"Dear Sirs," Part 1, with Mark Pedri and Carrie McCarthy, PhD

Documentary First, Episode 212 · with Mark Pedri, director of Dear Sirs, and Carrie McCarthy, PhD, producer · 59 minutes · December 7, 2023

Listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all apps · Watch: YouTube · Read: Full transcript

How do you make a documentary about a grandparent who never talked about the war?

Mark Pedri grew up knowing his grandfather, Silvio, had been a prisoner of war in World War II, but questions made him emotional, so the family did not ask. Ten years after Silvio died, Mark and his wife, Carrie McCarthy, found a knife in his bed, then a photo album, letters and papers left around his house in Wyoming, including a Silver Star kept in a coffee can. What Mark read in his grandfather's own handwriting was nothing like the prisoner of war stories he knew from TV. The discovery became Dear Sirs, the documentary Mark directed and Carrie produced.

In Episode 212 of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor talks with Mark and Carrie about leaving their jobs in Los Angeles to move into Silvio's house, and about biking across Germany and France as a crew of two to retrace his path. They explain why Silvio's experience went from a camp for Western prisoners, where he could write letters home, to a far worse camp for Soviet prisoners, and why a prisoner of war camp and a concentration camp are not the same thing.

They also talk about where the film found its audience after a festival run that included best documentary at the GI Film Festival in San Diego: community and impact screenings with veterans in the US and Europe. Carrie and Mark share how they worked with Footsteps Researchers and local archivists, how they gave each other honest feedback in the edit, and why Mark's composer started writing music before a frame was shot. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation.

In this episode, you’ll learn

• How a knife in his grandfather's bed led Mark Pedri to an archive of photos and letters about Silvio's time as a prisoner of war
• Why Mark and Carrie left their jobs and health insurance in Los Angeles and moved into Silvio's house in Wyoming to make the film
• How Carrie McCarthy went from researching flexible solar cells at USC to producing documentaries
• How two people shot a film across Germany and France on bikes, drone shots included, and why they kept their own struggles out of it
• Why community and impact screenings with veterans reached more of their audience than film festivals
• How prisoner of war camps differed from one another, and why they should not be confused with concentration camps
• How Footsteps Researchers, the National Archives and local town archivists filled the gaps in Silvio's story
• How to give an editor or composer critical but gentle feedback, and why Mark's composer wrote music before the picture

Questions and answers

What is the documentary Dear Sirs about?

Dear Sirs follows filmmaker Mark Pedri as he gets to know his grandfather, Silvio, who had been a prisoner of war in World War II but rarely talked about it. Ten years after Silvio's death, Mark found an archive of photos and letters in his grandfather's house in Wyoming. That discovery sent Mark across Europe on a bike with his wife and producer, Carrie McCarthy, to retrace Silvio's experience as a prisoner of war.

How did Mark Pedri and Carrie McCarthy start making Dear Sirs?

Mark Pedri and Carrie McCarthy were living in Los Angeles: Mark worked at a film institution helping others get projects off the ground, and Carrie was finishing her graduate research in chemistry at USC. Around the time both were ready for a change, they found a knife in the bed of Mark's grandfather. They left their full-time jobs and health insurance, gave the project a year, and moved into his grandfather's house in Wyoming to tell the story.

How did a two-person crew shoot Dear Sirs in Europe?

Mark Pedri and Carrie McCarthy chose to go without a crew, so they did not have to keep a fixed schedule, feed or fund a crew, and could slow the bike ride down when Mark needed time. Mark shot almost everything, including the drone shots, flying the drone from his bike. Carrie says that without call sheets and people to manage, they were free to stop and get a shot, and she tells new filmmakers they do not need a huge crew to make something great.

Where did Dear Sirs find its audience?

Dear Sirs won best documentary at the GI Film Festival in San Diego, a festival for films about and by people associated with the military. Carrie McCarthy says the film found its audience in community screenings, including an impact screening tour in Europe supported by the US embassies in France and Germany and screenings across the US. Mark Pedri says those screenings turned a three- or four-month festival run into a second year of community screenings.

How did Mark Pedri research his grandfather's prisoner of war history?

Mark Pedri and Carrie McCarthy first sorted what Silvio had left in his house into chronological order, then hit gaps that needed military records. They found Footsteps Researchers on Instagram, which pulled records from the National Archives, and Joey from the team helped them understand maps, after action reports and unit journals, then met them in Europe and helped find foxholes. Local historians and archivists in German and French towns also pulled books and translated them for the pair.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and a message of thanks to listeners for their support.
• 3:58 Introducing Mark & Carrie Pedri and their recent project, their BIOs and film awards for “Dear Sirs”.
• 7:32 Finding your audience and engagement, and veteran stories.
• 13:10 Building a bridge to connecting the civilian community to the military community. How did this story start?
• 20:37 A man’s life and WWII experiences through personal belongings.
• 25:19 Storytelling techniques to who was the crew and their personal experiences in doing all the things to capture the story.
• 31:10 Documenting WWII experiences and survivor’s guilt.
• 39:12 WWII veteran’s experiences and the importance of archival research and finding the right people to help.
• 48:35 Hills to climb: Personal and Filmmaking Hills, Editing and Feedback – Critical yet Gentleness and sensitivity is required
• 53:44 Documentary filmmaking similarities to Ken Burns and the use of music that leads the story telling.
• 55:57 DocuView Deja View

DocuView Deja View picks

DocuView Deja View picks: Carrie recommends Boys State (2020), which she did not expect to like so much. The film follows a group of young men who are split into two parties and build a government of their own, electing leaders over about a week. Carrie calls it a picture of society on a micro scale, admires the access the filmmakers got and the authenticity of the young people on camera, and notes it was directed and produced by another filmmaking couple, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine. Christian and Mark saved their picks for Part 2. Every guest pick is in one place.

About the guest

Mark Pedri is an expedition-based documentary filmmaker and writer from Rock Springs, Wyoming. Before Dear Sirs, he worked in Los Angeles at a film institution, helping other filmmakers get their projects off the ground. He wrote, shot, directed and edited Dear Sirs, the story of his grandfather Silvio.

