E45 • The Humanitarian Crisis Through a Filmmaker's Lens • NATHANIEL LEZRA, dir. of ‘Roads of Fire’ - BEST DOC WINNER at the Santa Barbara Int. Film Festival

In this conversation, Nathaniel Lezra discusses his journey as a documentary filmmaker, focusing on his latest project, “Roads of Fire”, which just won Best Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Nathaneil’s past inspirations include Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”.

He reflects on the challenges and triumphs of cinematically capturing the humanitarian crisis and the political climate’s impact on filmmaking. He also shares insights into the smuggling industry and the importance of capturing authentic experiences in documentary storytelling. 

Nathaniel discusses the complex, harrowing realities faced by migrants, the need for empathy when addressing these issues, and how filmmakers can play a crucial role in pushing for change.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Past Present Feature, Hosted by Marcus Mizelle
• 0:20 Nathaniel Lezra, dir. of "Roads of Fire" - BEST DOC WINNER at the Santa Barbara Int. Film Festival

Transcript

Marcus Mizelle (00:20)
In this conversation,

discusses his journey as a documentary filmmaker, focusing on his latest project, Roads of Fire, which just won best documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this year. Nathaniel's past inspirations include Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. He reflects on the challenges and triumphs of cinematically capturing the humanitarian crisis and the political climate's impact on filmmaking.

He also shares insights into the smuggling industry and the importance of capturing authentic experiences in documentary storytelling.

discusses the complex harrowing realities faced by migrants, the need for empathy when addressing these issues, and how filmmakers can play a crucial role in pushing for change.

Marcus Mizelle (01:03)
You know what it first reminded me of, and correct me if this is not the right vein, but Beyond Utopia. Have you seen that? Beyond Utopia. I haven't seen it. I know about it. know It's on Hulu, I believe. But yeah, I watched it like two weeks ago. Oh wait, wait minute. I'm so sorry. Is Beyond Utopia the North Korea project? Yes.

I've seen half of it. I've seen half of it. I loved it. I was not in a good environment to finish it. was on a. Yeah, right. You need a specific environment for that one for sure. Yeah, it rocks though. I loved it. I had to finish it in two settings also for whatever reason. I guess as far as just trying, you know, trying to migrate, trying to get out from like, you know, point A to point B and going through the hell to get there. Yeah, it's really interesting. I watched that and actually saw a lot of similarities. I think that.

The primary thing that that film did that struck me that was so sort of, you know, so moving and that I realize unknowingly because I hadn't seen the film when I when I made Roads of Fire was how they also focus. They saw the value in anchoring the story to the architecture of what a this in my case, a group of NGOs were doing. But with Beyond Utopia focusing on this guy who's essentially a fixer.

who operates sort of like our smuggler, know, basically treating, you know, the people who are fleeing, the people who are in crisis, and then there's what are the infrastructural support systems that they turn to. What I've seen of that is great. Congratulations, dude. You won best documentary at Santa Barbara. What? Thank you. Thank you, man. It felt, I mean, totally surreal. It's funny. I've been talking to producers about this a lot this week, but, you know,

five years ago when I maybe more than five. So in 2016, I directed my first feature. It was a tiny little DIY narrative piece. And it sold on a, you it got exactly the life that it needed. It was, you know, for a tiny sort of art film that had a lot of DNA of stuff that I would later do. People always said about that first film was called It's called In Echo Park. It's about gentrification and gang culture and sort of the intersection of the two. Everybody always asked me about it.

why it wasn't a documentary, which is a great question because I ended up pivoting my entire career into doc. But yeah, with the win, I just had been looking back on the last eight, nine years and just back then, or even as recently as 2020, know, Santa Barbara was a total goal festival. It's always been. a, you know, it's not a market, but it's a prestige festival that's up there with South by and these other festivals. And I would have killed man a few years ago to be at Santa Barbara at all. So.

being there and then winning was just completely surreal. And it struck me also while I was there, just like they had such good curation. Every film that we saw was awesome, intimate, thoughtful. I sat on a panel, the dock panel about the intersection of basically documentary filmmaking and social activism. And every filmmaker I had just killed. their projects were just so, so interesting. was...

Long story short, felt very humbled, I guess, to be there. I mean, look, I had this very similar experience because I was making fiction stuff, DIY for sure, micro budget, not even micro budget. What do we call it? DIY? Just like no budget, literally no budget. Filmmaking, know, films for 2009 until 2018. It was a fucking abusive relationship. It's what it felt like. You know what mean? It's like, why am I still with her? Why am I still, you know what mean? And I switched to docs 2019.

consciously switched to docs, but like I did my first doc, 2019, 2018, something like that. It's been so wonderful ever since. And Santa Barbara also put on my last feature doc and we got nominated for best documentary. We didn't win, but it was a win to get into the festival. And then we ended up winning the LA area Emmy. So it was just this validation, this like, yes moment that also when you said I would have killed to have into Santa Barbara, you know, previously I felt the same exact way.

