There's a whole genre of films about filmmaking, and a lot of them are documentaries. Elliot is a new addition to the canon. What happens when two no-budget documentarians team up to make a film about two no-budget martial arts filmmakers? Not what you might expect. We talked with Matthew Bauckman and Jaret Belliveau about the making of the film.

Documentary: How did you come to make Elliot?

Matthew Bauckman & Jaret Belliveau: We first found out about Elliot after reading several newspaper articles about him and Linda Lum. Elliot was promoting himself as an accomplished martial artist and award-winning filmmaker who wanted to become Canada's first action hero. When we watched the trailer for Elliot and Linda's first movie, They Killed My Cat, we immediately rushed out to rent their first two action movies. We had recently decided to co-direct a documentary project based in Atlantic Canada after working collaboratively on Jaret's first feature documentary film, and we had a strong intuition that this could be a fascinating story about two passionate low-budget filmmakers. There was an obvious disconnect between all the glowing reviews of their movies and the quality in which they were made. Upon meeting Elliot and Linda we found out that they were working on a new movie called Blood Fight. At this point we decided to follow them onto their set, where we met their friend Blake Zwicker, a self-proclaimed method actor, and several other passionate crew members who were all trying to realize their dreams. After a short time of being on their set, we realized that things in Elliot's world were not as they seemed, and we set out to discover what this story was really all about.

D: The crime fiction writer Jim Thompson famously said, "There are 32 ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem."  Did you have this taped over you desk as you put together the film?

MB & JB: No, we didn't, but perhaps it would have saved us time if we had. In Elliot's world plot twists are commonplace, so it was really about having the patience to let the story find its own natural conclusion.

D: In terms of themes, ideas concerning truth and trust are at the center of this tale. Can you talk about these ideas in relation to storytelling, and a filmmaker's relationship with his/her subject?

MB & JB: With everyone's hopes genuinely pinned on Blood Fight's success, we knew the only way to give a fair and honest portrayal of these larger-than-life characters was to film in an objective, cinema vérité style. We tried to limit our influence over our subjects, and this is reflected in the way we have captured the seemingly mundane moments of their lives, which to us are usually the most honest and revealing. Capturing these moments demands a great deal of trust from our subjects, and the way we entered their lives was through compassion and empathy. As filmmakers we related to their struggles. As documentarians, getting to the truth of any situation is of great importance to us, and it becomes very tricky when your subject is not entirely truthful. There seemed to be something in Elliot driving him to delude himself and everyone around him, and our goal was not to give any answers but to present questions about how we all lie to ourselves.

D: There's a long history of films about filmmaking. Did you have a model in mind as you set forth, or did you simply start filming to see what you would find?

MB & JB: We are both huge fans of American Movie, which is an incredible film about a passionate amateur filmmaker, so we were aware of the obvious parallels but we did not use that movie or any other as a template, really. We definitely set out with a clear trajectory in mind, which, of course, quickly goes out the window when making this type of film. What we were unaware of in the beginning was the dramatic shift our film was going to take from comedy to drama as all of the conflicts in Elliot's life came to a head.

D: What did  you learn about filmmaking, and yourselves, as you moved forward on this film?

MB & JB: First off, it is not always the best idea to edit your own movie. Having shot the movie ourselves and being involved in these characters' lives for so long, it took a long time for us to get a reasonably objective view of the story again. There is a great peril of getting pulled too far into your story as a result of being involved in your subjects' lives so much, and we certainly found ourselves deep into Elliot's world. Luckily, we had the privilege of working with a very talented producer and editor who was able to give us fresh eyes on our project; it's true what they say: "In filmmaking you are only as good as your team."

D: If you had to do it all over again, is there anything you might have done differently?

MB & JB: I suppose we would have kept more of a distance from our subjects, which is easy to say looking back but difficult when you place yourself in the middle of other people's lives. Getting any money up front would definitely have made this process a lot smoother for our personal lives. Not having to edit the movie in Jaret's dining room and not having to borrow several of our friends' cameras may have made for less tense times.

D: Any other thoughts you want to share about the process of making the film?

MB & JB: Through the process of making this film, we had constantly questioned and reassessed the validity of what it was that we were doing. In a way, we weren't certain if we were seeing our own movie through rose-colored glasses like Elliot. Strangely enough, what kept us going was the cast of Blood Fight and their unwavering dedication to their dreams.

Elliot won the Jury Award for Documentary Feature at Slamdance.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premiered at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

Like many sports documentarians, Allan Luebke looked to Steve James' Hoop Dreams for inspiration when he set out to make Glena, a film about a women's mixed martial arts fighter.  He then expanded the scope of his influences, and dug deep to pull together a character-driven vérité doc that brings the audience into the fighter's world.  It's a story about staying balanced when one gets pummeled by life.

