Interview w/ Marina Zenovich, Director

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

In 1977, eight years after the brutal slaying of his actress wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child by the Manson “Family,” Roman Polanski (the Polish-born Holocaust survivor and internationally renowned director of Repulsion, Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown), was convicted of drugging and raping 13-year-old Samantha Gailey (now Geimer), an aspiring young model (driven to the rendezvous by her own mother who arranged the tryst). Rather than face certain further imprisonment, Polanski (with a loan from producer Dino De Laurentiis) fled the U.S. for France, where he still lives day.

Fast-forward to 2001 when the industry buzz prominently favored an Oscar nod to the long-exiled Polanski for his direction of The Pianist. Synchronistically, documentary filmmaker Marina Zenovich, in search of her next film project, caught Samantha Geimer and her lawyer on Larry King. When she heard the lawyer say, "The day Roman Polanski fled was a sad day for the American judicial system," Zenovich, who had been only 14 during Polanski’s trial, wondered what he meant and knew she “had to find out.”

What she uncovered, through interviews with most of the primary figures in the case (including Geimer’s lawyer, the DA in the case, and, eventually, Polanski’s own attorney), was the little-known fact that the hunger of the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband, for a share of his 15-minutes of media celebrity, swayed him to rule unfairly and unjustly against Polanski’s admitted unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

In addition to Rittenband (who died in 1993), the most important character of course was Polanski himself, who is “wanted” in the U.S. as a criminal, and “desired” in Europe as an artist and survivor. Zenovich’s initial fax to him remained unanswered, but she forged ahead until, close to the film’s completion, she wrote a letter asking if he would be willing to meet with her. After several weeks without a response, on her way to a directing job in Italy, she booked a ticket through Paris, hoping for an encounter with the elusive one. Polanski’s attorney apologized on his behalf saying that he feared his appearance in the film might look like self-promotion. Disappointed but undaunted, she decided to call him anyway. He agreed to meet –– off the record. “I think he was quite appreciative of the work I had done to bring the legal story to light,” she says. “He apologized for declining the interview. He seemed more vulnerable in person. He had been living in my head -- through archive -- for many years, so it was satisfying to meet him.”

Making a documentary about a living person without his involvement can be a complicated procedure. In fact, Zenovich had already made a film about someone who declined participation. In her sometimes comical, often self-revealing, always entertaining 2001 doc Who is Bernard Tapie?, Zenovich (as compelling an onscreen personality as her subject) obsessively pursues (“I’m not a stalker!” she shouts at the camera) the object of her curiosity and craving –– the titular French iconic politician, soccer team manager, actor/entertainer, businessman, talk show host, and ex-con –– with the abandon of an adolescent school girl. (Her next film, part of her “French trilogy,” focuses on yet another inaccessible individual: Nicolas Sarkozy.)

Zenovich’s dense psychological portrait of Polanski is less the standard bio-doc than her attempt to understand the particular historical moment of the late-1970s, which has always intrigued her. The level of her sophisticated filmmaking is a good match for her subject and even reflects the style, intelligence and humor of Polanski’s work through clips of his films.

What were some of the more important stylistic decisions she made, I wanted to know. “Stylistically I wanted a lot of archive and the look and feel of a dream,” she recalls. Very early on, she cut together the airplane shot of Polanski landing in France (after fleeing certain imprisonment in the States) with the voiceover of Polanski’s friend Pierre Andre Boutang: “I think he has a dark side, a sad side, a veiled side. Given his childhood he has a relationship to life and death he can’t talk about. It’s impossible. He has a strong vision of death and sadness inside him but since he has such energy, such working power, such desire to do extraordinary things, he prevails.”

This counterpoint was exactly the level of filmmaking she was aiming for, but she admits it took a long time to get there. “I never wanted to include dates or movie titles. It makes it too informational. I had struggled a lot with the beginning and ending of the film. Joe [Bini] cut together the opening –– Polanski laughing during an interview with Clive James talking about Chinatown and corruption and the audio of Mia Farrow humming the theme to Rosemary's Baby –– with title cards explaining the facts. I was thrilled!” she explains.

The juxtaposition of aspects of Polanski’s character and from his biography with relevant clips from his films is brilliant and one of the most original and entertaining features in the film. Zenovich says that one of the producers always thought the film warranted film clips. But she never understood how it would work “because the dialogue of the Polanski film always took you out of the doc.” She cites an unsuccessful example of a scene with Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown that she hoped to use as a representation of Judge Rittenband, Polanski’s nemesis. However, a breakthrough came when Bini cut a scene at the beginning of the film where Mia Farrow (in Rosemary's Baby) is talking on the phone, and it appears that she is calling one of the characters in the documentary. “Marrying the two,” says Zenovich, “made me realize my instincts were right -- a dialogue scene wouldn’t work, but we could use moments from his films to heighten the scene. We were always looking to add humor and an eastern European irony to the story because of who Polanski is and who Joe and I are. Once we established that it became fun -- it was like, what film moment is going to work here?”

Then they found The Tenant trailer, where the voiceover says, “Nobody does it to you like Roman Polanski.” “Under the circumstances of the film,” she laughs, “how could you not use that clip?” But the great find was Polanski's short The Fat and the Lean. They’d had editing problems with the final meeting between the judge and the lawyers, and the short served as the perfect sardonic and comical visual commentary of the situation.

For the film’s top-notch crew during the five-year production, Zenovich hired Tanja Koop (DP) and Bini (the film’s co-writer as well as its editor), both of whom have worked for years with Werner Herzog. She grants that Polanski was a difficult film to edit because of the various elements: the complicated legal case, Polanski's life story, his movies, and the necessity for archival material. She worked with a few editors who added their contributions, but says she “kept calling Joe until he was available.” For her use of the vast archival material from the '60s and '70s (they used 40 minutes of footage and 253 stills), Zenovich worked with researcher Michelle Sullivan.