Carrie McCarthy, PhD, is a scientist turned producer. She studied chemistry from high school on and went to graduate school at the University of Southern California, where she worked as a materials chemist researching flexible solar cells, and got her start in film as a scientific film consultant. Mark and Carrie are married and together run Burning Torch Productions, a boutique production company focused on character-driven stories from the backcountry and back roads of the world. Their films have played international festivals, national PBS and major streaming platforms.

About the film

Dear Sirs is Mark Pedri's personal journey to understand his grandfather, Silvio, who helped raise him. Ten years after Silvio's death, Mark found an archive of photos and letters in his house, and he and Carrie McCarthy set out by bike across Germany and France to examine Silvio's experience as a prisoner of war in World War II. Silvio served in the 95th Infantry Division, 377th regiment, and his last camp was at Sandbostel. The film was released in 2022, won best documentary at the GI Film Festival in San Diego, and has toured community and impact screenings in the US and Europe.

More from this series

The conversation continues in Part 2 of Dear Sirs with Mark Pedri and Carrie McCarthy, with more on the making of the film and DocuView Deja View picks from Mark and Christian.

About Documentary First

For people who make documentaries and people who love them. Discover how documentaries actually get made, paid for and seen with filmmaker Christian Taylor. Plus DocuView Deja View, where every guest recommends a documentary worth watching. One week, a long-form conversation about a guest's journey, projects and lessons; the next, The Deep Dive, Christian's short solo reflection on one idea from that conversation. Guests have included Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy. Christian directed the award-winning documentary The Girl Who Wore Freedom. Nearly 300 conversations. Listen Notes top 5% worldwide. 4.8 on Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week. Follow the show · About the podcast · Support the show on Patreon

Resources mentioned

• Dear Sirs (official site)
• Footsteps Researchers
• Boys State (2020, IMDb)

Full transcript

Introduction and a message of thanks to listeners for their support.

Christian Taylor: Welcome to Documentary First, an inside look at a documentary filmmaker's journey. However, now we are giving you an inside look into documentary filmmakers' journeys. I'm your host, Christian Taylor, and I am here this week alone. Jason Rugg is taking care of his grandmother. He is a beautiful grandson, and we just want to wish you, Jason, and your grandmother well. I'll be praying for your family, and I hope that your grandmother has a speedy recovery.

I would like to also take a few seconds before I begin to speak with you guys candidly for just a few minutes. If you're a listener, a longtime listener, you'll know that Jason Rugg and I, as well as Josh Lindsay, our former co-host, were on another podcast, and we've been on that podcast for many, many years. I had been there for about 12 years or 13 years almost, and over time things began to change. People were leaving. I decided to stay, and then there was an abrupt change just a couple of weeks ago. It shocked me and, I know, a lot of the listeners. And since that time, I've received an incredible amount of love and support from listeners all over the world who were sad to see me leave that podcast.

It was heartbreaking for me. It's been a very challenging couple of weeks dealing with that and figuring out where to go next. But a lot of our listeners came over to join our Patreon. So we were at 26 Patreon supporters; now we're at 119. They wanted to show their support for me, which just was an incredible blessing. Other people have started to listen to this podcast as a way to support and connect with me. So I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you so much and give you the warmest of welcomes.

I cannot tell you how much your support has meant to me. I have read notes all over the internet about how much you guys appreciated what I did on that other podcast, and it has just been such an incredible blessing, and it's really made me feel like those years that I invested on that podcast were truly worth it. My desire is to be a blessing to other people and to help people on their journeys, whether it's a faith journey or a filmmaking journey. And so it really blesses me to know that that was the case. So welcome to our podcast.

I really do hope that you will consider joining our Patreon if you haven't. Our company is at the point where if we want to continue going on at all, I have to grow our support in Patreon. So if you've been listening to the show and you find it helpful, inspiring or entertaining, would you please consider coming to support our Patreon? And if you were a listener on the other podcast and you're coming here to show your support, and if you'd like to hear more of the kind of things I shared on that podcast, I'd also encourage you to join the Patreon for more of the same. I'm going to be a little bit more open in sharing my journey, my faith journey as a filmmaker and an entrepreneur, behind the scenes on Patreon.

So joining at the $5 level or above will be a considerable help to us, and you'll not only be listening to the exciting new things on the horizon for me and my company, but you will be helping shape what comes next. So if you [words unclear] soon, you'll be able to join the Zoom party that I'm going to host the first week of December. So we would really love to have you join us. I would love to meet you. So please consider that, and thank you so much for coming here to listen.

Introducing Mark & Carrie Pedri and their recent project, their BIOs and film awards for “Dear Sirs”.

Christian: Now, enough of that. Today I'm super excited because I have some new guests that are coming here to talk about an incredible show, and I am just so excited to have them here. So Mark and Carrie Pedri, welcome to the show.

Mark Pedri: Hey, Christian.

Carrie McCarthy: Yeah, we're excited to be here.

Mark: Sounds like an exciting episode, too.

Christian: Yeah, it's gonna be great. I'm just delighted. I've been waiting to meet you for such a long time and have this conversation. We have so many things in common. So before we get into all of that, I'd like to introduce your film and read your bios, if you don't mind.

Mark: Sure.

Christian: All right. So this film is called Dear Sirs, and it is a very touching and personal journey of a grandson yearning and seeking to better know his grandfather. So here's the logline for Dear Sirs: Mark Pedri had never heard his grandfather Silvio's story. Ten years after his grandfather's death, Mark found an archive of photos and letters that changed the rest of his life. The discovery inspired Mark to journey across Europe on a bike with Carrie to examine his grandfather's experience as a prisoner of war in World War II, in an effort to understand the man who helped raise him.

It is such a, I mean, a profound personal story. If you watched The Girl Who Wore Freedom and you realize that was a personal story, I think this beats it hands down. It really was an incredible, intimate journey of what you learned of your grandfather. So I'm going to give your bios real quick, just so people know kind of your expertise and where you've been.

