, and we can get into it, but three years of trying to figure out how this film got made– gets made. The tree families know all too well [laughs] because not only was I trying to direct the film, I was driving our crew vehicle, I was taking calls trying to get money to make the film as we were doing it. So it’s– when you say, “How did it sustain you?” It’s the only thing that sustained me. I will tell any jaded New Yorker, I’ve now been here for 15 years, spend Christmas on the streets of New York. Spend– basically we spent 26 straight days on the street. You will never want to go anywhere else. You will never have a jaded bone in your body again. Even when you’re filming at 30 Rock. Even when you’re filming, if anyone remembers, the tree families, I know, do, 2023 it rained almost every day.

[audience laughs]

CELIA: It still– there was magic every day. There’s so, so much. Our first assembly was five and a half hours long that didn’t make it into the film because there was so much magic. So it was very easy to stay sustained.

JAIE: Ah, I love that. And, you know, there’s so much I learned. You know, I’ve bought a Christmas tree, I’ve only been in New York for four years. Not jaded yet. But I bought my Christmas trees and I, you know, had no idea what was– What did you learn from what, you know, from the, you know, you read the article– what was– when you started making the movie, and, and getting to know the protagonists. What did you  learn? Can you tell us?

CELIA: I learned so much, and I felt really dumb. I don’t know how many New Yorkers in here tonight felt this way, but like I just woke up one day and all the trees were there,

[audience laughs]

CELIA: and I didn’t really think much about how they all got there. But you do. As a New Yorker, you know, you wake up one day, and they literally built cities overnight. That was one of the best parts of making the film was to get to be there in that overnight shift of when all of the trees arrive. And you know, so, you know, I learned not too many trade secrets. You guys were really good at not telling me the trade secrets. But I think I learned a lot about the ins and out– I learned that really not anybody can do this. You kind of, as I think Little Greg says, you kind of have to be born into this. It’s really a family thing. And to know that just brought me so much joy, so it was really incredible to learn. I, you know, yes, again, the nuts and bolts, but like all the traditions everyone has was really magical. 

JAIE: Ah, great. And I love how you edited the film together, and you moving us back and forth from the different families. I was wondering while you were putting the film together, what did each of the families come to represent to you? ‘Cause, you know, they all– they all have a different role in the film, and I was just wondering how that, you know, came to you in terms of storywise and, and building the mosaic.

CELIA: They all do have a very different role to play, and I am grateful that you’re all so different. All of you. Four families and Kevin, who are in here, are all so different. I think, for me, the Nashes represent that legacy and tradition, and they are not exaggerating when they say every member of their family has touched a tree in some way. And that was a beautiful thing to– again, we got really lucky this year as well that we were there the year that they passed it down, right? Like that was an incredible thing to get to witness. You know, George, I think you got more laughs than anybody, and that’s what you wanted.

[audience laughing]

CELIA: There was a running– there was a running joke between Big Greg and George that the film should be called– well, Big Greg wanted to call the film “Mostly About Greg.”

[audience laughing]

CELIA: And every time I saw George, he asked, “Do I have more airtime or does Greg have more airtime?”

[audience laughing]

CELIA: So I loved that we got that comedy in there. Heather… Where are you? I love it.

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: Heather can be a tough nut to crack. When I first met her I thought maybe she doesn’t like me very much.

[audience laughing]

CELIA: I was like, yeah, I realized like she’s a– she’s tough, and as people who know me, I can be tough when you gotta be tough right back. She’s running a business, she’s not trying to make my life easier, and that was an incredible thing. I think, in so many ways, Heather embodies a New Yorker. As one of her workers said, “She’ll scream at you that the tree’s in the wrong place, and then pick you up and get you a meal and help you.” And that to me is a New Yorker, right? Like we are kind, we are not always nice, right? But that’s important. 

[scattered applause]

CELIA: And oh… Big Greg. It’s probably evident by this film that all these families became family to me. You don’t live on the street with people and spend time with people in this way without them becoming family. Big Greg is Santa. Little Greg is taking on that role now. To me they represent– Big represents– Big Greg represents everything that is wonderful and good about Christmas. And it was, I’ve said this to all of you and it’s true, the honor of my life to get to tell this story, and I just feel so lucky. I will say, before Greg passed, on his birthday no less, which is such a thing for him to do to make sure that we’re celebrating him even when he passes, he got to see it and screen it with his family. So he did get to see the film.

[audience clapping and “aww”ing]

JAIE: So I would love to open the conversation to all of you and have you share in this experience of this beautiful world premiere. Just gonna ask another couple of questions and I’ll come out to you. I just wanted to ask you though, if you do wanna participate in this process, to just keep it to one question and just to be as succinct as you can so that we can get to as many people as possible. But I loved what you said at the beginning of the film about, you know, this is not the  kind of film that is– gets through and gets to be a success, and you made a really beautiful comment about filmmakers who were trying to tell this kind of very human stories. What– Could you just talk about the risks that you took in the early days of, you know, putting this film together? You know, I’ve seen your other work, and this film really feels risky in so many ways, and almost like the film you were born to make, but…

CELIA: Oh, well that’s very kind. Yeah, so I sat with Arthur Spector from Epic Magazine, who sadly cannot be here tonight because he is making somebody else’s dreams come true on a film in Korea. But he sat with me, the film came out, I said, “I have to make this film.” It was a couple days before– Sorry, the article came out, I had said, “I have to make this film.” It was a couple days before Christmas, and I was awful to poor Arthur. I was like, “I need to get on the phone right now. I– No other director can do this.” And he was like, “It’s Christmas. Leave me alone.” I was like, “Just one Zoom.” And I got on the Zoom and he had a bunch of– despite being Jewish, he had a bunch of Christmas trees in the background, and I was like, “I think I’ve reached the right person.”

JAIE: [laughs]

CELIA: So sort of on a handshake he said, “Go for it.” And so February of that next year, 2023, I met Big Greg for the first time who, as the rest of the tree families know, then called all the rest of you and forced you to talk to me. Which was very kind. And I thought, you know, I’ll spend a year getting to know these people, and then I’ll just make a movie at Christmas. I’ll film at Christmas. And I learned that Christmas is a 365 day a year sport. And in February Greg said, “Well I buy all my Christmas decorations for the season in three days, so if you wanna come you better start.” 

And so I self-funded a first shoot. Which was not my intention. And then as I learned, again, Christmas is like a sport season. And, as you saw, the film is mostly verite. You can’t not film because then you miss a thing and you can’t go back. So I kept shooting and I kept shooting and I kept shooting. And my, again, very gracious family watched me max out credit cards, watched me take loans, I do not recommend that to other filmmakers in the crowd. But there was just something about– day two of filming, I know it’s a different place in the film, but day two of filming is when Greg got that call from Sloan Kettering on camera. And he looked at me, and he said, “Well now we’re definitely making the film.”

[audience laughs]

CELIA: And it really felt– it felt like I just– I couldn’t, I couldn’t stop. It felt like, also, this film, and I [sighs] I know this sounds cheesy, but like this film needed to happen. It was meant to happen. My tireless agent at the time, Julia Bodner, who’s sitting right there, would talk to me at two in the morning [laughs] making sure we tried to find someone, and then I had a lunch with Jack Turner, who I know is back there somewhere, from Boat Rocker. Literally, and my crew, again, my crew knew this, right? Like I’m driving the car as we’re filming, so they’re hearing me take all the calls on speaker phone about that fact that like I’m not gonna be able to pay their invoices as we’re filming.

[audience laughs]

CELIA: And so we started December 1st knowing that I probably wouldn’t be able to pay my net 30 invoices to my crew if we didn’t find funding. Talk about pressure, right? And I had a lunch in Brooklyn with Jack Turner from Mad Door, and then met Todd Lubin at Boat Rocker, and I said, “I need to pay my crew invoices.” And they said, “Well it’s Christmas, we’re in.” Which is the greatest thing a filmmaker can ever hear. “It’s Christmas, the deals, we gotta get them closed. Like I’m pretty sure you guys got me money to pay my invoices before the deal even closed, which is another Christmas miracle. I mean, there were just people at every step who said this film has to get made, these stories have to get told. I also just have to say like the risks they took are huge, but my crew Zoe, Vera, and Carrie, the three who were with me…

[audience cheering and clapping]

CELIA: …every minute of every shoot. To be clear, that was our entire crew other than the days around Christmas where we had multiple crews running because it was Christmas. But other than that, it was the three of them through everything, and they, you know, like they were buying me coffee [laughs] as they were shooting. Whenever I see that Brooklyn Bridge shot I think of Carrie’s poor fingers and like numb on the Brooklyn Bridge, you know. There is two archive shots in the entire film. Carrie shot everything. 

[audience clapping]

CELIA: Everything is [indistinct] footage. Yeah. And then it, again, talking about [indistinct] magic, and I promise I’ll shut up in a second, but I just have to call out some more people. Usually as a documentary filmmaker, when you call people and you say, “Hey, I need you to sign all these releases. I need you to let us in.” They’re like, “Hell no.” Doors flew open. We wanted to film a Christmas mass, doors flew open. All of those– we wanted to film Edward’s Bakery, we wanted to film chocolate babka being rolled, which you’ll get to taste tonight at the after party. We wanted to film red and green bagels. There’s a pizza place that is my college pizza restaurant in the Bronx in there. We wanted to film– we wanted it to feel like, even if just for a millisecond, you might have seen something that is your tradition in there. Whether it’s a Puerto Rican parranda, a Kwanza celebration, the endless Christmas celebrations, that just for even a millisecond you might have been like, “Wait, that’s what I do.” ‘Cause that’s New York, right? That’s how we all celebrate here. Deviated from your question completely.

[audience laughs]

JAIE: Theres– No that’s beautiful, and it’s so beautiful to hear about all the angels that were involved in this production, and not all on the top of the trees. Okay so, reminder, if you wanna ask a question please keep it to one succinct question. And if you just wanna put up your hand I will call on you. And… ooh, right there! With the Santa Claus beard. Yeah, you. [laughs]

[audience laughs]

PERSON 1: I have a question for you.

JAIE: Okay…

PERSON 1: You said before, you came to New York, in New York you bought Christmas trees. Who’d  you buy it from?

[audience laughs]

JAIE: [laughs] I bought them… well [laughs] I don’t wanna get shot…

CELIA: Are you gonna say something bad? [laughs]

 [audience laughs]

JAIE: So I’m gonna not tell you where I bought them from, but I bought them in Manhattan on an avenue that [coughs] is numbered six.

 [audience laughs]

JAIE: Okay, right here. 

PERSON 2: [indistinct]

JAIE: What’s that?

CELIA: He asked if Kevin’s here.I don’t believe Kevin’s here.

JAIE: Okay. Uh-huh, how ‘bout in the back over there?

PERSON 3: I just wanted to say thank you for representing the Christmas tree business the way you did. It was really heartwarming. I really appreciate it.

JAIE: Aww, thank you.

[audience clapping]

CELIA: Thank you, [indistinct] that.

JAIE: Fantastic. Oh, over here. Yeah.

PERSON 4: So it seems like the beginning of the movie is a couple different like themes [indistinct]. It seems like the very beginning there was more of a [indistinct] 

JAIE: I’m just gonna repeat the question in case you couldn’t hear it in the back, but he was just asking about the sort of two themes or two energies of the film. It starts off as kind of a business drama with a lot of cut throat type of like drama, and then it evolves into more of a vibes… character film, so how did you modulate that?

CELIA: It was probably the hardest part of the film. And, you know, also the awful part of making a film by yourself without a distributor and without all that stuff is that you’re making a film by yourself. The hard part when lots of people get involved is lots of people have different opinions about what the film should be. I just have to call out again like Boat Rocker, Epic, Amazon, never asked me to make a film that I didn’t want to make. Which is really rare. And I didn’t wanna make a film that was tree mafia. I was worried– Merchants of Joy, which is the tagline for the Nashes that they’ve had for 50 years, I was sure someone was gonna make me change that title. Like it was gonna be called the five families of Christmas, it was gonna be called Tree Wars. No one asked me to change that film– that title.

So it was a balance. I knew that there would be people in the audience, and I’m sure you all feel this way, some of you are probably like, I wanna know more about how much it costs and I wanna know more about the, you know, the business specific side of it, and some of you probably want to know more about different things. Again, five and a half hour assembly. A lot of stuff. I felt like it was important to get a look behind the curtain. Some of the things that I didn’t know, which is some of the business. It’s a business. But it felt really important to me to land the plane. Talking about what is actually important, which is the tradition and the memory and the reality that we don’t buy a tree for the tree, we buy a tree because we remember those moments with our families. And I will say, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, every time I bring up this film, someone tells me their tree story. Everyone has a tree story, and it’s amazing.