Getting the project launched was, “as usual, a long process,” she says. Originally the film was to be a French production, but after several delays, she resumed control of the project. She gratefully acknowledges that Steven Soderbergh (executive producer of Tapie as well) assisted with developing the story and provided important introductions. (She first met Soderbergh at Slamdance in 1996 when she interviewed him for her first film Independent's Day, about independent filmmakers.) “When you are working on one of these projects that takes a long time, it is always good to have a mentor to help and inspire you,” she advises.

One of the criticisms of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is that Zenovich isn’t hard enough on Polanski, that she excuses his “peccadilloes,” or crimes, because of his life tragedies. But she insists she was “very conscious of trying to not go easy on him. It was a great concern of mine. But I wasn't going to make a film about the sex crime, so maybe to some people that is being easy on Polanski.”

Did or does she feel sympathy for him? “I think the beauty of the film is that you keep going back and forth about whether you feel sympathy for him or not. Your opinion keeps changing -- at least that is what I've been told. It is a quite complicated story, so as a viewer, you have a myriad of feelings. The story was a tragedy for everyone involved. The best way to judge what happened in this case is to see the film. Even the victim in the case, Samantha Geimer, talks about how everyone talks about what happened that night, as if they were experts on it. Nobody knows but Samantha and Roman Polanski. We will never know exactly what happened. It is awful that it happened, but my film is not about that night. It is about what happened as a result of that night.”

Originally published in Documentary Magazine, Summer Issue, 2008

Interview w/ Lisa Jackson, Director: "Silence in the Congo The Greatest Silence"

From Lisa Jackson's The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, which airs April 8 on HBO. Photos courtesy of Sundance Film Festival
“Why use sex to humiliate and defeat someone?” asks Dr. Denis Mukwege, who specializes in treating hundreds of female victims of sexual violence at an understaffed eastern Congo hospital in Bukavu. That question serves as the subtext of Lisa F. Jackson’s "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo" as she encounters face-to-face the physically brutalized, soul-wounded survivors of a dark force that has assaulted 250,000 women and girls. Jackson’s approach is political and humanist and at the same time profoundly personal, given her own survival of a gang-rape in Washington, D.C., when she was 25 years old. This personal/political confluence serves her well in building up a sense of trust among the women she meets and interviews, especially given her willingness to share her story with photographs and newspaper clippings with the film’s participants. But, perhaps the most chilling aspect of the film is Jackson’s interviews with members of the Congolese army in the bush, who unabashedly admit to raping and torturing women. Jackson performed all the production functions (producer, director, DP, sound, and editor) on "The Greatest Silence," which won a Special Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance this year and premieres Tuesday, April 8, on HBO at 10 PM. I sat down with Jackson in Park City’s Yarrow Hotel during the Sundance Film Festival.

Cathleen Rountree: First of all, I want to commend you on your courage in addressing this horrific issue. How did you decide to include yourself and your own experience with rape in the film?

Lisa Jackson: This was a difficult decision and it didn’t happen, I’d say, until halfway through the edit. In fact, I shot for two months in May and June in ’06, then I went back in November to film the rapists. In between I’d assembled some cuts, and people who saw it, kept asking, “How did you get these women to open up to you?” and “What did you tell them about yourself?” I had intentionally gone over my story with the women, using the photographs, the newspaper articles and all the background information about myself. When I told people this, they said, “Well, why don’t you put that in the film? And why don’t you put yourself in the film? You have this incredible journey.”

Then it occurred to me that it was also a way of making these amazing stories I was getting a lot less voyeuristic. So I shot some recreations of me showing the photographs to women and, actually, those reaction shots of the women (when they’re looking at me kind of baffled early on) are when I was telling them what was going on and the translator was relaying it to them. So there were some very authentic moments and, obviously, they could see that my photographs were real.


So, it wasn’t a conscious thing from the beginning, but it seemed to me as an appropriate narrative device. And also a way of making the film more accessible, because the whole point of the film is that these women are not “other.” That we [in this country] experience the same things they do. Within the gradation of human experience, the overlap is a lot more profound than you might think.

CR: How do you feel when you see yourself in the film?

LJ: It still makes me a little squeamish to see myself on the screen, but in the end I think my friends persuaded me in the right direction.

CR: The sections of you do have an organic feel to them.

How frightened were you when you were traveling in these dangerous war zones, especially when you confronted the rapists? I guess there was a period when it was just you and the translator?

LJ: Oh, I was alone the entire time. I mean Bernard [Kalume, a Congolese man who works with the UN peacekeepers as a translator and liaison] came with me for my first trip into the bush, but for the second one, I was pretty much on my own, because the U.N. was completely preoccupied with the election and the count. And … how frightened was I …. You know I’ve done a lot of traveling in the third world and you get into this zone where you’re just so into the moment, you’re not really thinking about what’s going on around you. People have asked me at the screenings, “Weren’t you afraid of getting attacked? Well, people get attacked on the streets of Manhattan, so you can’t not leave your apartment because you might be attacked.

CR: Yes, but you were in the midst of known rapists.

LJ: Yes, that’s true, and there was a moment when I was heading up into the mountain when I went Holy crap, what have I gotten myself into? And suddenly I was just drenched in sweat. Again, it was just putting one foot in front of the other. And then it occurred to me that these guys were such narcissistic, preening, arrogant assholes that they really wanted to be filmed, and that my camera really was in effect a weapon. If anything were to happen to me, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to brag about their accomplishments.

CR: I’m sure that you had already dealt with it in depth, but I’m wondering if making this film had any kind of healing effect on you?

LJ: Well, I’d dealt with it pretty thoroughly, and I’ve made other films about women and sexual violence, and I’ve told my story and written about it. But what was poignant to me is that I had been able to move on, and I’ve actually been able to use that experience to inform a lot of what I do. But the majority of women I met will never be able to move on, they will be stuck in that place.

CR: They’ve also suffered severe lasting physical effects and many of them have children produced from the rape, which leads me to the question: How are the women dealing with their offspring. Is there any resentment toward them or have they transcended their anger?

LJ: No, there’s something about the women I met … I had an interesting question at the Q&A last night: Have I heard anything about these women committing suicide because their lives are at a dead end? There is still an incredible love among these women and a commitment to family and their children. They have such resilience and a grace and strength that shine through. Even that young Immaculate, who had a child by rape, you know she’s going to stick with that child. She may resent her and she may remind her of the rapist, but the maternal instinct trumps everything.