You know, and just being able to find a home, a wonderful, warm home, you know, through them was everything. And it changed my whole faith and view and kind of like my own career. You know what I mean? I was a little, a little bit pissy, a little bit, you know, and then once I'm like, oh, wait a minute, festivals do care. You just get in where you fit in, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's tough, man. I mean, especially right now in the doc space, it's, so easy to get so cynical.

and jaded and all this stuff. And so I think it was really important for us to get over there and to just immerse ourselves back in the community. We, you know, I sold a project to Paramount that we did. We shot it in 2022, just as Roads of Fire was starting. The idea was percolating to Roads of Fire. The project right before that was, it's called Don't Leave Me Behind, the stories of young Ukrainian survival. It's about, it was for Paramount and for MTV, and it was about the

basically the mental health impact on teenage Ukrainian refugees fleeing combat after Russia's invasion. And at that time, the sale was sort of an anomaly. I think that it was that epicenter of the collision point of, okay, the political discourse in the country was pretty unified, actually. There was a general sense of, right, there are clear boundaries about what the political rhetoric is. There's an aggressive,

are, you know, enemy, basically rogue state, invading and completely diplomatically innocent state who are on the verge of joining the EU and all this stuff. And so a lot of different things were aligned in terms of the discourse, which allowed, I think, a lot of the fear that's attached to political projects to kind of go away. So Paramount were like, all right, we have a mental health initiative that's happening inside of our network. We this is not a scary political subject for us.

and it's gonna be youth oriented. they're very down. And so we sold it off of that first pitch and then we went out and made it. But with Roads of Fire, what happened, which is really fascinating, we were shooting through the strikes, we were shooting through, you know, we got started as we were editing that Ukraine film. And I think that the combination of the political landscape being so completely polarized and so like toxic and just destructive.

You know that stuff moving through all just the shit that we've been enduring as as filmmakers in this in this landscape. It was easy to go from that high of that sale and like wow we aired you know linear commercial free on broadcast TV. We it had like something like 200 percent viewership based off of their previous biggest special and then suddenly.

the word on the street was no one is buying anything anywhere. None of the streamers are buying everybody's their slates are curated and programmed through 2027, 2028. At that point it was 2023 and we were starting this film. And so it was just like, yeah, we went from feast to famine really, really quickly. And I remember feeling like, mean, you we got really lucky. We I'd been on to say, again, DIY, taking it back to the roots.

I what tiny resources I did get from that Ukraine film. We my company bought a very just lean doc package, just enough for a single stripped down team to be able to kind of rock and roll. And we we just started making it initially roads of fire out of just proximity. The crisis was happening. Migrants were on the streets in front of us. We were editing and we'd walk outside and there'd be walls of people in midtown who had just been busing here in New York. NYC at this point. Yeah, New York. And so.

I just started making it. mean, it was completely just camera on my shoulder, precision shoot to the full team as needed occasionally. But most of the film was very just scrappy and sort of back to basics. Camera on my shoulder, loving up subjects, sometimes not even loving up subjects and just participants and just rocking with them. I had a solid, high-fidelic little ride on shotgun mic that would I would end up going to the Darien Gap and working with the cartels and just shooting just me.

this mic often, but we got lucky last year at Sundance. We picked up post financing. pitched to somebody who came on board as a partner to get us through post. But yeah, man, it's been this feeling of bizarre whiplash of things are great. Things are terrible. Strike no longer strike glut and then nothing. And in the meantime, we filmmakers are getting so jaded. I talk to people who are like, I'm getting out of the business. I can't pay rent.

There seems to be no desire for creative work right now because people have programmed themselves out through 2028. So it's like, you know, with the Skydance deal at Paramount, Paramount isn't really doing anything. Like entire studios are basically on in this state of paralysis. So it's yeah, I can I can understand why you would have been in that state of like jaded fuck this.

I think producers and filmmakers in general are always trying to fight that instinct. Like AI is happening. So the commercial filmmakers I know are terrified. The DPs I know are terrified. It's a very weird time. Okay. Your film, Roads of Fire. So talk about how did you shoot this? I mean, it was mostly on your shoulder. you basically, you said that you were shooting in proximity to what you have. I mean, I can relate to that because all my docs have been like that.

All these stories are like right in front of us, right? It's like if you're paying attention and you align with what your heart is, what your mind is, they're right there. Don't you feel like? Like all these stories. Like, I my specific question is, when did you realize you had a documentary here? You know, did you, was it right in front of you or what? How did it come, what was the origin moment for that? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So I, answer your first question, the strategy hinged on like, all right, so industry's in kind of a paralysis state.

no one really knows what's happening. didn't feel like I wanted to. I also just coming off that Paramount project, I remember feeling like it was my first real exposure to how slow a megacorporation works. So it's like, I remember in the act of developing the project with them after the sale, we moved in terms of the power structures of a megacorporation like that. moved pretty quickly. So we were in the field not too long after the sale.

But even in terms of that velocity, we still already had to pivot the creative and like rescout participants and sort of rebuild it because of how slow that process was. And that's not necessarily a criticism of them. It just kind of is what it is when you do a bigger project. With Roads of Fire, I didn't want any of that shit. I was like, all right, so if we're going to embrace this as an indie, I want to be able to move as leanly as possible and to go with where the story wants to take me. wanted to really embrace that freedom.

We got basically a Sony kit, a nice cinema package from Sony. we I was we were finishing the edit on the previous film and I just saw these lines of people and I had to kind of confront my own ignorance to it because it was the broad political structure of it. I kind of understood these are people who being bussed here theoretically from Texas, but a couple other places as well. And the rhetoric at the time was, OK.