So Mark is an expedition-based documentary filmmaker and writer from Rock Springs, Wyoming, and his wife Carrie is a scientist turned producer who got her start working as a scientific film consultant while she worked as a materials chemist researcher at the University of Southern California. Together they run Burning Torch Productions, which is a boutique film production company that focuses on character-driven stories from the backcountry and the back roads of the world. Their films have played at international festivals, on national PBS and on major streaming platforms. So you will understand now why I have them here. I feel like we have so much to learn from these guys.

First of all, guys, please tell me about these awards that you have won, because I see them all over your poster. I just want to hear more about the success of Dear Sirs.

Mark: Wow. Well, thanks for the introduction. I think sometimes you need to remind yourself of the journey that you're on, because the day-to-day feels just like a lot of emails and deadlines. But it's been exciting, and I think telling the story was kind of, I guess, the honor of a lifetime for me, to be able to connect with my grandpa and bring his story from the drawers in his house that he had left behind to screens all over the world. And I think that's maybe what people recognized in it, and maybe some of the accolades and the awards, that's where it's coming from. It's people seeing a version of their own story in this.

And you're right, it is so personal, and you know firsthand how that personal element, first of all, it's the thing that makes you do the project to begin with. Without that, who knows what we'd be working on. But I think it's also the thing that brings people in. And those screenings, we've had a pretty good festival run, I think. You never know in the festival world where you're going to land, and I think if you claim to know, that shows how little you actually know. We submitted to a lot of festivals, so if we showed you the list of nos to the list of yeses, I think it's more of a story of endurance and...

Finding your audience and engagement, and veteran stories.

Carrie: Yeah, finding your audience. Finding your audience is huge. Not every film is a festival film, and I think that doesn't mean you shouldn't absolutely submit it around. You made the film for a reason, and it should be appreciated for that. But sometimes your audience isn't a film festival audience. And I would say we started off with a festival run, and we got a major award, best documentary at the GI Film Festival in San Diego, which was a huge honor. It's a film festival that are films about and by military, anyone associated with the military.

But then from there, that was sort of the end of our festival run. We had a huge impact screening tour, which included a couple of tours in Europe supported by the US embassies in France and Germany, and then also all across the US. And I think what we found is these community screenings were more where our audience was. And it was, you know, when you're in festivals, and like Mark said, you keep getting nos, you keep getting nos, and you get that one yes and it feels so great. But it felt easier, these community screenings. It felt like you can feel it, I think. And that was really rewarding as a filmmaker, I think.

Mark: I want to jump in real quick. And what we learned that was invaluable, that I think we'll take with every project, is film festivals exist because film moves people. People love going into the theater and experiencing this communal event and seeing something for the first time with others. But not everybody, as at film festivals, they kind of tend to attract a film crowd. And a lot of what Carrie is saying is there's so many more people out there that have that same love, and they're moved by art in the same way, but they're just not exposed to it. They don't live in Park City, Utah, or Toronto, Canada, or something like that.

So we kind of went out on this journey to find those audiences and bring the film to them, and we were just met with so much gratitude and connection that I don't think we ever would have been able to plan for that. So those screenings really kind of extended the lifespan of our film in a great way. It's gone from a three- or four-month festival tour to, I think we're going on our second year now of community screenings.

Christian: Yeah, it's amazing, because I saw you released your film in 2022. I'm sure there was a lot of festival stuff before that. And so, yeah, you are still kind of going. What's amazing to me is I hear you talk now, but also everything I've read on your website and that I've kind of dug around and found, it's so similar to my journey, especially in this element where we found our most success in going to tiny little audiences in towns with museums or veterans groups or things like that, where people care about the actual story, not just the filmmaking part of it. And it is such a niche audience with World War II films, I think. But you have to go and find that audience. So that is still going on for you, then, these impact screenings?

Mark: Yeah. And I think a big thing, too, that you mentioned there is the veteran community, which has been a big part of our audience, because every veteran has a story. Every veteran's family has a story. And a lot of times those stories don't get told, and there's a lot of, I guess, reasons why that may be. Sometimes there's trauma involved, and it's hard to figure out how to tell that story, or what parts of that story the veteran feels safe in sharing with those closest to them.

But also the stories that kind of get projected up into, like, the big screen, the big Saving Private Ryan, and [word unclear] ways that kind of paints society in a way that makes it feel like there's a very black-and-white version of a hero versus somebody that's not a hero. And I think that kind of is destructive to people that have lived through these experiences, because it's not so simple as it is in those movies. They're great movies. I go to see all of them. They're iconic films that definitely have a place in our life, but it's not really the voice of the people.

And like your film and our film, I think it's much closer to what people are feeling in their hearts and their homes. So when something like that comes to their town, they just feel seen and heard, and like I said, they see a version of themselves kind of unfolding on screen. And in a way, that's what we're all looking for when we go to the movies. We're trying to find these stories to believe in, to help guide us through something that we're struggling with in our own lives. And the closer that our experience can be, it comes back to representation. And that's why we need to have so many different stories being told: there's so many different people out there, and if all of a sudden your story is not being told, you kind of start to feel that you're pushed down and fall through the cracks in a lot of ways.

So, veterans, we can't have veterans feeling like they're falling through the cracks, because that's an incredibly dangerous place for them to be. And we've seen that in the past, there's been gaps in the health care and mental health care and things like that. So a lot of these impact screenings have been focused on not just sharing a story, but how can we mend these wounds and bring people together and help bring something into the community that helps people heal.

Building a bridge to connecting the civilian community to the military community. How did this story start?

Christian: Yeah, I think I saw it in your film. It's also in my film. I feel like they are a bridge that can connect the civilian community to the military community. Because I don't know if you saw the movie The Best Years of Our Lives by William Wyler. If you haven't, you absolutely have to. But it is about these three soldiers that come back. They kind of go their separate ways. They don't know how to talk to people. Their friends and family don't know how to communicate with them, and it's just this heartbreaking story of not understanding how to communicate, and people feeling isolated after a very traumatic thing.

And what your film demonstrates is that it is so important to talk and to share. And it's important for us to learn the questions to ask: what was your history, what can I learn? And it shouldn't be just about World War II. I think these films should inspire people to talk to their grandparents that have never been in a war, starting to ask just questions of who they are, so they do feel seen and understood, and so we are bonded to people that are older than us.