CR: Did you come away with any sense of forgiveness or compassion for these men, who themselves are products of a horrendous culture of violence.

LJ: Pretty much zippo. If I had seen any sign from them that showed the least bit of contrition or even an understanding of what they had done, I might have been able to see them as something other than callous assholes of the first magnitude. They actually seem kind of familiar to me, you know, I see them on the A-train everyday –– and they can be white, too.

I found myself –– in the interviews with them –– being extremely polite with them, and not pressing them on questions they didn’t understand, so I was obviously intimidated by them. I mean I did feel sympathy for them in the sense that they are part of the culture and were raised in the same cycle of violence. They were probably raised in conflict zones as kids and saw a lot of violence. And you wonder, did these guys ever respect a woman? Maybe that’s the source of their contempt for women.


CR: The level of atrocities perpetrated on those women is unimaginable. I mean, some of the torturous acts are things I’ve never heard of. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around them, like the men forcing a pregnant woman’s child to trample on his or her mother’s stomach to kill the fetus.

LJ: Yeah, well, there was a lot that I just had to edit out. One woman talks about being forced to eat her own feces that was mixed with the flesh of her child who the men had murdered. Acts that you really cannot imagine.

CR: My god . . .

LJ: It’s on a Nazi level.

CR: It’s beyond that –– it’s pure evil.

LJ: Yes, it’s pure evil.

CR: I mean the Nazis were a calculated machine, but this is raw and primal.

You know, I can’t help but wonder how documentary filmmakers, such as yourself, who encounter these atrocities (last year’s "The Devil Came on Horseback" also comes to mind) –– how does Lisa maintain the filmmaker’s point of view and maintain a human presence, an emotional equilibrium, without being entirely overwhelmed by what you’re hearing and seeing? How do you walk that line?

LJ: Well, as a documentarian, part of your job is to probe the soul, if you will. And, I’ve had –– I can’t tell you –– countless, countless interviews where my job is to get that person to return to that dark place, to remember it and to feel it and to share it.

CR: How do you do that?

LJ: How do I do that? [Hesitates] I don’t know how I do it. Well, I don’t just sit down and start talking to them, first of all. There’s always that long, slow approach so that we know each other and trust each other. And I let them take their time. And, of course, so much of it was in another language. I had a female translator for the majority of the time, but for the rest of it, I didn’t have a translator at all. And these stories didn’t come out until later. Like in the church group, for instance, Bernard was there for the very beginning, and when the old woman started telling the story about being raped by the seven soldiers, you know, he couldn’t take it anymore. He fled, and spent the rest of the three hours sitting outside, while I was inside. I had a sense of this incredible passion and this truth-telling, and also felt this incredible privilege. That was just a spontaneous moment and I kept filming.

CR: You must have been a wreck by the end of each day.

LJ: Yes, in terms of the interviews, by the end of the day, I would just be shaken, just destroyed, particularly out in the bush. At night I would just weep. I still find it hard to watch. I feel such an incredible responsibility to these women. You know, they said to me: “We’re telling you, so that you will tell other people.”

CR: What do you hope this film will accomplish?

LJ: Well, that’s what’s been so gratifying about these screenings [at Sundance]. After the second screening, I was overwhelmed with people wanting to know what they can do. So we cobbled together a one-pager with a website of where they could go for further information [www.thegreatestsilence.org/links]. Also we’re building a huge outreach campaign for when the film airs on HBO.

CR: So did you pre-sell the film to HBO?

LJ: Yes, they bought it on second rough-cut, back in the spring.

CR: Is there anything else that you’d like people to know about your film, Lisa?

LJ: Well, yesterday we were up skiing and a couple of women who’d been at the screening the day before came up to me and said, “We’re a group of six women from Phoenix and we all had tickets to your film, but at the last minute, four of the women said, ‘I can’t take it; I don’t want to see those stories this early in the morning.’” But people, I think, have a moral obligation to listen. Particularly because there’s a certain complicity the first-world has in the destruction of a lot of third-world countries; and the Congo is very much an economic war. You know, our cell phones literally have the blood of Congolese women on them.

I just hope that people aren’t turned off by the title, and that they’re driven by a sense of compassion and by a sense of our common humanity, and also by a sense of curiosity about an invisible war and the invisible victims of this invisible war, and that they will want to know, and that knowing, they will do something.

CR: Do you have any sense of hope about the condition of our world?

LJ: In general, not much, but in the specific … I’ve started shooting a film in Columbia, kind of on the same subject, where the war has been going on for almost 60 years, when the presidential candidate was assassinated by the CIA –– very much like Lumumba in the Congo.

CR: And Allende.

LJ: Yeah, and Allende. They say that at least half the women in the country have been personally affected by the sexual violence –– either through rape or physical assault. One 11-year-old was raped by the para-military, and when her mother denounced them, the threats began. They have all left their homes because of the violence and have found each other. So, I’m just going to follow them over the next year. When you look at the aggregate of Columbian women, you just think, How has this country kept going? That country is our [the US government’s] personal embarrassment; it’s a disaster.

But when you talk to the individuals and you see that, despite it all, they want to start a beauty salon or they want to get their daughter back to being the champion rollerblader that she was before she was raped, you know, they have hope and they keep going. They’re living in slums with no running water, but they still have this dignity. And it’s the same with the women in the Congo. It’s the women who are going to save that country, and we have to save them.

[This interview was first published in the IDA e-Newsletter on 4/3/08 with permission to reprint.]

"Iron Ladies of Liberia" airs on PBS "Independent Lens" on Tuesday, 18 March 2008

"We have had many governments here in the recent past that have relied upon brute force, instilling fear into people. We say that you can still exercise leadership without repression. As far as I’m concerned, so far in this administration it’s working better than the use of force."
—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia

A Liberian-born, Harvard-educated grandmother of eight, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been jailed, charged with treason, exiled to Nigeria and the U.S. and has held positions at Citibank, the World Bank and the United Nations.