New York is at capacity. It's a shelter. It's a shelter state, but it's also as a city. are shelters are completely overwhelmed and there's no capacity to house these people. So what do do with this? What became clear really quickly to me in terms of my research was the Adams administration was unable to act in a way that was meaningfully addressing the needs of the city. They were not in a position where they had either the resources or if they did have the resources, they were being misallocated such that

they were just leaving these huge holes in support for people. So this was the mayor, right? Correctly at the time. Mayor Adams. Yeah, that's right. So Mayor Adams. So we were at a capacity. There's all this rhetoric happening. And so I started to notice the NGOs were really stepping up to fill the gaps left in the administration. So Mayor Adams, he was in a position where he had no capacity to meaningfully address things. So the people who were addressing the needs, the humanitarian needs of these migrants, these refugees were these NGOs. So I connected

through online, through, yeah, through researching basically social media. I was just curious, like, what do the frontline workers actually look like? Who are these volunteers who the who were there? And I connected with a woman named Adama Ba. Adama Ba, B-A-H, is this really interesting character. She, her, I mean, her backstory is wild. She, post 9-11, had been targeted by the FBI and ICE as a potential suicide bomber, being, you know, misidentified. She did some jail time, and then she got out as a

as a late and older teenager. Yeah, she wrote a book about her experiences being, you know, black Muslim in New York and herself having a documentation experience. She came as a child from West West Conakry, Africa, and she didn't even know that she was undocumented. She went through own documentation process as a unknowing refugee.

in the wake of all of the stuff with ICE and the FBI. she got her citizenship and all this stuff sorted eventually, but her experiences led her to essentially become a humanitarian fixer in New York. She's an immigrant rights advocate. She's the first person that refugees and that asylum seekers are calling when they get to the country. she's this sort of, yeah, she's a really cool, really interesting sort of fixer in the city. I embedded with her initially.

So I was really curious, know, mental health, physical impact, like what are the things that these volunteers are going through in a city that's collapsing around itself over this issue? I met her, I traveled with her around the city and then through her, I met the other NGOs and then each of them had these, they're all just wild characters, really interesting people, colorful, hilarious, compassionate people and then they connected me and it just inevitably.

I just spoke to just hundreds of asylum seekers, hundreds and hundreds of refugees, migrants, people. And through those conversations, it led me to Maria Pascal, who is one of the primary characters and participants in the film. And that's where it all kind of Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. All right. Let read your synopsis for this film, just so the audience can know. It brings the camera to the beating heart of the South America, USA asylum seeker experience, examining an intimate detail and accelerating humanitarian crisis from three interwoven perspectives.

OK, so yeah, so Maria Pascal was kind of like your entry point, your first character where you're like, holy shit, I've got a story here. You think a character in a story? I how did you know when you had something where you were like, we have a documentary? It was when you had her, would you say the volunteers were the first indication they they had? Initially, I was was was interested in the finance side of it. So the idea of OK, this is a feature happened when I saw how interconnected these people were. So it's like

You have really only about 75 organizations, all of whom are very, very small, supporting 200,000 new arrivals in New York City. So you've got these people, all of whom know each other intimately. It's this web of people kind of catching these these exhausted, dehydrated refugees and supporting them. So it occurred to me that I had stumbled into a world. Usually when I'm when I'm thinking about features and my brain always works in long form, I think about the first thing I think about is

what world am I entering in and where are my points of ignorance? So I got a sense in a really big way that A, I was fairly politically ignorant to the situation. B, I was gonna learn a lot from these folks, but more than anything, I was walking into a world. And my goal was to be a proxy for the viewer. So I was very, very aware that no one really knew, if I didn't know anything about...

the NGO humanitarian support networks that are at play and at the front lines of the Port Authority welcoming people and getting people who haven't had water in 48 hours, food and water and support and the basics, then no one did. No one really knew. So that became the initial idea was I'm going to embed with these folks on the humanitarian support side. And this is going to be a veritable documentary about what that looks like. Getting in with an asylum seeker became a priority. Just the more that I learned and the more that

the need became clear. I think that at that age, it pivoted into being, all right, this is a film that's going to be a two hander and the film is going to be the moment to moment experiences of what it means to be an asylum seeker in New York City and what it means to be a volunteer. So sort of a cause and effecting like on one side. These are the people who are going through the supporting side and these are the people who are receiving that support and are going through the mental trauma of what they've gone through. A solid structure. Yeah. Yeah.

