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The Hollywood Reporter partners with the Toronto Film Festival to present this Master Class with Dream Hampton.
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00:00:48The Saudi monarchy operates like the mafia,
00:00:51and they don't cross the godfather.
00:00:53Jamal Khashoggi was one of the only dissenting voices.
00:00:56he would be willing to disclose we'll never know the hollywood reporter is pleased to partner with
00:01:05the toronto international film festival to bring you this year's master class program as part of
00:01:10the tiff industry conference so head over to thr.com slash tiff for full coverage of the 2020
00:01:15festival it's very important that we put the stories in the hands of the people who
00:01:24own those stories
00:01:26classic stories good stories original stories are always going to have high value
00:01:36good filmmaking requires vulnerability and vulnerability requires courage and that's just
00:01:48what we do
00:01:54welcome to
00:02:24day five of tiff's industry conference i'm tom powers the festival's documentary programmer
00:02:30i'm coming to you from my home in new jersey the traditional territory of the lenape
00:02:36before we get started i want to thank our lead sponsor bell our major sponsors rbc l'oreal paris
00:02:43and visa and our major industry supporters telefilm canada and ontario creates this panel is presented
00:02:51by showtime documentary films i'm truly pleased to bring you this master class with dream hampton
00:02:58originally this was going to be moderated by dj lenae denise but this morning she was feeling under the
00:03:04weather so i'm going to fill in that role and it's one that i welcome because i've been following
00:03:10uh dream's career for a long time uh there she is uh joining us from martha's vineyard thank you
00:03:17very much for being here hi thank you uh you know i want to say that for me it's extra meaningful to
00:03:24be interviewing you because you're from detroit i grew up in the city's white suburbs went to high school
00:03:30on seven mile at u of d high i always uh take a detroiter's pride in uh seeing people do great
00:03:39things uh in that city so yeah we claim you tom i appreciate it i was told that a detroiter
00:03:47um heads the docs program at tiff years ago and i and i we make the um my daughter and i uh make the
00:03:55drive uh from detroit to toronto for tiff so it's um it's with great sadness that i join you via
00:04:03um satellite but i'm honored to be here and of course since you um talked about the land that you're
00:04:09on on i as you said i'm on martha's vineyard and this is um wampanoag territory um and the wampanoag
00:04:16tribe is the tribe that the myth of thanksgiving um is about yeah so thank you for that uh acknowledgement
00:04:24um so uh dream when we were emailing this morning i gotten uh out of office reply that you are taking
00:04:32time uh to recharge you just had a birthday weekend happy birthday thank you um but can we start by
00:04:39you know just acknowledging the roller coaster ride that you've been on for uh at least the last
00:04:47couple years so you know when you're taking time to recharge right now maybe you can just summarize
00:04:52what you're recharging from yeah well i mean most recently i um was kind of double fisting to
00:05:00productions that i i was running a remote um one hour a crash to show in 11 days for facebook live
00:05:08a reflection on the march on washington and then i um had been working for two or three months with
00:05:15movement for black lives on the 2020 black national convention and um that was inspired of course by
00:05:22the 1972 convention and you when i told you i was working on this when you first reached out to me
00:05:28about tiff and being on this this come in this conversation i um you sent me nation time a link
00:05:34to nation time the incredible film um made about the 1972 convention that inspired the black national
00:05:41convention that we just produced um i want to put in a plug so that film nation time that was made by
00:05:47william greaves uh the great black american filmmaker trained in canada um at the nfb uh it it it's been
00:05:56lost for um decades or out of circulation anyways but it is going to be uh re-released it's been restored
00:06:04and it's going to be re-released in october um from priceless yeah it's where shirley chisholm announced
00:06:12her candidacy and in 1972 black folks weren't excited about the um candidate and so they um got
00:06:22together to um create a true um obviously the black radical left tradition was being created in the
00:06:29moment and they um really got together to push from the left on the democratic party so that was
00:06:35amazing and so in that spirit movement for black lives did something but when you talk about the
00:06:39two-year you're right i mean um in 2018 i basically produced three films um one of which is up for
00:06:48primetime emmy i don't it's hard to know when the emmys are anymore because they'll be virtual um but
00:06:56um it's a hard truth ain't it which was an hbo um feature doc um the first time ever that i think
00:07:03that 11 guys from inside um a state prison in anywhere in america but in indiana in particular
00:07:10were um nominated for a primetime emmy so that happened i was really proud to produce that film
00:07:16um and what else uh finding justice a six-part docuseries that i did for vet
00:07:23which talked about police brutality we looked at six different problems or injustices that black
00:07:30people are facing and i could have done police brutality anywhere but i did it in minneapolis
00:07:36um which i'm not taking credit for there were these amazing activists who were pushing back and a really
00:07:42incredible dynamic with the police union um all of which became national news after the killing of
00:07:48george floyd of course but that in 2018 and for 2019 um i did that docuseries i also did in that
00:07:55docuseries then i was in atlanta the night that stacy abrams had um the governor the uh the gubernatorial
00:08:03race stolen from her by brian camp um and that of course has cost lives in georgia having this
00:08:09disastrous um fake governor in place um but voter suppression was another issue i was looking at
00:08:16finding justice and then in january of that year of course um surviving r kelly was released so it's
00:08:23been non-stop work for two years i don't think that i took a i tried to take three weeks this is
00:08:28my third week of so-called vacation um and i don't think i've done that in four or five years
00:08:35so um yeah restoration is important it's well uh earned uh look at any one of those projects would be