Documentary: How did you come to tell this story?

Allan Luebke: By total accident. I was producing a talk show for a small independent television channel in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge, and I was researching potential guests. Our college intern heard that a female cage fighter worked at the Oregon Veteran's Home nearby. We checked it out online, sent Glena an email, and met with her in person soon after. I wasn't necessarily a fan of mixed martial arts—I knew what it was but had never really watched it—but the story of a single mother in her 30s trying to become a pro fighter was certainly intriguing. We booked her for the show, and she was one of the best guests we'd ever had.

D: Did you have an idea of where the film would go when you started, and if so did the story move in the way you expected?

AL: Glena started as a short film meant to just fill a few months while I was unemployed. I planned to follow Glena only for about four weeks leading up to her fifth amateur fight, and hadn't the slightest thought of making a feature-length film. But after filming was completed, people started asking about a feature film. To be perfectly honest, I don't remember when the switch flipped and how I decided to extend it, but I do remember starting to ponder how to build a feature-length narrative that viewers could stay interested in. Short films can be more experimental with their storytelling, but features have to be tightly woven stories with character development and emotional arcs if the audience is expected to invest up to two hours watching.

D: You are clearly comfortable behind the camera. What films or filmmakers did you look to for inspiration as you set out on this journey, in terms of style, storytelling or subject matter?

AL: Yes, a lot of movies. I'm a big fan of finding ideas in other movies and incorporating them into my own project, then over time refining them into something all my own. Visually, I wanted to make a vérité documentary because it seemed challenging and because I just love how in-the-moment those stories feel. Initially Hoop Dreams was my Bible from a storytelling and visual perspective. I also watched the documentaries Stevie, Murderball, Buck and Racing Dreams quite a bit. But after filming ended and editing began, I started watching fewer documentaries and more fictional narratives. I wanted Glena to be as compelling as a documentary but as entertaining as a movie you'd see in the theater. The Fighter, Rocky, The Wrestler and Warrior—which are all movies about boxing or MMA—were major sources of influence. Watching Tom McCarthy's Win Win was a nightly event for a while. The documentaries The Queen of Versailles and Undefeated helped me work through several structural issues.

D: There are a lot of different themes that kind of weave in and out of the film:  dedication, communication, relationships, poverty, family. Oddly, gender wasn't a very major theme. How did you handle the different themes?.

AL: I think what audiences will find surprising about Glena is that it doesn't have an agenda. The movie isn't about gender, and it doesn't advocate for mixed martial arts. It's just about a woman you come to deeply care about. You want to see how her journey ends. My favorite stories focus on the characters, not the issues, and that's the kind of movie I tried to make.

D: When you make a doc about a fighter, or any sports story, you're at the mercy of the results. That must have made the process both harrowing and exciting.

AL: While filming Glena, we always worked with three different outlines: what is likely to happen, what's unlikely to happen and what we want to happen. There were a couple times when we thought that it'd be helpful for the story if Glena won or lost a certain fight because then we could explore some themes that intrigued us, but ultimately the story that happened was better than we could have written. As a storyteller, you have to allow the story to unfold naturally but also be hyper-aware of every nuance so that you can be ready to follow those threads. When making a documentary where you're at the mercy of the results, you've got to have your storytelling skills as sharp as possible because you're going to be doing a lot of writing to mold the story into a proper narrative. One of the great things about filmmaking is that there are thousands of other movies to use as study guides, and we regularly referred to ten different movies that helped us understand how to tell our own story.

D: When you make a doc about somebody who struggles as much as Glena, it must be emotionally and intellectually difficult to move forward at times. As a filmmaker how do you balance out the need to keep some distance with the desire to put down the camera and do what you can to help the subject out?

AL: Glena went through some pretty tough times, but that's also what makes her story so good. If we as filmmakers had intervened, then Glena's story would have lost some of its power. Luckily for us, Glena understood how unique her situation was, and she encouraged us to roll the camera during those difficult moments. One morning I was planning to make the 90-minute drive to her town for some filming, but she called me early and said, "Something happened to my leg and I can barely walk. I don't know if I can even fight this weekend. My doctor is coming in on his day off. You should get here." Glena's life was pretty chaotic for those nine months of filming, but her willingness to let us be present with cameras is what made this movie possible. This movie unfolds entirely in front of the camera, so everything the viewer sees was the first time it happened to Glena, which makes for a uniquely intimate experience.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premiered at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

When Chris Furbee picked up a camera to document his mother's struggle with Huntington's Disease, he used it as a tool to understand not only her struggle, but his own as well. Eighteen years later, with the help of his editor, Herbert Bennett, he's crafted Huntington's Dance, the kind of naked and honest film that gives all of us insight into coping with long-term illness. He was gracious enough to take some time out to talk with us about the film.