JAIE:  [laughs] I couldn’t resist, myself. We have time for maybe a couple more quick questions. We’ll go with you. Go ahead. Mhm.

PERSON 5: What is the thing you’re saddest you had to cut?

JAIE: “What is the thing you’re saddest you had to cut?”

CELIA: [sighs] I was thinking about this actually on the way here. So there’s one thing I didn’t get to film because it never snowed. I wanted to film a slomo shot of Big Greg falling and doing a snow angel. 

 [audience laughs]

CELIA: That was like on my shot list dream. And the thing I had to cut… I had to cut my favorite Christmas song, which is Fairytale of New York by The Pogues. Not because we couldn’t use it, but because we cut our sort of Christmas Eve. Also it talks about being in a drunk tank on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t really the vibe.

 [audience laughs]

CELIA: But I love that song, and I was pretty sad to cut that. There’s also just so many– I mean, the moment with the homeless man in the shed with Heather like I… we were filming, and, you know, West 4th, which is where that is, is pretty dangerous area now. Like there are night guards there. Georgie Porgie, who’s there, will tell you, I was like what the hell’s gonna happen. There were so many of those like we had moments where we were like we can’t put another one in. Just so many of these incredible moments, so yeah. There are a lot on the cutting room floor.

JAIE: Awesome. Well I have one, one last question. I’ll take the last question. If Big Greg could be here with us at the world premiere today, what’s the one question you’d want to ask him?

CELIA: Oof… I asked him a lot of questions. Ah! Okay, I’m gonna give my true answer, but then I’m gonna give a better answer, if that’s okay. My true answer is that the only person I’ve ever met who’s a bigger New York Mets fan than me is Big Greg. 

 [audience laughs]

CELIA: So I would ask him if the Mets are gonna win the World Series this time.

 [audience laughs]

CELIA: I don’t think I have a question. I think when I think about– I was thinking about Greg tonight. Little Greg and I took a photo like this which you may see in the DOC NYC photos. Big Greg will teach you that when you take a photo like this you lose 30 pounds.

 [audience laughs]

CELIA: So always make sure to do that. I think I would really like to tell Big Greg that his son is doing an incredible job.

[audience “aww”ing and clapping]

CELIA: And that I’m very proud of him.

JAIE: Thank you so much for sharing this film with us. This was a dream come true to host the world premiere of your beautiful film. And thank you for being here, and thank you to Amazon. And remember to vote! This film is eligible for the audience award, and we’d love to hear your feedback, so…

[audience clapping]

HOST: Yeah, so this–

JEREMY WORKMAN: Oh, do we want mics? Do you want a mic?

HOST: Do we need a mic? What do we think?

JEREMY: Alright? Yeah?

HOST: Okay.

JEREMY: Alright, let’s get a mic.

HOST: Do we have ours?

JEREMY: We do. We can just snag this?

HOST: Here.

JEREMY: Yeah, okay. How’s that, better? Oh, yeah. Ohh, yeah.

HOST: Yeah, so Jeremy… Is this on?

JEREMY: I think it was.

HOST: Was it? Hi, is this on? I guess it is, yeah. Congratulations.

JEREMY: Thanks!

HOST: I mean, it’s just amazing. And we have a special guest here, right?

JEREMY: We do. We do. We have one of the mall residents.

[audience clapping and cheering]

JEREMY: This is Jay Zehngebot who you might remember in all the scenes of the 9/11 tribute. You were very involved in that. That was sort of your scene, as well.

HOST: Yeah, well, I mean, I just love this movie, and it’s not just because I’m a Providence gal. [laughs] I really appreciate seeing this aspect of the mall that I had no idea about. But, you know, it’s just not often that you get to see a film that is about– It's got some serious issues. It’s about creativity and gentrification, and white privilege, and yet it’s just so fun.

JEREMY: [laughs] Sure.

HOST: Thank you so much. I mean, my first question is obviously, Jay, you and the rest of your crew were filming all of this material. That was almost two decades ago. Where the hell has it been, and how did you get your hands on it?

JERMEY: Yeah, I mean, I could talk about the footage, and then, Jay, you could talk about, [laughs] like, why the heck you guys were filming so much. But when I first heard about the story, I’m not from Providence, and when I first heard about it, I didn’t know how much footage there was. There was some stuff on, like, YouTube, there was a  couple news stories, like, very small, not much was out there at all. And then, when we started to make the movie, Michael, and Colin, and everybody came and gave me 25 hours of footage of them filming in the secret apartment. Which was all with that tiny camera. You know, for the video people in the room, it’s footage that was shot at 320 by 240

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: So the people that are laughing know that that’s way worse than like a VHS quality. It was ten frames a second, and we weren’t sure if it would even be something that we could be put in a movie, but I was just stunned, the technical quality aside, I was just stunned how good it was, and it’s stuff that they captured, and how amazing they were able to film everything. So I just knew that that would really structure the movie, in a way. Do you want to talk a little about why you guys filmed so much?

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: Lotta people ask me that, too.

JAY ZHENGEBOT: We were documenting as a function of the rest of the work all of the time. ‘Document, document, document,’ was the mantra. And so we were just in the practice of filming or taking pictures of everything all of the time. Some people liked to be in the camera, and some people liked to be behind it, but, like, actually, I haven’t had a chance to appreciate… There are a lot of great moments in this film, and I realized after seeing it a few times, like, ‘Oh, I took that picture.’

[audience laughs]

JAY:

And I’m really proud of, like, a handful of the pictures that appear in this film because of [indistinct]. So yeah, just documenting everything all of the time.

HOST: Did you have to convince Michael, Jay, and the rest of them to

give you access to this?

JEREMY: Yeah, I mean, there was, there was a little bit of convincing on this film, and you know, obviously, you knew this, but, like, as a documentary filmmaker it’s kind of, like, almost like an underrated part of it. The process of, like, convincing subjects, you know, to earn their trust, and to make them, you know, ‘cause you’re telling their story, it’s kind of an invasive process trying to convince people to let them into their lives, you know? So that’s something that I take really seriously in all my films. I really worked hard to earn that trust. This one took a while.

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: They didn’t want, initially, to do a film. They had turned down a lot of offers.

HOST: Who had the footage?

JEREMY: I guess all of you guys had footage. But, like, there was a little bit of a reluctance… Jay, I know you were reluctant in a way. Yeah.

JAY: Yeah. Whoa.

JEREMY: Alright, take that.

[audience laughs]

JAY: I was quite reluctant. Immediately after the mall was discovered, Mike kind of gave everybody the option to be associated or not associated with the project. And a handful of us were really focused on teaching and we weren’t totally excited about the idea of, like criminal records or whatever.

[audience laughs]

JAY: And then also, like, some of us were less comfortable being in front of cameras and other people were more comfortable being in front of cameras, so I think, for me, having James and Andrew call me up and say, like, “You should hear this guy out, he gets it.” Also we checked out Jeremy’s prior films,

JEREMY: [laughs]

JAY: And that, like, boosted our confidence in this endeavor quite a bit. And lastly I think the crux for me, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, like, I have a couple small children now. The first one had just been born when Jeremy approached me about the movie, and that was the linchpin for me. Like oh, I want him to see this story.

[audience laughs]

JAY: And believe in it. And the last little bit, and this is maybe relevant because we’re in a cinema, so, like, 15 years on, the sort of focus of the story for me is actually, like, the Batman, Dark Knight narrative of, like, 

[audience laughs]

JAY:

When the project broke, I really distanced myself from it. I didn’t like that we were sort of bending or breaking the truth in some places, but now, like, the myth is almost more important than, like, what is factually accurate.

[audience laughs]

JAY: And because this apartment has lodged itself in peoples’ minds as like a place of possibility, and everybody sort of projects their own fantasies of, like, secret spaces onto it, that’s more important than, like, some fibs that were told here and there, or some areas where, like, the documentary and Mike’s telling of the story might not be 100% accurate, but, like, who am I to say…

[audience laughs]

HOST: You wanna say any example of that?

JAY: I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna…

[audience laughs]

JAY: You’ll have to ask Mike.

HOST: I mean, I think that it’s a great combination of the playfulness of the project…

JEREMY: Sure.

HOST: …and the playful approach that you took to telling of them. Talk to me about that.

JEREMY: Yeah, thanks. I mean, that was definitely a real intention, you know, I kept on feeling like, when I was working on the film, that it was such this, like, like the secret apartment was such this sort of shape shifter for me. Like, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s, you know, it was this protest against gentrification.’ And then it was like, ‘Oh, no, no it’s not. It’s–’ Wait, we lost Jay? Oh, yeah, he’s [indistinct]

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: Oh, nice, nice. He’s filming. Better camera now. It was, you know, ‘Oh, it’s this protest.’ ‘No it’s not, it’s this, you know,  this work of art.’

HOST: Yeah.

JEREMY: ‘It’s a place where– this headquarters, where they would work on their other art.’ ‘It’s an artwork unto itself.’ You know? Like, it was always, like, shifting, for me. And I always felt that that was really… I wanted the movie to have that, in a way, and I wanted the movie to convey that, and to me it was fun and absurd, in a way. They were living in a mall!

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: I mean, it was, you know, I always wanted to remind myself that, that this, you know, yes it has all this sort of deeper stuff, but at the end of the day, there were these, you know, eight people sneaking into a mall and bringing furniture in there, and it was this horrible space that had no light, and that’s where they were.

HOST: Talk about the decision to, I guess you commissioned… 

JEREMY: Yeah.

HOST: …the, the model of the mall, and also to commission the recreation of the mall. Talk about that.

JEREMY: Yeah, I wanted to have the participants involved in the process of the movie. You know, obviously they’re all really unique artists, and they’re very creative and interesting, and do all this very unique stuff. And I also, you know, I think a lot of filmmakers now, documentary filmmakers, are thinking about this, like, how to integrate subjects into the making of the movie, a little bit. I mean, some movies really go far in this direction. This movie didn’t really go that far,

but it was an opportunity to invite, sort of, Colin to build that model, and how that would sort of work within telling the story and then also doing the recreation and then having those participants kind of be involved in it as part of that, as well. And, yeah, I mean, of course there was also a practical reason.

They had stopped filming altogether, so I knew that we had to do a little, kind of, recreation.

And how to do it so that it would be in keeping with the tones and the textures of their project.

HOST: I know that you had a kind of guerrilla approach 

JEREMY: Mhm!

HOST: to getting this movie out there. I wonder if you could talk about that? And also, sort of additional, how the movie has been received, especially in Providence? But, both of you…

JEREMY: Yeah, yeah. So we released– we self released this. Which is, you know, it– in other words, we turned down offers from distributors. We did– some distributors just were not, you know, they want whatever it is they want, and they– this didn’t necessarily fit into that, check that box. So we self released it, and we put together our team with my producer, Matthew, who is right there in the fourth row there.

[audience clapping]

JEREMY: And we kind of did this very kind of grass roots, guerilla approach where we said, “Okay, well we could put this movie out ourselves and possibly do better than the distributors that were out there.” And we did that. We released in March, and we were in theaters until two weeks ago? Yeah. We, essentially, we played in 250 cities since late March. It was, you know, for a documentary, and I know we’re at a documentary film festival, but it was an enormous hit for a documentary, especially now. And we were really proud of that decision to do it on our own, and then, yes, there was– Oh, do you want to add something, Matt?

MATT: Also we had a blockbuster opening weekend in the mall that it took place.

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: Yeah, so this is this incredible coda to this.

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: Yeah, where we kind of knew that we wanted to premiere at the mall. And we didn’t know how to do that, and Matt, and I, and our team were kind of putting our heads together. How do we do this? Michael’s banned. Are they gonna put, you know, this was illegal what they were doing. So we were just kind of like didn’t know how we could do this, but we wanted to premiere there. And then, miraculously, they came to us. They said, “Oh, we heard about this documentary. It’s getting a lot of buzz. Why don’t you guys come to the mall and premiere there?”

HOST: Yeah, there’s a theater on the top of the mall. Right? Yeah.

JEREMY: Yes, so there’s a–

HOST: Top floor.

JEREMY: Exactly. Which is the theater that you guys were watching movies in.

