Filming Nikki Giovanni: The Directors of Going to Mars

Documentary First, Episode 220. Christian Taylor talks with Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, directors of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. 40 minutes. Released March 28, 2024.

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What do you do when the woman at the center of your documentary tells you, plainly, where she will not go?

For Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, the answer shaped their whole film. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is their portrait of the poet Nikki Giovanni, and Nikki was clear from the start that she would not relive her pain on camera. So they listened. As Joe says, every moment of pain she has lived through is written in a poem, and the poems became the road map.

In Episode 220 of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor talks with Joe and Michèle, the married directing duo behind Going to Mars and Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games, both shortlisted for the 96th Academy Awards. Neither started in film. Michèle was a human rights lawyer who wondered how much change she could really make through legal cases. Joe was a psychiatrist, the son of a preacher in Los Angeles, who realized his father's sermons about Bible characters were really stories about the people in the pews. He decided telling stories could have more impact than his practice.

They call themselves tonal filmmakers. Michèle describes a Black Atlantic aesthetic in their editing, polyrhythmic rather than simply rhythmic, where archival footage, new footage and Nikki's poetry are "in conversation with each other" instead of one illustrating another. They talk about American Promise, the film they made over 14 years following their son and his best friend through school, and Stateless, about anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic. And they explain why Nikki's clear boundaries turned out to be a gift, "much better than having to deal with passive aggressive yeses," as Michèle puts it.

In this episode, you'll learn

• Why Michèle left human rights law for documentary film
• How Joe's father's sermons taught him what a story can do
• Why Joe left psychiatry to make films
• What happened after American Promise reached families and educators
• What Joe means when he says they are tonal filmmakers
• What a Black Atlantic aesthetic looks like in the edit
• How they built the archival footage without Nikki's personal archive
• Why Joe says his training as a physician taught him to "shut up and listen"
• How they handled the ethics of not pushing a subject to relive trauma
• What making Slaying Goliath on cheap cameras taught them

Questions and answers

Who directed Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project?

Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, a married directing team, wrote and directed it. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2023, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary, and it was shortlisted for the 96th Academy Awards. HBO Documentary Films released it, and it debuted on HBO on January 8, 2024. Taraji P. Henson voices Nikki Giovanni's poetry.

How did the filmmakers handle Nikki Giovanni's refusal to talk about pain?

Joe Brewster says Nikki made it clear she would not go to painful places on camera, so he fell back on his training as a physician: "shut up and listen." She gave them the road map. Every moment of pain in her life is written in a poem, so the film tells those moments through her poetry. Michèle Stephenson says that clarity was a gift, and that it kept the film from becoming hagiography.

What archival footage is in Going to Mars?

Michèle Stephenson says Nikki did not give them access to her personal archive, so only a few family photographs appear. Their archival producer dug into collections of Black family footage from across the United States and beyond. The directors stitched it together to show celebration, joy, dance and family, so that Nikki's personal poetry would be felt as a collective experience, with the images in conversation with the poems.

Should a documentary push a subject to talk about trauma?

Joe Brewster asks what the ethical consideration is when a participant doesn't want to remember and doesn't want to be triggered. When a student asks Nikki in the film where she was when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, she won't answer. Joe says the team respected that, and learned from her work that every trauma in her life has an equal expression in her poetry, which the film uses instead.

What is American Promise about?

American Promise is a documentary by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson that follows their son and his best friend through New York's independent schools. Joe says they filmed the boys for 14 years. It won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, and Joe says the award that mattered most was the attention it got from Black families and educators across the country, and he says laws were written to address the discipline gap the film showed.

What is a Black Atlantic aesthetic in documentary editing?

Michèle Stephenson describes it as an editing style that is polyrhythmic rather than simply rhythmic. Archival imagery, newly shot footage and what is being said are in conversation with each other, rather than the archive serving as illustration or b-roll, so a larger meaning comes out of the combination. Joe Brewster adds that every culture has its own storytelling tradition, and that their work grew when they became more culturally specific.

Where can I watch Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project?

It streams on HBO Max, according to the film's HBO Max page.

Chapters

Times match the YouTube video.

• 0:00 Going to Mars Directors
• 1:35 From Human Rights Law to Film
• 3:42 A Psychiatrist Who Chose Stories
• 8:09 Two Oscar Shortlists
• 10:25 American Promise and Stateless
• 14:55 The Beauty in Nikki's Home
• 20:20 A Black Atlantic Aesthetic
• 22:43 When a Subject Sets Boundaries
• 27:42 The Poem About King's Death
• 30:57 Revealing Her Slowly
• 33:05 DocuView Deja View Picks

Watch the film

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project streams on HBO Max. Credits are in the HBO announcement.