Documentary: Your film feels very aware of and conversant with the history of documentary, yet it doesn't feel formal. At the beginning of the film, you seem to be either in film school or working at a camera house. Tell us about your film background prior to starting on this film.

Chris Furbee: I got started in film via a friend of mine who was working on a movie called The Money Tree 1989-1992. I did grip and dolly grip work. Through that movie I got a job at Adolph Gassers Inc. in San Francisco, where I worked as a rental tech for eight years in the lighting and grip department. I also ran the Chapman Leonard rental house in San Leandro for a year. I was very much into being a grip, gaffer, dolly grip and crane operator. I got out of feature film work years ago, but I kept shooting for my film.

D: Eighteen years is a long time to work on a film, yet the length of shooting and focusing on the ideas gives it a great breadth. Did you always think it would be such a long-term project?

CF: When I first started filming, I was thinking that I wanted the film to end after I did my test results in the movie. I did not think at that time that it would take me 18 years to make, but I feel the film is much stronger as a result.

D: While I appreciated the parts of the film that focused on the illness, I think the most beautiful part was the dance. Can you talk about how shooting the scenes of your mother moving through the house, and working with that footage many years later?

CF: It was extremely hard for me to shoot that footage. Obviously it was disturbing to me to see my mom that way, but I knew it had to be done so I could help educate people as to what Huntington's Disease is. It is depressing sometimes to watch it; it's like reliving my worst memory of my mom all over again. I tried to edit the film myself, but it was just too difficult. Herbert Bennett, who is an amazing editor, has been on board for most of the 18 years of filming.

D: Did the camera start to become a tool that you used not only to deal with your emotions, but also as a way to buffer them? One of the strongest moments of the film for me is the turning point; the relationship between you, the camera, and the audience is intense. It's both fraught and not fraught because of the nature of storytelling. That must have been a very difficult issue and scene to deal with in the editing, as well as the shooting.

CF: The camera was my confidant and my therapist because I could say anything to it and I didn't hold back anything. My family in West Virginia doesn't talk about Huntington's; I felt frustrated. Having the camera and being able to go out to my studio was powerful. It helped me not only through my filmmaker's eye, but also for me as a person. There were times when I had to force myself to shoot footage. I would look at it and think, Nobody's going to want to watch this. I promised myself to shoot all the time, and I thought, When I get back in six months, if I don't like it I can throw out the tapes, but I have to shoot a lot while I'm here.

D: Did that help you keep your sanity in that difficult situation?

CF: There were times when I would get so frustrated with what was going on there. I couldn't explode at my mom but I could go out to my studio with the camera and say what I wanted—scream, curse, get it out of my system and then deal with my mom in a less intense way.

D: The nature of filmmaking is such that you can't understand a situation when you're in it....

CF: Definitely. One of the things that I am thankful for is by its taking so long it gave me the opportunity to look back and think about how I might do things differently—be it my personal life or family or with friends.

I watched some of the older footage with my mom in it, and I wish I hadn't been as reactive at the time. I was reacting to her and not to the disease. I learned how not to do things. I learned how to be more compassionate. It's very helpful for my work that I do now.

When I first started shooting I didn't know what I was going to do with the footage. Back then, I got a call from my Aunt Linda, who lived across the street from my mom and checked on her all the time, but my mom got paranoid and delusional about my aunt and she locked the door and wouldn't let her in. So I got a camera and took it there with no idea what was going to happen. I set up a studio for myself in her garage and I put up the camera and I would go out to talk to it whenever I needed to. I also went around and shot stuff when my mom was aware that I was filming her and also sometimes when she wasn't aware that I was filming her. If I had to talk to my mom, I had to figure out where to put the camera. Some stuff didn't turn out well, but a lot did.

Huntington's Dance won a Jury Special Mention for Most Compelling Personal Journey at Slamdance.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premiered at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

In viewing all of the documentaries that are in competition at Slamdance, I found a wealth of styles, tones and subjects. Glena and Sometimes I Dream I'm Flying were the most observational. However, while the title character, Glena, often talks to the filmmakers, the ballet dancer at the heart of Sometimes I Dream I'm Flying floats through the film with almost zero awareness of the camera, giving it perhaps the most "cinematic" feel of all of the films. I spoke briefly with the director/producer Aneta Popiel-Machnicka about her film and her process.

Documentary: How did you come to be involved in this film?

