E49 • The Power of Real-Time Documentary • NAYIBE TAVARES-ABEL, dir. of ‘Colossal’ at Berlinale

Nayibe Tavares-Abel shares her journey from a political science background to becoming a documentary filmmaker. She discusses her film “Colossal”, which just premiered at Berlinale. Past films discussed include “Beyond Utopia” by Madeleine Gavin.

Nayibe’s film intertwines her family history with the political landscape of the Dominican Republic, exploring themes of political violence, activism, and the importance of storytelling. She emphasizes the challenges of documentary filmmaking, the significance of family archives, and the universal themes that can emerge from specific stories. 

Nayibe also reflects on the evolution of her film, the importance of building relationships in the filmmaking process, and how her filmmaking journey began with her Grandmother’s camcorder.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Past Present Feature, Hosted by Marcus Mizelle
• 0:20 Presented by Valerion Projectors
• 1:02 Nayibe Tavares-Abel, dir. of "Colossal" at Berlinale

Transcript

Marcus Mizelle (01:02)
Naibia Tavares Abel shares her journey from a political science background to becoming a documentary filmmaker.

She discusses her film Colossal, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Past films discussed include Beyond Utopia by Madeline Gavin.

Naibah's film intertwines her family history with the political landscape of the Dominican Republic, exploring themes of political violence, activism, and the importance of storytelling. She emphasizes the challenges of documentary filmmaking, the significance of family archives, and the universal themes that can emerge from specific stories. also reflects on the evolution of her film, the importance of building relationships in the filmmaking process,

and how her filmmaking journey began with her grandmother's camcorder.

Marcus Mizelle (01:43)
Naib Tavares-Ebel is Dominican of Lebanese and Palestinian origin. You are a prop master, documentary filmmaker and research consultant. Before completing a filmmaking conservatory at Altos de Chavon School of Design, she'd studied political science and French language in Michigan and Paris. She has directed the short films Carmencita, honorable mention at International Day Trinidad Tobago 2020. So you've been around the world. Aye, aye, aye. I mean, it looks like you're from all over and you've been all over.

I've been fortunate enough to like go to college in the States and then my master's in France and now I live in Costa Rica. So yes, I've been very lucky. And you're of Lebanese and Palestinian descent? Yes. Wow. So cool. Do you have a first memory of when you were, you know, of being a filmmaker, whether it was a decision to be one or you just happened to be making films without even thinking about it? So...

My, I bet a lot of filmmakers have stories like this, but my grandma had a camcorder when I was growing up and she recorded everything. Every birthday party, every trip we took. And that's like my first memory I have of like someone using a video camera around me. I now have those,

So she had a high eight camera and then she had a mini DV camera and I have those. There's 90 of them. I've only been able to like see like 10. So that's like my first memory as a child with people using cameras around me. But then I actually got to cinema through theater when I was doing my masters in France.

with, which was a political science masters. I was struggling with my French pronunciation. So I joined the student theater group at my university just for fun and to like practice my French. And I loved it. I loved theater. So I did that for like seven years in France. And then when I moved back to the Dominican Republic, I joined several different like independent theater troops and

Through theater, I met a few actors and through them, I joined the film world. And fun fact, I was in front of the camera at first as an actress. I did a few shorts and like smaller roles and features. And whenever I was on set as a talent, I would see everyone behind the camera and I was like, okay, this is where the magic actually happens. Right? So at 28,

I decided to go back to school and I went to Chavon for a two-year program in filmmaking. Where is that? Chavon? Chavon is in Santo Domingo. Okay. The city where I'm from. Okay. In Dominican Republic. Gotcha. I love this story. This is unique. I love how in the roundabout way of you trying to get better at your French, so you joined the theater and then you fell in love with film. Yeah. Which is fantastic. It's funny how we just kind of come around to where we're supposed to be, you know, if we just follow our instinct.

It reminds me of being in high school and we were already making home videos, but it was definitely not something I thought I was going to do for a living. It's more about just why wouldn't we do that? It's fun and we're bored and we're in the small town. But then I was in high school and for my senior year, my buddy Jason was like, I think you'd like this film lit class that, that this teacher's putting on. You should join that because like, you know, senior year, you're just chilling, like all these electives, you know, well, yeah, I watch movies all day. I guess that sounds cool. And all the cool kids were in the class.