And then it went just it went just haywire and it just expanded. as I as I worked with Maria, who was our she's Ecuadorian, it became clear to me that to really get into the guts of what she was talking about and what she had lived through, I needed to the viewer. I'd be shortchanging the viewer and the story itself if I didn't try to go and walk her path. Wow. And the whole thing opened up and it became all right, I'm going to go to Colombia.

and I'm going to experience what it means, you know, from a geopolitical perspective, what does it mean to like, what does it mean to escape a country that's collapsing? And so I was initially going to go to Ecuador, couldn't do that for a variety of reasons. Mainly the military told me that they couldn't protect me if I went. Oh really? Yeah. And so basically you said, okay, I have a decision to make then you felt, I mean, that's some bad-ass shit though. Let's be honest. Like you were

You then said, I'm going anyways. You packed your gear up. I'm going to go anyways. I couldn't go to Ecuador. They I mean, they were in the midst in the exact window of time that I wanted to shoot the then president. Guillermo Lasso dissolved the Constitution, basically the National Assembly. He the opposition leader was assassinated and they had an economic collapse. So the military literally spoke to me and the embassy said, if you go, there's a good chance you'll be kidnapped at the airport because the value of of a white journalist getting to Ecuador is so high that there's we just cannot protect you. So

It was just sort of like the value of that, like me, even if I was able to, it just seemed so prohibitive that it was like, all right, fuck that. I then I knew I could get to Columbia and I knew that the story went to Columbia anyway, because what she did was she fled Ecuador into southwestern Columbia and did the migrant trail starting in the Darien Gap. So I went to the other primary escape point, which was the Venezuela side of Columbia to the border towns there. And that's where I started. So.

I was like, all right, I'm going to, you know, while embracing the fact that it's going to be dangerous to whatever degree, I'm going to make it as safe as possible. had a local team, I had a fixer and a couple of producers. also crucially, I had a DP, a Venezuelan DP with me who had a lot of experience in the region. He'd done a film himself about the town that we went to, Cucuta, which is a border town in Venezuela, on the border of Colombia and Venezuela. And his name's Braulio. He

is Venezuela and he shot a lot of the Venezuelan street protests. A lot of the media scene that went viral in like 2012 or 2012 and around then that like has resurfaced over the years. He shot that stuff and a lot of Venezuelans on the street kind of know him and know his name and know his media. So he came with me and he got me a lot of access. He was a creative partner. He was everything. And so we we got down there and we communicated with the smugglers. We communicated with the cartel and

We kind of played by their rules, but we yeah, the goal then became to track Maria, a version of Maria's footsteps starting in Colombia up to the Dian up to the jungle. And that then proved to be like the visual anchor point to her storytelling. Right. So it's like we have the NGOs and the humanitarian organizations in New York. have her verite stuff, which is so her moment to moment experiential.

What does it look like to pursue asylum in New York? But then we also have her retroactively telling us or retrospectively telling us her story, the retrospective stuff. Then initially, the idea was like, all right, we're going to basically just get specialty B roll of us moving through her whole story. And that's how that side of it happened. And so when you were filming through the trail, you felt good about it. It wasn't this thing of like, I don't know what we're doing. I don't know. Sure. If we have anything here, you kind of were already visualizing as you were shooting how it was going to go on top of her through line.

Is that right? Yeah, I a plan very concretely in my mind for what we would do with it if if all we got was specialty B roll. What I had walking in that I knew was already really exciting. And it also just like it impacted the whole, you know, the DNA of the film was we through a then just, you know, a humanitarian worker in Caracas, Venezuela, who ended up joining the project as a participant producer. She.

that connected me to a smuggler specifically who had helped get one of her family members out of Venezuela. So I knew and we were close and had we had negotiated thoroughly with this guy, Jonathan, who agreed to be a participant in the film. So he was a smuggler. And so even getting there, I was like, all right, if all we get is B roll, then I know how to use it. We can plug, you know, Maria's story. But we also have this really exciting opportunity to tell this whole other side of the story. Like we have migration. We have asylum. We have

The humanitarians, have Eric Adams, have corruption, but what we don't have is the intersection of all of that with the business of migrant smuggling, which is the first step of this whole tapestry. Yeah, it's one of your first lines in the film, it says it's a $35 billion business. Is that correct? that the number? That was the number in the end.

At the end of it, we reveal the current number, which is $42 billion. But even that is considered low. 35 was the number reported by Reuters in, I wanted to say, want to say like 2019. so adjusting for inflation or a whole new wave, we calculated 42 billion. And then I saw a congressional report that says the 42 billion number is considered low. But there needs to be an assessment of more data collection. Like how do we collect data when we're dealing with 50 countries?

10 different migrant paths, all of which go through multiple countries, all of which are incredibly difficult to track the dead. So it's like, it's this really shadowy industry, but it's a huge industry. So that, yeah, we got all of that, that whole world opened up to us when we went down there. And critically, the, and I mean, the heart of the film in a lot of ways, I mean, it's Maria in a big way, but a lot of the film is anchored by the humanity of the migrants that we worked with in.

Columbia. So we got down there and because Braulio had a sort of name that people could kind of recognize from Instagram or from local reporting, we went onto the smuggling bus with Jonathan. I was going to paint too much of a target. As a white journalist, would have painted too much. I'm half Spanish, so I speak Spanish, but I'm a gringo one way or the other. I would have endangered the bus. So I went a different route to the north of Columbia. But Braulio

got on the bus and he embedded on the on the bus with them and all of the Venezuelans. Well, a good chunk of Venezuelans knew him and got to know him. And so we then suddenly I connected with him a couple of days after he got on and he got off the bus. Everybody was they were beat up. was this, you know, it's a clandestine smuggling bus going through the guerrilla territories of Colombia. They get off the bus and he says, we're beat to shit. But look,

this family of Venezuelans will let us follow them through every step of their journey into the jungle. Wow. And so suddenly we not only have Maria, the humanitarian, you know, the NGOs, the human rights folks, have Maria's story retrospectively about how she got out of Ecuador. We now have the smugglers and we have a real time Verite examination. So your whole documentary elevated, you would say, once you got that, captured the Verite. You're capturing the present day versus kind of like a retelling.