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: Which is also incredible because it’s in the documentary. So we premiered there in March. We opened there and it was… I think it was the biggest movie there other than Sinners this year,

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: Is that right? Yeah, I mean, it was just a gigantic hit in Providence. It became, you know, we played there, you know, all the time for weeks. And then they continued to have it where Townsend was doing, you know, Q&As every Tuesday, and they were still drawing crowds as of two or three weeks ago. And then, another irony is that theater now was shut down two weeks ago.

PERSON 1: Oh my god. Oh my gosh.

JEREMY: As you saw, the [indistinct]

JAY: I didn’t know that.

JEREMY:  Yeah. The mall’s having all kinds of problems.

MATT: It was taken over. Taken over.

JEREMY: But it was taken over, and now there’s a new theater in there, yes. Yes.

HOST: And what about Michael? Was he allowed to come and see the movie?

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: So they decided that when they invited us in they decided to unban Michael.

[audience laughs]

[audience clapping and cheering]

PERSON 1: Hell yeah.

HOST: Are there any other questions here? Yeah.

PERSON 2: Is it going to be available to stream? I would love my daughter to see this.

JEREMY: So we are available now on, like, Amazon and iTunes where you could rent it. Since the movie had this, you know, great, great audience response there’s also now we’re talking with those paid subscribe– streaming services. Which is interesting because we’ve taken this very, you know, DIY, no we don’t want to be involved. The movie’s, you know, kind of ethos is very much, you know, defined by these artists. That they’re, you know, we’re not just looking to kind of drop it wherever. However, it’s still, it’s tough to be a documentary filmmaker, so we’re exploring those with those paid services. The short answer is: Yes. You can find it on Amazon and iTunes right now.

PERSON 2: Thank you.

HOST: Yeah.

PERSON 3: Have you been to festivals in Europe yet?

JEREMY: We are just starting to play in Europe. We’d love to play more. We played in a couple festivals in the Netherlands last month, and we won a couple awards. So yeah, we’re starting to slowly kind of go, play in Europe now.

PERSON 4: I had a question for Jay about the public art thread of the film. That was really unexpected, and I wonder if you could speak to you and the crew, any involvement with other public art projects since that era of your life.

JAY: Hmm… Okay, so the question is public art, and what’s our affiliation with public art. Public art was sort of how I re-fell into the fold with Mike and Andrew. They were working on public art at RISD at the time I started studying there, so that’s what sort of sucked me in. And that was the main sort of focus while I was working with Mike and the team full time. And it informs a lot of how I, like, approach the world, but I’m not doing, like, full time public art as it stands. What would I say… What about public art? You know, I’m still drawing with tape, kind of everywhere I go. I still focus right now, it’s, like, largely a focus on my son and his school. But, you know, that’s a conversation I'm having right now with his art teacher.

[audience laughs]

JAY: You know, I think that it was just a great chance to sort of get comfortable with practicing art in public and sort of normalizing that. Sort of for myself and hopefully for, like, a broader public as well. I don’t know if that’s a good answer–

JEREMY: Wait, I had heard that there’s now some interest in the 9/11 Hope project and possibly doing it as a [indistinct], yeah.

PERSON 5: Oh that’d be great.

JAY: Yeah, I don’t… The public, the 9/11 project, the interesting thing I would say sort of behind the scenes is when we– When we started that project,  9/11 was fresh. And people took the project for what we intended, which is to say, like, they appreciated that this was an attempt to try to maintain that unity everybody felt, the whole country felt, in the sort of immediate aftermath of 9/11. But by the time that project was wrapping up, it had been so politicized that we would tell people we were working on drawings affiliated with 9/11 or firemen, and they would have, like, really intense reactions, really positive and negative. And it was just really clear to me at that point in time, like, oh, this project has expired and it no longer is doing the work we want it to do in public. That’s just an interesting thing I think about sometimes.

PERSON 6: I’m wondering between when you got found out and the screening there, did you go to the mall and shop? [laughs]

JAY: Between the mall and the project, I mean, I was in Providence for a while. I would’ve shopped at the mall, for sure, but I’ve been in New York for a while now, so like, it’s not a regular everyday–

PERSON 6: Did it feel weird shopping in the mall?

JAY: No, you know, this is a funny one, too, of like, when I moved to Providence, just like everybody else, I was like, ‘Fuck the mall. This place is awful.’

[audience laughs]

JAY: It’s all a casino trappings of, like, you can’t find your way out, it’s labyrinthian. And then by the end of the mall project, we just all loved the mall.

[audience laughing]

JAY: We felt at home. We knew every nook and cranny. We felt so comfortable there. And so, like, that sort of act of personal transformation was actually really important to me in my sort of feelings towards or conception of this project. It’s just, like, take that thing you hate,

[audience laughs]

JAY: Build a home there, and you’ll surprise yourself. Probably.

HOST: I’m a little worried about the mall. Is it, has it gone bankrupt? I mean…

JEREMY: It’s, yeah. It’s, as you know, the mall is, and I’m sure a lot of people in the audience too, that mall is literally like in this epicenter of Providence. So if the mall goes down, it would probably be really–

HOST: Very bad for Providence.

JEREMY: Yeah. So I know, you know, the mall’s struggling, but it’s still hanging in there.

JAY: They should turn it into a dirt bike park

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: That probably won’t happen.

JAY: You could do something really cool with it.

[audience laughs]

JEREMY: But I know they are trying to do, they are trying to, like, really think out of the box and come up with like, you know, all these different things for– Still open! You know, when we were there this summer, they were drawing a lot of crowds, and people still go to the movies there. And yeah, so I think it’s kind of hanging in. But, you know, most people’s conception of malls these days are just like dead malls and how bad they are, so in some ways, this movie also is an opportunity to kind of, you know, kind of remind people that there was, you know, this time in our lives when malls were really central, whether you liked it or not.

MATT: I think it’s for sale, actually.

JEREMY: Oh.

HOST: Oh, really?

JEREMY: Yeah, it’s for sale, if anybody wants to buy it.

[audience laughing]

PERSON 7: It feels like Michael needs to pitch a tape art project for the community.

JEREMY: Funny enough, he was doing– he did tape art when we released in the mall, he– there was tape art all over, and he did a lot of, like, Easter eggs where he would put, Jay, did you see that? Where he would put each of the eight people in various spots of the mall. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

PERSON 8: Yeah, I just wanna say thank you so much. I love the portrait of Michael, and I feel like it’s so inspirational. We really don’t see that, right? A person who’s own draw is to want to do things with other people. Like that and that kind of external art creation. So thank you for doing it, it’s great.I hope that, I don’t know, art schools use it or..

JEREMY: Yeah.

PERSON 8: But also, there are projects, I was gonna say, all across the country about reclaiming dead malls. Some of them about regreening, about knocking them down, some about claiming them for, like, government, local government and civic spaces. So it’s actually, like, a nationwide problem that [indistinct].

JEREMY: Yeah Definitely.

PERSON 9: [indistinct]

JEREMY: Yeah.

PERSON 10: It just seems like, as you just talked about, the mall was like, occurring at a very particular time in American history as a way to kind of like revitalize the urban core or whatever.

And I’m wondering whether you think something like this could happen today in our, like, new politics of urban development.

JEREMY: Oh, I think, you know,  could this happen today? Absolutely not. I mean, I think that just, I mean, just from a logistics– I think the security cameras are so much better now. And also, also I think it has a lot to do with almost just like how we see the world differently now. You know, if you saw a bunch of people, like, carrying couches and cinder blocks through a mall in the parking lot, you would instantly like record them on your phone, and you’d be like, ‘Check out these people! Oh my god!’ And post it. So I don’t think at all it could be done whatsoever.

JAY: And I feel like that’s the challenge. Like somebody should do it, right?

[audience laughing]

JAY: I subscribe to that. I hear that. I totally think– And also I think it was actually kind of interesting to see–

PERSON 1: He’s like, ‘I dare you.’

JAY: There was a dynamic in the crew between people who were like young when 9/11 happened, and then Mike basically who was older when 9/11 happened. And from my like security mindset, I was thinking like, “If we haul fuel into the mall, there’s no way this is not being viewed through like a prism of a security threat.” So you know, yeah the atmosphere has changed since then, but then I think like you know the Luddite kids in Brooklyn who have sworn off cellphones like one of those kids is gonna build a secret apartment in a mall someday.

[audience laughs]

JAY: You know like so yeah, conventional wisdom, I think, reason says the time for this has come and gone, but, you know, something else surely will take its place.

JEREMY: Now’s your chance.

[audience laughs]

HOST: Well I want to thank you  both, Jeremy for this beautiful film,

[audience clapping]

HOST: Jay for your artistic work. Thank you.

JEREMY: Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks everybody for coming.

…

INTRO

JAIE LAPLANTE: Alright. Good evening, everyone. Welcome. My name is Jaie LaPlante, I’m the Artistic Director of DOC NYC. And welcome to day two of the festival.

[audience clapping]

JAIE: Thank you. I absolutely insisted on putting this film on my schedule to personally introduce. Mr. Nobody Against Putin is on the  DOC NYC shortlist this year as one of the fifteen films that we chose as what we consider to be among the strongest contenders for this year’s Academy Award, Best Documentary Feature and other awards. So I’m thrilled that you’re here to  share it with us, and we have the director with us here.  He’s a terrific filmmaker. I’ve been following his work for many years as he’s also a very good friend, so please welcome David Borenstein.

[audience clapping]

DAVID BORENSTEIN: Thank you, Jaie. It’s so nice to be here at DOC NYC. The film that you are about to see started in March of 2022, just a few weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was, at that time, when I got a very… interesting message from a very  unexpected person. The person that sent that message, you’re about to meet him, both in the film and in person, soon. And over the next few years we made a film together that at times kept me up really late at night just filled with fear for what might happen to him or any of us. And so many times throughout the process I just had no faith that this would ever end up coming into fruition. So, right now, it’s so nice to be able to show this to you here, right now. It brings me so much joy to see you here in this, I think, here in this theater. So thank you so much for coming, and after the show let’s definitely talk more. Bye.

[audience clapping]

JAIE: Thank you, David. Also want to thank some of our major sponsors: Apple Original Films, HBO Documentary Films, National Geographic Documentary Films, Netflix, our leading media sponsor Thirteen, major media sponsor Variety and Indie Wire. As David mentioned, there will be a Q&A after the film that will be led by my colleague Sam Plakun, right here. Sam will be doing those duties. And lastly, thank you to the staff, crew, and venue teams for making DOC NYC  possible once again this year. As I mentioned, it’s only day two. We’re going all the way to November 20th in person, and after that online until November 30th. So please enjoy Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

[audience clapping]

———————————————————

Q&A

[audience clapping]

SAM PLAKUN: Amazing. Thanks so much for spending your evening with us. Obviously a very worthwhile film. I’m so excited to have the chance to talk with you. I’m Sam Plakun, I’m the Assistant Film Manager here at DOC NYC. And I would love for you all to introduce yourselves and your role in the film.

DAVID: Yeah, I’m David Borenstein, and I’m the director of the film together with Pasha.

[audience clapping]

PASHA TALANKIN: [speaking Russian]

SAM: Amazing…

KATYA KIZE: I’m just gonna quickly– My name is Katya, I was an assistant director. I’m also gonna be translating for Pasha tonight.

[audience clapping]

SAM: So I think to start off, I’m sure a lot of us are wondering, you know, we see Pasha leaving the day after graduation. We know he leaves the day after graduation. I think we all are so curious, you know, where have you been since then? And what is your life like right now?

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “After leaving, we have been working. We’ve been doing a huge work on making the film and on promoting the film. So yeah, it was a huge work.”

SAM: Yeah, go ahead.

DAVID: Yeah, just right after that graduation ceremony, Pasha, and Katya, and I, we all met in Istanbul. That was, like, directly after that. It was just us three together with the producers in Istanbul kind of, just like, celebrating the fact that Pasha was out. It was a really surreal time. It was just– I mean, it was like taking a big breath of air out because we were so nervous for so long, and then, suddenly, we were just all, like, free together in Istanbul. It was just a strong and incredible feeling.

SAM: Amazing. And I should say that we’re, hopefully, gonna have some time for some audience questions. So as you’re thinking of things, you know, keep it in mind and, eventually, we should be able to get to it. But I’m curious, you know, we know a little bit about how you two met, but can you give us a bit more context on how that all came together?

DAVID: Yeah. There was a casting call on the Russian internet. So, basically, there was this Russian web content company and they put up an ad on Instagram looking for stories across Russia of how the quote-unquote “special military operation in Ukraine” had affected people’s jobs. And I think they were looking for positive stories, from their perspective. So they were looking for stories about how people were donating supplies to soldiers, or writing letters, or something like that. And Pasha saw it, and he got angry, and he said “Let me tell you how my job has changed.”