DocuView Deja View picks: Michèle recommends I Called Him Morgan (2016), Kasper Collin's film about jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, told through the recorded voice of Helen Morgan, the woman who loved him and killed him. Its visual language for those audio tapes helped inspire Going to Mars. Joe recommends Making "Do the Right Thing" (1989), by St. Clair Bourne, who mentored him and Michèle early in their career, and Slaying Goliath (2008), their own early film following a team of fifth graders to a national basketball championship in Florida, which he says taught them more about filmmaking than any other. See every guest pick on the DocuView Deja View page.

About the guests

Joe Brewster is a psychiatrist and filmmaker. He earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School before turning to film. His fiction feature The Keeper (1996) premiered at Sundance and earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Joe on Wikipedia

Michèle Stephenson is a filmmaker and former human rights attorney who studied at McGill University and Columbia Law School. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her film Stateless was nominated for Best Feature Length Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Michèle on Wikipedia

Together they founded Rada Studio, which supports Black storytelling. Their films include Slaying Goliath (2008), American Promise (2013; Sundance Special Jury Prize), Stateless (2020), Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games (2023, ESPN 30 for 30; Tribeca premiere) and Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023).

About the film's subject: Nikki Giovanni died on December 9, 2024, at 81, later the same year this conversation was released.

Related conversations

More from Documentary First: another married directing team, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, on Leonardo da Vinci, and Phil Maher on why documentaries use home movies.

About Documentary First

Documentary First is a weekly podcast about the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them. Host Christian Taylor, director of the award-winning The Girl Who Wore Freedom, talks with filmmakers, distributors, entertainment lawyers, actors and more, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-timers, across nearly 300 conversations. Each week brings one of two formats: a long-form conversation with the people behind films for HBO, Netflix, PBS and independent film, or The Deep Dive, where Christian takes one insight from a recent conversation and follows it wherever it leads. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5% of all podcasts worldwide. New episodes every week.

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Full transcript

This transcript was made from the recording and lightly cleaned up. It may contain small errors.

Christian: Welcome to Documentary First, an inside look at a documentary filmmaker's journey. I'm your host and a documentary filmmaker myself, Christian Taylor. I'm typically joined by my co-host Jason Rugg, but today he is again looking after some of his family. So I'll be holding down the fort on my own and hopefully I'll do all right. I am so excited to introduce to you today a new film. Today we're talking about Going to Mars, the Nikki Giovanni Project. And I have with us the directing duo, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. This latest film is just unbelievably incredible. I watched it today. This film and their other film, Black Girls Play, the story of hand games, both of which have been shortlisted for the 96th Academy Awards. They are a married couple who have dedicated their creative lives to telling stories of the Black Dysphoria. Their collaboration led them to found Arata Studios, through which they further empower and support black storytelling, both Going to Mars, an HBO-length documentary that first premiered in Sundance in 2023 and Black Girls Play, an ESPN 30 for 30 short, which first premiered at Tribeca, offer a specific focus on black women. And today we have Jo and Michelle with us. I did not. do justice to your story or to your bios. So I'm gonna introduce each one of you, let you tell a little bit about yourselves, and then we'll dive into talking about this phenomenal film. So Michelle, I would like ladies to go first. So why don't you tell us a little bit about you and how you got involved in this crazy world of film.

Michèle Stephenson: Well, I did not go to film school. This is not my first career. It's after a few years of working in the field of human rights and law that I was able to do the shift to working and doing narrative building work around specifically documentary film. And it's really when I met Joe while I was in law school, he was in the middle of transitioning out of his profession. in psychiatry and I was figuring out what was I going to do around law and feeling a little bit disheartened about how much change or impact I could really make through working around legal issues and cases. I felt when I met Joe and became more immersed in what storytelling and the power of what it could do, I felt that my place both in terms of my own personal growth, as well as the idea of what kind of impact storytelling could have, that culture was really the place I wanted to be in. And so set forward together with Joe to sort of build this body of work that we have today that in some ways is not just multiple award-winning, but it also just spans a lot of different genres from fiction. to nonfiction, which is what we've done the most of, but also playing with form within the nonfiction space. And we've even done some virtual reality work and immersive and interactive work. All the time looking to see, you know, what is the best way we can sort of excavate our stories that kind of land and be provocative and make people sort of think about their place in the world.