So you were hoping you were hoping for B-roll, but you ended up getting the good stuff, the good, the really good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Half the film. And I mean, truly it's hard to express. Like we there are scenes that I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on when you get to it. But there are sequences that no one in American contemporary media have any of American media contemporary or otherwise has ever seen or saw. It's we see this family bankrupting themselves to afford Jonathan.

his smuggling fee. see them, you know, frantically on the phone calling people across Latin America, trying to sell their houses, trying to sell their cars, trying to sell everything down to the paint on their houses to afford the smuggling fees to get to get to the United States border where they then have to start Maria's journey of asylum. So it opened up, it revealed the whole other side of this crisis, which is that what people go through from the day they leave their doorstep is

financial exploitation on a level that no one understands. As soon as you flee a country that's collapsing, every step of your way, you're getting fucked. The cops that interact with you are charging a bribing fee. The smugglers need to be paid. The buses, the motorcycles, the cottage industries of people selling you fake goods when you get to the jungle that you don't need. There's every step of the way. And then you get to other countries. The Panamanian Army is going to charge you to take you up to the border once you

of the Mexican, there are gangs that are, I mean, every, every step of the way. So once you, once you get to the United States border, I mean, we, the family we were with, they were an upper middle class family from Southern, Venezuela. They had bankrupted themselves unilaterally to a lot of these people who you see, who people see in the news who are just migrants standing in lines, refugees in lines, tired. They might've been a doctor two, three months ago.

It's so it's so it's so intense. It's so it's so it's it's just big. It's huge. mean, I guess my brain goes to a place of it. I wish I could have finished the film. But when they hit the American border, what did that situation look like? Were they pushed through or were they pushed out? Or I mean, I mean, how did it go? I didn't get to see that. Yeah, it's complicated. So with them, they I mean, I don't want to ruin it for you. They they as always. I want to say always, but often happens. They go get into the jungle.

They are not mentally prepared for what's ahead of them and they quickly get lost. But long story short, it was a very scary few days as that happened. We lost track of them and we got voice audio messages from them that are playing the film that are horrifying. we eventually, months later, months and months later, because we lost contact with them really, months later we found that they had reconnected safely, all of them in Mexico City.

They made it to Mexico City and they were going through the asylum application process on the Mexico side, which was smart, I think, for them. That also showcases to me that they were able to put together enough money to just just on the road. They probably were stranded in a number of places and they probably worked a little bit odd job. They to do a side quest to raise money to continue their journey.

It happens to be like so, so many people lose their money and they just can't move forward because they're all again, they're always there to bribe. needs to be paid local gangs, cops, whatever. So like usually it happens in southern Mexico. But one of the reasons a lot of the refugees and the migrants will say that southern Mexico is the most dangerous part of the whole journey is because by that point, not only are you exhausted from five days in the in the raw jungle where you're dodging gangs that want to rob you, abduct you, rape you, all this stuff, you're, you know,

on horseback, you're on buses, you're on trains to get to southern Mexico, all of which you paid for. And then suddenly you're in the desert of southern Mexico, controlled, which is controlled by gangs and corrupt cops. And you have nothing. You have nothing. So a lot of them get stranded there and they work at, you know, they work odd jobs. They work side of the road. That's also a big, abduction point for women who get smuggled into the sex industry there. or smuggled up, they were able to bypass a lot of that, which shows to me that they were able to raise money and they

Reconnected Mexico City and they applied for asylum from there, which is a great way to do it you can. Maria did that. She went to the border. She went to Juarez and crossed at the El Paso checkpoint and she was jailed in El Paso for two weeks while they processed her and then they paroled her into the because she she claimed he claimed in her first round of paperwork that she was applying for asylum. She had the intention to apply for asylum, I should say, which is an important

because you get to the border, you get to a checkpoint, and you make it clear that you are going to apply for asylum. And that's an important part. And you become protected by indicating that you intend to apply for asylum. And then they parole you into the country. But what they don't tell you and what they don't tell people is that there's a finite amount of time before you need to then go and apply. So you haven't applied. So she thought she'd applied at the border and then she was paroled into the country. So sleazy, sneaky. I mean, it's ridiculous. Wow.

That sounds like some bullshit. It's intense. Yeah, it is. It's it's intense. and you know, this is all communicated to them in English and they maybe had an interpreter, but maybe they didn't. So she had to go through this whole process and the film captures in real time the moments that she realized that she hadn't applied for asylum and tracks her immediate application and all this stuff. And also it just makes me think, you know, the embarrassment of riches that we have, you know, as Americans, fuck, man.

I was worried about LA traffic. That was my big concern today. You know what mean? I'm blessed to even be up in LA traffic. That's where my head's at right now. I don't want to give away the rest of your film, but it's such an amazing thing that you've done. Adding a camera to these people's struggles, that's where the power comes in. That's where we as filmmakers do have a certain power and a certain thing that we can give back to the world. Would you say, not to pat ourselves on the back, is there...

strength and power and good in putting the camera on it, know, and having the story out there. I mean, you're just starting, you know, you're just premiering it. You world premiered at Santa Barbara, right? It's your first stop. This film is going to be out there. I don't know, talk about what the value of putting a camera on these people's struggle. Like, what do you see besides just, you know, going to festivals? My last film, here's the value. Here's the potential value. So my last film,

was about the mental health of these kids fleeing Ukraine in combat. It played, it screened at a global psychology conference in Warsaw, Poland that was attended by thousands of people, both virtually and in person. It's screened there and those people were essentially the mental health and psychology specialists that helped guide global policy on refugee support. So.