And I think you didn't get to do it while your grandfather was alive, but how beautiful now that you feel like you know him so much better, and you can share his story with the world. It was just, and I'm getting ahead of myself, we haven't even talked about your movie. So why don't you just, let's talk about it, and talk to me about how it started. It's just an amazing journey. So tell me about the film.

Mark: Sure. So I guess the beginning, there's two beginnings. The first beginning is Carrie and I are living in Los Angeles. I was working in the film industry, but not in the hands-on documentary day-to-day existence that I have now. It was more of working at a film institution, helping other people get their projects off the ground. So hearing a lot of pitches, helping give people the tools to make their dreams come true. And it was great, but I was kind of seeing my own stories slip by, just because there's only so many hours in the day. And Carrie was kind of in the depths of scientific research, which is...

Christian: Sounds intense.

Mark: Yeah.

Christian: Like, oh my goodness, sounds super intense.

Carrie: I think it sounds intense from the outside. On the inside, it's very similar to filmmaking, actually. It's a lot of the same skill set, which is, at first, when I transitioned to producing, I was very afraid because I'd never done it before. But once I saw sort of all the skills that I had developed, it was a fairly easy transition. Anyway.

Christian: Well, talk about what... We'll get back to him. I'm really interested in hearing, talk about what you did. Explain kind of what you were doing before you jumped into this filmmaking world.

Carrie: Sure, yeah. So I had been studying chemistry since high school, and my undergrad degree is in chemistry, and I went to grad school at USC to study renewable energy materials. So my focus was on flexible solar cells, that you could basically paint the material on a flexible substrate, like a sailboat sail or curtains, and then you could have solar cells in unique places like that. And so I was researching and traveling around to conferences and presenting, and I just got to the point where I was defending my thesis and looking at the jobs, and I was like, oof, I didn't want any of them. And it was...

Christian: Why? That's an interesting reason why.

Carrie: Yeah, I think when you're in the depths of research, as Mark says, you're so far from people. You're working on, like, the molecular level of a solar cell that may be in someone's house in 20 years. You're so far from the impact that you have. And I think I was just missing that connection of, like, immediacy with people, and I wanted to do something more connected with everyone else. And so, of course, we're going to go to filmmaking.

Christian: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. I think the thing was, Mark and I had been together for 10 years at the time, and this kind of, my defending my thesis and looking at these jobs I didn't want, coincided with him being ready to leave where he was at. What he was saying is, like, he was missing the filmmaking part of being in the industry. We kind of both had this moment together, and that's when we found the knife in Mark's grandfather's bed. It was all sort of, wow.

And so then we found all these pieces of the archive and everything, and Mark's like, this story is so unbelievable to me. And he just kept talking about it with his friends and people at work, and they were like, what are you going to do about it? And then at that point we were just like, let's just, I think we should just give it a year. Let's try it, let's see what we can do. And so it was very coincidental, all these things lining up, and felt very serendipitous, actually.

Mark: The thing you don't see in the film is, when we found the knife in the bed, we had both had full-time jobs, both had health insurance, all these things. We're living in Los Angeles, and then we decide to leave all of that behind, move back into my grandpa's house in Wyoming in order to tell the story. Both artistically, I felt like I needed to be here in order to really understand what was happening, and investigate, and truly grasp all of the stuff that he had left. But also financially. Things like this, a personal project, comes across your plate, there's not a line of financiers out the door waiting to write a check. If it was their grandpa, I'm sure they would love for us to make that film, but it's not, and you can't communicate to them that it represents something bigger until it's done. And that was definitely the case for us. So moving into the house was kind of an immersive way of telling a story, but I think it was also a necessary way.

Christian: Oh, and I think it was a beautiful way to tell the story, actually, because you did integrate the house and the things, so it felt so genuine and real, and like we were in the house with you. Again, we're kind of skipping ahead, because this film, I'd love to know the very first thing that you discovered where you thought, oh my goodness, I don't know my grandfather. He has this hidden history. We've got to figure this out. Was the knife the very first thing? But I mean, you had to think about something in order to go back and be there. How did that start?

A man’s life and WWII experiences through personal belongings.

Mark: Yeah, so I think the knife was the big catalyst, the thing that says, like, you need to look into this more. Because growing up, I had known that he was a POW, but in a very surface level. Don't ask questions, because the times we did, it resulted in him being very emotional and not being able to talk about that. So we also knew that there was this photo album that existed, and it was something that we weren't really, like, especially when he was alive, we wouldn't run up and start looking through it and asking him questions about it. It was kind of like a thing that you don't mess with.

But it was actually looking at those photos in detail after finding the knife and saying, okay, you need to look at this. You need to at least get an idea of who this guy was, because you based so much of who you are on him. So as soon as that photo album disappears, it's like a part of myself is no longer retrievable. So I think the biggest detail that caused me to be kind of lost in the desert, metaphorically, is looking at his journey as a prisoner of war and seeing that it was so much different than some of the pop culture references, the TV shows, some of the other documentaries about prisoners of war, some of the other stories that friends had told about their family.

Christian: It certainly wasn't Hogan's Heroes, that's for sure.

Mark: Yeah, it was very different. And I think we're going back to something that we were talking about earlier: we assume that all veteran stories are the same, and that couldn't be further from the truth. So we see a TV show about prisoners of war, and we just kind of think, like, oh yeah, my grandpa was there. I wonder if he was cooking the soup or playing catcher at the baseball game. And it's like, what I found in his own handwriting was so much different than that, and quite traumatic. And he was never somebody to talk about hard times that he had been through. He never showed that side of himself. So to see it in his own words just felt very vulnerable and emotional for me, to begin that conversation, even though at that point he had passed away 10 years ago.

Christian: Well, yeah. I mean, there was a treasure trove of stuff. You show in the film how, when you kind of move back in to live in his world and experience who he was, the home was left exactly like he left it, including with his shoes on the floor that he took off probably the night before he passed. And the things that you showed, you didn't say this necessarily, you did just show it: his whole life was there. You could learn a lot by going there and digging around the house. And I was amazed with what he kept. Where did you find those things that he kept?