Christian: Hmm, that's so beautiful how you kind of fell into this filmmaking journey naturally. But you certainly honed a lot of skills, I think, that made you a fantastic storyteller. Clearly, you just found another way to make your difference in the world. So, I can't wait to hear more, but let's hear what Joe has to say. Joe, apparently you didn't start off as a filmmaker either.

Joe Brewster: No, I started off as the son of my parents growing up in Los Angeles who migrated because they were concerned about their future in the South along with so many hundreds of thousands of families in South Central Los Angeles. But I grew up in Tinseltown. And so... It was movies that inspired me from, you know, the first moment I watched the television screen. And they still do today. I didn't know that as I proceeded on my journey to earn money, to become a physician. And I was sort of recruited into that, but always looking backwards at film and storytelling. What I didn't realize is how much storytelling is a part of the South and part of Black culture. My father was a preacher every day. He told a story. And then I realized at one point he's telling this story about biblical characters.

Christian: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Joe Brewster: But he's really talking about the people in the church. So he's taking Job or Saul or Paul, but he's talking about Jacobi in the front seat, who basically wasn't taking care of his family. And so I realized it was a skill. But more importantly, I realized the pageantry and the dramatic tension within the church is something that blessed me.

Christian: Hmm. Of course.

Joe Brewster: Now this is looking at hindsight, but I went up to medical school and during my residency, I stayed above a repertory theater in Montreal and I ended up going to movies. I probably saw every foreign film on video. They remember they had video cassettes. That was probably a couple of thousand.

Christian: Yes, I do.

Joe Brewster: And I just thought after practicing for a few years, the impact that I could have by telling stories like my father was much more significant than treating someone for the I and don't mean to minimize medicine, depression. And so I set out to learn that skill level. What I didn't know is that I was in love with the art, as well as how you tell the story, as well as the politics. And more importantly, I think you asked, I'm gonna tell you, is validating my truth. So what I was seeing on television was really not about me. And when I saw black characters, it wasn't somebody I recognized. Because the kind of things that we were dealing with day to day in Los Angeles, we're not wasn't allowed on television. The kind of agency that I would have liked to have seen black characters have was not common in the 60s. And so I asked.

Christian: That's an understatement, by the way. I just have to say that's a significant understatement for the 60s, but I don't mean to interrupt. Please keep going.

Joe Brewster: So fast forward, we tell stories about people we recognize. We tell histories that are unforgotten. We kind of see ourselves as historical archivists. And we love it.

Christian: You're good at it, clearly. And you have been recognized for this, not just because I'm saying that, but a lot of other people in our industry have found your work to be deserving. So why don't you let our listeners in on the secrets of kind of where you've been nominated, what awards you're up for right now, and talk to us about your award prospects.

Michèle Stephenson: Well, currently, you know, we come to going to Mars and Black Girls Play with four Emmy nominations. Joe was nominated for a Spirit Award for his first fiction film, Sundance Jury Prize. This is leading up to 2023 when our two other films. were released, you know, and a number of other, you know, festival recognitions throughout that. With Going to Mars, we won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. That was our debut, thank you. And we went on this kind of crazy ride in 2023, leading us to a Oscar campaign that brought us to the shortlist. And the film was also nominated for a Spirit Award.

Christian: Wow, congratulations.

Michèle Stephenson: And so Oscar shortlist and with Black Girls Play, similarly, we premiered at Tribeca where we won the best short documentary there, which qualified us for an Oscar campaign. And we were shortlisted for that as well. So it's...

Christian: So you guys are up for two Oscar Awards this season.

Michèle Stephenson: This season we were shortlisted for both. Both films were shortlisted, yes.

Christian: Yeah, that's just amazing. Congratulations for both of those things. That's a huge accomplishment in anyone's lifetime, much less having two at the same time. So we really do wish you all the best. Yeah?

Michèle Stephenson: Thank you.

Joe Brewster: Well, there are bigger accomplishments that I like to. And so, since we have some time, what I'm gonna say is that we certainly appreciated those nominations. We've won 20, 30 festivals over the years. But the award that we really love is

Christian: Please go, go.