00:08:44uh massive finding justice surviving r kelly putting on uh the black national convention uh let me ask
00:08:52about the black national convention since it uh just took place on on august 28th and i'm really
00:08:58interested in this moment when we're trying to create media when uh most of us are stuck at home and
00:09:07trying to make connections in in another year the black national convention would have been an in-person
00:09:13event that brought people together you and the organizers of the event were tasked with
00:09:19how to make meaning how to create a sense of community online uh of course at a film festival
00:09:27that's something we think a lot about what did you learn from that experience and i've been looking at
00:09:32film festivals my friend is at the justine hebron is at the san francisco film festival so
00:09:37um i took her out to dinner wondering what that was going to be like and how people were
00:09:42approaching it i think she was the first among these festivals that i knew of that were going
00:09:46online so the black national convention was supposed to be in in person in detroit it was meant to be a
00:09:52convention and they had to move it online and i'm not um a runway kind of tech operator you know so
00:10:02that they wouldn't have needed to engage me if they simply wanted to do panels and put them
00:10:08online um i having attended the amc the allied media conference which of course you know tom in
00:10:16detroit this one of the most innovative conventions in my mind in the country um that happens in detroit
00:10:23it began in ohio a little punk rock kind of um gathering and and got some infrastructure in detroit
00:10:30and and those whatever i don't want to get into the amc but it's an amazing inspiring event
00:10:35that um as i took thought about the bnc i thought about the opportunity to make this something really
00:10:41terrific online and so what i pitched them you know was this idea of these kind of mini docs these
00:10:48bite-sized micro docs that were no longer than three minutes and we produced 28 of them and i even if
00:10:54covid hadn't required that we do that remotely i would have wanted it to be led by local filmmakers so
00:11:02um louisville of course um outside of minneapolis when it is one of the real sites of um of this
00:11:09movement moment and we were able to connect with the organizers in um louisville and ask them like
00:11:16who should be on camera who should be behind camera who do you want to shoot this who's been shooting
00:11:21this is uh louisville significant because it's where brianna taylor was uh by police in her sleep
00:11:27yeah and i thought that i knew this story because i knew as much as you just said that brianna was a
00:11:32so-called essential worker who was absolutely dispensable when it came you know when once the
00:11:39police killed her um there still have been no arrests made and i thought that story i'm familiar
00:11:44with we just had it happen with osmond arbery um there was an enormous push of course to get george floyd
00:11:50his killers arrested but um i so i thought i knew that story but then you talk to the actual local
00:11:57organizers and they're like actually we learned in our work that the mayor of louisville who's been on
00:12:06a huge gentrification push owned the building you know was an investor and this is what's alleged
00:12:13an investor in this building that brianna was killed in so these sweeps that they were doing these
00:12:19so-called you know 5 a.m no knock drug suites that they were doing they were in the wrong apartment
00:12:23brianna had nothing to do with drugs she was an emt worker and her boyfriend also worked really hard
00:12:29and not that having a job can you know protect you from state violence but you know so there was this
00:12:34other story to be told that had we parachuted in had we arrived with our film crew and our agenda
00:12:41which i learned long ago is not the way to approach i mean one of the back to the amc one of the
00:12:46tenants of the amc is that whenever there's a problem there are people on the ground already
00:12:50working on the problem so you might visit india and be like oh my god the girls have no maxi pads
00:12:58turns out you don't have to go home and try to solve that problem i'm sure that there are local
00:13:04women in india in this village that you were so smitten by that are already leading this work
00:13:10and so it's about identifying those people investing in them you know we had money for
00:13:15the conference that was now being turned to this film budget um which as a filmmaker i mean this was
00:13:22not a ton of money to do 28 mini docs but we were able to pay people in a fair and equitable equitable
00:13:30way um when it came time for releases i made sure that we didn't have these like proprietary
00:13:37you know uh kind of ownership releases we wanted you know the independent filmmakers in these
00:13:43different places who were sending us these beautiful dispatches we wanted them to be able to use these
00:13:48um mini docs in any way that would lift up their work moving forward so it was it was a real
00:13:55collaborative i mean some of the things about covet have been amazing in turn i mean not obviously the
00:14:02disease or the pandemic but this ability to innovate and to have to um rethink what you were doing and
00:14:10how you were doing it and for people who want to check out some of the work you did at the black
00:14:15national convention is that still up and can people still see that you know we had to do we made a
00:14:20commitment to the disability justice um team on on movement for black lives to do something i'd never
00:14:27done before it nearly killed me which was open captions yeah and when i got the open captions back
00:14:34from of course we used a service um it was misgendering people it was a weird intersection like you're
00:14:41trying to do this one thing and i guess i should describe myself i learned that that i'm a um a black
00:14:47woman a light-skinned black woman with a top bun on my hair i'm wearing a blue dress printed dress with
00:14:53clear glasses and a red lip and i learned to do that um as you're giving a presentation
00:14:59at the black national convention because we had this mandate from the disability justice team
00:15:04to be make it as accessible as possible but that meant that there were so many errors and some things
00:15:11that you can't you'd have to teach the machine to do we just as um i'm not a journalist anymore i don't
00:15:16idea as one but journalists just got the new york times to change their style guide so that black is
00:15:21capitalized right so we had to go through each one of these captions and hand correct all and it was