Mark: It was all over. Interesting thing is that some of it was kept, like the photo album, obviously someone had put those into place. But some of the stuff was in an old coffee can with parts to things around the house. Like, that's where his dog tags were, and the Silver Star.

Carrie: And the Silver Star was just in the coffee can.

Mark: Yeah, the paperwork that went with it.

Carrie: And it almost was, Mark always says his grandfather wasn't a hoarder. He would throw things out. It wasn't like his house was full of stuff we had to sift through. There was a lot still left, but it felt like he was a bit curated. It wasn't that he kept everything. Which I think, sometimes when you're going through the house or the things left behind by someone, it's hard to decide what they meant to leave for you, or if it's just a bunch of stuff. But it felt like Silvio left all these things for some reason. Who knows? We do know he didn't talk about it when he was alive, so he must have known someone was going to find it. He didn't talk about it, but he also didn't want it to disappear, because otherwise he would have thrown things out with everything else that he had gotten rid of.

Storytelling techniques to who was the crew and their personal experiences in doing all the things to capture the story.

Christian: Yeah, yeah. Well, I really loved the storytelling devices that you used, and kind of the way that you told the story. You had an interesting storytelling technique. I thought it was fascinating how you used his desk to present your story. That was almost like this backdrop of the way you presented the story. It did seem to me that there were many more people involved than just the two of you. You had drone shots, there was just all sorts of different shots where you're like, how could the two of them just do those, cinematically? It was a beautiful film, I mean, from the very, very beginning. Talk to me about this shooting aspect, as well as the storytelling aspect. How in the heck did you pull all of that off?

Carrie: Yeah, don't want to burst your bubble, but it was just us two.

Christian: Wow.

Carrie: Yeah, so amazing. I think part of what makes our team, like, I think it's a superpower and sometimes a crutch, but we are very hands-on, and if we can do it ourselves, we'll do it ourselves. It's almost like we know each other's skill sets, and we trust what each other can do so well because we are life partners. So when we started thinking about how are we going to shoot this thing in Germany and France, should we have a crew follow us, should we have support, what do we need? And we just thought of the logistics of it, and we were just like, you know what, if we don't have a crew, then we don't have to stick to such a schedule. We don't have to feed the crew. We don't have to fund the crew. And so we considered both options.

And luckily we're both [word unclear] to begin with, so we were very confident that we could do the bike ride. And I think from a producing standpoint, it was just like, let's just keep it as simple as possible, partially because it makes it easier, and harder at the same time, but also because Mark himself was going through this process of getting to know his grandfather. He's going to be processing all this along the way, and we just weren't sure how much time that would take. We wanted to give ourselves space to stay a couple of extra days in a place, or if we needed to spend more time shooting somewhere, slow down the bike ride. So I think that's why we chose to go just the two of us.

So for the drone shots, if you look closely, you can see Mark on the bike. He's got the controller in his hands. And yeah, I think Mark's power behind the camera is pretty impressive when you know that he shot... I mean, I was handed the C camera a few times, but it's all Mark.

Christian: So you weren't shooting? I mean, seriously, you shot most all of it, Mark?

Mark: Yeah, unless I was on camera. Or even when I was on camera, with the drone. Yeah, we didn't have anybody. The only people that we had helping us in Europe were researchers who we met in a few of the towns, and that's it. Other than that, it was just us two.

Carrie: Yeah, or like somebody that would take us in and buy us dinner for the night or something like that.

Christian: But it is remarkable, especially the drone shots. I really would have to say they were beautiful, they were well done, and it really did make me feel like you guys were just riding along doing your thing, and someone else somewhere was controlling this drone. I'm just stunned to realize that that was just you.

Carrie: I think one thing for the filmmakers out there, and I think this is me coming from the outside into filmmaking later: you forget how much simpler things become when you don't have so many people to take care of and to tell what to do. So I think when you don't have to have a call sheet, when you don't have to think about where everyone's going to stay, it frees your mind up a lot. And I think in doing that, we were able to say, we're biking for a whole day, let's take some time and get a drone shot. And you don't have everything else on your mind, of like someone asking you, hey, when do we meet at this location, and blah, blah, blah, troubleshooting things. And I think as a new filmmaker, I think that's an excellent place to start. You don't need a huge crew to make something great.

Mark: For sure. I think it's a very universal thing, too, of how much is your filmmaking practice impeding the subject that you're documenting? And for us, having other people there, having a crew, it would have completely changed the experience that the subject was having. Similar to, I guess, Free Solo, to make a weird comparison. Alex Honnold didn't climb that mountain to be on camera, and that was a very clear boundary that he laid out at the beginning. He said, you can document it, but we need to be very careful about my goals as a climber versus your goals as a filmmaker. And in that case, they had to make some very clear decisions about how they were going to interact with him, and, long story short, they didn't have the mountain crawling with all these cinematographer ants in every little intimate moment that Alex was having on that mountain.

And for me, going through that journey, the camera was a tool for me to help understand what I was going through. It's always been there for me as a kid, ever since I got my first film camera. It's a way to digest the world emotionally. So what better way to make sense of this journey than documenting it firsthand with this thing that I've always had? So it was kind of a perfect storm of the subject is going through this very emotional experience to connect with their grandfather, and the way that they process that is by documenting it.

So yeah, the drone shots, the shots of pigeons flying off of a roof or something like that, or crows in a field, that was something that I never would have been able to direct had there been a camera. That was all a product of being there in the moment, feeling the different emotions of connecting with this person, and looking around and saying, okay, what am I feeling right now, and how do these things play into that?

Documenting WWII experiences and survivor’s guilt.

Christian: So yeah, I think that was something that I was thinking about during the movie as a filmmaker myself. I was realizing everything that was going on, and the fact that you were having an emotional experience. I've been in those same situations, and I was following my own great-uncle's footsteps. When you are in that situation, it is overwhelming emotionally to realize that they stood there, they saw this, what they lived through. There's no way... When I went to Germany and I showed people the castle that my great-uncle drew, they were in tears because they couldn't believe I'd come this far to find this castle, and that my relative had helped liberate their town. And so there is all of this emotion that is tied up in that.