And I ended up like the very first lesson that they gave us was the importance of opening credits. And she showed us Hitchcock's, know, Saul Bass's opening credits for Hitchcock. And then we just kind of, you know, it was the first kind of like formal film education that I received. I didn't go to film school, but I got like chunks of film education here and there. It's just funny how, you know, how it unfolds for each of us, you know? And I think the most important thing is like, thank God we found.

film, right? And clearly you love it because it's so hard. How can you do it without loving it? I agree 100 % with that. It's really hard, especially when you do industry films, you know, his smaller shows, you know, like for example, this documentary, Colossal, we were a very small team. even when we had four people, five people most of the time. And then

When we had like the more difficult shoots, like for example, the underwater, we had a bigger team, right? Because we needed like marine security and more camera assistance and stuff. But most of the time it was very little people. Actually, like when we were shooting the 2020 electoral campaign, for most of it, was Kat, my videographer, and me. I was doing sound and she was on the camera. and those, those.

those productions are, in my opinion, more fun and not as tough. But when you work in the industry, like in the Dominican, I don't know if you know this, but we get a lot of shows from Hollywood. Okay. I wasn't familiar. Yeah, we have a big studio there that was previously owned by Pinewood Studios. Okay. Like an hour away from Santo Domingo, the capital.

And so after that pandemic, we started getting all the shows because it was way too expensive to shoot in LA. And then you come to the maker Republic, everything is cheaper. Labor is cheaper too. have to say. reminds me of, I'm from North Carolina and you know where Wilmington North Carolina is? heard of that? No. So it's like Screen Gems Studios, which was formerly Dino De Laurentiis Studios. Okay. And he basically in the eighties, but it's like a back door into the industry, like cut to like.

25 years, 20 years later, and I'm able to kind of like get, you know, get in there, like without having to go in the front door of Hollywood. So anyways, it reminds me of such a valuable thing to have where Hollywood kind of sets up shop on the outskirts, like, you know, what you're saying, being able to come through or even being around that to have a film culture around you and to have film workers, film people, film filmmakers around you, right? Right, yes. It's a big deal. It's a blessing, really.

It really is like, it's crazy like watching Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock on like a big screen when you're little in an island in the Caribbean and then 20 years later you're on set with them. It's so wild because you know, Wilmington's where they filmed Dawson's Creek and Wondry Hill, but also I know what you did last summer, but they filmed Ninja Turtles there. They filmed Super Mario Brothers. They filmed Firestarter. They filmed Manhunter. Anyways.

I'm watching an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie the other night and I'm like, wait, this is Wilmington. I didn't know this was filmed in Wilmington. And I looked it up. I was like, damn, it is Wilmington. It's just such a crazy thing. Like Arnold was in Wilmington? What? Not to, you know, go on and on, but yeah, it's such a, we share that in common then. I mean, do you feel like you, it's helped you a lot to have that near you? Yeah, definitely. It also helped me to understand that I didn't want to do industry films as a filmmaker, that I like documentary.

and like smaller shoots way better. It's more intimate. Also, it helps you have a more work-life balance. Like the film industry is tough. know, 16 hour days, 14 hour days, like it's rough and like I have a kid now. So couldn't imagine leaving my six month baby like alone for such a long time. I was a grip for seven and a half years on big sets. So I know exactly what you mean. My very first.

I was a PA, my very first job ever, this TV show called Surface. 19 hour a day, very first day. 19 hours, y'all, shame to y'all self. Shame to y'all self. Props is like that. Like when you work at props department, you have a pre-call, then you have to pick up afterwards, and then you have to get everything ready for the next day, and maybe you check your...

your prop list for the next day and you realize you're missing something and then you have to go run to the store. It's rough. It's rough. Like people watch movies and they don't know like how much sacrifice is behind it. It's so much more interesting behind the scenes. It just is. My old roommate's a prop production designer. So I got to see firsthand his methods. Yeah, it's a lot. But I feel like I should have probably, I mean, I was happy with the grip department because I was so enamored with the lighting, like the cinematic. Like how do they make, I remember this very specific thought in my mind.

How do they make it look the way they do? What is all that equipment over there? Why do they have styrofoam, also like these boxes, but also these nets and like, what the fuck is going on? I wanna know. It's a great way to kind of gain entry into filmmaking and also getting on set. That's like real film as far as filmmaking education. But also like for me, was always an exit strategy. Exit strategy in mind. was always, I was never meant to be a grip. That's just.

so that I can pay bills and move forward and get out of, know, North Carolina. And I was very much the same as far as I made some fiction films and I thought I wanted to be in the industry for a while. And then I just constantly got frustrated, frustrated, more and more frustrated to the point where it's like, let me go back and make this documentary in my hometown real quick. And then all of a sudden, my God, documentary form is wonderful. Cause I don't need any of this bullshit.