Joe Brewster: for viewers of our community to see ourselves or viewers of other communities to see us the way we see ourselves. And so that is an honor. And even today filmmakers, the gatekeepers decide what kind of characters you can have in a film and what kind of subjects you can deal with. And we've been able to create that. and create work really on our terms. The minute that we basically create for the distributors, we create for awards, we basically lose the ability to create on our terms. So for example, we made a film about the raising of our son. It was called American Promise. We shot him and his best friend as they negotiated the private school, independent schools in New York. We followed them for 14 years. It also received a jury prize at Sundance. But what it did receive is attention of families, black families, educators all over the country and laws were being created. to address the issues that we saw in this film. That is black boys being punished at three to four times the rate of white children in Northern progressive schools for the same infraction. So that is a tremendous accomplishment. we produced a film looking at anti-blackness in the Dominican Republic. And that is an issue that probably few other people know about on the spot.

Christian: Did you see my eyes wrinkle? I'm like anti-blackness in Dominican Republic. What are you talking about? What does that even mean? Those words don't go together.

Joe Brewster: It does go together. And that's the reality of the world that we live in, that most of colonialism involved teaching people to dislike themselves. And that's how power was maintained in China, India, South America, and the United States. So we explore that.

Christian: What does that mean?

Joe Brewster: Michelle, you wanna?

Christian: Just last, sorry, just last week, we interviewed Alex Ivany, who has a film coming out where in Sierra Leone, these women there put bleaching cream on their skin because they want to be white. This is what you're talking about, correct? I get it, I see what you're saying.

Michèle Stephenson: There you go. Exactly, yep, the internalized self-hatred. And this has to do with the DR and its recognition of its own African ancestry and that sort of self-hatred being projected onto the Minnetons of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants there. And it sort of hits close to home because I'm originally from Haiti. I was born there and my father is Haitian. And so we felt compelled to cover some of what was going on down there. And that film was actually nominated for a Canadian Screen Award, which is the equivalent of the Canadian Academy Awards. So we were nominated back in 2020 with that film. It's called Stateless and it's available on Prime Video.

Christian: I just have chills honestly. I had not met you or heard of you until Impact24 sent me your information. And I feel completely embarrassed to say that. But I am so incredibly honored now to know about you and the work that you are doing. Because after I've seen Going to Mars, which I hope everyone will do, is it out yet? Has it been released yet?

Michèle Stephenson: Yes, we were picked up by HBO documentary films and it is streaming right now on a Max on HBO Max. So you can watch it on that platform.

Christian: Okay. Just a few minutes about that because we are really short on time today and there's just so much I want to unpack here. We will have to have you back. What I loved about this film, there's just so many things that I love that I'm not gonna have time to go into them all. But what was so creative was that it was cinematically beautiful. It was beautiful. Even in the messiness of Nikki's home, there was beauty. the way that things were shot there or placed there from the opening scenes in her garden, just the way that it was shot made me see the beauty in her home, in her messy cluttered, and I'm using air quotes, home. And that was, that summarizes her life. The whole film, as I watched this film, it was unveiling beauty. Beauty in her garden, beauty in her home, beauty in her head, beauty in her relationships. You know, what you guys did was shine a light on this beauty that I never knew existed. And it wasn't beauty that you would normally see. Like, you know, I wouldn't look at this woman necessarily, or this garden necessarily, or this home, and think, oh, that's beautiful. But when you... turn the glass and you look at through a new perspective, you see the beauty and that's what you did. You highlighted the beauty there for us and the way that you wove together the past and the present, you know, the voiceovers from her past, but also the ones today speaking in her past voice, how they just flowed together was beautiful. The editing, there was this one scene where, you know, she's talking about, you know, I can't remember exactly what she's talking about, but visually she has her head down and you're, you know, you see her looking and it melds into these ocean waves and so you go from her hair, which is looks like waves into the water or else it was vice versa, one or the other, but there was that kind of symmetry. Another auditory one was where she was talking about relationships being broken and difficult in families and there was this auditory warbling.

Joe Brewster: I'm out.

Christian: that you were hearing what she was describing. It was genius. I mean, you absolutely deserve to be shortlisted. And so I applaud you. I can't wait to see your other films. What do you want me to know about this film that I don't know?