But that wasn't the only thing going on for you. You were having, like, a cross-country bike trip. I mean, to think that you, and you didn't show, you didn't focus on the difficulty of this bike journey. You sort of integrated it in some of your shots. There was this, I thought, remarkable... clearly you had a bike problem. You went into a bike store, you had to get a part, but all you showed was walking in the bike store, getting the part, and your bike's right. And I just thought, wow, we're not really hearing that whole backstory, but that backstory of that journey seemed very hard to me. So you have this emotional journey that you're taking, the physical journey of the bikes, and then you've got this third brain, which is, we're going to be thinking critically about how to document all of this. That was a lot to juggle.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And I think the short answer to that is we made three different films. We could have cut together just the bike journey, and what prevented us from doing that is there was a risk in emphasizing our struggles too much, in a comparative way to what my grandfather or any of the prisoners and soldiers that were with him during that time. So while those things were a big deal in our lives, and we did document a lot of that, like the scene where the bike broke, it actually happened three different times. So that was a really big problem for us. But when it came down to telling the story, it just felt so trivial to be worrying about, oh, my wheel is squeaking and now it doesn't turn, whatever will I do? Oh, I could probably just get on a train or rent a car. I have all of the freedoms, and everything's at my fingertips. Whereas these prisoners 75 years ago were starving, freezing, sick. Their future was completely undetermined, and they were prisoners. They had no freedom.

So that kind of acted as a North Star, I guess, when we actually sat down and started editing the film. At any point, if it started to feel too much like an adventure for us, that was usually a sign of, we need to refocus back on Silvio's story. Except with one exception, where we do call to the fact that, like, we are on this adventure, and it's kind of amazing, and that's what we're going to remember, which is in total opposition to what my grandfather is remembering and how it changed his life. But I think that was a bit of the elephant in the room. We had to call attention to that.

Christian: Yeah, I thought that was remarkable. I think, Carrie, you said it, it was very insightful at the moment, which is: this is a horrible situation, we are freezing, it is so cold today. Not nearly as cold as it was when your grandfather was in a boxcar with hardly any clothes on, going the same distance. But you're freezing, and in a sense, no matter where you are in time, if you're freezing in that moment, you're freezing. And you're like, one day we're going to look back at this and it's going to be a beautiful moment. We're going to remember nostalgically what we did together. Right now, you didn't say this, but right now we're freezing our asses off, but one day this will be beautiful. So yes, you did call attention to it every now and then.

I had somebody say to me, when I was making The Girl Who Wore Freedom, and it was just this incredible, I felt like I was in a battle, with different people in our production and problems with this and that, and it was just so excruciating, not enough money, and I felt like every day I was fighting just to get through this thing that I decided to do in the beginning. And a very faith-filled woman said to me, "Christian, I was praying about this last night, and I realize that you are going through this so that you can really understand and empathize with the people that suffered and went through battle for real, so that you can tell their story." And in a sense, that's what I saw in your own story. You were suffering to a degree as you're trying to tell his story, and I think it gave you even more empathy, knowing that his situation was completely incomparable. And I listened to you tell it, going, how did anyone survive at all? It was awful.

Mark: Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that makes it so hard to talk about for the people that do experience it. There is this survivor guilt, and they've seen the day-to-day version of this experience, which is so much different than the historical account, or looking back, or the documented account. Because you think about when somebody talks about a traumatic experience, or going to war or serving, we think about it as a whole, but they experienced every minute of it, every day of it. And it was long. It wasn't just, oh, one day it was cold, or one day we crossed a river, and then the rest of my life was different. There's so many moments that are built into that.

And I think one of the things that was kind of personally, I guess, hard to grasp, but also in the film, it was maybe a technical thing that was hard to achieve, is the [word unclear]. Because even to this day, people go back to that camp in Sandbostel, family members, and they go there to memorialize the people that were lost there, but they also go back there to commemorate the happiest day of their life, which is crazy to me, because when I went there, it was the darkest place I've ever been. It just felt like so much darkness had happened here that you'll never be able to separate this place from that darkness. But then you see that the people that experienced it, there's this version where they talk about, I was free, and for the rest of my life I was free. And that's just something I could never wrap my head around, because I only see the trauma in that, and for them to go through the trauma and then see this light.

We tried to capture that in the animations, and then even the score, in a sense, where that begins the journey of my grandpa going home and returning back into this world that he had left and wasn't sure if it was still going to be there. He writes to his fiancée, not knowing if she had waited for him to come home. I mean, can you imagine that? Being a prisoner, surviving, and then writing this letter to your love, saying, I hope you still love me and that you'll take me back, even though after all I've been through, I still love you. There's no one emotion that describes that. And I think that's why I needed to go on this journey, because I don't think that I would have been able to understand it for myself or capture it in any way other than both the physical suffering along with these immense moments of gratitude and appreciation for what these people went through.

WWII veteran’s experiences and the importance of archival research and finding the right people to help.

Christian: Yeah. You're talking about the last prisoner of war camp that your grandfather was in. You do see it in the film. I think it's a beautiful thing that it kind of still partially exists, because you can go back, and you were able to go in and kind of see what it was all like. I have to say, I didn't realize how similar the prisoner of war experience was for the people that were taken prisoner by the Germans to the Holocaust experience. Now, you can't ever equate anything with what the Jews went through during that time, but they did treat these prisoners of war the same in the sense that they starved them, they didn't give them clothes, they shot and killed them if they weren't working, or they just threw their bodies out until they stacked up and had to be taken away. I mean, the images that you showed of the prisoner camp during that time were very similar to images that I had seen from different concentration camps. And so it does give you a sense of how horrible the experience your grandfather must have gone through.

Mark: Yeah. And that was something, too, that we've kind of encountered throughout the filmmaking process and after sharing the film. The prisoner of war experience is so complicated, because there were some camps, for officers, or in particular British and American prisoners, where they were treated humanely in terms of how the Geneva Convention decided that prisoners of war should be treated. So take that however you will. And then on the other end of the spectrum, just talking about prisoner of war camps, not concentration camps, there were the camps that housed Soviet prisoners. They did not treat them equally to what they treated prisoners from the West whatsoever. And that, I mean, that just kind of pulls back the layers of the horrors of war and how we dehumanize people and use things like ethnicity and religion as a wedge to say, well, these people can be treated this way, but these people have this other feature that allows us to completely disregard their rights.