00:15:28weird because they capitalized white every time and black wasn't so we had to go through and decapitalize
00:15:36white and capitalize black there were times when people were talking and it would try to gender
00:15:41them man speaking woman speaking that didn't always match how the person itself i deed um so we just
00:15:48hand corrected that's a long way of saying that it'll be on black november.org but we took another
00:15:5380 hours after we wrapped to hand correct these open captions so it's i have an editor's um ep and
00:16:01director's cut on my vimeo which is public um dream hampton and um it'll be on black november.org
00:16:07okay so people want to check that out um i also want to uh let people who are watching know that if
00:16:13you want to uh participate and ask a question there is an opportunity in the lower left corner there to
00:16:19write in a question i'll probably save it until the last 10 minutes or so to uh to dive into some of
00:16:25those questions um uh i mean dream we were talking about uh detroit and i want to ask about
00:16:34what uh what kind of perspective you have coming from detroit um because you're unusual as a media
00:16:43maker um in that city or really as a media maker outside of new york or los angeles uh at least
00:16:52a media maker whose uh whose work is being elevated to to prominence the way uh some of your projects have
00:17:00um can can you talk about uh you know what what perspective you have well i mean a couple of
00:17:10things i don't know that all of my work has been elevated to prominence i have things even in 2019
00:17:15for instance um probably a lot of people watching heard of surviving r kelly which came out in january
00:17:202019 didn't hear about finding justice which came out in march didn't hear about this uh project that
00:17:26i'm so proud of that we shot um in indian state prison it's a hard truth ain't it which came out
00:17:30on hbo in february of 2019 so there are three projects that i did you know again 2018 working
00:17:36too much like an octopus and then 2019 comes out and only one of them is so-called elevated um only
00:17:43one of them has eyeballs on them i don't i doubt that finding justice had a quarter million eyeballs on
00:17:48it um after george floyd was killed he ran it again um and i'm sure that the hbo doc um also
00:17:58wasn't similarly elevated in fact the opposite might have happened with that so but i'm still proud of
00:18:03it treasure um which was the documentary i did based in detroit i don't know if 15 000 people saw
00:18:11that i'd be surprised you know it's not like social justice docs have a ton of eyes on them right
00:18:17so surviving r curly was this mix of like celebrity and scandal and an old story um that for some
00:18:25reason you know not i hope that was because we did a good job at it but that got so-called elevated
00:18:32the truth about me having um i guess access is a sad truth and it's an old truth um and it's that i
00:18:43left detroit you know and i spent as many years as i lived um in detroit when i left detroit at 18
00:18:50in new york so i was in new york for 20 years i went to nyu film school and that meant that so that's
00:18:57a very traditional story you know um and and i went to the high school that every detroiter you meet
00:19:02outside of detroit went to which is past tech and i was a performing arts student there like david allen
00:19:09greer like lily tomlin um like friggin ron carter you know um betty carter so i went to this amazing
00:19:18diana ross went to my high school um and and yeah that was a story about detroit up until i i would say
00:19:25the past decade which was that you had to leave detroit to make work um that was seen or respected
00:19:32in fact i would come home and no one knew in detroit knew or cared what i was doing in new york
00:19:38like they were like i think she writes i don't know i've never heard the village voice if i had
00:19:43something in essence or something then it would be like oh dreams out there doing something
00:19:47um but yeah so so that was that story and then i spent you know um i bought in detroit um in in 07
00:20:0008 and well i came home in 07 08 and then bought in detroit but then i also went and established
00:20:06like i went out and lived in la which was my plan to like live my 40s in la so i mean i'm someone
00:20:13who lenae denise who you mentioned was going to moderate this has this term that i love which
00:20:19is international local and that just means that i'm adaptable that i'm a traveler that i'm blessed to
00:20:26like find community where i go and build with that community um it wasn't until i made treasure um
00:20:33a feature doc um that premiered at los angeles film festival that i felt i was even making something
00:20:39about detroit um so i've always repped detroit i never let people mistake me for a new yorker
00:20:47i'm really proud of my city and and often people in detroit um go hard on repping the d because it's
00:20:57so maligned so we had those great shirts that everyone kind of bit off of even toronto i know
00:21:03a bunch of toronto people are watching and they had their turn don't get me started on
00:21:08the everybody versus toronto what the heck what is it toronto nobody is no one just is toronto no one
00:21:15there's no one against you toronto so the reason that we had um this detroit versus everybody is
00:21:23because we were looked at you know as what trump would call an s-hole country and i do look at
00:21:28detroit as a country um we are um disconnected from michigan in almost every way you know i am in
00:21:36martha's vineyard because i never felt growing up that it was safe to vacation in my gorgeous state
00:21:42you know there are whole sections of the mitten that are like um for lack of a better word sunset
00:21:50towns holland michigan where the devosses um built their their parents built their scammy little empire
00:21:57um they freaking have a clan march you know twice a year never felt that safe to me i've literally gone
00:22:05to my friend's cabin in the woods and they were like gunshots all night long um so here i am in
00:22:10martha's vineyard and i would be in the south of france if we didn't have covid so place is
00:22:18important to me there are people like gracie boggs who and invincible and people who work in detroit
00:22:24um to wanna petty um my friend eric howard who's a photographer and a budding incredible filmmaker i'm
00:22:31actually collaborating with him on an experimental doc that i'm doing that's deeply personal
00:22:35you know and those people never to wanna petty calls herself a lifelong detroiter because she
00:22:41didn't do what i did she didn't leave you know those people thugged it out during detroit so-called
00:22:46worst years and they innovated um in a post-capitalist kind of landscape um and everything that we're