Like really, it's like, don't need to wait for this glossy thing that's not gonna affect the audience's emotional standpoint at all, which is the main ingredient, you know? I love that you're a documentary filmmaker, and I love all filmmakers, but I love that we can talk documentary, and I love also that you seem to have a blend of documentary with a little bit of fiction. Was that you? Am I reading this right? Yeah, well, for my short film.

Carmencita, we wanted to play with the form, right? So the story started when I found my great grandma's 1920 diary. Wow. My aunt had kept it. And so I read this diary and it's hilarious. My great grandma was super jealous. Like she was very insecure and like she would write these passionate letters to my great grandpa.

And so I said, okay, I want to do something with it. So our team, was, this was by chance, which is something that I love about documentary. Like the film kind of like unveils itself to you. The other two actresses that were a part of the team, one of them was the new girlfriend of my ex-boyfriend. Right. Wow. Okay. Right. So.

We did a documentary filming the whole process of like finding the locations, doing the rehearsals, getting our wardrobe and all that, right? And that's like part of the documentary, but also like the emotional process, we were all living and being like part, and then the sound person was my ex boyfriend, right?

So we were all like mixing there and like feeling the same things that my great grandma was feeling a hundred years before that. And we shot like in the documentary, there's a short film. It's a black and white 16 millimeter silent film based on the diary and it's fiction, but it's hilarious. And it was really fun to like when we were doing like the shot list, we went back.

to like the classic. we were looking at Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Georges Melier, you know, like, so we really went back to like the history of like the beginning of film and it was super fun. It's a real challenge to shoot film, but it's a, it's a documentary, a short documentary about love, but also about our love for film. And what's the name of this short film?

This is the one right before Colossal. Colossal, first feature? It's my first feature. And you get into Berlin? Well, go ahead now. I know, I'm so honored and lucky. Well, I'm sure you're deserving as very honored. But it's a project that took me eight years. A lot of work has been behind this. High risk, high reward me read your synopsis for Colossal. Every family has its secrets, says director Naibia Tavarizable.

Those of her own are intimately interwoven with the history of the Dominican Republic and with the political violence and frustration inherent within it. She is an election observer for the 2020 presidential elections in the Dominican Republic. 30 years earlier, her grandfather, a renowned lawyer, was appointed chair of the Electoral Commission in the hope of a fair democratic process and the end to dictatorship under Joaquin Balaguer. Balaguer. Thank you.

However, the election was overshadowed by suspicions of electoral fraud leveled at Tavares. Archived material shows the hopes and disappointments that accompanied the elections while a spontaneous survey on the streets of Santo Domingo reveals fundamentally different perspectives on the re-elected long-term ruler. Baleago. Colassa was a self-examination of a younger generation, autobiographical and sincere, a transgenerational family portrait caught between fear and trauma. Crash course in the history of the Dominican Republic and democracy as such.

A filmic attempt to find peace, dare to do something new, get active. So this seems like a film inside of a film, wrapped inside of a film, like it's very meta, right? I mean, you're character in this, right? Yeah, yeah. So being in front of the camera was one of the first decisions I took when I was writing this back in 2017. Wow. So the whole story with the electoral fraud really took a toll on my grandpa's health. Very shortly after that,

they discovered he had Alzheimer's and the disease evolved very quickly. Like he passed away in 1997. So only seven years after this happened. And so it's a painful part of my family history. And I knew that it was going to be hard for my family members to like relive and retell something that had been buried in the past. So that's why I decided like, okay, if I'm going to expose them,

I need to be right by them. So I need to be in front of camera to tell this story. The motivation was very intense, I'm sure. I mean, right? Sorry to hear that and thank you for sharing. And you had to do this then, right? It sounds like you felt so compelled. Like it was necessary for you to make this film. Yeah, especially because although it's like my grandpa's story, it's also my country's history.