And when we talk about it, I think we have to be careful in how we talk about it, because even in my grandpa's case, where he ended up in one of these Soviet prisoner of war camps, where the conditions were far, far worse than the camp he was supposed to be in, quote unquote...

Carrie: [Words unclear] That still was better than the concentration camp.

Mark: Yeah. And one of the things with his experience that I think is so much, it's just so complicated: he started in the camp for the Westerners, so he saw what the Geneva Convention had stated a prisoner of war camp should look like. He had the opportunity to write letters home. Then he was moved to this other camp, which was the opposite of that. People were starving, people were being forced to work, people were essentially being killed deliberately, not in the gas chamber sense, but they were being starved, or they're being worked to death, or shot, and then just... When you think it can't get worse, an actual concentration camp marches the prisoners, the political prisoners, civilian prisoners, and you see that it's just so complicated.

But one thing I wanted to point out is how we throw around that term concentration camp. And I think sometimes we just have to be careful. We've heard some people call prisoner of war camps concentration camps, and they're certainly not the same thing, and it was very, very rare that there was ever an intersection. And in fact, in our research, my grandpa wrote in one note that he was in a concentration camp, and we just knew that there was something there that wasn't quite lining up, because he wasn't in a concentration camp. But what had happened is that the camp he was in, like I said, merged with the concentration camp at the end of the war, which made him think that that's where he was, in fact. But they were very [word unclear] places.

Christian: I'm glad you clarified the difference. I think from watching it, you see similar images, but yes, they are very different. Let's talk about the archival. It was phenomenal. And at the end, there were so many similarities as I was watching this. When you said that he was in the 95th Infantry Division, the 377th regiment, I was like, oh my goodness, that is Ceo Bauer's regiment. And Ceo Bauer, of course, was in The Girl Who Wore Freedom. He was really the rock star of our film. He did live through the Battle of Metz, but was injured on November 8th, and that was his million-dollar ticket home. [Words unclear] He was more fortunate than your grandfather, unfortunately.

But also the other similarity was that you used the same researchers we did: Myra Miller, Joey Van Mason, Footsteps Researchers. We want to give them a shout-out. They're pretty phenomenal.

Carrie: Yeah, they were great. Joey drove down from, I believe he was in the Netherlands, still going to college at the time, and he helped find the foxholes that are in the film. He was with us on that shoot. And so the way we wound up working with them is, we had all the stuff that was in Silvio's house, and we tried to figure out what all of it was, put it into some kind of chronological order and make sense of it all. And we just got to a point where there were so many holes and so many questions, and we were like, I think we need to go to the National Archives and pull his records and get some clarity on this. But neither of us had ever been there before, and, you have a research background, but it's in science, so it was not so helpful at the National Archives.

And I think it was on Instagram that we found them. I think Mark sent a message over, and they were like, yeah, we can pull stuff for you and help you understand it. Joey spent time with us understanding maps, understanding what after action reports mean, what unit journals were, and finding Silvio's name in all these lists, and descriptions of what happened from the front lines. It was just phenomenal. And then when we said, we're coming to do the bike ride, Joey's like, yeah, I think I'm going to come, I'm going to meet you. And he was invaluable over there, so helpful. And it was such a treat to be able to be there with someone who has such a vast understanding of the greater picture of this history on the ground there. So yeah, Footsteps Researchers, shout-out.

Christian: I met Myra Miller and Joey Van Mason through Flo Plana. Flo Plana is in our film. He is a field guide in Normandy, but he is way more than that, and he and Joey partnered together on lots of then-and-now photos that you can see on Snafu Docs, or you can see them on World War II Veterans Memories, which is Flo Plana's Instagram page. But the exact same experience was true for me. They took me to the National Archives. They taught me how to get my research, you know, little certificate, and I was able to go in and put in requests for people. And then Joey and Flo Plana took me to find the foxholes of my great-uncle with the 84th Infantry Division. So we did the exact same thing with me, and standing in those foxholes, it was just mind-blowing to think that they could find the actual foxholes where they were.

So yeah, I'm so happy that you had the opportunity to work with them. And if you guys are listening to this podcast and you need some sort of researcher in Europe with anything having to do with World War II, footstepsresearchers.com is the place to go. So yeah, that's just phenomenal. I'm so glad that they were able to teach you so much, because I do see how impactful it was for you.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, the stuff we found in Silvio's house was enough to scaffold our story around, but the reports and everything that were in the military files really filled that in. And then by the time we were ready to go to Germany and France, we still had questions. We didn't really understand the final camp that Silvio was at. There were questions surrounding that. There were questions surrounding the hospital that he was in. And so something we really relied on were local archivists and historians in the towns that we went to. We called ahead and said, hey, do you think you could help clarify this? Because that stuff isn't online. You can't just Google it. So they were pulling books and translating them for us, because it was in German or French. And so we owe a lot to the local historians, which are, I don't know if it's the same in the US, but it feels like it's more common there. Every town had a local archive and an archivist, which saved our butts more than a few times.

Hills to climb: Personal and Filmmaking Hills, Editing and Feedback – Critical yet Gentleness and sensitivity is required

Christian: Well, they have a lot of history to archive, and they've been at it for a long time. So talk to me about the most difficult thing, or maybe three of the most difficult things, in making this film. What were the hills you had to climb?

Mark: Boy. Well, there's personal hills, and then I think there's the filmmaking perspective hills. I think personally, it was figuring out how to tell the story, and knowing that this guy was not just my grandpa. He was a father, a brother. He has a lot of other grandchildren who had significant experiences with him. So just trying to balance out how to tell this story, how to tell it in such a personal way, but not rule out the fact that it wasn't just him and I hanging out all the time. There was a lot more to his life. That was hard to balance. And I think being that close to your subject, and kind of a side subject of a film you're also editing, it's really kind of horrible. And that's where Carrie was a huge help, just having very honest and sometimes overly critical, brutal feedback. There were some tears cried, for all reasons: the weight of going on this journey, but then also coming home and figuring out how are we going to tell this story. I think a couple times we abandoned it, or at least I did.