That was the first of many risky things he did on this project. He had no idea who posted this ad, yet he still sent this message across the country to a person who received it. And it turns out the person who received it is someone that I know. It was just this guy that I had met in a documentary training course who was working a kind of BS job for this Russian web content company to make ends meet. He saw the letter, and he connected us. And then we started working together.

SAM: I mean, that’s just so incredible. And I’m also struck by the film, you know,  it’s so dark, and so dire, and bleak. And yet there’s so many moments of humor and lightness, and I would love to hear a little bit about how you worked that in. And I wonder if it’s just because Pasha, himself, is such a likeable person?

DAVID: Pasha, why are you the way that you are?

[audience laughs]

SAM: But for you, I mean, how are you kind of balancing as you get this footage and you’re editing it, I mean, you know, how did you, yeah, balance that dark dystopian feeling with so much humor and lightness from Pasha?

DAVID: For me it was really about being true to how Pasha is. It’s about helping everyone see the school through Pasha’s eyes. It’s not, to Pasha, a place that suggests of dystopia and darkness. It’s a place that he loves. It’s a place that he grew up in. It’s a place that is his entire community. He loves the office that he built. I could see that in the footage, I could see that, I could hear that talking to him. And it was really important that we see that space through his eyes, so that we know the full weight of losing it.

SAM: Yeah, and for Pasha, I just wonder, has the school in Karabash seen the film? Are they seeing this? Are they aware of everything that’s happening around it?

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “There was a lot of different reactions, and they were kind of proportionate to all the information that was coming [out] about the film. So, throughout a couple months, every Friday I was receiving reactions, and some of them were good, and some of them were really bad.”

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “And I was wondering for a long time, why was it always Fridays? And then I realized that, you know, after work, after a long week, people would gather drinking beer, and they just needed someone they could talk about. So that’s great that it was me who they were talking about, in a sense.”

SAM: It’s kind of remarkable even after all of this you’re still the person that so many people in the town turn to. It's remarkable what a pillar you were in the community, you still are, even though you’re not physically there. I think a lot of folks are probably wondering about safety, things like that. For both of you. Obviously Pasha on the ground, but you as well. This can’t be something that doesn’t freak you out a little.

DAVID: You mean right now?

SAM: Yeah.

DAVID: I mean, we have a really good security team. Security was a huge issue from the beginning. For us, for other people in Karbash. And we outsourced that. From very early on the BBC was on this project helping us out, giving us access to their research team, to their security team. And we were able to really follow their advice on how to keep people in the film safe. In fact, they went frame by frame in our edit to make sure that no one was saying anything that would compromise them. And then we also have advice on our own safety. For me it’s really not a big issue. It’s a much bigger issue for Pasha. But I think that we can rest assured that we’re in a pretty good situation. Pasha, right now, is one of thousands of Russians who are working in media, who are living in Europe, who are dissidents, who are outside the country.  So he’s part of a strong community there.

SAM: Were there any moments that you wanted to include in the film, but it just felt like, ‘We can’t, it’s too risky’, or, ‘It puts someone in too much danger’?

DAVID: I think we both have different answers to that question. Maybe…

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “Some of the scenes, like for instance when teachers had to pay money to the army, or the scene with the nuclear testing that happened in the town. Or, for instance, the scene, where after mobilization, teachers were sent a list of things that they had to buy for the soldiers. Or, for instance, the fact that in the year of the pedagog and the teacher, more than one hundred fifty thousand teachers actually quit their jobs. A lot of different scenes and a lot of different… facts that I wanted to put in the film, but David told me that then it was gonna be ten hours, so…”

[audience laughs]

DAVID: Yeah, and then, for me, there was a scene that I cut. It wasn’t really cut for security reasons, it was cut for more dramaturgical reasons, but there was a scene that we cut that I really loved. It was Pasha and his mother walking to the school on the day of the presidential election, in Russia. And they were talking on the way there. I think Pasha’s like, “Who are you voting for, mom?”

[audience laughs]

DAVID: Like, "Please don’t do it. Don’t do it." They get to the school, the school is, like, the voting center of the town, and she goes into the voting booth, and he just follows her into the voting booth, and just films who she’s voting for.

[audience laughs]

DAVID: And it’s Putin. Then he walks out of the voting booth, and Abdulmanov, the history teacher, is, like, the election observer. He’s like, “You can’t film in the voting booth!”

[audience laughs]

DAVID: And that was a really good scene. But, you know, sometimes you just have to cut out these darlings. There was a dramaturgical problem, actually, with it. There was really no spot for it in the film.

SAM: Oh my gosh. I mean, the film is so wonderful, and, you know, I’m sure you both feel very proud of it, And, Pasha, you know, watching it, I hope you feel really wonderful about, you know, the choices you made to help get this footage. But I wonder if there was any point during the process that you regretted getting into this, and felt like, ‘Oh, no. Maybe I made a mistake.’

[Pasha shakes his head 'no']

[audience laughs]

DAVID: I knew you were gonna say that.

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “Sometimes when I’m on a really long flight, like a flight here, like nine hours, in the middle of it you’re thinking why the hell am I, you know, why the hell did I start all of this? But then, when you land, you’re like, yeah, okay, I remember why.” [laughs]

[audience laughs]

DAVID:  You just gotta get that nicotine gum.

[audience laughs]

SAM: Do we have any questions from the audience? Oh my gosh, great. I see some hands. We’ll do right here first.

PERSON 1: Hi, Pasha. You are a brave man. I love the way you’re pushing the luck every single day, and you did it. Two– one question and one note. Pasha in Turkish means ‘emperor’, I wonder if you know that or not. Number two, What is the update on your mother? And how come [indistinct] your dad?

KATYA: The first one, yes he does. Sorry, what was the first part of the second question about mother?

PERSON 1: How is his mother now? And how is his father?

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “My father drowned. There was a moment in the film where you could see him in the casket. And when we were showing the film in London, one of my friends said, ‘You look so much like your dad.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you only saw him in a casket'," [laughs] "'so…’” 

[audience laughs]

KATYA: “I don’t know if it’s a compliment." And for the first question, yes Pasha knows about the Turkish.

SAM: Anyone else? I saw a couple of other hands. Let’s go over here.

PERSON 2: Hi, thank you so much. I teach US Government and Civics at a public school here. And so my question for you is: What do you recommend to teachers if we see these trends happening in US society as we know has happened in [indistinct]

PERSON 3: Can you repeat?

SAM: Yeah, the question was from a history teacher from the states wondering– a US history teacher from the states, civics, wondering, you know, how to handle similar situations in the classroom, essentially.

PASHA: [speaking Russian]

KATYA: “If it happens in the same way, the teachers are being forced to say some things that they don’t want to say then there are some tricks and some ways of how to say that information in a way that kids don’t remember it.”

[audience laughs]

SAM: I saw some other hands up here. Let’s go over in this corner.

PERSON 4: Sure. You three have made an amazing, beautiful film. I wanted to ask you about Pasha’s voice over because, right? We have so many tools available to us filmmakers, but his voice over is so engaging, and brings you in, and makes you love him so much. What was the decision like to go that route, and when did you come across that?

DAVID: So I came across that pretty early. The way that we ended up working together was he really shot what he wanted to shoot. There was a time in the beginning where I actually sent a DP there, but, very quickly, and you see someone shooting him for some of it, but, very quickly, I determined that I liked Pasha’s material the most when I was, like, editing it. So we just started talking about creating a new system where he would shoot what he wanted to shoot, and then I would just edit it.

 And that’s how we worked for two years. So he just kept sending me material, and then it was on an encrypted FTP server. I’d wake up every morning with new presents from Karabash. You know, whether it would be, like, a rap video he was making with his students, or just, like, two hours of him walking around town, or, like, Wagner soldiers, like, teaching people how to identify land mines. So it was just, like, a new surprise every morning. Yeah, it was a challenge figuring out how to put it all together. It was really, like, lots of different things in many different directions. Pretty quickly, I thought that voice over was probably going to be a big deal because, A, it was almost like an archive film. It was just so everywhere. And then secondly, I have been talking with Pasha on the phone every single week, and I was just falling in love with him as a person, and just really inspired by what I heard, and just so inspired by his bravery to film everything. I just knew that, like, the stuff that I was hearing from him, I just need that to be in the film. So it was a pretty natural decision. It was needed basically to construct the film, like, some sort of mechanism like this was necessary.

And then I just knew that these phone calls had to be part of it. In the beginning I actually thought that maybe our phone calls themselves would be the film, so that was actually a mechanism that I played with for a little while. But that mechanism, I feel, didn’t work because I just didn’t care about me [laughs] like, when I was watching it. And I just didn’t want myself, it’s– you don’t care about me. So… We really decided to center it more around Pasha, and that’s how it, kind of, came about.

SAM: Amazing. I think we have time for one more question. I thought I saw something over in this direction?

PERSON 5: There was a gentleman down here that raised his hand, but no longer.

[audience laughs]

SAM: Sorry, I didn’t fully catch that.

PERSON 5: Didn’t you have your hand up, sir?

PERSON 6: Me? I did, but my question was already answered.

PERSON 5: Okay.

PERSON 6: I was wondering what all the wonderful footage that was gathered was– there were collaborators, but I hear a DP was send out? How did that work?

DAVID: Yeah, so, you know, in the beginning Pasha responded to a casting call, so it wasn’t, like, immediately apparent that we would be working together as two directors. And so, in the beginning, I sent the DP there, and it was only, like, a little bit into the process. It was pretty quick, but, still, it took, like, a few months before I realized that we could do it in a different way. So you might notice in the film, there’s a lot of someone shooting him in the very beginning. That’s actually where we have the most, kind of, third person cinematography. And then that changed over time was we all fell in love with Pasha’s footage. It also changed due to security issues. Russia changed dramatically in the first year following the full scale invasion of Ukraine. Within the first year, there was a new treason law that completely criminalized everything in this film. There was a foreign agent law update that changed everything. So it became dangerous and impossible to send a DP. Although that didn’t stop us from doing it at the very end.

[audience laughs]

DAVID: So that we got, you know, the graduation scene that you saw.

PERSON 6: American DP? Or was it a local person?

DAVID: It wasn’t local, it was an outsider.

SAM: Amazing. Well, thank you both– all three of you so much for doing this.

[audience clapping]

INTRO

[audience clapping]

TIA LESSIN: Okay, wow. Hey! We are so excited to have our New York City premiere of Steal This Story, Please!

[audience cheering and clapping]

TIA: We’ve been showing this at festivals, and someone introduced the film as “Steal This Story, Please.” And we’re like, “No! It’s, ‘Please!’”

[audience laughs]

TIA: And you’ll find out why in a little while. We first I want to thank Jaie Laplante for programming this film as a Centerpiece Selection. It is quite the honor for us to be here. This is my third film at DOC NYC, and it just keeps getting better and better, and this is one of the reasons why. So thank you Jaie.

[audience clapping]

TIA: And thanks to Raphaela Neihausen and Thom Powers. I don’t know if you’re here tonight, but you guys had the leadership and the vision to create this extraordinary celebration of the nonfiction art form, and we’re grateful to you for everything you do for our community. Carl and I are New Yorkers, and we made this film in Brooklyn together with many of our collaborators, who are here in the audience tonight. So we’d like to recognize them right now. They’re behind the scenes, but right now they can stand up and be front and center. When I call your name, okay? First, producers Karen Ranucci and Caren Spruch.

KAREN RANUCCI: Do not throw your ticket away. There’s a number on here. You get to vote. [indistinct] vote.

[audience laughing]

TIA: Ever the producer. Did everybody hear that? We’re eligible for an audience award.

JAIE LAPLANTE: That’s right. It’s next in my script.

TIA: Excellent. Hey. [laughs] And executive producers Dominique Bravo and Julie Cohen.

Our extraordinary editor, Mona Davis. You want to stand up? And Marin Burga, who helped keep the edit room humming. Martin, who’s also associate producer.

Julia Dengel and the late Jonathan Oppenheim captured Amy and her team on camera 25 years ago as the US was invading Iraq. And you’ll see some of their beautiful footage in this film. I don’t know if Josie is here? But we want to thank you, Josie.

KAREN: [indistinct]

TIA: I did! Yes. Jake Ratner… And DPs Nausheen Dadabhoy, Cliff Charles, George Lerner, stand up.

Eliza Paley... Alexa Paley, our supervising sound editor. And our post-production guru, Ben Murray.