Joe Brewster: Well, I'm going to just address a couple of things that you said before. You talk about the beauty. And beauty is really about the tone. So we are tonal filmmakers. And so that the tone of that image juxtaposed to another image of her hair or the water or a. The Bees is something that's intentional, and it's part of that storytelling tradition that we come from separately, and Michelle in Haiti and in Canada and me from Los Angeles. But that kind of skill level We used to attribute to European filmmakers, but we realized that every culture worldwide has a storytelling tradition, and we're trying to mine that. And that is not only in the visuals that you'll see when you go to Haiti, and these shacks that are beautifully painted in blue and red and bright yellow are all inspiring, but that is a tone that they set with their art. And that's what we're trying to do. And when we began to be more culturally specific in the kinds of tonal images and representations, our work grew exponentially.

Christian: Hmm, that's fascinating.

Michèle Stephenson: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know how much more I mean, I think the one thing for us, Joe's already mentioned is the intentionality behind every frame that you see and everything that you hear and how we weave in and out. Basically what we were trying to do is honor the poetry and artists that Nikki is. by challenging our own artistry and approach and honoring what she sees as the beauty of the black experience for us to sort of express that in how we filmed, in how we edited. And it goes back to what some call sort of, and that we're sort of excavating in our work, a black Atlantic aesthetic. which means for us, looking at an editing style that is polyrhythmic, right? Not necessarily just rhythmic, right? That there's something that we're doing here that's got a little twist to it. That between the archival imagery and what's shot and what's being said, there's a conversation. There's not just an illustration or a B-roll. that these two things are in conversation, or three things, the elements are in conversation with each other. So that somehow we come out with a larger meaning from that, but clearly from using archival material that's grounded in our cultural experiences. And so, yeah.

Christian: Yeah, you, so sorry to interrupt. I thought you were done. There's a little lag here. You talk about the archival. I was gonna mention, there was so much in there I had never seen before. Just some beautiful archival footage that was new to me. So talk to me about your archival, you know, deep dive. Where did you find your things? Was that challenging?

Michèle Stephenson: Well, it was a combination. We had a very strong archival producer. Her name is Hannah Shepard, who really sort of dug pretty deeply for us when we sort of explained things that we wanted. Nikki was not giving us access to her personal archive. There are only a few little photographs you see of her and her family. The rest is material from the Black Family Collective in the United States. some maybe even beyond that, the diaspora. And so we stitched those together with the intentionality of showing, celebration, joy, dance, family through that so that her poetry, however personal it was, would be felt visually like a collective experience. Some footage is familiar. But because we treat it differently, it's, you have to think a minute before you realize, oh, I've seen this before. It's because we're treating it differently and it's in conversation with the poetry. So yeah, yeah.

Christian: Very creative. Very creative. What was the most challenging thing about making this film? And I did wonder if Nikki might be one of those challenging things because she is a unique individual that cannot be put in a box clearly and has her own ideas about how things should be and she will not be moved. I think maybe Joe, you had asked her a question at one point in the film and she said, I know where you think you want me to go there, but I am not going to go there so you can think of another question. But it was a beautiful line. She says, I refuse to be unhappy about something that I can do nothing about. Which I thought was genius.

Joe Brewster: And people always mention that moment in the film. I can tell you that it was quite uncomfortable for me. And then I relied on my experience as a physician. Shut up and listen. And she gave us the roadmap to making this film. It would not become, it would not go through her recalling pain, but. every moment of pain that she's experienced in her life is written in a poem. And so we begin to excavate her poetry. And this is our revelation that many times when you're making a documentary, the boundaries are not clearly set, but they're equally as difficult to negotiate.

Christian: right? I saw that.

Joe Brewster: And so they just don't tell you, they don't wanna talk about that. And they mumble through it or don't show up on time or don't show up at all. And that is with every documentary. I am currently on a set where we broke a rule. And the rule is that we would talk without the camera for a significant period of time before we turned it on. So I broke that rule because I needed to shoot.

Christian: Mm-hmm. All right.

Joe Brewster: and she didn't talk until that time period went. So I didn't save anything by shooting early. And the point I'm trying to make is Nikki was not that difficult. But we elected to put that up front so that it... So it reveals more about her personality, which is pretty clear to everyone. She is her own person. Ah, and. I'm trying to be politically correct. I wouldn't mess with that. Ha ha ha.

Christian: Right? Well, you know...