00:22:53seeing now it happened to detroit first um and so while i i represent detroit and i i deal with detroit
00:23:00you're right no my work if there has been success connected to my work or visibility connected to my
00:23:06work sadly it's because i was working out of the two traditional and conventional media centers
00:23:11yeah yeah you uh i have a question from melanie addington asking asking about uh regionalism and
00:23:20i mean regionalism is a funny word because we never mean regionalism when we're talking about new
00:23:26york or los angeles when we say regionalism we mean someone besides new york and los angeles in in this
00:23:31country um but uh you are an advisor to a group called the detroit narrative agency um that is uh you know
00:23:43partly motivated by this fact that people used to come into detroit and tell a story from uh new york and
00:23:51uh and and and you know get a lot of things wrong and uh one of the goals of the detroit narrative
00:23:58agency is to tell homegrown uh stories um uh you know i melanie is is asking if you can uh reflect on
00:24:07the rise of regional storytelling yeah i mean well we talked a lot right in the 90s about the democratization
00:24:15of like film because we had these uh you know before cell phones of course but we had these cameras
00:24:22that weren't big rigs that didn't when i started shooting at nyu my goodness i mean we were on three
00:24:27quarter tapes and we had these 14 pound cameras on our shoulders um when we didn't have a tripod or
00:24:35you know so like that that didn't happen though it's not like um the moment you turn on a camera
00:24:43um you're still spending thousands of dollars somewhere you know on either end um so i mean
00:24:50it didn't happen in this wide way i think that people thought that they would be soderberg like
00:24:54a lot of people wrongly thought like there's a whole generation of people that if you're not
00:24:58shooting they don't consider you a director and i'm like i don't you're a shooter dude like i hear
00:25:05you gearhead um and thinking that you're a director because you shoot but we can't all be
00:25:10soderberg right long way of saying like the promise of tech being this kind of liberatory and
00:25:17democratizing um kind of force you know wasn't really fulfilled in a in a real way in my opinion
00:25:24but then social media i think my friend aj says this um arthur jossa he talks about like
00:25:31film being so expensive well he used to talk about this i haven't talked to aj in years but
00:25:36about film being so expensive that we don't have a chance to play in it and and we meaning black
00:25:43people and people of color but this is really true for anyone who doesn't have a huge backing
00:25:47you don't have that chance to play and fail you know um and and i think that so much of again these
00:25:56particularly these short pieces have allowed people to do that when i made my first short out of film
00:26:03school um there was no where for it to be doug lyman bought it you know um the director doug
00:26:10lyman purchased it who knows where it went maybe on netflix somewhere but now you feel like there
00:26:16are all these platforms to get it seen to have feedback to have a loop even if they're regional
00:26:21platforms back to the question um and so that is encouraging but dna detroit narrative agency which
00:26:29went to the foundations and got funding really the people who conceived of that project and it's a
00:26:36brilliant one they not only wanted to like have the ability to take back our narrative but they also
00:26:43wanted to seed a community of filmmakers who were learning skills um who were learning what it is to
00:26:50gap who was you know who were learning what it is to edit um to shoot to direct and produce
00:26:56um things skills that you ordinarily had to go to either coast to learn in the past detroit is
00:27:02unique in that there's always been a commercial industry i know that you know that tom they're like
00:27:07beautiful car commercials that come out of detroit right with some really good storytelling but none of
00:27:13those were being given to like actual detroiters that was all happening in the suburbs
00:27:17and so yeah we definitely became for a couple of years a place to look at the comeback city and
00:27:23people would parachute in and try to tell these stories and dna exists um so that people in the
00:27:29city can tell their stories and when i first saw you know them present i think it was either at sundance
00:27:36or black star um a group of the films i had been looking at them as they prepared to put them out i
00:27:43couldn't believe how much i was learning about my own city um salvadoran refugees who had come in the 80s
00:27:50um like just all these amazing stories experimental docs um about daydreaming on detroit buses
00:27:57um so it was just you know it's just inspiring always um i want to ask about your career path
00:28:06because you went to nyu film school you've described to me that you were really set out to make scripted
00:28:12films and uh you made a short i am ali that went to sundance and uh and was named vanity fair's best
00:28:20short of the year uh that's a scripted film yeah you know today you know people are uh discovering you
00:28:28through surviving r kelly um but can you talk about the you know trajectory of your career that started
00:28:37out trying to make scripted films and you know like anyone's career took a uh a weaving direction
00:28:43yeah um michelle obama who's here on the island with me somewhere has a quote i don't like her when
00:28:51they go low you go high quote i'm like when they go low get in the mud and like smother them to death
00:28:57um but her quote about um motherhood in her book she talks about you can have it all just not at once
00:29:06and so yes i was attending nyu film school um at 24 25 i became pregnant i had a daughter um
00:29:17and that's not a derailment it's kind of like what happens in women's lives when we attempt to do
00:29:26anything not just public but that's a career you know that we call it the motherhood cliff at an
00:29:32organization i work with mom's rising um just literally go off of a cliff sometimes financially
00:29:37but definitely career wise um so i mean and i wanted to be a particular kind of present mom
00:29:44maybe i would rethink that now i'm thinking that my whole generation overdid it with the helicopter
00:29:49thing because we're gen xers and we were raised in the 70s by parents who didn't know what a seatbelt
00:29:55was let alone a car seat and maybe we're drinking and driving i have no idea what my parents had in that
00:30:00red cup and it was like we did the opposite we were like i'm driving you to rites of passage and