You’ll see their names in the credits, but just because this is a hometown crowd, we want to give them some love. There are many more things to be said, and they’ll be more meaningful after the film, but one in particular, Nermeen Shaikh, who you’ll see in the film.

Karen Shatzkin, our lawyer.

And a really, truly special, we– this film took a village of funders and supporters and one very special one, Roberta Grossman, who, with Caroline Libresco, founded Jewish Story Partners, and is here tonight with us.

And last, but not least… Amy Goodman. 

[audience cheering and clapping]

CARL DEAL: Yes, thank you, Amy. I do want to add one other really special person who’s here, and it’s John Alpert. I just see him sitting in the front row here. With Denis Moynihan, the man behind the scenes who makes things happen. 

So Tia and I think about documentary films as sort of the intersection of art and journalism, and, you know, you’ve got emotional truths combined with factual truths to create a story. And, these days, it’s pretty clear that art and journalism are both forms of really radical resistance right now. And we learned so much, Amy, from watching you over these last thirty years, and particularly over these last couple years making this film. Amy’s been ringing the alarm about the problems with… commercial media. And what we’re seeing right now with President Trump, with having not just a bully, but, well, we don’t have to get into Donald Trump, I guess. 

[audience laughing]

CARL: You know, people are capitulating right and left in the corporate media, and even the BBC, public broadcaster overseas...

[audience booing]

CARL: ...just folded today because Donald Trump is a shake down artist, and he’s creating the truth that he wants. But Amy’s been giving us an example of how to not get shaken down by the people in power.

[audience cheering and clapping]

CARL: We hope everybody here will stick around afterwards. We hope you enjoy the film that Amy will be here to talk with us [indistinct]. Thank you Jaie, and thank you everybody.

JAIE: So as Karen preempted me a little bit, the next part of my speech was that, yes, we do want you to vote for the Audience Award, this film is eligible. And there’s a QR code that you can scan on your ticket, and if you forget in the excitement of tonight, don’t worry. Do it tomorrow morning, you can wake up, you can vote all the way up until November 22nd. The last thing is that I want to thank our staff crew and venue teams for their hard work at putting DOC NYC together once again this year. The festival’s running in person all the way to November 20th, and online until November 30th, so lots more to see. But for now, enjoy Steal This Story, Please!

[audience cheering and clapping]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Q&A

[audience clapping]

JAIE: Please welcome to the stage, Amy Goodman,

[audience cheering and clapping]

JAIE: Carl Deal. Tia Lessin. And Zazu, who could forget. Come on and [indistinct] over there. Truly one of the more unforgettable nights at DOC NYC in sixteen years. Amy! Thank you so much for joining us and sharing with us. Carl, Tia. I’m, you know, you’re not here to listen to me, so I’m only gonna ask a couple of questions in the beginning, and then I’d love to hear, you know, you in conversation with Amy. I do ask that if you would like to raise your hand and ask a question that you make it a quick question so that everyone can, you know, participate, who wants to. So my first question is gonna be: Amy, so, you know, [laughs] I think someone’s gonna be a show stealer here. Maybe my first question is for you. [laughs] Okay.

[audience “aww”s at Zazu]

AMY GOODMAN: She’s learning English, but she’s not quite there yet.

JAIE: She’s, you know, it’s a big night. There’s a lot of emotion here. Okay. Tell me about the process of getting to know Carl and Tia, and trusting them with your story, and how did that come to be.

AMY: Well, first of all, I would like to give Carl and Tia a little gift of flowers.

JAIE: Aww.

[audience “aww”-ing and clapping]

AMY: For making this film.

JAIE: Aww.

CARL: Thank you.

AMY: I also wanted to give the flowers to the producers, to Karen Ranucci and to Caren Spruch.

JAIE: Come on up K/Caren!

AMY: K/Caren. Thank you, thank you. And also I wanted to give a bouquet of flowers to the woman at democracy now who has run the organization for– well she’s been there for now nineteen years. Julie Crosby, would you come [indistinct]. 

[audience cheering and clapping]

AMY: Where are you, Julie? She might have had to go home to take care of her kids. There she is. She does not like the spotlight.

JAIE: Congratulations. Wonderful.

AMY: And then I would like to ask everyone who works at Democracy Now, right now, if you would stand up.

Thank you so, so much. And if you’ve worked at Democracy Now before, join us in standing up. And if you listen to or watch Democracy Now, if you would stand up. Thank you! So this is the community that is Democracy Now. And Nermeen Shaikh is here, who cohosts Democracy Now.

Your question is, “What was it like working with Tia and Carl?” Well it really goes back before the making of the film, though it’s part of the making of the film because I would like to, you know, there’s that scene in the film where I was questioning President George H. W. Bush. So that was how many years ago? 

TIA: 2000, it was at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia in 2000.

AMY: Okay. And it was Tia Lessin who actually filmed that sequence with me when we went over. If you want to get some of the big political figures, you go and you stand next to Fox News.

[audience laughs]

AMY: Their little carrol where they’re interviewing people, and then when the people come out, like a former President, you get to ask them a question. And Tia was there with her great deal of TV experience or video experience. Why don’t you explain what happened?

TIA: Oh my god. Well I was just finished producing I think the second series of The Awful Truth with Michael Moore. We’re on Bravo, we’re on ABC. And Jeremy Scahill was one of the associate producers. He recruited me to come down to Philadelphia to volunteer because it was when Democracy Now was piloting a television form of the show, and they wanted people with TV experience. I came down, and I went chasing Amy. 

[audience laughs]

TIA: They put a camera in one hand and a press pass over my neck, and off we went. And Amy, as you can see from the beginning of the film, you know, does journalism like an athletic event.

[audience laughing]

AMY: If only we would accept corporate sponsorships. We might get a lot of money from Hoka. I don’t know.

[audience laughing]

AMY: We don’t do it, so forget it.

CARL: But if anybody from Hoka is here…

[audience laughing]

TIA: I was a TV producer. I was not a DP. I was not a camera person. And so, you know, I had a one man band, I had a rig, and I was following Amy. And she buttonholed Newt Gingrich, we got that. We got George Bush coming down the stairs, but I looked after she asked him this searing question, which was what one would ask a former President, “What do you say to people that call you a war criminal?”

[audience laughing] 

TIA: And I got the whole thing except I looked at the camera mic and it was off.

[audience: oh no…]

TIA: Meaning no audio whatsoever. And I turned to Amy, who had really not worked with me ever before, and likely would not work with me ever again...

[audience laughs]

TIA: ...and I said, “Amy, I’m sorry, we didn’t get the audio.”

AMY: [laughs]

TIA: She said, “What!?”

[audience laughs]

TIA: And then she said, “Well, we’re gonna do it again!” And so she just followed George Bush down the hall. Barbara didn’t know what was coming. And then she asked the very same question. He gave the very same answer.

[audience laughs]

TIA: And that’s what you see in the film. 

[audience clapping]

AMY: So we go way back. But Carl and Tia are amazing filmmakers, have been nominated for an Oscar for Trouble the Water, did amazing films like Citizen Koch, were Michael Moore’s producers for a number of films, and working with them was a dream. You know, it’s very painful to be at the, what do you call it? The lens end? I mean, yeah, at Democracy Now every day we’re in front of cameras, but this was different. Follow me everywhere. A bit painful, but...

[audience laughs]

AMY: You know, we live in community at Democracy Now. And to be able to document that, and for you to see what that work is about, especially now, when we have a President who calls the media the enemy of the people. That even after there’s an attempted assassination of him, he points to the media at a rally, and he says, “Look, you could aim right there and get them.” These are very dangerous times. It takes everyone of every political persuasion, and hue, and religion, or not religion to say it is critical that in order to survive we have to stand up together. And that’s what we’re doing, leaving– Some of my colleagues aren’t here right now because they just left for Belém, Brazil. We’re gonna cover the UN Climate Summit. I will be heading there with my colleague Denis Moynihan after we go to Amsterdam for the International Film Festival with Carl and Tia, in Amsterdam. The largest doc festival in the world. It’s critical to spread the word that we need independent media. We need a media that covers the majority of people, right? Those who care about war and peace, those who care about racial economic social justice, those who care about LGBTQ issues, those who care about the climate catastrophe, about the fate of the planet are not a fringe minority. Not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority. Silenced by the corporate media. So we’ve gotta all take it back.

[audience cheering and clapping]

JAIE: Well, thank you for that. Thank you for that. So one more question before I come out to you all, and kind of putting the shoe on the other foot with Carl and Tia. How did you approach the, you know, the awesome responsibility of, you know, capturing who Amy is and telling her story? How did you lower yourself into that?

TIA: I mean, I’ll just start with, you know, this is a woman who centers other people’s voices, as Nermeen so beautifully and eloquently said. That’s what [indistinct] does. So she, the idea, I think, of being at the center of a film, she was allergic to that. 

[audience laughs]

TIA: Because she, you know, her practice is uplifting other people’s voices. So we really had to take her from the margins to the center of the frame. And we had thirty years of archive to do that. Amy entrusted us with this extraordinary wealth of footage. We have this footage that Julie Dengel and Johnathan Oppenheim, you know, filmed. We had Amy’s personal archive. So we were immersed in the day to day, you know, historical record.  And so for me, I love archives, but in this moment, when we have a regime trying to erase the historical record actively, it felt really meaningful to be immersed in that, you know, in the history. Each of these segments, each of these episodes, everything that Amy’s covered has this resonance right now.

CARL: The only thing I can add to that is to say that it was also incredible not just to work with the footage, and the stories, and Amy, but, you know, she– the people around Amy are incredible. We knew a lot of her crew from just bumping into them wherever we were working at the time. Whether it was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or in Baghdad before the war in Iraq, right before ‘shock and awe’. I mean, it just felt like they were everywhere that we wanted to be. And so we had, also, their material. and their brains, and their hearts all over this film. So it was an even more awesome responsibility for us.

TIA: And I want to give a shoutout, actually, to one of those people behind the camera, Hany Massoud.

CARL: Hany, come on.

TIA: Who’s behind the camera right now.

AMY: His was the first voice you heard in the film. Also to my family, I think the editor in chief of Dave’s Press is here. He grew up a bit since then.

[audience cheering and clapping]

AMY: Jasper and Ariel, both journalists. And Anna Escuder and Scott Hadas and Eli Whitman as well. It’s so wonderful to have you all here. It’s such an honor to be all together. 

JAIE: Oh, great. So, okay. I’m coming out to you. I’m gonna remind you of my request if you want to participate to just please keep it to a succinct one question, so that we can get as many people to participate. Just raise your hand if you have a question for Amy or Carl or Tia. We’re gonna go right here. I saw you first. Yeah, go ahead. And I’ll repeat the question in case anyone in the back can’t hear it.

PERSON 1: Hi, I’m a high school social ethics teacher, and recently me and my students have been talking about how we relate to the media in a time of hyper visibility and maybe discussing why it even matters to capture these things, because they feel very pessimistic about– well everyone seen what’s happening in Palestine every day for years, you know, and people see videos of these things, the protests, it doesn’t matter. Why does it matter? So I guess my question to you is what would you say especially to young people that feel like… it doesn’t matter if we capture or witness the truth because it doesn’t do anything.

AMY: Oh, it does.

JAIE: She’s a high school teacher and she’s just saying that she would like to know what Amy would say to her students who feel pessimistic about–

AMY: I would say watch Democracy Now, and...

[audience laughing]

JAIE: Yes!

AMY: You will see the majority of people in every walk of life rising up or challenging or resisting in one way or another. And it really does make a difference. I mean, what is the alternative? I mean, the fact that millions of people have taken to the streets, yes, now, and you see back in 2003 in Iraq. I mean, the protest movements in every country rock the world for peace. Now, yes, the US did invade, but when you talk to people in Gaza, when you talk to people in Iraq, when you talk to people who are at the target end, how often they talk about what it means when people in other countries, especially at the trigger end, say, “No,” to their governments. I think the movements are the story of the past and the future, and when all of the media echoes those movements, you know, interview people at every level, but interview them. Don’t just show a picture of a protest and then interview those in power. You gotta bring them into those hallowed studios or get out there and broadcast from the streets. 

JAIE: Amen. Alright, right here.

PERSON 2: Thank you for everything that you’ve done. Sometime in the next couple years Palestine will be free and [indistinct]

AUDIENCE: Yeah! Woo! [clapping]

PERSON 2: What do you want to do for your third act?

[audience laughing]

JAIE: “What do you want to do for your third act?”