And it's a country that has endured a lot of political violence, a lot of repression. And to this day, people, a lot of people, you can, we actually show that in the film. A lot of people still think Balaguer was like a founding father and a great president because they don't know the actual story, you know? They don't know the actual history. So that's like one of the reasons also why I thought it was so important to like make a film about this. You know, I watched, you seen Beyond Utopia?

documentary? No, I haven't seen it. It's about North Korea and people, you know, trying to escape from North Korea. But anyways, there's one moment where these people that have escaped talk about how they had no idea how bad they had it. And then you have this older grandma character who has spent her whole entire life in North Korea. And even though she escaped, she was still praising Kim Jong-un.

Basically she was like, yeah, but he's still a great leader and da da da da. She was just still saying things to praise him. Lady, you just had to go through China and Thailand and Vietnam to find freedom. And why are you praising this man? It's just a very interesting thing. You're revering someone who is literally oppressing you. It's wild. It's like a sort of Stockholm syndrome. think it's, you know, like political violence is so rough.

It even, it's even transgenerational. I never lived through a dictatorship, but I remember growing up and my grandpa like, like, don't say something like that. You know, like being very careful with what you say and who you say it to, you know, don't rock the boat. Yeah. It's kind of like growing up in a small town in a way, kind of, I mean, you know, as far as nobody wants to be ostracized.

So the power of documentary though then, like you're not just making a film here, you're making a statement. And I mean, this is a big deal, right? You're putting perspective and a spotlight on as far as Dominican Republic's concerned, like this is a very important film for your country, for the world you grew up in. I mean, what does that feel like? I mean, you haven't premiered it yet, you haven't seen the results of it yet, I guess, but I don't know. Like, how do you feel about that? Are you just so inside of it that you haven't thought about it or what? I mean.

This is activism in a way, right? So this film had a long journey. We've been to many, many screenwriting residencies and labs, editing labs, co-production markets in Europe and Latin America. And one of the things they always ask us is, are you guys safe? Like, do you feel, do you fear?

for your safety, right? Because a lot of Balaguer's followers are still in power. A lot of them are very wealthy people or they're in the military. And what I've always told them is like, I'm not afraid. I think we have moved on from that. Like that sort of political violence where people would come to your home and murder you. I don't think it happens anymore.

Fortunately in the Dominican Republic, political violence takes another form now. For example, I have a very close friend who's very active. She's a leader of a feminist movement that's trying to get reproductive rights and abortion rights approved in the Dominican Republic. And the way she's been threatened is more to her person and her reputation. For example, like...

intimate photos of her at a party would show up online things like that, you know, like they're trying to like... don't want to hurt. Yeah. Like they'll try to take you out of the closet publicly or like, or like try to shame you for smoking weed, things like that, you know, like you're not going to get murdered anymore. They're just going to try to discredit you. Wow. Yeah.

It's like as filmmakers, you know, we're not just here to provide entertainment. That's what you want to do. Cool. But also like we have power. That's the silver lining. That's the great thing. We've got power. can't preach, you know, when you preach to somebody directly or you give them information directly, they're not going

care, but if you give them a film that hits their emotions, uh-oh, you can get in there. And that's what's so amazing about what we do, I think, especially as documentarians. And it sounds like you about, you about to do that for sure. It only took you eight years to get this project, you know, ready to go. Can you talk about those eight years you had workshops, you had, development, development, development. How long did you kind of shoot? Did you shoot it over the entire eight years or what?

You know, in documentary, it's, I think it's funny because the different stages, development, production, post-production, they kind of like blended in documentary, you know? I love that. You shoot something and then you find something during that shoot and that makes you rewrite. So you go back to development, sort of in a way, and then you want to edit what you shot because you want to know what it looks like. So it of goes back and forth, which makes it harder to have a final cut.

But I was exclusively writing from 2017 to 2020 and obviously doing a lot of research, doing interviews, which I didn't record on camera. I just recorded them by sound because I was by myself then. I didn't have my cinematographer yet. So in January 2020, I went to France for a screenwriting residency called Moulin Dandet and back.

then the film was going to be mostly historical. It was going to be based on archive and it was going to be like looking at the past, right? Which is tough in my opinion. It's as far as the engagement of it all. It's like a beast of a form. But then I go back to San Domingo right before the pandemic started and it was election day. It was the municipal elections into the Dominican Republic.

And I told Kat, my cinematographer, like, hey, we should, you know, just take the camera. I'll do some myself. Let's just get some shots just so we can have like something to compare the past with in case we want to use it eventually. Maybe we won't use it. And then I go to vote, right? Where I'm registered and I can't vote. They won't let me into the building. And there's like a whole bunch of people outside. Like what's going on?