Now, as the first elected woman president of Africa, the “Iron Lady” and the many other powerful women she has appointed to leadership positions are not only changing the face of Liberia, but also making history worldwide.

After nearly two decades of brutal civil war, Liberia is a nation ready for change. On January 16, 2006, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated the country’s first elected female president and Africa’s first freely elected female head of state. A Harvard-educated economist and grandmother of eight who had been exiled to Nigeria and nicknamed the Iron Lady, Johnson Sirleaf won a run-off election with 59 percent of the vote, but faces enormous obstacles in rebuilding a war-torn country.

Despite massive support both in Liberia and abroad, Johnson Sirleaf must not only find ways to reform a corrupt authoritarian government saddled by astronomical debts, but must also confront opponents loyal to former President Charles Taylor—all without alienating her voter base.

Since taking office, Johnson Sirleaf has appointed an unprecedented number of women to leadership positions in all areas in the Liberian government. With the exclusive cooperation of President Sirleaf, IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA goes behind the scenes of this groundbreaking administration during its first year, as it works to prevent a post-conflict nation from returning to civil war.

IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA follows leaders in the Johnson Sirleaf administration such as Beatrice Munah Sieh, the newly appointed national police chief. A former deputy chief in Liberia’s police force, Sieh survived an assassination attempt allegedly ordered by her boss and worked as a special education teacher in New Jersey for 10 years. As the national police chief, Sieh must maintain order while heading an institution known more for its corruption and repressive tactics than public service.

The film also follows Dr. Antoinette Sayeh, the minister of finance, as she battles a crippling national debt of over five billion dollars and a notoriously corrupt staff. As Dr. Sayeh says, “Women have not been, to the same extent as men, party to all of the bad things of the past. They certainly were very strong voices against the atrocities in Liberia in the war, and they fought very, very hard to make sure that the democratic process worked this time around. And so, this is our biggest opportunity to change Liberia.”

Other “iron ladies” seen throughout the film include Minister of Justice Francis Johnson-Morris, Commerce Minister Olubanke King Akerele and Minister of Gender Vabah Kazaku Gayflor. How would the world be different if women were in the seat of power? As IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA illustrates, they already are.

Ellen Johnson was born in Monrovia, Liberia in 1938. She attended high school at the College of West Africa. After marrying James Sirleaf, she traveled to the U.S. to study. Johnson Sirleaf received a B.A. in accounting from the University of Wisconsin in 1964, a diploma at the University of Colorado in economics and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University in 1971.

After Harvard, Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia and became the assistant minister of finance in William Tolbert’s administration. In 1979, she became the first female minister of finance. In 1980, Samuel Doe assumed power in the country following a military coup. Johnson Sirleaf went into exile to Kenya, where she worked in the Nairobi office of Citibank.

In 1985, Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia to run for the Senate. She was briefly imprisoned for criticizing the Doe regime and initially supported rebel leader Charles Taylor. During 1989 to 1996, when Liberia was entrenched in a civil war, Johnson Sirleaf lived in Washington, D.C. and worked as an economist for the World Bank and as the director of the United Nations Development Program Regional Bureau for Africa.

Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1996 and ran against Charles Taylor in the 1997 presidential election under the Unity Party, coming in a distant second. Taylor charged her with treason. She campaigned for his removal from office, serving as the head of the Governance Reform Commission and assuming a leadership role in the transitional government after the second Liberian civil war ended in 2003.

In the private sector, Johnson Sirleaf has served on the advisory boards of the Modern Africa Growth and Investment Company (MAGIC), the Hong Kong Bank Group, the International Crisis Group, Songhai Financial Holdings, Women Waging Peace and the Center for Africa’s International Relations. She was an initial member of the World Bank Council of African Advisors and a founder of Kormah Development and Investment Corporation. She is the mother of four sons and has eight grandchildren.

After winning a run-off election against former soccer star George Weah in 2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected president of Liberia. But despite a long career in both national and international politics, her ascendancy to the presidency was not free of controversy.

Some critics are wary of her because of her previous support for former President Charles Taylor, whom Johnson Sirleaf later campaigned against. As of January 2008, Taylor is on trial in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, charged with war crimes for his alleged ties to the rebel insurgency in neighboring Sierra Leone. The Johnson Sirleaf administration has launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights abuses and claims of war crimes during Liberia’s 14 years of civil war.

Since taking office Johnson Sirleaf’s administration has faced monumental challenges. After decades of war and corrupt leadership, Liberia’s infrastructure and economy were in ruins. The country had an unemployment rate of 85 percent and owed billions of dollars in debt. Monrovia had been without electricity and running water for nearly 10 years. During her first year in office Johnson Sirleaf opened a large investigation into corruption, including members of the Taylor administration. Many Taylor supporters remain in Liberia, including his former wife, Jewel Howard Taylor, who is a member of the Senate.

Perhaps Johnson Sirleaf’s most significant accomplishment to date as president has been her successful appeal towards debt relief. The cancellations of more than a billion dollars of debt from creditors including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States government, much of which was accumulated illegitimately under the Doe regime, allows Liberia to concentrate on reconstruction and development. Recent efforts by the Johnson Sirleaf administration include fostering foreign investment opportunities with countries such as China and providing free, compulsory primary education for all elementary-school-aged Liberian children.


Director’s Statement from Daniel Junge:

When producer Henry Ansbacher and I look back on how, weeks before her inauguration, we learned we might have access to the first days of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s term in office as Liberia’s president, it’s funny to think how, at the time, we thought this might make for an interesting short film. One year and 500 taped hours later, IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA proved to be more than just an interesting short film.

This indeed was appetizing subject matter for a filmmaker—a chance not only to see the inner workings of government at the highest level, but also an opportunity to explore the resonant subjects of female leadership, post-conflict re-development and democracy in the developing world. Perhaps most importantly, it offered an opportunity to witness—as our other producer Jonathan Stack calls it—“the most unabashedly positive story to come out of Africa since Nelson Mandela.” This comes from a producer whose last experience in Liberia was dodging bullets during the country’s brutal civil war.