00:30:07figure skating in harlem so um i mean i had this other life i mean people think that what i did was
00:30:15i was a journalist who became a filmmaker so yes i arrived in new york um i took a dot class
00:30:21and stephanie black the brilliant director of life and dead and um other films came and visited my class
00:30:30and i was inspired at the time i was living around the corner from biggie and i had worked at this
00:30:37magazine called the source for a very short time 18 months when i was 19 and i thought that i would do
00:30:43this kind of documentary about that thing um and it ended up just shooting a bunch of footage of biggie
00:30:50before his album came out that ended up in other places and won an emmy but they think of me as like
00:30:57a journalist turned filmmaker um and i thought of myself always as a filmmaker since i was 12 i used
00:31:04to go to the detroit institute of arts um i grew up in an alcoholic household and i didn't want to go
00:31:10home and so i would stay at the dia until it closed and we had a wonderful film theater there the dft
00:31:17and still do still do still do and i would literally like watch bicycle thief it was i was so pretentious i
00:31:25was me and my friend sean sweeney who ended up doing commercial acting in la for years we would have our
00:31:31like jewels and jim versus 400 bulls arguments and like i remember the season the first season i started
00:31:40going to the dft they had a francois truffaut retrospective i'm sure i was there yeah and it
00:31:46was every sunday for 10 weeks they would show that very meaningful experience of my film going and i
00:31:53mean let's just take a moment the at the theater at the troy uh the troy institute of arts it's like
00:32:00a 1200 seat theater it's a magical place to watch films i feel sorry for people who don't get a film
00:32:07education in that theater i mean like grace lee boggs says you know i feel sorry for you if you
00:32:12don't live in detroit but yeah when treasure showed there i was like over the moon i was like oh my god
00:32:19treasure showing at the dft but yeah so i would watch films there and i knew that i wanted to be a
00:32:24filmmaker i'm sure that my incoming freshman application to cinema studies at nyu because i
00:32:29didn't have the resources to make that film to submit so i didn't submit to the ugf tv the film and
00:32:34television program i submitted to cinema studies and then when i got in i turned it into a double
00:32:40major but i'm sure it was super pretentious i'm sure i was talking about maya darren and michael snow
00:32:45and all of this stuff that you know charles brunette like all of this stuff that fed me as a kid in
00:32:53detroit in the 80s and i arrived in new york in 1990 at a time when i understand very on a visceral
00:33:02level what state violence is what it feels like and looks like and so the nypd were behaving like
00:33:10the gangs that they claimed to be wanting to stop they were jumping out of honda friggin civics
00:33:15and accords and playing clothes big burly white guys from long island and throwing 12 or 14 year
00:33:22old boys up against the wall and just searching them and seizing stuff from them from their backpacks
00:33:28at like you know nine ten o'clock at night and so my friends and i started inspired by the panthers
00:33:34a cop watch program and and we had mentors around us who kind of took us in and we started the
00:33:41um they were older than us they were from another generation who had been criminalized for their um
00:33:46for their politics um they were definitely part of black radical left tradition people like
00:33:51and asada shakur and and we started the new york chapter of the malcolm s grassroots movement so
00:34:00that activist part of my life which had begun when i was a kid in detroit like learning about south africa
00:34:06from don cornelius and stevie wonder or something i'm sure um but you know i understood something about
00:34:14an economic boycott very young you know um we had that fluffy we are the world thing that celebrity led
00:34:20moment in the 80s but we also had real strategy being laid out for us by our brothers and sisters
00:34:26in south africa and quite frankly by the women of that movement the wives of a lot of these political
00:34:31prisoners and so when i got to new york i um i started organizing with my best friend monifa bandele not
00:34:38because we wanted to but because we felt as you know and we were 19 and 20 and we just couldn't believe
00:34:45you know what the city was and and who was running it particularly when giuliani became mayor um and so
00:34:53that part of me that impulse um is strong and um i don't want to call it like motherhood it's not a
00:35:01derailment it's my life it's who i am also and it's how i ends up making docs or doing any work in the
00:35:07unscripted space is because yes when treasure was killed this trans girl in detroit like that story
00:35:13moved me and i knew that it shouldn't have happened and and there was a deeper story to tell um i did
00:35:20black august a film about the work that we were doing to raise money and awareness about political
00:35:24prisoners in the u.s um yeah i don't know if that was us anymore well we're talking about career path
00:35:33and yeah and i think it's important to kind of center how activism uh has been a meaningful part of uh
00:35:40of your career um you know before the uh broadcast started um we were talking about the ways you think
00:35:49about uh getting points across uh in the media and making a comparison to the way uh right-wing media
00:35:58um has mastered the technique of short dosages of you know less than one minute long videos
00:36:06that uh get a point across and sounds like you've been thinking a lot about that um can you expand on
00:36:14that yeah for sure we were talking about um basically an infrastructure that was built up and i i located
00:36:21i've not done the work so this isn't me being some journalist this is absolutely my intuition and my
00:36:27anecdotal evidence and me watching pretty closely but i you know um remember from the 80s these
00:36:33evangelical films they were always about being left behind after the rapture right but they had
00:36:38all this production value quality i mean they built out the apocalypse right so they were like meant to
00:36:45scare you into christianity and they were these feature films and um from that there is this industry
00:36:52that's been built out you see it really clearly on platforms like breitbart but this way first of all
00:36:58that industry was there to catch a film like last temptation of christ when it got banned from theaters
00:37:03rightly for being anti-semitic and all the things that mel gibson is um and and so then you just um
