There’s some serious creativity taking root this spring at an organic farm on the eastern outskirts of Woodstock. Thanks to a new partnership between the White Feather Farm Foundation (WFFF) and the Woodstock Film Festival (WFF), four young independent filmmakers are using a monthlong residency to cultivate the concepts behind their latest projects, with assistance from some impressive mentors. Two are working on documentaries, two on narrative features, and all four represent constituencies who rarely get to tell their own stories in the Hollywood-dominated entertainment media realm.
While the 2020 festival was able to happen only via streaming platforms and at drive-in theaters due to the pandemic, WFF has not been snoozing this pastyear. “COVID suddenly gave us time to breathe and learn how to do things differently,” says WFF founder/director Meira Blaustein. “We increased our activities tenfold, and a lot of it was about education. Then this opportunity presented itself to us, and it seemed like a no-brainer.”
That opportunity took the form of Blaustein’s visit last November to a beautiful house that WFFF had purchased just down the road from the farm itself. The foundation’s director, Marc Scheff, offered her the chance to put it to use in a collaborative project that would address the issues of racism, climate change, food insecurity and immigration. Noting that WFF had aspired to host filmmaking labs and residencies ever since its inception in 2000, Blaustein says, “We knew immediately what we were doing. Within two weeks we had a proposal.”
With assistance from Film Fatales, Sundance Co//ab, the Jacob Burns Film Center and several individual filmmakers, project organizers spent this past winter finding the first four residents in what both WFF and WFFF hope will become an ongoing incubator program. Alex Smith was brought on board as artistic director, and indie superstars were recruited to serve as mentors to the artists-in-residence: Mira Nair and Matty Rich to coach the narrative filmmakers and Julie Anderson, Pamela Yates and Paco de Onis to work with the documentarians.
As part of the residency, the fellows are invited to partake in a variety of nature-related activities, from working in the fields and greenhouse to taking care of happy chickens, on a farm that makes a point of pride in being a former home to indigenous Lenape and Mahican people. “Connectivity with the soil” is a theme that reverberates through all four of the media projects currently being developed here, Blaustein says; and the filmmakers themselves commented on how the proximity of nature at this site was replenishing their creative juices – just the way an artists’ retreat is supposed to do.
Brooke Pepion Swaney (Daughter of a Lost Bird, Tinder on the Rez) particularly appreciates WFFF’s awareness of the area’s native roots, herself being an enrolled citizen of the Blackfeet Nation, with a Salish mother. While serving as a juror in a rape case, she began giving serious thought to the question of how traditional tribal justice might be meted out in the modern world. To address a crime in the 19th century, she explains, “You would sit in a room with the whole community…If you can’t work it out, you were banished.”
Her desire to make a narrative film on the subject was further fueled by an incident in which white supremacists, yelling “Go back to your country,” beat up her Native cousin who had attended a BLM protest in Missoula, Montana. In Pepion Swaney’s darkly comedic, as-yet-untitled new screenplay, a fed-up tribal cop decides to take justice into her own hands, abducting a pair of racist killers in a cross-country odyssey with the goal of sending them back to Europe.
Set Hernandez Rongkilyo (Cover/Age, In Plain Sight, Call Her Ganda), an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines, works as a community organizer and documents the challenges faced by other undocumented immigrants in California – especially with regard to healthcare and disability issues. In the course of that work, Set developed a close friendship with a social worker named Pedro who has been gradually losing his sight. Unseen, the project that Set is developing at the WFFF residency, taps the potential of multimedia technology in innovative ways to convey Pedro’s point of view to blind as well as sighted audiences.
“It’s not just a film; it’s a multi-platform documentary,” Set explains. “I want to shift the proverbial gaze of people who are sighted. It’s an audio-based film.” Utilizing both open captions and audio descriptions, the visual sequences are deliberately “impressionistic,” showing silhouettes, pulses of light and blurs of movement. Other components of the project will be released on audio platforms, and Set is now trying to figure out how to translate it into an immersive virtual reality format. “Each one of us has our own subjectivity. Which ones do we privilege?” the filmmaker asks rhetorically.
In her previous documentary work, Eunice Lau (Accept the Call) has focused primarily on the journey of the immigrant. But, she says, she has long wanted to do a project addressing climate change “from a very intimate, personal lens.” The incident that grabbed her attention and spurred her work-in-progress, Son of the Soil, was the suicide by self-immolation of David Buckel in Prospect Park in 2018. Buckel had pursued a long career as a human rights lawyer specializing in LGBTQ cases, including a lawsuit against the Nebraska sheriff who failed to protect a young trans man named Brandon Teena (the role for which Hilary Swank won an Oscar in Boys Don’t Cry) from his rapists and eventual killers. In 2009, Buckel, who had grown up on a subsistence farm in Batavia, New York, retired from his law practice to develop an urban composting program in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook.
Despite the program’s growing success, he felt that he wasn’t doing enough to generate public concern about climate change; so, he emulated the Buddhist monks who first galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War by setting himself on fire. But the impact of his self-sacrifice was quickly submerged amidst the horrors of the daily news cycle. Lau is shaping her documentary around Buckel’s “emotional trajectory,” with an emphasis on storytelling. “I want people to come away feeling inspired and hopeful. He didn’t do it out of despair, but out of hope.”
Sustainable agriculture was also the mission of the real-life individual who inspired the still-untitled narrative feature now being written by Maba Ba (#WarGames, Christmas Wedding Baby, Nafi’s Father). Born in Senegal, the filmmaker is the son of an agronomist who was working in the Central African Republic when civil war broke out there in 2013. She and her team took shelter in a UN bunker for 72 hours; but when a plane became available, “My mother sent her staff out and decided to stay. She said, ‘I came here to help with sustainability. Now there’s a war, that’s when they need me the most,’” Ba relates.
In his fictionalized version, the mother character is one of the organizers of a “women’s zone” that enjoys a truce from both sides in the conflict, so long as no adult males are admitted. When her grown son arrives, fleeing America, the mother must provide him a place to hide, but is ambivalent about it, believing herself to be jinxed. “Every man that she’s loved has died,” Ba explains. “The son has a Western education and psychology; to him, his mom is superstitious. But the son also has a phobia. So, she’s learning about hers while walking him through it.” Though this intergenerational tale is set during wartime, and the filmmaker’s style leans toward hyperrealism, the actual violence is not depicted onscreen. “I don’t want to sensationalize our trauma; we are more than our trauma,” he says. “It’s a risky business, being a human being. I try to show the humanity in the people. Even in war there is so much joy and resilience.” At the story’s core lies “the maternal instinct to protect and preserve – being one with nature and the soil. You’ve got to take care of the people, and the people will take care of the Earth.”
By all accounts, their interactions while sharing a household and farm-to-table meals for the month of May is proving as nurturing to these four artists as their mentoring sessions and the peace and quiet to focus on their work. “You’re inspired by the people around you. You see so much intersection in their stories,” says Lau. “This marinating is really doing its purpose,” Ba agrees. “We’re eating, drinking and breathing stories.”
Following the residency, the fellows will be invited as guests to the 2021 Woodstock Film Festival, which is scheduled for September 29 through October 3. These new films-in-progress won’t be complete by then, but Blaustein says, “Our goal is to help them continue and finish their projects, and hopefully show them at future Woodstock Film Festivals. We’re connecting them with a lot of film industry people.”
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