Michèle Stephenson: Yeah, I think, you know, Joe speaking to the fact that every documentary has its own ecosystem of constraints, of pushback expressed in its own way. I have to say, I'm grateful for the clarity of the boundaries because what it does, because she's clear about where she's willing to go and not go, immediately it's a trigger for us to decide, well, how are we gonna be creative with this? How are we gonna go there? And she says it, it's all in her poetry. So we were able to find you know, the moments of pain that inform her work while also excavating the joy. I think one thing is the film is certainly for me, far from hagiography at the same time because her own willingness, hagiography means like when it's a representation that's a representation of idolatry where you're idolizing and the person does no wrong and it becomes sort of this PSA about that.

Christian: I don't even know what that word means. What does that word?

Michèle Stephenson: You know, there are many bio biography documentaries that land there, right? Where we only see what they let us see, you know? And so for it leaves a bit of a superficial sort of interpretation of that particular artist or that particular profile of the person. So with her clarity and with her poetry, we were able to go deep and we were able to move away from creating an idol, but really. sort of showing a complicated human being who has a lot, who we can learn from on so many levels. And so, it was really that clarity was actually a glyph. It's much better than having to deal with passive aggressive yeses, you know, no. In other situations.

Christian: Yeah, yeah, no, that's such a great way to put it. And Joe, I love how you said right away when you said, she wasn't gonna go there, we weren't gonna get the film by having her reveal all these sad things, we discovered it was in her poetry. The moment that popped into my head is when some student asked her to talk about where she was when Martin Luther King was assassinated and she refused to answer. And at first I was like, did she really not remember? There's no way she didn't remember. And then I was like, oh, maybe she does just want to talk about it right now. It doesn't want to go there. And then you, you hear the poem and you're like, oh, of course she remembers. And of course she was upset. And of course, I mean, it sounds like at that moment, she felt like there was going to be a war right at the end of that poem. And what it meant was in that moment, you were not going to make her go there and be sad.

Joe Brewster: Now I am not sure she remembers.

Christian: Oh, because of her. We're not gonna, no spoilers. No spoilers.

Michèle Stephenson: Yeah, right, right. No spoilers. But ultimately...

Joe Brewster: I'm not sure she remembers. She certainly remembered enough to write that poem. But there's a bigger issue that we haven't discussed. We want her to remember, but what is the ethical consideration that we have to have when a when a participant doesn't want to remember. They don't want to be triggered. And so we are worried about triggering people. She has said clearly, this is my trigger. And whether she purposely agrees to forget that her idol was murdered on March 4th. I'm sorry.

Michèle Stephenson: April 4th.

Christian: April 4th, 1968.

Joe Brewster: or she just refuses to, or she lies to me. It doesn't matter. She, it is not something that she wants to experience in her life. And we respect that. More importantly, we learn from her and her work that every time there's a trauma, there's an equal portion.

Michèle Stephenson: poetic expression, expression in her poetry. And she couldn't say it better than what she said it and then how she said it in her poem, which is why she's a poet. It's the thing is like, it's the poetry that gives us the message. She could say it straight to us, but it could never be as eloquent or deep or layered as the poetry addressing the same issue or emotion.

Joe Brewster: No, but there's...

Christian: So true.

Joe Brewster: But we also took that poem and took it to a different level. What you see as the poem is expressed, or a lot of things, you see other people sharing their sentiments, some white, some black. You see love. You see expressions of hostility. We were able to share a more complex message in response to the death. of Martin Luther King, and therein lies the skill level of complicating character and images.

Christian: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you another thing that I really particularly loved about this film is I'm such a curious person, which makes me a good interviewer because I'm desperately curious about people and things. And so from the moment that this film started and she was talking and I was like, who is that? Who is that? Why don't I know her? What is she saying? What does this mean? And so... From the beginning, I had all of these questions about who this woman was that was talking, and you guys were not gonna tell me upfront. You just were not gonna do it. But slowly over time, throughout the whole movie, all the way till the end, you were still revealing things about who this woman was, and I loved that in the end that you drew it out like that and you didn't feed it to me all in one giant bite. That was beautiful the way you did that.

Michèle Stephenson: Thank you.

Joe Brewster: Well, thank you, but everyone doesn't appreciate that. Some people wanna be spoon fed, but they shouldn't watch our films.

Christian: Yeah, well. That's true. There are other films they can watch, but I think people will be challenged with all of their senses by watching your films, visually, auditorily. I think their soul will be moved. I think their brain will be challenged. I think that they will grow as humans. I think they will walk away with questions. I walked away with questions about things that I didn't even know why there were things to ask. So, and this is just one film of yours that I have seen. So.

Michèle Stephenson: Thank you.