00:37:11you've seen it kind of become adapt to the times and so you see the right wing having these short stories
00:37:19these short videos they got shorter and shorter and to the point they became breitbart videos and
00:37:24some of them are like news stories that get severely edited i remember um i can't remember her name but
00:37:29she was an agricultural she was a uh someone in the cabinet of obama who they like edited a video and
00:37:36basically got her fired and so the original video kind of came out and then they obama owed her this
00:37:42huge apology i don't think she took her job back but that kind of like activism that they were doing
00:37:47manipulating you know just basically creating fake news um has been happening worldwide for more than a
00:37:55decade i mean we have 40 years of really strong right-wing storytelling that tells us that um
00:38:02for instance the welfare queen you know um a welfare queen uh is the late mike illage in detroit who sat
00:38:11on speculated on properties in these stadiums in detroit and then got like 400 million dollars written
00:38:17off to build these stadiums in detroit that's a welfare queen but reagan gave us you know this black
00:38:24woman in chicago who was running some scams and she stayed with us she is still a talking point 40
00:38:30years later same with law and order um there was a video a horrific video recently about some immigrants
00:38:36on a sex crime i think it was sweden those videos on these platforms literally inform like legislation
00:38:44immigration and uh legislation and policy that happens in a country like sweden from a viral video and
00:38:52with this president we've seen some of that bubble to the top he'll tweet some insane video that like
00:38:58stephen miller put in front of him about white south african farmers being killed right and and people
00:39:03will have to flag him like hey that comes straight out of like like the south african nazi party or
00:39:10whatever but it's because they're linked in talking points they're linked in narrative um and so they're
00:39:16sharing in really effective and bite-sized ways this media and we just are so behind the eight ball on
00:39:23that there has not been similar storytelling even when we rolled out something as amazing and that's
00:39:29i'm saying we but it was really the people who really like said defund the police and we didn't
00:39:36quickly have like not just talking points but videos because people tune out you know you have to
00:39:42like show someone a quick video like we how we learned schoolhouse rock if you're from the 70s
00:39:47um about what a legislative bill was we need a quick video that explains what defund the police is
00:39:53um so though yeah that's work that i also do sometimes i mean can you you know i wonder if you can
00:40:01reflect on you know the way you describe it on the right-wing side there's a lot of reductionism and
00:40:07misinformation you know totally false information uh being spread um when you're working on it for
00:40:16your own causes um you know i wonder if you can reflect on like you know what happens in the
00:40:22reductionism of a complicated story to 45 seconds well yeah i mean the hope is always that you'll go
00:40:30deeper and what we know we talked a bit about a podcast on the new york times called you know rabbit hole
00:40:36um that focuses specifically on youtube we know that what happens with these algorithms is one
00:40:42thing leads you into another this is literally how we have q anon and how we have q anon candidates
00:40:47winning um in states in this very moment right um but there's this youtube scholarship that's happening
00:40:53in the absence of we wondered what would happen in the vacuum of newspapers kind of being defunded of
00:41:00of um public radio being under attack and what has happened in that vacuum is that there has the
00:41:07right wing has filled it completely with again this like programming that is primarily happening via video
00:41:15so um but yeah of course it gets reduced and of course if i'm making a we did a three-minute piece
00:41:20for instance with ndn a collective basically a sulakota collective out of um south and north dakota
00:41:28and you know they they have a hashtag called land back and there's a huge story to tell about
00:41:35rushmore six grandfathers is what they call it and it can't be told in a three-minute video even
00:41:42but when you see this like really well-produced piece of media you know out of out of that collective
00:41:49then i'm hoping that you'll be like encouraged to check out who ndn is um it's spelled ndn for indian
00:41:57um and that you will see the media that's being produced especially since standing rock they were
00:42:03like there was a whole media tent there um so i think that when people see like some soundbite by david
00:42:11duke what they end up doing is like a deeper dive or when when they see a piece on white genocide you
00:42:17know when they start to believe that white genocide is real and it has all these stats about falling
00:42:22birth rates in europe and latino birth rates in america um what they do is they go deeper into these
00:42:28rabbit holes um that you know basically radicalize them um for the right and yeah when we're trying to
00:42:36tell a story about the war on drugs um which we can start with nixon or you could start back when
00:42:43we started calling it marijuana because it was a mexican word um but with jay-z for the new york
00:42:49times with molly crabapple we created a three-minute video that was meant to unpack you know 50 years of
00:42:56policy that had put black people in prison for something that now is a multi-billion dollar above
00:43:02ground industry and so we didn't want to just talk about the decriminalization of marijuana we wanted
00:43:07to add something new to that conversation and for jay-z it made sense for it to be the economic aspect
00:43:13of like who's being left behind in that piece because he is an avowed black capitalist you know
00:43:19so it made sense for that to be the conversation um and you hope that someone goes deeper into what
00:43:26those policies were um i happen to ask you a lot about surviving r kelly because you've given so
00:43:33many interviews uh in the last uh couple years uh about that project but let me dwell on it for uh a
00:43:42minute um uh i mean let's just start by how you got brought into that project yeah yeah um i was asked
00:43:51pretty simple i hadn't heard from my agency in forever and um there was a guy jesse um daniels at
00:44:00creative which is um a label at beuna murray and he had the novel ideas they were looking at showrunners