15000 people, some of whom were in Ukraine, but were around the world who saw the film, who are responsible for advising their governments about how to spend money to help refugees saw that film. We have a write up from the World Health Organization talking about the impact that it had insofar as it contributed meaningfully to the conversation about the mental health of refugees fleeing combat. Now, like, look, I'm not an idiot as it relates to this stuff. I'm not naive. I think that a film there's a limit to what a film does it at best.

the conversation. But what I do think is that that film contributed to a conversation that then moved the needle very tangibly for people who are dealing with combat trauma. like, you know, to the point about Roads of Fire, I think that this film, if it's successful, it'll participate in conversations or be an element of conversations that will then maybe help move the needle as it relates to how we think about how we talk about and hopefully how we

allocate resources for migrants and for refugees. Because the thing, you know, the thing about this is that people talk a lot about an asylum system or an immigration system or I mean, right now there's street protests, there are deportations, all this stuff happening. But I think that people mostly don't understand that these are all these are basically clashing bureaucracies. Asylum is a very specific process.

immigration is a broad concept that just involves people getting to a border and naturalizing or not naturalizing and getting into the country and kind of figuring it out. It's a broad concept. What I hope is that people watch this film and walk away a with an understanding that it's it's not that there's a single broken system that these politicians are using as collateral and political political collateral in their squabbles. It's that there is no system and that none of these these, you know,

The housing authority in New York City, fire department of New York City that can approve how people are housed, the shelter system, ICE, asylum attorneys, and immigration advocates are all different and distinct things. So I think the more people understand how convoluted these processes are, I think that maybe the film will contribute to a dialogue that'll lead to a simplification and a streamlining of all of this. That's one major goal. So the more we fucking understand about all this stuff,

the more our policy can reflect that understanding and say, okay, if people are fleeing Venezuela and there's a correlating issue with homelessness in New York City, how can we make it so that the people who are fleeing that country can walk into this country, paroled in with a 24 hour waiting period for a work permit and maybe a $5,000 housing voucher that it covers first month and last month and security on a small apartment in Queens, New York. Because the thing is right now,

I mean, when we made the film, the overhead on a single asylum seeker was clocking in at $40,000 of support for beds and shelters, for meals, for all this stuff. And that doesn't even take into consideration what the humanitarian people are putting in. So it's like, if they were able to work within 24 hours of walking into this country legally, and they had a housing voucher that could put a roof over their head within a month, it would be self-sufficient, right? So it's like, if the film can be a part of those conversations, then it'll have succeeded. That's succinct, wow.

Big shit. I'm going to read your bio. Nathaniel Lezard is a Spanish-American director and producer who operates in the long form doc, narrative and commercial space. Your creative focuses on telling humanist stories that exist outside the conventions of contemporary culture and explore extreme lifestyles and global experiences. Let me ask you why that, why that space you think the last part conventions you want to work in, you want to tell humanist stories outside the conventions of contemporary culture. Why is that you think? Where does that come from for you? You know, it's interesting.

I think that it comes from my family, think. you know, I'm half Spanish. My grandfather, who passed away about a year ago, less than a year ago, he was a Spanish Moroccan man. and he lived a really just a really interesting life that involved really numerous experiences of being a refugee. But most critically, when he was a teenager, he grew up a middle class, secular.

Jewish Moroccan Spaniard in Spain and he was thrown into a concentration camp by the by the Spanish fascists. He threw a variety of sort of cloudy methods. I don't even myself fully understand. He was able to bribe. He and his family were able to bribe a concentration camp guard and smuggle. He was able to smuggle himself out of that concentration camp in the back of a car and took him to Tangier, Morocco, where they restarted their lives with absolutely nothing. And so

He was a refugee kid in Tangier and he became the stories. He became the donkey cart boy of Tangier. He was the sort of the kid who piloted this cart that had milk and import goods and he go door to door, dropping people their stuff off that they ordered. what's in your blood? Yeah. So it's like it's probably the thirties. And so it's just like, I think that there is something in the DNA of my family of just of just, you know, generations of interpreting

the geopolitics of being a refugee and of what to flee. think that's kind of in my family. And then I think that I I don't know. I'm very aware of what people make films about. Also, I think that, like, especially in the doc world, man, I think that there's an instinct to throw talking head up on screen, throw some dramatic music behind them and blah. And Netflix. Yeah. Crew crime.

in celebrity this can you believe that XYZ person was murdered and it's it's like here's the same exact story information but from a different angle right exactly so it's I think that my focus just kind of became like the whole the whole point of documentary from my perspective is putting a viewer in the lives and the experiences of other people sure did you ever see that film collective the romanian documentary no I heard about it fucking insane that that changed my viewpoint on docs as far as oh

Yeah, I'm trying not to do talking heads. I'm trying to do, I'm trying to capture the moment as it happens with my camera. And like that film is just entirely that where they uncovered this whole corporate plot and this journalists, but they never acknowledged the camera. They're talking, they're talking to each other. You know, they're, they're, they're not reenacting anything. You're seeing it as it happens. And the power of that was just eyeopening for me.