AMY: Well, tomorrow we gotta do the show, so…

[audience laughs]

AMY: And I thank all of my colleagues at Democracy Now who’ve been working through the day and then will work through the night tonight to make sure that we bring you the latest. Whether it is what’s happening in Sudan or what’s happening in Gaza or what’s happening right here in New York City. And for the high school teacher, I bet your kids, a number of them got excited about seeing young people organizing, young people knocking on doors, and you see what happens when young people get involved. Just covering what’s going to happen next. It’s the same as everything I’ve done for all of these years. 

[audience laughs]

JAIE: Can’t wait for that. Alright, gonna look over here. This side of the room. Okay, right here. Yeah. Go ahead.

PERSON 3: Thank you so much for everything you do. As a journalist, how do you not succumb to, like, apathy after all these years? What keeps you going?

JAIE: “What keeps you going?”

AMY: Well, I think that that’s a privilege. That’s a luxury we cannot indulge in, and that is apathy. From the beginning of Democracy Now, you know, I got the call to do Democracy Now from Pacifica Radio, and I was covering an underground house in Haiti. And there were elections at the time. People announced they were running for office, would be gunned down. People would go to the polls, would be gunned down. But still the vast majority of people voted.

And they asked me to come back to the United States to cover the elections. It would be the only daily election show on public broadcasting, where most people didn’t vote. And yet we had such an impact on the entire world, but I never thought it was apathy. I thought people were involved. I thought we could use the primary system to look state by state at how people are involved at the local level. See what their struggles were. And so that’s how Democracy Now started. And as for, you know, what inspires me? All the people that we cover. All of my colleagues at Democracy Now and in the independent media movement. That’s what inspires me every day. Working with a phenomenal group of people, and talking way beyond that to people all over the world who care about the fate of the planet.

[audience clapping]

JAIE: Thank you. Good question, good question. Lets try over there in the back. Yeah. Go ahead.

PERSON 4: Hi, Amy. I’m editor in chief of an independent media company. You've been a guide to so many of us.

AMY: What company?

PERSON 4: It’s called Eastern Standard Times, it covers Asia and the Asian diaspora. Question for all of you, Tia, Carl and Amy: You packed so much into that brilliant documentary, all the highs, the lows, the humor, the devastation, the brutality, the empathy, I wonder what didn’t make it into the final edit [indistinct]

[audience laughs]

JAIE: Let me check with the theater manager. Go ahead, go ahead.

TIA: Yeah, I mean, I would say so many, so many scenes. Mona Davis, our editor, you know, had this extraordinary wealth of footage, and we just couldn’t stop. You know, we didn’t want to stop. We had this, you know, Amy broke the story of the kidnapping of Aristide, the president Aristide from Haiti back in 1991? 199...4?

AMY: There were two kidnappings and coups against…

TIA: Two kidnappings. Two coups. The second one, and she actually went down with the congresswoman Maxine Waters and Randal Robertson, Robinson to the Democratic–

AMY: The Central African Republic.

TIA: The Central African Republic. Which is where they, which is where the US marines flew him and hid him, and so she had the first live interview with him. That was a very hard scene to cut because that is a history that so few know about, and Amy was right there. What else would you say?

 CARL: Well, I mean, I’ll take this as a little bit of a segue because we cut so much material here. They snuck into Western Sahara, last African colony, and they filmed with the resistance there, the underground resistance who were incredibly generous at great risk to themselves. And Amy and Denis and their team did an incredible series of reports.

AMY: And John Hamilton and Mike Burke. Mike, are you here?

CARL: And Mike. Yes, Mike is…

AUDIENCE: Yeah! Woo!

CARL: And, you know, Mike shot one of the best shots in the film that’s not in the film. 

[audience laughs]

CARL: But that’s a different story. So, because we have all this incredible material to tell different parts of our collective history, really, we have a website called StealThisStory.org. And we also have a new minted, newly launched Instagram @StealThisStoryPlease, and we’re going to be periodically releasing little bits, some of those cut scenes and also some other excerpts from the film on that. So anybody who does social media, you know, check us out on Instagram, look for us there. These materials will be coming out. But it’s always painful. This was extra painful because, you know, we had thorough documentation, video and audio, with an incredible voice leading us through it, of the last 30 years of global history.

JAIE: Well that’s a great segue. I’m sorry, that’s all the time that we have.

PERSON 5: What!

JAIE: Amy, Tia, Carl, thank you so much for being with us

AMY: We want to thank you so much [indistinct] right? Can you talk about the showing.

TIA: Yeah, just quickly. 

JAIE: Yeah, of course.

TIA: Well, actually, we’re screening tomorrow morning at 11:15 at IFC Center, but then we are going to be taking this film directly out to the theaters March, April, Spring of next year.

JAIE: Fantastic.

[audience clapping]

TIA: And we will be at the IFC Center, so please spread the word. We’re building a war chest to be able to do that, so if you know anyone who can help, if you can help StealThisStoryPlease.org is the website. Donate. StealThisStory.org

AMY: They dropped the “Please,” they’re not gonna be…

TIA: No polite. And it’s a non-profit that is actually distributing this film, so any contributions are tax deductible.

AMY: And we’re gonna, in all these cinematic releases around the country, with the cinematic release coming in the next months, we’ll be doing fundraisers with local public media. With radio and television. You know the Corporation for Public Broadcast has been eviscerated, stations are gonna be going under, so we’re gonna use this opportunity to shore up independent media, and help, we hope, to build new media. And what happens tonight, and if you guys decide you like this film that Tia and Carl made it will send a signal to theaters all over the country if there’s gonna be an audience for it.

JAIE: Alright, we’ll be there, we’ll be there.

[audience clapping]

MURTADA: So, when I first saw the film, I was thinking about Fatima and how, at the time, we haven’t seen that many… the daily life of people in Gaza. The war has been going on for more than a year. The time early this year when you first screened the film, and to me the film was this strong visual statement of how people are living through the war, through the continuous bombardment of Gaza by Israel, and what they do in their daily lives. And for me that’s where it drew its strengths, but… since the film has been playing, since May, in many other festivals, and I was struck by what you said in the introduction, that Fatima has become an icon, a representative of many people in Gaza. So can you talk, tell us a little bit about that journey of the film, and your relationship with Fatima.

SEPIDEH: Well, what has been happening since the film premiered is that, on one hand, we seem to have gone towards… ceasefire, or what is being called ceasefire, and a peace plan, which is not one so far, in my opinion. The extent of the bombardments has reduced, of course, but it’s still ongoing. Attacks never stop, basically. And starvation’s still there, there’s not enough food, no medication, or hardly any medication– a bit more than what it was before, which was null. Now there is some, but it’s certainly insufficient. And, so, and more images actually, somehow were coming out, but because of the fact that people think that it’s over, now the media attention has turned elsewhere, so we again see less images. So… and again I observe this thing that’s– there are not that many Palestinians who are addressed to say how they’re coping and, you know, we resort mainly to the social media, and our channels to figure out– again, I listen, I watch BBC, I watch CNN, and they’re talking about something else. Not– now, well there’s Sudan, of course, and for good reasons, of course, because it needs attention. But I mean Palestine has shifted away, out of the light again for good. And, so this is one thing that has happened.

The other thing is that, yes, the film is going around the world and many, many, many places. Festivals, releases, different kinds of screenings. And people write to me, strangers doing, like, last week a gentleman wrote to me from Belgium, said I want to take her to Vatican, because she wanted to go and she couldn’t make it, I will take her photo, do you allow me. He took her there, I mean the photo, and he took photos with her photo, you know, being there. I mean, things like that, and for Palestinians as well, for many people, she has– she’s representing something that’s far beyond her own story, which is already an amazing story, of a person who died, who was killed in captivity, I would say. She never set her foot out of Gaza, you know, in 25 years. And yet she is traveling now in a different way, and many people are talking about her, I realize that people are drawing her, they are making songs about her, or with her voice, or about her life, and yes it, she has become sort of an icon in a way, which is…

MURTADA: I mean, one of the things that, sort of, the film ends with is this promise of her like, the last thing we do is see of her is hope and promise that the film will be seen in Cannes. But at the same time, there is this voice of caution from you where you say, “It will be public.” And we know exactly what happened when the film became public, so can you–

SEPIDEH: Before the film became public.

MURTADA: Well, when it was just announced, right? So, the film wasn’t shown, but it was announced, and it was announced about her, and…

SEPIDEH: Not even.

MURTADA: Not even? Okay, so tell– that’s–

SEPIDEH: No her name wasn’t out.

MURTADA: Tell us about that time then.

SEPIDEH: This is the amazing thing that, when we… well her phone number was out. It had been erased and all. Her face wasn’t shown yet, and her name was not revealed at that moment when Cannes announced the selection. It was just the title of the film, and the subject, and my name. But within 24 hours, you know, the targeting happened, and…

MURTADA: They found her.

SEPIDEH: Either because of the film or she was already on the list because I found out later that she did two major interviews in Arabic language, which I had not seen, watched. And I watched them afterwards with Al Jazeera and AJ+, and she was, where she was talking about her documenting the genocide with a camera in hand to the journalist that was interviewing her. And I think they might have triggered, you know, some level of alert for the people who watch these things and decide to eliminate journalists. Or it was because of the film, but that was very quick, in 24 hours, but I do not know. I mean, I wish one day the archives of the IDF would be open and we’d see who decided to kill the whole family…

 AUDIENCE 1: Wow…

SEPIDEH: ...like that. And you know what? One last thing, sorry. They bombed the whole building because– her building, I invite, sorry, this is not filmic or has nothing to do with– oh, but it does have things to do with her, so I say it. It was a targeted attack. There has been an investigation by Forensic Architecture, which is an NGO. Please find that article online and read it. It’s available. It was published a month after her killing, but the building, it’s a very grim thing, you know, a drone dropping missiles that cross through three floors and detonate on the level where she was living on the second floor. Which is, in itself, you know, it kind of cuts my breath when I say it every time, but the building was holding. And just before the ceasefire, they bomb the whole building again, so it fell. So, I mean, if it’s not deliberate, what is it then? 

MURTADA: Exactly. I wanna talk to you about your relationship with Fatima. So you’ve never met except in these documented conversations that we’ve all just watched. But we see in the film that the relationship between the two of you sort of grows. And it’s a give and take relationship where you get to learn about each other, and get to know each other, and have conversations not just about the war, but about other things, and about hopes and dreams, and everything. So can you tell us about, sort of, building that relationship just over the phone, and why you thought it was important to film it. 

SEPIDEH: Well building the relationship was, I think, de facto one of the things that I needed to make the film, but I didn’t do only because of the film. Because we really made this very quick bonding, very quickly and very deeply, and you see it on the image. This is, the conversation that opens the film is the first time we met, actually. We had just had a phone, I mean, Skype conversation, and prior to that, I had never seen her face. This was really the first time. And something really happens in that moment, which I myself am amazed every time I watch it again when I present the film.

Perhaps it’s due to what I had experienced, you know, when I was… When? Fifteen? You know, beginning of the revolution in Iran. We were stuck, it was a cultural revolution. Nothing was allowed, and all. And I had the chance to find a pen pal. I paid some money, and I was in touch with a German girl. We used to write to each other. Letters. There were, there was no internet. There was no way to call, it was too expensive. We would exchange letters and it would take weeks to receive the letters, but we grew to know each other for years, you know, several years. And when I arrived in Paris, after years, I met her for the first time in person, and she’s still one of my best friends.

And this was the total opposite. That a person who I’ve never met, well, never got to meet, but we grew so close, and so quickly because of the images, and because of the exchanges that we had. And I think, because we were making images, also. I think it’s that, also. 

MURTADA: I don’t wanna bogart the conversation. I have lots of questions for you, but I would like to see… Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE 2: Will there be an exhibit, somewhere, of her photography? Because it was exceptional.

SEPIDEH: Yes, there are many exhibitions around the world right now in different countries. Italy, Belgium, France, and Japan, soon. Hopefully in the USA, as well. We’re working on it. And a book was published in France, and I’m trying to get it published also in English language here and in UK. But it’s out in France already.

MURTADA: Any other questions? Yes… Yes?

AUDIENCE 3: What an extraordinary film. Wow. Thank you for this. What was the impulse that brought you to her? How did you connect with her in the very beginning?

SEPIDEH: As I mentioned earlier, when I was stuck in Cairo I decided to film no matter what, so I started working with Palestinian refugees who had left Gaza because it was possible for a short period of time, March ‘24 until early April, to pay eight thousand dollars per head and to leave Gaza. Or ten thousand sometimes, depending on…

MURTADA: Who are you paying?