00:44:07um that i might be a good one um but i'm really grateful for him for like thinking that way and i took
00:44:14the call and then beuna murray for people who don't know what that name is a major production
00:44:21company that produces a lot a lot of reality tv shows and series they started they invented the
00:44:29reality tv series for all frederick weissman aside and they started um reality yeah they like so they
00:44:39started with the real world and they now do kardashians and so i was like i didn't understand
00:44:45why i was getting a call about a lifetime beuna murray project about r kelly because lifetime had just
00:44:51fumbled the time the aliyah i was a scripted doc it was awful and you know murray does reality tv so
00:44:58i didn't know exactly why they were calling me um and but i took the call and they said they want to
00:45:05do a serious documentary and i felt like i was the right person i felt like he was my generation's
00:45:11problem to solve something i've said in other interviews but i truly believe that i felt like
00:45:16i myself had fumbled with him i'd done a piece on him for the cover of vibe magazine um it was the
00:45:23october 2000 cover of vibe magazine maybe it's 2001 whatever it was by december if it was in october
00:45:31that means i submitted it in august this is back when there were magazines it would have hit the stand
00:45:36in september and um by december of that year december 21st jim derogadis working out of chicago
00:45:43um wrote a story about lawsuits that he was quietly settling with other teenagers so then we had
00:45:50evidence that it wasn't just some weird may december jerry lee lewis elvis and priscilla story um with
00:45:59aliyah that this was that he was a predator um i don't know why i thought that was acceptable back
00:46:04then um may december um maybe because i have it in my own family maybe because i have i don't know
00:46:10grandparents that are 20 years age difference or whatever but i i wasn't alarmed as i probably
00:46:16should have been um as a young person consuming and writing about media i did ask him about aliyah and
00:46:23he had a really bad response to it like a silence like a shutdown like you i thought i told you not
00:46:28i'm not sure his publicist had told me not to ask and i was like whatever publicist don't tell me what
00:46:32to do um and um and and so anyway i wrote a piece about his process um about his habits his studio
00:46:41habits and how he produces quite frankly um and his daily habits because i ended up spending seven
00:46:47days in chicago and um and when i learned that i had missed the entire freaking story it felt um first
00:46:57of all i i joined people we didn't have hashtags back then but we quietly you know we stopped
00:47:02listening our callie stopped playing him um at the time that his rape tape came out the tape of him
00:47:08raping would appear to be a 12 year old but during the court we learned was a 14 year old um you know
00:47:15he also put out his best album which was the chocolate factory which had like beautiful songs like
00:47:22step in the name of love on them and it was hard to be a black person at a wedding who wasn't going
00:47:27to get up and and do the midwestern chicago step you know to r kelly but a lot of mostly women had
00:47:36made that decision so here was after years of activism at this point mute r kelly had already
00:47:41been begun jim dirich always never stopped reporting on it and so it was an opportunity for me to get in
00:47:48there and try to make a real documentary i'd never worked with the network television i didn't know
00:47:52how many compromises that was going to involve i quickly learned um but it had the effect it had
00:47:59more than the effect that i could have imagined um you know the power of that uh show uh speaks for
00:48:07itself the degree to which it took a story that was hiding in plain sight with no serious consequences
00:48:14and turned it into uh serious consequences um you know i'm interested in the framework with which you
00:48:22had to uh create that uh that work that you know this framework of cable tv with its commercial uh
00:48:32inserts and uh and you know the beats of storytelling that um that are expected uh something uh like that to
00:48:41deliver you know at the time it was striking to me that the show has several executive producers uh
00:48:50including yourself but has no named director um you know compared to a series like oj made in america
00:48:58where you know that ezra edelman is the director you know uh he's working with great collaborators but
00:49:05at the end of the day there's a there's an authorship there that in this kind of television doesn't exist
00:49:13and that was did he do that with a&e with espn espn espn oh yeah and espn has actually been more
00:49:23encouraging of i don't want to use something as pretentious as auteurs but of authorship
00:49:28even when they started the 30 for 30 series that was the ideas we're gonna bring in directors and
00:49:35yeah and let them interpret sports through their own lens yep and so they had that so i mean this
00:49:42is a network by network question right on one hand and i learned this when i was writing for award shows
00:49:47like some some of those i'd have to be credited as a producer because they weren't they were skirting
00:49:52the wga of which i'm a member i shouldn't have probably been working on them um the same thing
00:49:58with this i'm now a member of the pga because of this project but this was not a producer guild
00:50:03project it definitely wasn't a dga you know um i don't know what lifetime i'm sure that they're on
00:50:12their scripted stuff that there are directors i don't know about celebrity wife swap i don't know i
00:50:18don't watch lifetime but i don't know if there's an auteur i have no idea about celebrity wife swap
00:50:25um i don't having worked with brie bryant she was so hands-on that i doubt that she was ready to see
00:50:33that kind of i if i had a better if i had ezra's uh you know um agent you know these are all things
00:50:40that i've kind of learned later you know if i had like someone better advocating for me i do have an
00:50:46agent now this guy just happened to pick up the phone and i'm really grateful to him for connecting
00:50:50me to this person but buna murray called so the agency i was with put the person who handles
00:50:56unscripted on the phone and so it was like this kismet and i don't mind being collaborative i mean
00:51:03someone like tamra um simmons absolutely held the survivors like she was the one who made contact
00:51:11and held the survivors and that was necessary work because i had to do something different with the
00:51:17survivors i had to interview them and those interviews at times felt like depositions i had