Fast forward later that afternoon, the elections were sabotaged and canceled because someone had messed with the voting machines. They were always with a camera during that. And we were filming all that. And then the next day, these massive protests break out everywhere in the country because the party that was in power at that time was the only party that was being shown by the voting machines.

and they had been in power for 20 years. So people were very fed up and these huge protests break out everywhere else, everywhere in the country, but especially in the capital. And we were there and we filmed it and that was incredible. We have like, I don't know, 20 plus, 30 hours of things we shot because we started going through all the political rallies and like,

all the protests and all the other, everything we could shoot on the elections, we did. Man, to have it right off the bat, to be able to capture that big meaty situation. And I remember talking to my producer about it, like, wow, this is really shitty and it really sucks for democracy. But this is great for our film because it stopped being a purely historical film and it became something from the present.

Okay, so I want to talk about that. Yes, like cinema verite kind of like you're capturing as it's going, you're capturing as it's going down as opposed to reliving it or reenacting it or showing archival, which always is a more of a larger emotional hit. And I always go back to this Romanian documentary. You know what I'm trying to say? Where it's entirely, they don't acknowledge even the camera. It's entirely in real time. You know, it's happening in the present. You're capturing the present moment. Collective, you ever seen it?

No, but that sounds fascinating. I've tried my best to stop talking about this movie because I keep talking about it, but it's like, it's my favorite documentary, I guess. The first time I saw a documentary that felt like a fiction film where it's like they don't even acknowledge the camera, which, and I noticed the power of that, you know, not only being in present day and filming something as it's happening, but also the fact that, you know, they're either they're talking to someone else in the scene, they never addressed the camera directly, which

gives it such power. And it's also about this uncovering of this health care fraud. think it was health care or some sort of systemic fuckery, you know, in Romania. Anyways, for you to go from historical archival to like capturing in real time, man. And we do have archive, like 20 % of the film is found footage. Because you need it probably to tell the story a little bit. So we go back to two different moments.

in Dominican history, the 1960s, which is right after the end of Trujillo's dictatorship, right? We had a, let's say a five or four year period where Dominicans were trying to establish a democracy that did not end well. We elected a president, like democratically elected, but there was, he was overthrown just eight months after being elected. And then a

whole bunch of things happened, including a civil war and a US military intervention. After the American troops landed in Santo Domingo, was a done deal. Like Dominican population, the rebels, they were called, they lost the war. And so Balaguer takes power. Balaguer had been Trujillo's wingman, basically.

And then we start a new regime for 12 years. So the film looks back to that era. And one of the characters we look at is my great uncle, Amin, who was an activist against the regime and who was murdered. And then the other moment that the film looks into is 1990. In 1990, my other side of the family, so now it's like my dad's side, my grandpa was head of the electoral board and...

So something we're trying to understand in the film is how he was accused of enabling an electoral fraud in favor of Balaguer, even though he was not a partisan of Balaguer. And well, I don't want to spoil the film, but you can imagine there's issues with pressure and political violence. And so we have three moments, like the 1960s, the 90s, and the 2020s.

We filmed, you know, just a digital camera, everything handheld. Just to match the kind of era that it's in, that the material is inside of. Would you have filmed for the 90s or how did that work? We have 16 millimeter footage from the 60s. It's black and white and it didn't have like the original sound. So we reconstructed some of it. And then for the 90s, we have

VHS footage. nice. Which is amazing. It looks great. It's actually footage that we got from a French filmmaker called Francis Candel. He's actually our co-producer. He joined our team because he had all this footage and I told him about the story and he was like, I'm going to help you do it. And the things he shot in 1990 are just amazing. Wow. How did you track him down? I'm curious.

I met him when I lived in France. He was married to a Dominican. Okay. Okay. To a friend of mine. Yeah. I met him way before I thought I was going to go to film school. Was it this kind of thing that was just floating there waiting for the right time to connect it back around to this project? Maybe possibly. Yeah. The universe works in mysterious ways. To actually have 90s footage, like actual 90s footage and know the person that shot it too. That's crazy.

And then the 2020s you shot on digital, yeah, to match the Yeah, yeah, just, you know, like a simple H264, Kodak camera. Uniformity there is pretty important, I feel like, right? When you're doing different time periods, having the different styles for different eras. This is where my production designer comes in. Because back in 2022, I had already shot everything from the 2020 election and...