The door cracked open for us to film the president’s inauguration for two weeks, and we firmly wedged our foot in that door, ultimately filming for a year with our Liberian crew. Often filming IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA proved to be an exercise in self-discipline. The task of simply keeping the camera steady and in focus, while remaining neutral to the significance of what we were shooting, was, to say the least, difficult. Not only were we privy to the inner workings of government at a level allowed to few in film history, and witnessing history being made by Africa’s first female president, we were also fortunate to be present at critical and possibly history-changing moments in President Sirleaf’s first dramatic year. So it was with difficulty that we had to anesthetize ourselves to these realizations just to keep the camera in focus.

As much as this proved a difficult task for our non-Liberian crew, for our Liberian co-director Siatta Johnson it was an even greater challenge. Here is a woman who, like most Liberians, lost everything during the country’s wars. Now, in Sirleaf’s presidency, she sees her first prospect for a “normal” life (a very low bar, measured by Western standards). “I’m not a partisan,” she often said, but we would catch her smiling when filming the president.

Like the best of politicians, President Sirleaf is adept at constantly reacting to her environment, and yet she was able to disregard our presence, even at moments in which her leadership may have appeared fragile. While, for the most part, she ignored our cameras (a blessing for filmmakers), producer Jonathan Stack told me that there would come a time when the president would give us “a conspiratorial look”—when she would be willing not only to let us film, but also bring us into her process. “Then,” Jonathan said, “then we’ll know we’ve got a film.”

That moment came towards the end of production, in a heated conversation between the president and representatives of the World Bank regarding Liberia’s debt relief. At a particularly rancorous moment the president looked my way. It was at a moment like this when typically we would be invited to leave the meeting. But this look was different. This look was to make sure we were rolling—a conspiratorial look —before she leveled into the men.

Indeed, we knew then we had a film.

Personally I’m honored to have been a witness and, hopefully, to have appropriately documented this critical chapter in African history, thus helping to open a wider dialogue on the themes mentioned above. While it’s easy to become a cheerleader for Ellen as she confronts her Herculean tasks, I don’t want the film to be agitprop for her nor against the dominant model in African politics, but rather for viewers to appreciate the complexity of the situation, including our complicity as Westerners. That viewers ask their own questions, not the least of which would be: Are women intrinsically better leaders than men? I have my answer to that one, but I expect audiences will come up with their own.

A Walk to Beautiful: Interview w/Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher

In December, A Walk to Beautiful won IDA’s award for the Best Documentary of 2007. Directed by Mary Olive Smith and co-directed by Amy Bucher, Walk chronicles the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and their subsequent healing journeys at the obstetric Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, where remarkable doctors devote their lives to repairing these women’s bodies and hearts.

Obstetric fistula is a rupture that develops between the vagina and the bladder, and sometimes between the vagina and the rectum during obstructed labor. According to U.N. figures, three million girls and women in developing countries suffer from this chronic condition. In addition to the embarrassment and shame of incontinence, these women are often rejected by their families and driven from their villages because they cannot hold jobs, take public transportation or, due to the fetid odor, even walk in public.

This noteworthy, lovingly rendered film has won audience awards at the San Francisco, Denver, and St. Louis International Film Festivals. Cathleen interviewed directors Smith and Bucher in April 2007 during the San Francisco International Film Festival.

(A Walk to Beautiful opens on February 8 in New York City and February 29 in Los Angeles and will air on PBS' Nova in May.)


Cathleen Rountree: What provoked the idea for A Walk to Beautiful?

Mary Olive Smith: We read a column in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof about obstetric fistula. He was the inspiration for this film. It was the first time he’d written about the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. He writes a lot about women’s health issues now. It was a beautiful column, written three years ago. Someone in our office read it. We knew it would be a difficult film to make, but we started talking with the Fistula Foundation, which was very small at that time and recently founded.

CR: Where is the Foundation located?

MOS: In New York City. The hospital had been supported for 30 or 40 years by foundations in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, but there had never been a foundation in the US. So it was new and they were supportive of the idea. Then Steve Engel [a producer] asked me to direct it because I’d had previous interest in human rights in Africa.

CR: When did you first travel to Africa?

MOS: I went to Ethiopia about three years ago on a scouting trip and visited the hospital and met with Dr. Hamlin and Ruth Kennedy. I wooed them and told them how much we loved their hospital and how much we wanted to do this project. And they said okay! I think that was our biggest success, just getting their approval, because they’re very protective of the women . . .

Amy Bucher: They’d had some not so good experiences.

MOS: in fact, when we first arrived, Amy started shooting in the hospital, while I went out to the countryside to find women –– we weren’t sure we’d find women who would agree to being filmed –– so we thought we’d better shoot in the hospital to be safe. But right before we arrived, another film crew had been thrown out.

CR: what had happened in that situation?

AB: I think they weren’t as sensitive to the women. They may have filmed before asking permission. I think there was an assumption that they could just go where they wanted to go. And that certainly wasn’t the way we handled it. I don’t think I had known they had been given the boot until we’d been there a couple of days. And then Ruth Kennedy said, “Oh, you guys are such a delight to work with.” Then she told me what had happened before we arrived. That was a relief to me that we were so welcomed there.

CR: Who is Ruth Kennedy and how did she get connected with the hospital?

Well, Dr. Catherine Hamlin and her husband went to Ethiopia from Australia –– I was doing the math –– about 47 years ago. They went, not necessarily to do fistula repair, but to do gynecological obstetric care. You pick this up, Mary, because you’re more familiar with it.

MOS: They were working at a hospital when Haile Sellassie was in power, and they came across fistula patients and, as she says in the film, they were so moved by these women (particularly her husband, who would single them out) who were often pushed to the end of the line waiting to get into the hospital, because people pushed them there and complained that they “smelled; those wretched women, get them away.” So both doctors began specializing in operating on fistulas, and eventually decided to found their own hospital. They’ve survived through the monarchy, the communist era and now the attempt at democracy. The hospital is still being supported by the government, or tolerated, at least.