00:51:24legal literally in the room you know buna murray's legal team had to like vet all of my interview
00:51:29questions they were present in the control room for the interviews um this was a piece that they were
00:51:35almost certain what they would be sued for and so it had to be buttoned up in a way that didn't allow
00:51:40for me to get to know these people and to connect with them i tried my best as a woman as a black
00:51:46woman as a survivor of assault um but i was there in a particular in a particular function so thank god
00:51:55tamra simmons was there she was an ep i mean she was there in the beginning she pitched this show to
00:51:59her lifetime um brie bryant and their executives at network who have a particular um approach and a
00:52:05style and she had a particular style i think that on the buna murray side um the executives didn't
00:52:13really know what they were getting into and quickly learned you know i think that they also thought they
00:52:18were hiring a journalist and i'm i'm certain like i put a hundred bucks on like the fact that none of the
00:52:23people who hired me looked at my films before they hired me um so who knew if they thought i was
00:52:30going to be bringing that to the and some of those battles i lost i would have never filmed it on green
00:52:35screen like i was you know and it's filmed on green screen i fought for scene work though and it made it
00:52:41in there and of course i brought um something that very that was uniquely mine that i own which was
00:52:48a particular kind of political you know lens to this um a racial a class a gendered lens um i don't
00:52:57think that brie bryant would consider herself as someone who like fights for racial justice that
00:53:02doesn't mean that she's not a black woman out here in the world doing her thing in corporate america
00:53:06but that's not how she would self-idea some kind of activist or someone who even um consider some of
00:53:14these things you know and i absolutely didn't do and so i hope in that way we complemented one another
00:53:20um and yeah it was tricky i mean i see any number of films or docs or any kind of project and there
00:53:27are a ton of eps credited there are a ton of um you know people credited but you're right yeah the
00:53:33director thing is something that in another situation with more power um i'm fighting for
00:53:39um but i was showrunner and and i also didn't know about cycling out showrunners which happens
00:53:46often on television not always and not to people who have power but they thought they they have this
00:53:53idea that you just run production and then they get rid of you and as a filmmaker as an independent
00:53:58filmmaker i know that film is made in post um and so i fought to be there in post and they were like
00:54:05yeah i know and then ended up having to bring me back anyway um and all of that is the drama of a
00:54:12production it's not very interesting except to any this is a master class so i'm assuming that
00:54:17filmmakers and media makers are watching it and they'll experience some of their things in their
00:54:22career so i'm being honest about it it's not like i'm not proud of all of the things like you know i also
00:54:29i'm still learning how to run a team you know particularly a team that you inherit which i'll never do
00:54:35again i don't always insist on picking my own people but somewhere like vena murray has a system and
00:54:40they looked at this as true crime so they plug in the people who did i don't know three weddings and
00:54:46a murder or whatever like you know they plug in people from other shows that what they think this is
00:54:52and i never thought of it as that um as a true crime drama at least not only that um you know we did a
00:55:00conversation on saturday with sonia childress and jesse wenty called uh steps to creating a better
00:55:07documentary industry and for anyone listening who's interested in some of these uh questions i'd
00:55:12encourage you to go uh listen to that conversation also yeah i will too we've got just a few minutes
00:55:19left so dream where are you now in your career that you're after your rest time is almost up
00:55:26i have a couple of projects i try not to jinx things i have a couple things that i'm working on
00:55:32um they have studios attached to them and and they're happening i have a dream i'm not asking
00:55:38you to name specific things but i'm wondering you know do you see yourself you know doing more fiction
00:55:43or non-fiction or activism or yeah that's exactly where i am i mean i because again back to that true
00:55:50crime label i've been asked to do other things in that space and some of them i'm just like outright no way
00:55:55and then a couple of the things i've been like actually we can do something really innovative
00:55:59with this so there are two things like that on my plate there's a dream project that i want to make
00:56:03before i die you know an adaptation two adaptations and right now i'm doing an experimental short with
00:56:10eric howard who i mentioned before and invincible who i mentioned another filmmaker desmond love in
00:56:14detroit where i'm thinking about the swelling of the great lakes i'm thinking about floods and memories
00:56:20and basements um so it is not didactic i really needed um a reset after you know for me r kelly was
00:56:29a bit didactic um surviving r kelly and i didn't want anything that kind of shrill um i wanted something
00:56:37that fed my soul and so this project um is one that i've been producing and directing for the past year
00:56:45and it's going to be like 11 minutes i don't know why it's taking me a year to do it but yeah
00:56:49sometimes it works out that way uh i'm uh so appreciative to you for taking this uh time out
00:56:59especially during your recharge period uh to share these stories with us and uh for people listening
00:57:07later on today at uh 3 p.m there's a dialogue coming up with sam pollard who directed mlk fbi
00:57:16uh at this year's festival talking to shala lynch uh the great filmmaker who's made films about
00:57:22shirley chisholm and free angela and all political prisoners that played the gala at tiff uh several
00:57:29years ago uh sam pollard was the editor of uh shala's shirley chisholm uh documentary chisholm 72
00:57:37unbought and unbossed um so that's going to be a great conversation uh at three o'clock and i you
00:57:44know hope you can go into the archives and watch everything that's been happening uh the past uh few
00:57:50days um dream again thank you so much for being here and uh we look forward to having you back at
00:57:57the festival sometime in the future i'd love that i'd be honored thank you for having me tom
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