SEPIDEH: Huh– who do you pay? Perhaps Egyptians and Israelis, I guess, I guess. So some people had left, and I was living with a family of Palestinians, and one of those young students was her friend. And that’s how I got introduced to her. They were from the same neighborhood, which is called Al Tuffah, which means apple, in North Gaza. 

AUDIENCE 4: Thank you so much for this. Have you stayed in touch with any of the friends that survived? Any of the other people that we saw in the film?

SEPIDEH: Of those who you saw in the film physically, only the two kids are alive. The little ones. The rest of them were killed. But her mom survived. She woke up, she was wounded, but she woke up, luckily. She’s in North Gaza now, and I’m in touch with her. And her best friend, the person who’s the aunt of those two kids, but you never see her, you just hear her voice sometimes, she’s also alive. And they’re in North Gaza now. Yes.

AUDIENCE 5: I just wanna make a comment, which is… not only was it incredibly sensitively done, but, you know, we as the audience could experience what you were experiencing. So I wanna thank you for that. As she got weaker and weaker, I mean, I felt like this is maybe the first time that I’ve… personally experienced, sort of, what starvation does to you. And I wanna thank you for that because it’s really kind of an abstract concept. And before you name it in the film, I feel like I’m feeling it. So I just felt like that was a whole other layer, I mean, of what the audience goes through with you as you’re going through it with her. So thanks.

SEPIDEH: Thank you. That’s one of the things for which you need time, I think, to develop, you know? Fortunately I was able to take that time, and unfortunately I saw her state degrading also. Exactly as you say. Before naming it I also felt it myself. Sometimes it was physical, sometimes it was psychological, mental. She was less present, and then we were able to talk about it, actually. Which was also amazing, that she addressed my question and answered it. So, yes.

AUDIENCE 5: Thank you for sharing.

AUDIENCE 6: Hi, thank you so much for [indistinct],  I find the title to be very  wonderful. Thank you. [laughs] I think the title is so beautiful, and I was wondering how your perception of Fatima’s words, saying that and, like, the message that she meant when she said that has evolved since the entirety of your relationship with her has passed, and where you are now. How you’ve come to perceive it. Yeah.

SEPIDEH: I think this whole… when she first sent me that message, the phrase is beautiful, so it did strike me. But I didn’t go [indistinct] towards until some months later where I was editing, and I found that message again because it was an audio message initially. And then I asked her in camera, I said, ‘Do you remember, you told me that?’ And she wasn’t very clear at that moment, but now when I think about it I see it. It’s really what she was doing, literally. I mean, the act of taking photos and commenting on the genocide, what she was doing, documenting it, was really putting your soul– And she describes it so beautifully in that phrase, and it was clear to me that that was the title of the film. I think this film is done with very little means, technical means, but with a lot of heart on both sides, I guess. 

MURTADA: That’s remarkable. Bob, I can’t see you, so how much time do I have?

BOB: [indistinct]

MURTADA: Okay, excellent.

AUDIENCE 6: I know that films like this that humanize Palestinians struggle to find distribution in the United States. I was wondering if you have plans or if you’ve had any opportunity to screen this in Israel. [indistinct]

SEPIDEH: Well I was asked by a festival in Israel to send them the film to be screened, and I did my research and that festival does not recognize the Palestinian state, so I said, “No.” But I hope, yes, to have the opportunity to show it in Israel and also in Palestine. So West Bank, we’re trying. Gaza, it was supposed to happen.

There was a festival two weeks ago in Gaza, it was called Festival for Women in Cinema, and my film was also supposed to be there. It started, it opened with The Voice of Hind Rajab, and then it was cut short because the bombing started again, so this was not shown. But it will happen soon, and hopefully in Israel, as well. I think everybody has to see this. I put my conditions for it to be shown in Israel because, you know, boycott is also an effective tool, and we have to use it in a good way, but we have to use it. And we do have Kino Lorber, which I want to thank here, who’s distributing the film in the US, and it’s running in theaters, so… it’s good, good thing.

[audience clapping]

MURTADA: So tell everybody you know that they can now watch this through Kino Lorber right here in the states. We have time for one last question. If anybody has a question. Yes.

AUDIENCE 7: Sorry if you’ve already answered, I just wanna mention, her smile, from the very first time we meet her, as well as the very last time we see her… I mean it’s really unmistakable how you can look at– it’s so amazing that she’s able to smile through this [indistinct] Also, would she have been able to go to Cannes if she had survived?

SEPIDEH: It was a question I was asking myself. The visa she would’ve got, we would’ve gotten from the French side, for sure. We had the invitation and the [indistinct] the immediately, the demand for visa. The question was how to get her through the Israeli checkpoint, so that was to be seen. I was counting on the French Embassy’s diplomatic services to help us because of the Cannes Film Festival. But we never got a chance to go that far, so… The day after I called them to say, ‘Cancel the visa because she’s gone.’

MURTADA: Thank you all for coming. Thank you Sepideh [indistinct]

[audience clapping]

TIA LESSIN: …while they’re walking to the stage, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about them. Amber is an award winning documentary filmmaker best known for her directorial debut Speed Sisters which aired internationally on Netflix, Al Jazeera, and RAI. Her subsequent credits include We Are Ayenda, Gutsy, Reckoning With Laughter, Convergence: Courage Under Crisis, America Inside Out With Katie Couric, and the Peabody Award winning The Judge which she co-produced and filmed.A Canadian, a Story Lab fellow, a Sundance Editing Fellow. Amber is currently based in New York City.

Rabab, editor, writer of this wonderful film, is a documentary editor best known for The Feeling of Being Watched, Another Body, HBO’s The Legend of The Underground, and the Emmy nominated Apart. And, of course, they collaborated on Speed Sisters.

You’ve also gotten lots of love from Sundance. This is such an extraordinary collaboration.I love this film. It’s deeply moving. It’s powerful. These are voices we are not hearing in the mainstream media. And even before October 2023, these were voices that we weren’t hearing. Tell us about the journey, how you set out to make this film, and how you originally came across Noam.

AMBER FARES: Thank you. Thanks so much for having us. I also wanna give a shoutout, one of the musicians did the music in the film, and it was a song that was played while Noam was with all the pressure of her getting married. So Alsarah is in the room, so if everyone could just give…

[audience cheering and clapping]

AMBER: She’s an amazing Sudanese-American musician. Noam and I are old friends, actually. I lived in Ramallah for many years while I was making Speed Sisters. Noam and I met during that time. And then I left Palestine and she left the UN. And then our paths crossed again when she was at Boston. So when she came to Harvard to develop her one-woman show, she came to Brooklyn and we had brunch together. She was telling me about how she was getting into comedy and what she was trying to do, sorta breaking apart this idea of coexistence, unpacking coexistence. And I just thought it was, like, such an interesting perspective. I knew Noam, I knew where she came from, and I already knew that she was a very unique voice. So I picked up my camera, and went to Boston the next weekend, and it was November of 2019. And at the very first shot of the film when she was at the shoe.

[audience laughs]

AMBER: It was one of the first things that I shot with her. Originally I thought the film was gonna be about an Israeli comedian that was trying to make a career in the United States, and was gonna be performing on university campuses in the election year. That’s kind of what the original log line of the [laughs] film was. And then Covid happened, and subsequently, you know, the world had turned upside down in so many ways, and I feel like Noam is really the vehicle for telling this story. It’s through her eyes that we’re seeing it, but it was such an amazing sort of way to understand what is going on there through Noam. That’s how it happened.

TIA: What’s so extraordinary about this film is that you are on a journey with her. And I think the best documentary films you don’t know where it’s gonna end when you begin, when you sit down, when you start making the film. So many things. The world happens when you’re making a film. Because she’s so clearly engaged with the world the film itself becomes an evolving thing. What surprised you the most in the course of this? You knew her, you’ve seen her show. I guess I’m always sort of alerted to what surprises me in the making of a film. What didn’t you know when you began and you began to learn and appreciate?

AMBER: The film was shot over a period of five years. I think the most surprising thing to me that Noam did herself was how she used her comedy in a way when she was going on Israeli TV in Arabic, and doing these skits in Arabic, and it going on Israeli TV with Hebrew subtitles, and then it would go online, and it would spread throughout the Middle East. And at that time, and I think even now there’s no one that’s speaking to both Israelis and the entire Arab world at the same time. And I think that that was just really brilliant, the way that she was trying to sort of subvert things. There’s so many things that happened. These last five years have just been so tumultuous. And it was like every time something, like Covid just that felt like it was the biggest thing. Politically those changes that were happening every time something was going on it felt like it was the biggest thing, and it was gonna be such a sea change.

And then it kept getting worse, and it kept getting worse, and it kept getting worse. There became a time when I couldn’t go there, right? Covid happened, and I wasn’t able to travel, I wasn’t able to leave the US. I partnered with a really amazing filmmaker in Tel Aviv named Rachel Leah Jones who directed a beautiful film called Advocate. Iit was really a relationship with Rachel and I. More of creative collaborators than a producer-director type of relationship. Rachel and her partner, Philippe Bellaïche, who’s a beautiful cinematographer, who were able to sort of carry that film on that collaboration. They were also very good friends with Noam. And Rabab came on very, very early, as well. Obviously Rabab and I have collaborated not on Speed Sisters, but also she consults on pretty much anything that I do, as well. [laughs] Has Rabab’s eyes on it. The make up of the team was really special, and it was a very collaborative relationship.

TIA: You can tell by what you came out with on screen. There’s a lot of warmth. There’s a lot of love. Rabab, when you came on board, I guess things were still being shot, scenes were still unfolding, but tell me about your approach. Had you known Noam in person? Had you seen her act outside of what was captured?

RABAB HAJ YAHYA: Yeah, I’ve known Noam through my cousins because they actually live in B'Tselem, Oasis of Peace. So I knew of her, and I was at the Palestine Comedy Festival. And that’s the first time that I met her, and I was really impressed by her humor, and she really captured everyone’s heart. When Amber picked up the camera and decided to start filming with Noam, we were already in conversation. We would always talk. We did some editing in different phases just for fundraising or pitching. And then we started editing fall 2023, right? Yeah, that’s when we did the deep dive.

AMBER: It was winter. We did a session in the winter. And we started right before October 7, actually.

RABAB: But it was, like, editing scenes, let’s see what we have, thinking about structure and all that. We started in the fall of 2023. And then it became really challenging because with October 7 and the genocide that followed, we were really editing as things were happening. My family in Palestine, Amber’s family’s in Lebanon, Lebanon’s being bombed. So, like you say, it was really, definitely a labor of love, and very beautiful creative collaboration. Rachel filmed, but also was part of the writing and in the conversation all the time. So it was me, Amber, and Rachel, but also we had an incredible team who supported us with cuts, or with just, like,  [laughs] phone calls of panic. You know, it’s like, ‘Oh, I have creative block,’ and, yeah. That’s really what made the project. That’s what pushed us to push through, to continue.

TIA: Did you feel more of a sense of urgency after October 7 to get this film done and out there in the world, or were you worried about the timing of the film?

AMBER: I mean, we were urgent to get it out because it was already five years, like [laughs]

[audience laughs]

AMBER: At that time we were like, ‘we really need to finish this film.’ But I think that what October 7th did was, the film became more urgent, for sure. It gave us clarity about what the film was about. Like Rabab said, we had a lot of scenes, and what we were able to do was just sorta go back with a new lens as we knew what we were building up towards. We were able to sort of reevaluate some of the scenes that we had cut, and whether things make it or not make it in. It really streamlined the story itself. We were editing and we were still in production trying to figure out, like, ‘Now what are we gonna do?’ like how do you tell a story about what happened after October 7th, and the genocide, and what is it that this film is saying about it. And it’s very hard to live through something like that  as well as make sense of it. We really put it off til quite late. The comedy show that’s in the film was actually filmed in Montreal in September of 2024. So the last scene with her on stage we wrote the night before she went on stage to perform it. So it was almost a year later to be able to reflect enough, to be able to have the words to describe both in terms of Noam, but that particular moment on stage, it was written, it was also a collaboration between Noam, and Rachel, Rabab, and I, as well. 

TIA: I guess she talks about needing a moment, you know, after October 7th, and that she had that moment, and she was able to really reflect. 

AMBER: I realize, too, it’s hard. I think for us, as filmmakers, like, ethically how we handle something like this because there was a huge rush to be like, ‘Do we go right away and start to film?’ and I was like, maybe I should just get on a plane and go. Then things were almost, like, too raw, you almost needed to let them settle a little bit before you can ethically ask somebody to have their thoughts on camera. And so, because we were so close that we were able to both give Noam space. It’s a real dance, I don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt her. You just need to be really careful about it, and so I felt like that’s sort of what we did. So we were editing, and then Rachel was there, and so we were to film kinda gingerly til we could figure out what it was that we wanted to do, and what we wanted to ask of Noam.