AB: And it’s growing like crazy. They recently added on a new wing. And Dr. Hamlin appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show about two years ago, and within days, several million dollars had been raised and they were able to expand. Now their goal is to open five more hospitals in the outlying areas of Ethiopia. Two have already opened. So, that’s a big change just since from when we were there.

CR: Who works in the hospitals?

MOS: That’s something that’s very important, Catherine and her husband Reginald immediately began training Ethiopians. So the hospitals are primarily staffed by Ethiopians and they are outstanding surgeons. Catherine’s goal is for this work to continue after she passes away. She’s 83 now, so she can’t be here forever.

CR: This is a worldwide problem, right?

MOS: Yes, in the poorest countries in the world, so there is a direct correlation with endemic poverty. But the highest rates are in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Africa –– Nigeria, I believe, has the highest rate in the world. And then Southeast Asia –– Bangladesh, Pakistan. Latin America has a lower prevalence and they think that’s because there are more roads! So the hospital may be far away, but you can get there, probably just better infrastructure, period.

So Ethiopia has one of the highest rates and they think that’s because of geography as well. It’s mountainous and very diverse geographically, so it’s all the harder to get roads in for women to get places.

CR: Who is affected by this condition? Is it particularly very young women?

MOS: Of all pregnancies, whether in the US or Ethiopia or Sweden or Nigeria, five-percent of all pregnant women will have obstructed labor. If they don’t get a caesarian, they’ll either die or they’ll end up with terrible injuries. Maybe there are a few lucky ones who survive without that happening. So you add to that, undernourishment. Dr, Ruth Kennedy always likes to remind us that the food in Ethiopia is really healthy, so they get good nourishment, but not enough. And these women work so hard, they burn a lot of calories, so the girls are underdeveloped. But the boys are too, it’s not just the girls, the boys are tiny.

CR: But they don’t have to push a baby out.

MOS: Right, they don’t. Then you add to that early marriage. So there are a lot of complicating factors. But if got rid of the cultural factors and even the undernourishment, there’d still be obstructed labor. And without a caesarian they would still suffer from fistula.

We still had fistula in the US until 1895.

AB: But Ethiopia does have one of the highest rates of young marriage in the world. It’s a complex picture, but it certainly is a factor that, if you have a ten-year-old-girl, who is as undernourished and works as hard as those girls do, it’s very unlikely that she’s going to be able to pass a baby through her pelvis.

MOS: One of the girls in the film was 15, but she was married when she was eight. She didn’t get pregnant until she was 15, but it’s still a big problem.

CR: How did you locate the young women, the characters, for the film?

MOS: I went with a big crew to a region of Ethiopia, a very poor area, and went out beyond the town we were staying in (just with my interpreter and producer and our guide). We worked with the local clinics and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church searching for these women; we went on immunization trips. And we weren’t finding any one. I knew it would be hard, and finally on day five . . .

CR: There are so many women suffering with fistula, why did you think it would be hard to find them –– because of the shame factor?

MOS: Well, yes, they hide. I think the villagers may or may not know what kind of sickness they have, or if they know, they’re afraid to tell. It’s interesting, we were just communicating with women, and really had no luck. And it was our guides, the men, who ended up having a little more luck. We found one young woman and I asked if I could take her picture. She said, “Oh, yes, I’ve had my picture taken a lot at the fistula hospital. And, lo and behold, she’d already been cured! I was about to cry. I said, “Very nice to meet you, but . . .” It turned out that she was on her way to her friend Ayehu’s house. She was sick and she wanted Ayehu to visit the hospital. So the whole scene in the film is exactly how it happened, how we arrived at Ayehu’s.

And then another women we found, thanks to a boy in the marketplace, who admitted that there was a woman in his village who was leaking. But he was so afraid, it took our guides an hour to convince him that he was doing a good thing by telling us how t find her. And then Yenenesh just came to our doorstep at the hospital. She happened to be a maid at a house in the town, and word spread, and the man she worked for heard about us and said, “Come, there are some people who are going to help you.” He was so happy. And there she was, two nights before we were leaving. So that’s how we found them.

Amy, you should talk about how you identified whom you were going to interview in the hospital.

AB: As I’m thinking about it now, I had the opposite experience and the opposite challenge from Mary Olive, which was we arrived at the hospital and it was not about finding the women, but the problem of narrowing it down from an enormous selection of candidates. They had about a hundred beds. And every woman’s story is compelling and heartbreaking. We asked the hospital if we could interview all the women who had arrived the day before, because we wanted to get their experience from the very beginning of their stay, hadn’t even been examined by the doctors yet.

We interviewed about 12 women that first day, and I had a set list of questions: How long have you been leaking? How old were you when you got married? What was your husband’s reaction? We went through kind of cataloging the stories. It was a day of just crying after hearing these stories. And, too, seeing which women seemed the most comfortable just talking to us. But we certainly didn’t bring any cameras in that day. It was a chance to see how they felt about the idea of us following them around.

Out of that first day we found two of the women we followed, one of which, Almaz, ended up in the film. Her story stood out because she’d had a double fistula, which –– well, urine is one thing, but add feces to that for three years, it’s hard to fathom. The next day we actually saw Wubete from across the room and she was kind of peering around the corner looking at us and her face was so expressive. And as soon as she opened her mouth, there was something about the quality of her childlike hope. She’s been there already three times. And I think there was something else interesting about her story because she had already been operated on, but she hadn’t been cured yet. So that’s how it started at the hospital.

CR: What was your purpose in making this film?

MOS: Our goal was not to just make an advocacy piece. We felt that we would advocate the best by making a beautiful nonfiction narrative film. The easy sell for the hospital would be: Woman comes in, fistula gets cured, woman goes home. Transformation, she’s happy, the end. But you need setbacks and conflict in a good film. And so these stories were, I think, particularly compelling and stood out to Amy. We were a little nervous about having a character who was not completely cured, but the fact that she finds her way, finds a way to grow up and be strong anyway, is all the more moving. So she ends up having one of the best stories, if not the best story, even though she wasn’t cured.

I hope that people see that we were not just making a film about fistula, but about women who just wanted to be whole people again.