And so it's I mean, I don't don't always get it. I can still live with the fact that if I need my character to talk to me to the camera, OK, fine. But I'm trying to find those moments where like, let's include another character. Let's find something that where it's like we're in it with you right now. We're not reliving it. You know, we're not safe in this moment because you're retelling it. No, we're in the moment. We might not be safe. You know what I've been thinking a lot about recently is not being scared of.

quote unquote talking head moments, but treating those interviews less like, all right, this is an information dump that we need to find a way to make dramatic. And think about them as scenes themselves. A filmmaker who really transformed the way I look at this stuff is Joshua Oppenheimer. He did the act of killing, the look of silence. And if you watch the look of silence even more than act of killing, I find, he turns the interviews into scene work. So it becomes this double function thing where the participant is speaking to

the interviewer who is the who is another participant in and of themselves. And so it becomes so it's structured as an interview, but it's a scene and it becomes this bizarre, very expert blend of verite and informational woven together. And it's incredibly powerful. it's like there's two characters talking to each other, essentially. I mean, even if it's just a little bit of a meta. Yeah. And so it's like one is operating as an interviewer, but is also a character in the film. So you have this dual function. And so that's that was really

powerful and it changed the way I look at this stuff. And it also impacted like, I always want my interviews to be on location and in the world of the the participants. So it's like, they have to be a part of the storytelling and not just this clean studio kind of a lazy ish kind of thing. Am I? That's what I'm going to say. It's just like kind of it doesn't doesn't inspire you as a viewer. It's just like, OK, cool. Let me ask you this. Don't make it wise.

Why filmmaking? Like, what was it for you? Did you have a moment where you were just like, this is it for me? What was it for you? I gotta ask you that same question. so for me, I actually was thinking about this the other day. I think that it use it like when you ask that question, the first question that you need to ask, at least I bet I have to ask to answer correctly is like, why does why would a nine year old, 10 year old or 11 year old kid feel alone?

in a crowded room, right? Like, why? Why would me me? But more broadly, like, what are the material conditions of somebody's life that when they're a kid, they feel dread and anxiety and alone when they're with people who are their family or their friends? Like, what are what are the state of affairs in that person's life in that person's culture that has put them in a position where they feel empty and they're not sure why?

as a kid. Interesting. So that's I start I start there because then I think about art. I heard somebody speaking recently about art as like a remedy for that feeling that we turn to art as very early unknowingly as fucking kids. For me, I think I think that film is the the most fully realized vehicle for escape from for me things like anxiety and depression. I think that as a kid even

I was in a space always where I was very governed by anxiety without even realizing it. you know, look, think about film and you think about the how wholly realized it is. like it's the marriage of sight and sound. It's all of the tools and the tool belt belt short of smell to bring you into a new world, to to take you out of the circumstances that you're in, that you feel alone in, that you feel depressed in, that you feel you're with friends, but you still feel alien in some way. You I was I was in.

you know, an American Jewish kid with like leftist parents in conservative Spain growing up at different points. Like when you're when you're in these shoes, turning to art to transport you and to build a new world for you is critical. So I think film hits you on all cylinders and it's the ultimate vehicle for that escape. That's I think that's where I got it from. But what about you, though? You're a filmmaker. I want to hear.

I love this answer. That's a very good, fresh answer. I have not heard that take, but it makes complete sense. Like what's the moment before that moment? Yeah. For me, it was kind of similar. mean, I was always drawing like my kid does now, which is a mind trip. you know, because I was just, I always kind of simplified it with like, I was always bored. I love people. love connecting with people, but also, yeah, it kind of makes me think like what you said, like I always kind of wanted to take a step back and observe and not just observe, like, you know,

Push record, publish it, know, or push record at least. And so when, you know, the home video was just right there and out of boredom, I always saw it as, you know, we would take the camera and just create these stories without even seeing it as like, I'm a storyteller. was more like, Ooh, what if we did this? And it was mostly funny stuff, know, funny skits and things like that. And then it just became again, what you said, which was this kind of like place to go when other things weren't working out, you know, when it was like not knowing.

what the word was, but yeah, a little anxious. I grew up with like lot of change throughout. you know, my parents got divorced when I was four or five, was my first memory. And my first memory is change, essentially. My grandma died at age nine. My mom ended up passing away at 20, 21. Always change, always change. And so I think the one thing that always was there for me was film. And, you know, whether it be filming or writing or, you know,

like getting it out, you know, and turning it into something. So for me, you know, it was always different art, different forms. I was either drawing or I was playing music. I used to want to be a singer songwriter until I just, I just accepted the fact that I was not blessed with the, with the, with the voice that I like to hear sing. But anyways, it was an expression and it was about connecting with people. What's fucking more wonderful than that, you know, it just kind of, it was there. It was like right in front of me and I didn't even realize it, you know, until after I've been doing it.