RABAB: And up until that point Noam would say, “They were up my ass the whole time!” [laughs]

[audience laughs]

RABAB: “ Whenever [indistinct] they were filming my ass!”

AMBER: There’s a scene that didn’t make it into the film. Though it is on our Instagram page. I should say this too, Noam is pregnant, which is why she’s not here with us today.

[audience “aww”-ing and clapping]

AMBER: But she did, at one point, freeze her eggs. And there’s a scene about her freezing her eggs.

[audience laughs]

AMBER: And it was funny because [laughs] we were there filming it, and then she went and had a colonoscopy, and she was like,  “Do you guys wanna come?”

[audience laughing]

AMBER: And we were like, ‘No, no, no, it’s okay. You can just get the video footage for us.’

[audience laughing]

TIA: Some people would describe being on camera in a documentary as a colonoscopy procedure, so…

[audience laughing]

TIA: You so masterfully, Rabab, wove this comedy routine through other much more somber moments in the film. I wonder if that was sort of from the outset what you were thinking of in terms of structuring the documentary.

RABAB: Well, thank you. Again, it’s really teamwork. It was a conversation from the beginning of how do we, because it’s these different scenes and themes, there are so many different themes that we were exploring, and Noam’s journey, and her comedy, and how do you structure that? So, early on, Amber knew that she wanted her comedy to be the thread throughout, and so we used her comedy from different locations to stitch together scenes. Sometimes it would be one scene with like a sentence from, Haifa, and then Jerusalem, and then England.

AMBER: Sometimes it would be in Arabic or English. And we just stitched together a joke that she told in a bunch of different places.

RABAB: So we had that as placeholder, and this is how we worked. And once we knew that, alright, we had our structure, the ins and outs and everything really worked around that. So we had to write the final comedy with Noam so that it matches everything. It is based on her show, but the way it’s been now stitched to work with the film. That’s why a couple months before picture lock we filmed the main comedy show in Montreal, and replaced the placeholder scenes.

AMBER: She was developing the show as we were filming this, too, right? So it was incomplete or there were jokes that she told often, other ones were new. So it was really a collaboration with her, sort of a back and forth. And then when we shot it in Montreal. Because English is Noam’s third language, we were a little nervous about just having one show, and having so much pressure just on one performance. So what we did was we booked out a theater in Montreal for the entire day, and we did two sets earlier in the day with a very, very small audience. And shot it very close, and we could tell her to stop and start and redo something just so that we had those takes if we needed it. And then in the evening in front of a sold out show basically, we sold tickets to it and everything. And then she performed the whole thing, right? It was good to have in case she stumbled or said something the wrong way. We had other takes we were able to edit in.

TIA: No, it feels so seamless.  It’s a really nice touchstone to keep coming back to, the comedy and the reflections. I wanna ask about distribution, but before I do, my question is: How did you resist laughing and screwing up the sound...

[audience laughs]

TIA: ...every time when you were shooting? Like, were there moments you had to cut around the camera person’s laughter or…? 

RABAB: In the main show? Or…?

AMBER: No, just in her life. Because she’s so funny. I’m sure there were. Yeah, yeah. I think there was a few times where I’m sure my camera was shaking because I was trying–

RABAB: The way Amber films, and Philippe as well, they run all the time, so there’s a lot of footage.  And that really allows for that more genuine, natural, it’s not farming for the camera. We have a lot of footage with Noam, and yes, she’s just so gorgeous. Like, every frame, we constantly, in the edit room, like, ‘Noam, you’re so pretty.’ [laughs] You know, like, every frame of her, and it was– it was really fun to work with her material.

AMBER: And also, to her credit, it’s really hard because she’s a performer, right? So it’s very natural for her to perform in front of the camera. And in order for this film to work, we needed to get deeper than that surface level performance. And I think, because we had that relationship before, that we’ve known each other so long, she also has known Rachel for a long time, it allowed us to have that kind of relationship with her. She allowed the camera to come in when she wasn’t looking her best or when she wasn’t feeling her best. That sorta trust is so important.

RABAB: But also, to your credit, Amber, This is something with Speed Sisters, as well. You develop this relationship with your participants in your films that really becomes so natural and, Amber is immediately welcome to their homes and becomes part of the family. It’s really beautiful.

AMBER: I’ve eaten a lot of good food, let’s just say that.

[audience laughing]

TIA: You can’t fake that. To the degree that we feel some warmth towards Noam it’s because. you have that, you feel that, and you share it with all of us. So I think that’s really beautiful. I don’t see Amazon Prime on here or Netflix. Can you tell me about the distribution, if you’ve gotten push back here or elsewhere, and what your plans are for the film?

AMBER: Sure. We don’t have distribution in the United States. To be honest, there hasn’t been a film that is about Israel-Palestine that has had distribution in the last two years. There’s a lot of really amazing films out this year that warrant it, and whether or not that’ll happen is still really unclear. We have distribution, we have Arte in France, and in Switzerland, Italy, Greece. In all these smaller European countries. We have found distribution in Europe, and in Canada, TVO. In the United States we’re self-distributing. That just means that it’s just our small team that’s putting it out. We’re doing all of the advertising, all of the social media. Trying to fill the theaters. So for us it’s a huge help if everyone… It’s playing at the IFC for the rest of the week, so everyone here, if you enjoyed the film, please tell five friends to come and see it over the next, over the next week or so. And also, there’s a QR code right here. We’re up for the Cinema eye Audience Award. Everyone can vote apparently multiple times.

[audience laughing]

AMBER: So… Please vote multiple times. Yes.

TIA: Vote early and often. I can’t stress this enough that word of mouth is what gets people into the theaters. You can post on your social media sites or Facebook, but calling up a friend and saying, ‘You must see this film, and you have to see it this weekend.” Is so important if you care about cinema, if you care about this conversation, if you wanna see more films like this. It’s not only allowing these voices to get out and this particular extraordinary film, but it’s also telling these distributors, ‘We want these films.’ ‘We wanna see this content, that they call it, in the theaters, on our broadcast platforms, on our streaming platforms. If you don’t understand that, we’re gonna tell you.’ So that the box office is sort of like your ballot box. Please do tell your friends. Tell us about screening this in Israel or elsewhere, is there any possibility of that happening? Last question.

AMBER: We’re still figuring that out. And very soon we’ll figure out how we want to screen the film in Israel and Palestine. So that’s something that we’re still working through right now, but it’ll happen soon.

TIA: What is your website? If people want to–

AMBER: It’s CoexistenceMyAss, everywhere. So, dot com, Instagram, Facebook.

TIA: Okay, let’s hear it again for Amber and Rabab [indistinct]

[audience cheering and clapping]

RABAB: And also, check out Steal This Story, Please! on November 13th  [indistinct]

AMBER: This is true, this is true. Tia just made an amazing film about Amy Goodman, so please go check that out.

TIA: November 14th, and it’ll be here at the IFC.

[audience clapping]

HOST: …is not what I expected to hear, so I want you to tell the people what it was that made you really decide you had to be a part of this film.

CONSTANCE WU: Well, at the beginning, it’s not even really a spoiler, there’s this scene where like the husband, and I don’t know how much you guys know about the movie, but the husband’s like eating dinner. And he’s just like hunched over. And he’s eating like gross. And he’s not giving any regard to his wife who’s just kind of watching him. And I was like, 'That is so fucking Chinese.'

[audience laughing]

CONSTANCE: 'That’s so real.' And I was like, 'This is real. If an American audience saw this they would think that this husband is like such a fucking dick.'

[brief audience laugh]

CONSTANCE: He’s just like, 'hahh rah rah rah.'

ELIZABETH LO: [laughing]

CONSTANCE: And like doesn’t give a fuck. But at the same time it’s like I recognize them and it’s not that he doesn’t give a fuck. That’s just like… I don’t know, that’s just how it is.

ELIZABETH: Cultural.

CONSTANCE: Yeah. Also the premise of the mistress dispeller, which is you know, if you think your spouse is cheating, you outsource somebody else to come in and try to break up the affair, so that everybody saves face… is interesting.

ELIZABETH: Yeah. That scene, you’re so astute to pick that up, that…

CONSTANCE: So Chinese!

ELIZABETH: Yeah, so Chinese, and, like, when Chinese people watch this film, they believe in it because it’s not that extraordinary the way that they’re behaving. It’s not that strange. It’s real life. It feels authentic to the way their families probably operated. In the way the dynamic across the dinner table, and that scene in particular. We did various cuts of this film. There were cuts where that scene, because I like to use long takes, ‘cause I want you to believe in the authenticity and be able to sink in and be a part of these people’s lives, have the patience, but when we extended that lunch scene, which you’ll see shortly in ten minutes, by like a minute or two longer, people hated him so much. People hated them so much they couldn’t root for their marriage. It’s like the whole concept is bust. So we had to like be very protective of our participants in the edit.

CONSTANCE:  And you even had to sound design it to lower the slurping a little more, right?

ELIZABETH: [laugh] Yeah, yeah. Which is a cultural thing. But I’m so grateful that Constance joined.

CONSTANCE: Everything else besides that is also good in this movie. But that was something that really stuck out to me.

HOST: Well maybe you could tell us a little bit about it. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of this profession, mistress dispeller. How did you discover this profession and what made you know that you had to make a movie about it?

ELIZABETH: This is a profession that’s only cropped up in the last ten years. I’m from Hong Kong, originally. I grew up there. Documentary filmmaking is my way to get to know a culture, and I knew I wanted to set my next film in mainland China as a way to get to know this country that was both close and foreign to me. And what better way to get to know a place than through their love stories, through the scenes of love and intimacy, where people are at their most vulnerable and their wounded selves are showing up. I also was interested, as a woman in my thirties navigating life, what are the pressures that women face in society? And so I started to look up mistresses in China, I came across the phenomenon.

You’ll meet teacher Wang in the film. Once we met her, my producer Maggie Lee found her, she was able to get us access to her clients on screen. And once we had that I was like, 'We can make this as a documentary.' And that it would be this Rashomon of a love triangle. But what I didn’t foresee was that it would take us three years of following teacher Wang, and filming with at least six other couples before we could get the kind of access that we did with this final couple that makes up the film.

HOST: When did you meet the couple that’s at the center of the film?

ELIZABETH: At the end of those three years. We kept filming. There were love triangles we couldn’t get the full access or the beginning of the process or they dropped out, and it was only finally this couple who we documented them from the beginning to the end. And at the end they still re-consented to be a part of the project, which other couples didn’t. So we’re very lucky.

CONSTANCE: Which is something that you’ve had to say in a lot of these screenings. This is not narrative film. Nothing is scripted. This really is documentary. Which I think surprises a lot of people that the throuple would agree… not throuple, but you know… 

[crowd laughing]

CONSTANCE: The triangle! The triangle would agree to have this so intimately filmed. Which I think is a testament to you knowing when to give space and all the things you need to do to get people to really open up even though there’s like a camera right there. But I couldn't believe it was real. I was like, 'Oh they probably moved the timeline to edit it,' and no, it’s all real.

ELIZABETH: It’s basically chronological, like the first shot that you see in the film which is… You’ll see. That was the first time we encountered the wife. And then as you’re encountering the characters is when we’re encountering them. And I’m just very grateful that at the end of all of this they still chose to be in the film, which is remarkable, and attests to the kind of people they are.

CONSTANCE: And even though they had already signed you had a lot of integrity and care to be like, [laughs] 'I know that you guys already signed your lives away, but lemme just show you what you signed and see if you’re still willing, and…'

ELIZABETH: Well, no film is worth jeopardizing…

CONSTANCE: Others would disagree! Not myself, but there are definitely filmmakers in the world who have not been so ethical.

ELIZABETH: We knew that being ethical was really important to a film where there’s so much deception and lying involved.

CONSTANCE: And heart.

ELIZABETH: Thanks.

[both laughing]

ELIZABETH: That’s so true. I hope you feel that, too.

HOST: Well, I don’t think we should make people wait any longer to see it. It’s such a fantastic film. Unfortunately Constance and Elizabeth can’t be here at the end, but I want to thank them so much for coming to introduce the film. Thank you all for being here.

CONSTANCE: Yes, thank you, everybody.

ELIZABETH: Thank you so much.

[audience clapping and cheering]