AB: That tenacity was important, that they were willing to do whatever it was going to take. Neither of us had any idea about what would transpire with these women, what would happen next. In some cases it was very straightforward and happy; and in other case it was very complicated and an indirect route to the end product.

MOS: We never thought we would have five characters, but each one seemed to bring something so different.

CR: How was it for these women after they were cured and they returned home? Were they welcomed back into their society?

MOS: That’s a complicated question. I’m not sure Amy or I know the answer or if the hospital even knows the answer. My guess is that for the women who were cured, and who hadn’t been sick for that long, they’re welcomed back. Zewdie was welcomed back immediately, although she was nervous about reintegrating. Ayehu, the first woman you meet in the film was sick for six years, and I went back and saw her three months after she’s been cured. She was still angry because of the way her family had treated her, so she wasn’t running out to the well to hang out with the neighbors yet. She’s older and doesn’t plan on getting married again. For the younger women who get cured, my understanding is that they reintegrate pretty quickly.

It’s not that hard to get married again. We found that virginity in an orthodox community is not a big issue. Some of the women had had three or four husbands. If you’re married and your husband leaves, you can get married again.

AB: There are so many reasons why girls are married off early. We want to do our next film on early marriage, which we’ve gotten some interest in.

CR: Early marriage in Ethiopia?

AB: Yeah, we’re going to focus on Ethiopia because it has such a high rate, for a variety of reasons –– from economics to making sure that your daughter is protected and not abducted into marriage as Almaz was. You know, you’re abducted, then you’re raped, then you’re a wife. Almaz’s husband treated her well, sold a cow so he could help her, bought soap for her. He never abandoned her, or put her out of the house. But when Almaz was cured and we went home with her to film the homecoming, it all started to come out what her sense of this marriage was. She just had so much spunk, I left thinking: I wonder if she’s going to stay with this guy. And, lo and behold, as soon as her body was healed, she was out of there. She left her husband and her village and moved back to Addis Ababa and found a job on a rose farm. So she acquired the strength to leave a marriage she never wanted to be in in the first place. But every story was different.

CR: How long did you film in Ethiopia?

AB: We were in the hospital for 2 ½ to 3 weeks following the women through their surgical procedures and recovery process. Then we went off for a week before we returned. So that first trip was about four weeks. And then a couple months later we went back to film Wubete for a couple of weeks.

MOS: Then I went back again with our composer and we recorder traditional music and a lot of the traditional sounds to include.

But what I didn’t do was tour. So, I’m taking some time next fall to travel in Ethiopia, and we’re premièring the film then!

(This interview was originally published in the IDA e-Newsletter 2/6/08.)

Park City Dispatch 8––On GreenCine Daily

Docs Rock at Sundance


As in recent years, the documentaries once again stole the show at Sundance 08. Among the 41 films I crammed into nine days, 23 were nonfiction titles.



Topics included: social activism, environmentalism, economic concerns, anti-war issues, the corrosion of democracy, world politics, displacement, gender identity, inspiring senior citizens, and entertaining biographies of Roman Polanski, Hunter S Thompson and Patti Smith.




One festival highlight was certainly the premiere of U2 3D, a genuine concert experience utilizing the technology of 3-D and surround-sound. Leave it to Bono, the Edge, Adam and Larry (all in attendance at the screening, along with Al Gore) to merge rock-and-roll with social activism. After the screening, Bono's response to an audience question about whether the band might consider doing a "deeper" show, inadvertently spoke to the festival's raison d'etre: "Underneath there is a narrative running: social activism, human rights, non-violence. Taking human rights on the road is not a flippant thing to do," he reasoned. "I think you might know that in this country."

I marveled at many of the documentaries' timeliness and the prescience of the filmmakers, many of whom spent upwards of three, four, and five years in production. For example, I.O.U.S.A., Fields of Fuel, Secrecy, Flow: For Love of Water, Dinner with the President, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Slingshot Hip Hop and Bigger, Stronger, Faster each address topics of immediate national and international concern.

Continue reading at: http://daily.greencine.com/archives/2008_01.html
Originally published on GreenCine Daily, 1/31/08.

Sundance 2008: Day 7, Weds., 1/23/08

Parties and Panels

Something I haven’t yet mentioned, the parties I’ve attended as well as the informative and worthwhile film panels.

Sundance parties are particularly legendary, even infamous. I’d heard many stories and before this year, felt a little left out. But press credentials go a long way –– and journalists are invited to a number of parties.

Earlier in the week, while working in the pressroom, I started a conversation with a guy who, it turns out, attended Stanford years ago and his daughter is currently a student there. I thought he was another film journalist, but he turned out to be the president and CEO of Sundance Channels. You never know whom you’re going to meet here (witness Bono’s and my intersection last Saturday night). Larry invited me to the Sundance Channel Party downtown on Main Street and I was thrilled. I’d already RSVP’d to the IDA (Independent Documentary Association) invitation to their Heineken sushi party, held right after SC’s.

Because I was coming from interviews with two directors, I arrived late at the Sundance Channel party, but it was still in full swing. I made my way through the throngs looking for anyone I might know or recognize. Alas, no one. After 15 minutes I headed up to Park St. to The Lift (literally a ski lift in the middle of town) for the IDA party. The editor of “Documentary” Magazine (in which I am proudly listed as a Contributing Editor in the masthead) greeted me. Yay, I know someone. Then I saw A.J. Schnack, a documentary filmmaker (“Kurt Cobain: About a Son”) I met and interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago. Naturally, by the time I arrived, all the sushi was eaten. But, given today’s NYT headline –– “High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi” –– maybe that wasn’t so bad. Oh, well, I've never been much of a party person and feel much more comfortable one-on-one. So, after 20 minutes, I split from The Lift and headed back to my favorite haunt: a movie theatre.

Tomorrow: Sundance Panels

Cross posted on "The Santa Cruz Sentinel"

Sundance: Day 6, Tuesday, 1/22/08

Sundance: Day 6, Tuesday, 1/22/08

Yesterday I happened to be working in the Festival pressroom when the news of Heath Ledger's death broke. Industry insiders felt shock and deep sadness at the loss of this talented and much-too-young-to-die 28-year-old. A tragic waste of life.