I was doing it before I even consciously, and maybe that's for a lot of us, you You're just doing it because it feels right and it feels good. And then you get a little older and like, wait a minute, I guess I should start thinking about a career. And then I did. And then it was just a matter of figuring it out from there. It's always been, it's always just made me feel fucking fantastic. And now I'm seeing it with my kid. He's five and he's like, can we film again tonight? And I'm just like, yeah, man, yeah, I'm tired as hell. We just did eight fucking videos in the past week, but yeah, let's do it.

And he's just getting off on it, you know, and I'm yeah, it's like the instinct, the vibe, the feeling, you know. Yeah, beautiful. And I mean, now is both. mean, it's funny you said. And then there's that career moment and it's like and at that exact career moment, that's when our our new adults, you know, existential terror begins. You start taking it a little too. It's like it's like the baseball parents, you know, when they start. I used to play baseball growing up till I was obsessed with baseball until about 12.

And then I just noticed everybody's parents just yelling at their kids and dropping F bombs and like, this isn't fun anymore. and I think with the film thing, there's been moments where maybe you've experienced this with your DIY projects too, where we were putting our money where our mouth's at, which is a big deal. Like we, we went and did it and did it again and did it again. But also where was the reward? Fuck, this is hard. This is not fun. But then we continue doing it. And it sounds like we found, we both found our fulfillment by.

Maybe in this case for now, switching, you know, not switching, but, you know, doing documentary work where it's like, it's not about the return. not about the amount of eyeballs. That's great stuff. But it's about the kind of like, what am I really doing here? What am I really contributing to the world here? That's that's my my thing. And it's just a fucking rad thing that I never expected to do, which is like, wow, we're actually maybe having we have a chance here to like contribute to a world of people's kind of issues. You know, maybe we can help with this.

I think that's huge. think that it's, there's a lot of, know, it's important to never forget that a doc is still cinema and we're still storytellers and making film. But I think, I think that's exactly right. I think that there was a part of me at some point where I was like, all right, first off my, my, where my DIY narrative storytelling instincts went anyway, was still sort of the documentary space. Like my first, my narrative feature that sold out of festivals, it was sort of an examination of issues and people that

I would love to go back and make a doc about and I realized and like let me just chase that instinct like what is What is it about the world that is so appealing to me in a nonfiction way? and then I started to realize like The artificiality of narrative is is great in some ways and you can completely lean into it and discover Things and learn and change people's perspectives and all this stuff But man, I wanted to get into the world and I wanted to I want to tell

stories that had an immediate impact on people who were living in environments that I was not a part of or living situations that I was not a part of. And I could use these films as a mechanism of discovering the world and growing and learning and being a part of something much bigger than myself. So that became really attractive and a huge focus for me. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. Let me ask you this. What would you go back and tell your early filmmaking self if you could tell them now anything? Would you tell them anything?

Would you just let them be? think there's right now a version of all of us who have pretty uniform. First, OK, so the most concrete thing is to not undervalue the relationships that I made in film school, because those people grad students a lot about this. you go people. People are always talking about the value of film school. For me, those friends on that first year floor where we're all hung over and we're all stumbling late in class.

those people gave me my career. So those relationships, those people who are on your floor or whatever at the bar or at that party and they are being idiots, those same people that you care so much about right now are cinematographers who in 10 years will be shooting the biggest music videos on the planet. They are people who are producers. They are people who are in the midst of discovering something that will be wildly valuable to you later. So those friendships, I I cannot.

I can't overstate this. Those people are not only my closest friends to this day, but those people shaped my entire career in ways that I can't even fully express yet. Some of my absolute best friends shoot my projects and they're people I've now known since college. Those relationships do not go away. So I think like first off, don't undervalue those things and that you're there for those relationships. The classes are great. The, you know, the debt sucks. I'm still in that debt.

Don't forget that your jobs that you end up caring so much about that you pour everything into, whether it's a DIY film that sells at a festival or it's a tiny commercial spot for a shitty brand that you don't care about. But you know what you're doing? You're bringing your friend who's a shooter onto that job. And then that friend who's a shooter brings you onto a small music video six months later and you start cobbling together a career with your best friends. And then you blink and 10 years have gone by and you're happy because you spend every day with your best friends.

working on projects or, you know, shooting the shit about projects that went terribly and whatever. it's you've built a community that's not going anywhere. And that's a great, great feeling. So I would say that first off, I would then say strap in for a lot of rejection and do the film like do the festival thing early so that you can get prepared for rejection, because this is an industry where you need to have thick skin always. And a great

training ground for that is those little short films, not even because they themselves matter as creative vehicles. It like the value of getting slapped around by the festival circuit and getting 50 nos and one yes. And the thing is, if you're not, if you're not into that, then just go do something else. Like that's okay. But that's, that's, that's the reality. It's going to happen. And it's just part of it. Yeah. You're so right. And you keep going, right? Yeah. So thick skin and don't undervalue your relationships because they all matter. Perfect.

What do you have coming up next in my last question? What are you working on? Yeah, I've got this film that I'm putting together right now. We've got some studio interest or streamer interest, I should say. We've got some indie interests. So we're looking at the pieces of it. It's about extreme weather events and the impact it has on climate events, I should say, and the impact it has on the first responders who are called to fight them. So that's that's a major focus. And yeah, man, I can't say too much about it, but we're in the midst of of getting getting it over the finish line.