It was so much, so much information, so many things that happened in like 60 years of Dominican history. like, we didn't know how to like show it on the screen so that it would make sense to people, right? Because that's a part of his Dominican history that most Dominicans don't even know. So Milena, our production designer, who's actually a textile artist, joins the team.

And her and I come up with this idea of building a huge collage in the form of a tree where the roots are my family tree and the branches are my research, right? So the film shows us, we go through these branches and we see like one branch shows like what happened to my great uncle. Then the other branch shows what happened to my grandpa. And then the middle branch is like the national history where we see like

the dictator and the guy that came after him and the military intervention and everything is like interwoven with my family history. And that's how we were able to connect all of this different footage. It was a real challenge. So cool. I'm looking at an image right now. It's the screenshot that Burlina was using. Yeah, I wish other people, I wish people that are listening to this could see this because what a brilliant.

image and like a brilliant visual visualization of the timeline, right? And the different kind of like threads, which would otherwise be hard to follow. I would think from what you're what you're telling me, that's brilliant. Yeah, we wanted to make a story that's local enough to touch like the to raise awareness in the Dominican Republic, but also universal enough that people from other countries could watch it and understand. Even if you haven't had a dictator in your country, you probably like

Europe and North America, like you guys have had wars, right? So there's someone in your family that maybe went to war and came back home and they have trauma. And that's like the emotion we're trying to connect with the viewer. I think a lot of people also feel like that they don't have any choice, even though like we can vote left or right, red or blue. It's like, yeah, but can we, why can't we vote for the third person that because, our vote is going to be wasted. You know what I mean? Like they could maybe mildly relate at least maybe not to direct dictatorship, but at least like

the fact that they're not, they just kind of left with no choice. So as far as like micro and macro connecting, you know, as far as something that's universal in story form, but also you're telling it through something that's very specific, like a small, not a small community, but a specific community or a place. I mean, do you find that there's so much universal elements in any story, right? Any sort of specific story or place. It's kind of wild. And once, once you identify that as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, it's such a,

an exciting moment, I feel like, to where it's like, you don't have to be from this place to understand, to be touched by this, right? I mean, how valuable was it to find those universal kind of emotional points for the audience while you're telling? Because every story needs to be specific about something and fresh, but also like, I don't know, like you always want to have that universal connection.

I want to say that something that really helped was that screenwriting residency that I did in France. Our advisor is a filmmaker from Colombia, but who has been living in France for over 20 years. name is Catalina Villar. She's a fascinating woman and like, she went beyond above, know? Like she did the consultancies that were paid for by the residency.

But then she kept working with us for like another year. Like my editor and I would just call her or, you know, shoot her an email. It's like, hey, we're, we're founding this blockage. Like, could we send you the scene or the cut? And she was always so available helping us take that movie out of the Dominican Republic and make it more universal. She also has a fascinating film about her grandma, who was one of the first women that was,

institutionalized and they practiced alabarame on her in Colombia. I think the film is called Ana Rosa. It's a really fascinating documentary. Third time that Grandmothers Come Up came out today. I love that. Shout out to grandmamas. Go back to you. You said you found your diary of your grandmother. That was from your short film. That was related to your short film? Yeah. What is it about going into the past? It's so powerful that also that captures us. Besides knowing the history, it's important to know our history, right?

It's so fascinating when you can find connections between the past and the present. And then of course, what the future might look like. And it sounds like you've definitely been in that diving in that territory. So I had a small production house called Cinema Costanera with my dear cousin, Isabel Tabades, who lives in Detroit, Michigan. And we are both very interested in genealogy and like understanding where we're coming from.

from understanding our family, but also other people's families and generations and generational time. I also want to say that having a family archive, having family portraits from like 100 years ago, it's a privilege. You have to come from a privileged background to have even videos more recently.

And we're very lucky to have that on our dad's side, you know, to be able to look at that diary for my great grandma. Pictures from where my grandpa was a baby. No, it's not everyone is that lucky. I got lucky too, because I was looking into the origin of my last name, Myzel, and my parents didn't know anything about it. They didn't seem to really care much either. They thought we were Italian the whole time, which is not the truth.

And I looked into it and come to find out like records from Jamestown, Virginia, 1620. Yeah, a hundred and what, 60 years before the United States. They kept great records and Luc Maizel came through from France to Britain through to Jamestown, Virginia around 1620. And I traced it all the was gonna say, it sounds French.