Christian: I'm sure that's probably true for others. We are getting to where we need to close pretty soon and we need to do two things. One, we are gonna do a segment at the end for our Patreon subscribers. So if you guys wanna hear more from Joe and Michelle, please make sure you hop on over to Patreon, sign up, join us, and you'll hear a little bit more from them. And then we're going to do everybody's favorite segment called DakiVu Deja Vu. All right, you guys, this is where you get a chance to share your favorite documentaries. And I'm sure you have a pocketful and you can share other people's works or you can share your own. I'm not even gonna share any today, so let them rip. Michelle, we're gonna start with you.

Michèle Stephenson: Thank you. Okay, well, the one, I mean, I have many, so it's very hard to select, but one that's been at the top of my mind more recently because of some work we're doing, and it really sort of challenges the form, but it's really a beautiful film called, I Called Him Morgan by the Swedish director, Caspar Collins. And it follows the life of the... musician, Lee Morgan, through the eyes of the woman who was his lover but who was also his murderer. So it's beautifully poetic, and I don't want to say too much, but he was a famous musician from the mid-60s who was a contemporary of John Coltrane. And yeah, his tragic death is sort of revisited on multiple levels through her voice, her audio tape voice.

Christian: And what is your favorite thing about that film? What is it?

Michèle Stephenson: I think for me, and it sort of inspired us with going to Mars to a certain extent, is the visual representation. Like, what were they gonna do with these audio tapes they had of her recounting what happened? And they found this beautiful language of New York City, some of which was from back in the day and some of which was shot today, current day, but with a feel of the past. So you didn't tell what was present or what was past. And it was very sort of evocative. So... That was beautiful. But also I think hearing a female voice from back in the day, she did her time and then was released, was also a fascinating perspective on that time. So yeah, I called him Morgan.

Christian: Interesting. All right. Thank you. All right, Joe, you're up.

Joe Brewster: Well, you're making it tough on me.

Christian: I'm gonna give you more than one, Joe. In fact, you can talk about and share as many as you want. Listen, preach it, brother.

Joe Brewster: Okay, well, I love a film that's gonna be hard to see. It's called The Making of Do the Right Thing. It was made by a filmmaker by the name of Sinclair Bourne. He was our mentor early on in our career, but he had an eye for... looking at reality and bringing nuance and another point of view. And so he is, you're going to ask me, well, what is it about that film? It was about Sinclair Bourne, who basically never wavered in his commitment to the form, to the art and to a message which was not always

Christian: I am.

Joe Brewster: accepted and not adherent to orthodoxy. So that was one film, but I think, we made a few documentaries before our 14 year documentary, American Promise, but we made a film that I like to say that we made, you know, with tape and glue. It was called, uh, slaying a liar.

Christian: it's gonna be good. Slaying Goliath.

Joe Brewster: And you could probably find that somewhere just by typing it and putting the name.

Michèle Stephenson: It's available on demand on Amazon Prime.

Christian: Yeah, we'll look it up for sure.

Joe Brewster: It is a story of follows. 11, 12 fifth graders as they attempt to win the national championship for fifth graders in basketball in Florida. So we, we follow them on a bus and I call it the journey.

Christian: How much fun is that? It kind of sounds like a nightmare. I've had four boys. Four is enough.

Joe Brewster: It is a nightmare. But the point is that we were learning. We use prosumer cameras and sometimes just cameras that cost $200 at the local store. And we chronicle something as kind of special because it was really not about the kids. was also about the families and what their expectations were for this sport. One of the kids is our own son, so who's got a cameo or two, but I think really it taught us a lot about filmmaking, like when do you intervene? How do you cut these dramatic scenes? You know, what are the ethics of shooting these kids and their families? I think that probably taught us more about filmmaking than any film we made. People love that film, but no one picked it up. But what happened is became a sort of like a cult film and it's been seen as much as any other work. that we did and probably made it for a hundred thousand bucks.

Christian: That's amazing. Well, you guys, time has been too short. Thank you so much for just your generosity of spirit. Thank you for making this incredible film and letting us get to know you just a little bit. I do hope that you will come back and we'll look forward to seeing you in just a few minutes in a Patreon conversation just for our Patreon subscribers. So everybody, thank you so much for listening to Documentary First where we believe everybody has a story to tell and you can be the one to tell it. Bye everybody.

Joe Brewster: Bye-bye.

Michèle Stephenson: Bye.