Carrie: I think the other thing for the audience is that Mark, this was his grandfather. He went on the journey. He wrote, shot, directed, edited the film. He was just so in it that he would say, I have a scene, I'm going to show it to you, and it was such a big deal for him to show me. And coming from science, I'm very to the point, or I used to be. I've gotten better through the process, but I was just quite critical. And I think, putting that forward, any editor, you put your art that you've just created, you've cut together, and to get critical feedback is really tough. On top of that, it's your personal story. On top of that, you feel so much pressure and responsibility to tell the story in a way that is true for not only you, but all the other people in Silvio's life.

I think that relationship, at the beginning, I didn't realize how much Mark was putting himself out there with every new edit he had. And I think that, as a producer, that's something so delicate when you're working with a director or an editor, to understand how vulnerable it is when they have a new cut to show you. And giving critical yet gentle feedback is... because once it's broken, you can't fix it. And we've been on projects like that, where you're getting notes that just feel like they're too technical, and they're missing the entire emotional arc of everything, and you start to question, did they just watch this five minutes as they were driving to work? And once that's broken, you can't fix it. So thankfully, we didn't break anything in this film. We actually got married during the middle of it.

Christian: Oh my goodness. That, on top of everything else. Oh my goodness.

Mark: I wanted to get married in Metz, France, but Carrie said separate things a little bit.

Carrie: Yeah, yeah.

Christian: Her practical mind. I think that is such a great point in terms of how to work with an editor. I had this conversation with our composer, Jeff Kurtenacker, when I was kind of being overly critical about, I don't know, instruments he was going to use, or, anyway, he got very emotional and said, "I don't think I'm the filmmaker for you." And later, we joke and laugh about it now, but I didn't realize either how vulnerable people are when they create a piece of music or they edit something together. It is a part of who they are, and they're showing you something, even more so if it's a personal story like yours. So I think that's a great note to people.

Mark: Thank you. I mean, you can definitely overdirect, and I think that's not good. Like, even working with our composer, James, he brought so much to it that I wasn't able to articulate. And in retrospect, the worst things I would do would be, like, hand him a piece of music and say, how about something like this? And as soon as you do that, I mean, some filmmakers prefer to work that way, and maybe some composers, too, but you can get locked into that source music, and it just wasn't created for what you're trying to do. It's just something that kind of looked like something that might fit. But what James helped me realize early on, before we even shot a frame of footage, I mean, he was writing music before the picture...

Documentary filmmaking similarities to Ken Burns and the use of music that leads the story telling.

Christian: Wow, this is great. Then you're following Ken Burns's footsteps, because that was something I learned that he does when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. He lays down the music first. It's the first thing he has. So that's interesting.

Mark: I think it's invaluable, because the music is another language. It's like having a dialogue track. And if you're having that conversation with the composer early on, like James, he writes in music. He's writing this story in ways that I never could have given him any kind of source music that would be moderately close to. So in a sense, he wrote exactly what I needed, but maybe I didn't know that I wanted it right away.

Christian: Yeah. Well, I have a question for you. We're going to take a pause here for a second and come back. So now we're paused. We're sort of at our time, but I still have more questions, and we haven't done DocuView Deja View. And so I'm wondering if maybe we could wrap this one up and maybe start again, if you have time. If not, that's fine.

Mark: Sure, yeah.

Christian: You have time?

Carrie: Oh, it's right now?

Christian: Oh, okay.

Carrie: I thought, okay, another time. Yeah, sure.

Christian: How about, how much more time do you think? How much time do you have?

Mark: Let me look at our calendar real quickly. I'm fairly open. I could do at least another half hour or more.

Carrie: Yeah, I think we can do a half hour.

Christian: Okay, so let's shoot for that. I'm gonna have one of you do the DocuView Deja View, okay? And then your DocuView Deja View... We're gonna close, and then we'll start over. Who do you, do you want to go, or do you want me to go?

Mark: I think you should. You're the director.

Carrie: Oh no, we're both going to do it, right?

Christian: Oh, just one. You're both going to do it, but just one for this segment, and then one for the second.

Carrie: Yeah. Oh, oh, okay.

Christian: It's just who wants to go first.

Carrie: I guess I can go first.

Christian: Okay. All right, so now we're gonna jump back in, so just give me a second. All right, we are running out of time for this episode. It's been such a delightful conversation. I do still feel like I have a lot of questions to ask you about this, so I'm wondering if maybe you could come back again and we could do another short little segment. Would that be all right?

Mark: Yeah, sure. Let's keep it going.

Christian: Super.

DocuView Deja View

Christian: All right, before we go, we're going to jump into our segment, DocuView Deja View. All right, Carrie, here we are. Do you have one to recommend for us today?

Carrie: Yeah. This one I didn't expect I was gonna like so much, but it's Boys State, that came out in 2020.

Christian: I remember this. Yeah.

Carrie: And the idea of Boys State is, it's put on in, I think, every state. And through the film, you get to see these young boys trying on who they think they want to be. They have to create a government within themselves. They're randomly separated into two different parties, and they have to elect people, and at the end, I think it's one person gets to become the president, based on votes. And it's just such a beautiful picture of distilling our crazy society into a documentary that you can watch, how things happen so fast. I think they're only there for a week. It's phenomenal. The producing was just otherworldly, how they shot it. It was incredible to get that much access and authenticity from these young people.

And the other reason I like it is because it was directed and produced by another filmmaking couple, like Mark and myself. It was Jesse Moss and McBaine. And I just think it's a fun film. It's incredibly entertaining, but it's also just a phenomenal look at society on a micro scale, in a grain of sand.

Christian: Yeah, in a Petri dish, really. Awesome, thank you so much for sharing that. I'm going to reserve my DocuView Deja View recommendation for our next segment, where Mark will also give his. So we're going to wrap up here today. We thank you so much for your time. Really encourage everybody to see Dear Sirs, and also come back next week for the second part of our interview. So we're going to just wrap it up. We would love that you listen to us today. Thank you so much for being here and listening to our podcast. This is Documentary First, where we believe everybody has a story to tell, and you can be the one to tell it. Bye, everybody.