Well, it's French German, actually. It's like, depending on what time it's like right there at the border, it's the Mosel River Valley kind of thing right there in south of Luxembourg. It's fascinating. I was fascinated. I named my child Luke LUC after the first Mizel in America, you know, and it's such a thing where it's like, I took the history and applied it to the now, you know, and it's like, it means something. It's not just a cool name. You're a mirror of the first indentured servant that came here and, and, and, you know, came with nothing and died with 80.

bushels of tobacco or whatever the hell it so it's like, yeah, for me that was my most exciting kind of time with my own genealogy. And then to be able to go back to my family and say, this is our story. This is our history. Pretty important people, pretty important stuff. So anyways, the film took you eight years. I mean, as far as like fiction filmmaking, it is such a frustrating thing to have so many scripts and to try to get it packaged and to try to have it be.

ready to go and then you don't get to that point of being able to film. And so what I love about documentaries is it's the opposite of that. It's all of it at the same time. And like the thing about documentaries is you can go and film immediately right now. And yes, the payoff or the rub is you have to discover the final cut, the cut in a more frustrating, it's a more deeper process. But the fact that you can go ahead and like create beyond just getting off the page immediately is such an amazing thing.

So I mean, it's like, guess my question to you is like, what took the like, what the eight years, within the eight years, besides the development and all that, like filming and editing as well, like how long until you felt like you actually knew your film? Like you knew what you had, like what the film was and like what the shape was, not the final runtime. How long did it take until you felt like you had the film? Like you were, could kind of hold it and see it. I always joke about this with my editor, Natalia.

because we've had so many final cuts like we thought it was done in 2023 and then what we did and this was very smart of her we started showing it to colleagues and friends and doing like private screening sessions that's when we started realizing okay like people are not understanding this part or people are losing interest in this other part and so we kept working and working so yeah it took

Two years after we thought it was ready. I always tell her that she's not only my editor, she's also my psychologist because it was hard, like emotionally going through that and like going through like painful parts of my family history. and that's something that I love also about documentary, like the relationship you create with your team. I'm best friends now with all my protagonists of all my films, which is just kind of funny. It's funny because it's just like, of course I am.

But I love that, you know, it's so great. We went through hell together and you're like, now we can hang out and, you know, have a good time. Did you ever get to a point where like you're trying to battle against just wanting to be done because you've put so much into it and you almost just want to be done and then you realize you have to battle against that moment where it's like, no, the film's not ready, even though I'm ready to be done. Yeah, I can think of like two points. In 2021, I actually took a break.

We didn't touch the film for like nine months. That's so good. I was working very like nonstop in the industry. So on like the one hand, I didn't have time. And then on the other hand, like we needed time to like process what had happened in 2020, really try to understand how that was connected to the 1990s and the 1960s. So in 2021, we took a break.

from editing and writing and research. And then another moment was 2022. One of my uncles was the one who was supposed to give me an interview of like the pressures that my grandpa was receiving from the government. And the whole team was there with the camera. We were ready to shoot. And then he backed down. He didn't want to do it. He said that there were other people involved and...

He felt that basically he didn't want to put them in danger. He didn't want like something that had happened 30 years ago to be revealed and for that to like affect them in one way or another. So at that point we're like, okay, we don't have the main interview we wanted to have. We need to rethink this. And we went back to the footage. We let the images from the past tell the story.

or more than tell the story, it. So a lot of times you just, you have to realize that you're not going to get what your expectation wanted or thought it deserves. But more so you have to adjust to what the documentary wants and needs, right? That's 100 % true in my case. That's what I've seen. I've made three documentaries now every single time, especially right now I'm experiencing it's like, oh no.

Did I make a good movie? Is this a movie that makes sense? All these things. And then you realize like, well, it's not what I initially thought it could be and that's okay. It's like, let's really find, and it is in a lot of ways actually, thematically, and like all the stuff that I really do care about is still there. But as far as maybe the plot or the structure or the way I thought that the order of events could be or should go, it's not the case. And it's even better for it, I think. But every single time so far it seems like that. And I think it is maybe a big part of just making a documentary.

You said it at the very beginning, like the, it's like it takes longer to discover the cut that it needs to be, I feel like. And another thing I think is important when you're making, like this is something that I'm working on with my next project. When you come from a background of privilege and you are portraying someone who's not from the same background as you, like you really need to.

build a relationship with them. Like you cannot be just like a vampire and like try to steal the story. You know, like you need to know these people and because that's the only way you're going to treat them with respect as a filmmaker. And you just need to represent them correctly and not what your projections or perspective, limited perspective is. Yeah, totally. How is motherhood going so far? How is that going?