Yesterday I interviewed two doc directors: Irena Salina, “Flow: For Love of Water,” and Stephen Walker, “Young @ Heart.”


The most compelling and politically/socially/environmentally important documentaries I've seen thus far include the following:

(For fuller descriptions of the first 5 titles, see earlier post: “Sundance: Opening Day, Thursday, 1/17/08):

“Flow: For Love of Water” (U.S.), director, Irena Salina.

“Fields of Fuel” (U.S.), director, Josh Tickell.

“I.O.U.S.A.” (U.S.), director, Patrick Creadon.

“The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo” (U.S.), director Lisa F. Jackson.

“An American Soldier” (U.S.), directed and written by Edet Belzberg.

“Secrecy” (U.S.), co-directors, Peter Galison and Robb Moss. Looks at the staggering production of government classified secret documents that involves millions of people and billions of dollars.

“Up The Yangtze” (Canada), director Yung Chang. In this riveting and gorgeous doc, Chang spent 5 years chronicling the life transitions of families who live near the Three Gorges Dam and must find a way to adjust to the rising waters in a dramatically changing China.


“Singshot Hip Hop” (U.S.), director, Jackie Reem Salloum. Palestinian rappers present alternative voices of resistance within the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Very hot.

“Trouble the Water” (U.S.), co-directors, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. Lessin, an aspiring rap artist, and her streetwise husband who, filmed their experience of being trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, and seize their chance for a new beginning.

“The Women Of Brukman” (Les Femmes De La Brukman) (Canada), co-directors Isaac Isitan and Carole Poliquin. After the Argentinean economic meltdown between 2001 and 2003, with 60 percent of the population living in poverty and unemployment, after factory owners walked away from their businesses, workers took over a Buenos Aires men's clothing factory and managed to keep it in operation, providing employment.

“Alone In Four Walls” (“Allein In Vier Wanden”) (Germany),
director, Alexandra Westmeier. A heartbreaking account of teenage boys struggling to grow up in a home for delinquents in rural Russia where their home lives present even greater hardships.


“Be Like Others” (Canada, UK, USA, Iran), director, Tanaz Eshaghian. Forget what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia last year. This doc explores the unexpected subculture of young Iranian men who choose to undergo sex change surgery.

“Dinner With The President” (Pakistan), co-directors, Sabiha Sumar and Sachithanandam Sathananthan. Examines the current cultural climate in Pakistan by interviewing people-on-the-street, religious leaders


“In Prison My Whole Life” (UK), director, Marc Evans. Interviews with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Mos Def, Angela Davis, Snoop Dogg and others uncover the story behind award-winning journalist Mumia Abu Jamal’s death row sentence, and comes to startling realizations about American history and America's justice system.

“Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma” (Canada), director Patrick Reed. James Orbinski, former head of Doctors Without Borders, returns to Africa where he is forced to examine the meaning of humanitarianism.

Sundance –– Day 4, 1/20/08

Meeting Bono


“U2 3D”: the event of Sundance ’08. Swaggering up the roundabout in front of the Eccles Performing Arts Theatre at Park City’s high school at 9 P.M.–– beefed-up bodyguard his shadow –– Bono, sporting Hunter S. Thompson transparent orange-tinted wraparounds, shook 20 hands, one of them mine. It was a “Beautiful Day,” a memorable moment.

When he reached a baby in a pram, Bono squatted down, looked him or her in the eye: “Thanks for coming! Are you cold,” he said, acknowledging the 10-degree chill.

Ah, just the opening the mother had waited for, “We don’t have tickets and we really want to see the movie!”

“How many in your party?”

“Three.”

“We can get you in. He’ll take care of it,” he assured the woman and pointed to an official-looking fellow.

As I turned around and headed into the theatre, Al Gore walked by me. Yes, the should-have-been president. No security, no Tipper, just another man beside him.

Inside, the theatre went crazy when U2 walked in. Gore was already posing for photos. The concert was scheduled for 9:45. As 10 o’clock came and went, I wondered when the film would commence and to that end, why they didn’t simply ask people to sit down. Then, surrounded by his entourage, Mr. Sundance himself, Robert Redford, strolled in and the audience went wild. Naturally, we couldn’t begin without our host.

Geoffrey Gilmore, the Festival Director took to the stage and invited the filmmakers (Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington), as well as the band, up to say a few words and introduce U2 in 3D. Bono said, “There’s something fitting about being here in a high school; we are a high school band, after all,” he laughed.


Finally, the house lights dimmed and we donned our 3D glasses as “U2 3D”’s opening credits rolled. The film comprises seven 2006 Latin American Vertigo concerts shot on location in São Paulo, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, among other cities (70,000 people each). Bono called it “a love song to Latin America.” The light show and staging are first class with a red and black color scheme and an audience-embracing horseshoe-shaped platform on which Bono, Edge, and Larry pranced, played guitar, and for one song, beat a standing drum like a Taiko drummer.

The band performs 14 songs, including “Pride (In the Name of Love,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “All Because of You,” “Vertigo,” and “Yahweh.” During “City of Blinding Lights,” in solidarity with the concert audiences, many among the audience of 1200 illumined our cell phones.

The 3D effects were, in the original sense of the word, awesome. At times I reached out and “touched” band and audience members. And occasionally it felt as if I needed to duck to avoid the neck of Larry’s bass guitar. The cinematic experience of U2 is obviously different from a “live” performance. But Saturday’s event proved the best of both worlds: an unprecedented virtual nearness to the rocking Irish troubadours on stage thanks to 3D technology and the actual proximity to them two rows in front of me. I watched them watch themselves.

During the Q&A after the film, an audience member asked if the band might consider “doing a “deeper” show, like the Beatles in “Yellow Submarine.” Bono seemed a bit put off at first, but he responded with what seemed obvious to most of us: “Underneath there is a narrative running: social activism, human rights, non-violence. Taking human rights on the road is not a flippant thing to do,” he reasoned. “I think you might know that in this country.”

Isn’t it about time the Swedish Academy awarded Bono the Nobel Peace Prize?