Well, I can hear him now. He's probably upset because I've been away for a long time. He just turned six months old. And after we got the news from Berlin, I've been so busy, you know, just a lot of work. And he has been really upset that I'm not with him 24 seven playing games. remember that. Well, not as a mother, but I remember the constant, the first like year and a half is just like,

You gotta be right there with them. Next question, Berlin, Berlin now. How excited are you on a scale of one to 10? And then what do you expect? Well, I don't wanna say expect, but what are you envisioning for your premiere? So Forum, which is the section where we're gonna be a part of, is a really cool space. It's for films that are different in form or more experimental.

also films that want to engage the audience politically. So there are a few Q and A's that are gonna be happening. I'm nervous, obviously. Like it's really easy to talk to you, because I'm in my house, you know. Once you have eyes on you and you feel scrutinized, even if you're not being scrutinized ever. Another thing we're hoping for with the film, specifically in Germany, is that they're gonna have elections.

very soon after the festival goes on and the far right in Germany has been gaining power for a while now. So there's like a big expectations for this election and it goes straight to the point in our film. So we're hoping to have a lot of engagement from like the locals. Film festivals, you always have the filmmakers that go and go watch the films.

But something great about Berlinale is that it's a high attendance festival. So we're hoping for a lot of people outside of the industry that will come and watch the film. And we want to create discussions on how even in the global north, or countries that want to call themselves developed countries, even in those countries that have a longer tradition of democracy, democracy is a work in progress everywhere, everywhere in the world.

It's very fragile. Yeah. And we forget how good we have it sometimes, right? When it is fluid and it's working. We don't ever, we don't sit there and give it positive marks. It's only when it's not working, you know, like most things do we then put our attention to it. I mean, I'm so excited for your film. Congrats on Berlin Owl. It's such a great classy festival. And then also distribution wise, it's a market too, right? I mean, maybe you'll get, do you have any distribution? And if not, you think you're going to get some? Nope.

Not yet, that's another expectation that we have. We decided not to go with a sales agent for this project. The producer and I, we're gonna do the work ourselves because it's a very personal film. It's our little baby that took eight years to be born. So we wanna be able to like have more control. We decided to do it too because we made it to Berlin on our own.

My producer has a lot of years of experience as a field producer. She's one of the best in the Dominican Republic, L.A., but it's her first feature as the general producer. So we're both taking a huge risk. You know what, you're holding all the cards anyways. You're the one that's, in Berlin, you're in Berlin now. mean, there's a market there. Yeah, it's gonna be good for you. It's very smart. And also it's just like being a filmmaker is, I think is like, you need to,

develop new skills such as, or constantly develop skills, even including understanding market, understanding sales and understanding, you know, I'll say this real quick. So there was one time I went to American film market when it was still here in LA. And this was like six years ago, seven years ago, whatever, to sell my, this, this micro budget film that I had made was a whole experiment that I did for myself. My plan was to just talk to the buyers directly.

Little did I know until I got there that they keep the buyers on the third floor where you can't get to them unless you're a sales agent. So the whole fucking system was designed to basically support the middleman, middleman, middleman, middleman. But the beautiful thing about that I realized was just identifying what the main issue was and also how to make money in this town, which is to become a middleman, you know, the middleman or to understand that the middlemen are the ones that seem to make all the money.

It's a good thing when you're providing a direct service and getting paid for that service and then, okay, cool. As opposed to maybe a sales agent, for example, taking 90 % of your profits and then leaving you with scraps at the end of it when they didn't do a fucking thing except for send an email. It's crazy. That's exactly like what our colleagues advised us. Because after we got to Berlin, we got so many emails from sales agents and...

A lot of our colleagues, like other filmmakers, were like, okay, you're at home with a baby. You're gonna have time to send those emails. Do it yourself. And build those relationships too. Also, you're paying, I guess you're paying for their network, but also like you can't even build your own network because they don't let you on the third floor. The whole, you know, so that's, I started taking it personally and then things got better for me because I figured it out. And nobody's gonna sell your movie like you are.

Nobody's going to ring that rag out like you are. Last question for you. What would you tell your earlier filmmaking self if you could go back in time? I would tell myself, make the films that you want to watch. Make the films that you want to watch. That's what I would tell myself. That's good advice.