Aneta Popiel-Machnicka: The idea to make this film came to me a long time ago. As a child, when I was perhaps 9 years old, I heard about a very young prima ballerina who, the day before her premiere, went out of the house in slippers to take out the trash  and she slipped so badly she sprained her ankle. She was so ambitious and stubborn that she hid the contusion from everyone, and the next day she danced as the lead ballerina in the premiere, despite the pain. And that was her last performance. After the show she was taken to hospital. She'd done so much damage to her ankle that even after a lengthy rehabilitation, she couldn't ever return to her dancing. And that had been the beginning of a great career. One step and one bad decision destroyed her life. Her entire life before had been dedicated to hard work, and all for nothing. I've held this story in my mind ever since.

When I met our heroine for this film, I became very interested in her motivations, her independence, spending a lot of the time far from the family, and her very strong character. Not in my darkest dreams did I imagine that she would also suffer a similar, dreadful contusion. That was really quite overwhelming.    

D: It's rare to find a film this observational any more. Did you have any films in mind as a model for how to proceed stylistically?

APM: I can't imagine making this film any other way. Any interview, any conversation—even a very frank and open one—can destroy the intimacy of a situation while filming. This film had to be, if you like, "observational." And it was possible for a couple of reasons; first, we had plenty of time to make the film—several years, in fact;  secondly, Weronika was always so involved in her work that she didn't see us, and the camera didn't bother her; and thirdly, there was the timing and sensitivity of Michal, responsible for the camera, patiently waiting for the right moment to shoot.

I don't want to tell the viewers directly what's happening to my heroine. I believe in the viewer's ability to draw his own conclusions from the film about her life, even her internal life. She says very little in the film. While we were shooting the rehabilitation scene, Weronika opened up tremendously and I knew immediately that that would be included. We had some very deep discussions about how she was feeling and what she thought about her life. I chose just one such discussion, which I believe says everything.

After the really serious contusion she was very down and lonely, but at the same I had never seen her so strong. For 10 months she spent hours on demanding exercises and rehabilitation so she could return to her dancing. Any one else would have remained an invalid after such a contusion. She worked. She succeeded.  Today she's dancing solo parts and getting better and better at what she does. She's a wonderful, unique and very modest girl.   

D: One of the more powerful moments is when the dancer reflects on whether or not she would do it all again if given the opportunity. Was this one of those moments when you were filming that you knew the scene would go into the film?

APM: During the filming I was most moved by tremendous solitude of our heroine , the ballet dancer.

Looking at her daily struggles with her body, weaknesses and fears, I realized how all the people that we call artists are reliant on themselves, the power of their mind, talent and character. No one can replace them in their own work; they have to make choices on their own and face the audience.

Creating art means loneliness; in case of dance, also solitude under the pressure of one careless step, which can ruin your whole effort.

Sometimes I Dream I'm Flying won the Blackmagic Design Cinematography Award at Slamdance.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premiered at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

Editor's Note: Vanishing Pearls opens in theaters April 18 in New York and Los Angeles through AFFRM.This article was originally published in conjunction with the film's premiere at Slamdance in January.

Despite growing up in Louisiana, filmmaker Nailah Jefferson knew little about the communities of fishermen who worked the coastline bringing in the catch that made the state famous for seafood.  When the 2010 BP oil spill began to hit the shore, she didn't grab her camera, but when she saw that the media had gone away and the real problems were just starting, she jumped right in and made Vanishing Pearls.

Documentary: How did you get connected to this story?

Nailah Jefferson: I was born and raised in New Orleans. When the BP oil spill occurred, I remember watching the news and at that time, reporters were saying that there was an explosion, crew members were missing, but that the well was stable and no oil was leaking. Later, we would learn that those crew members had perished and the "stable well" would go on to leak more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Weeks passed and I followed the news closely, but I didn't have a desire to pick up a camera and make a film until I ran into Telley Madina, an old family friend.

At the time, Telley was working as executive director of the Louisiana Oystermen Association. He told me about the community of Pointe à la Hache, their fears of the spreading oil spill, and of his father-in-law, Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association. That weekend, I visited Pointe à la Hache for the very first time with just a flip cam in tow. Once I arrived I was captivated. The water, the landscape, the people—all were ravishing. 

Byron and I talked briefly about the history—that those fishing families had been fishing Gulf waters for over a century—and just how big of a threat the BP oil spill and subsequent clean-up efforts were to his community.  I wondered how I could not have known a place like this existed. I've always thought my city was this cultural jewel, because of the traditions—our food being a big part of that. I mean, the seafood New Orleans boasts about comes from communities like Pointe à la Hache. I was embarrassed by my ignorance, and also saddened that I was just being introduced to this place as it was on its way to vanishing. I knew we had to tell their story—if not to help save them, then to at least let the world know a place like this once existed.

D: There seems to be a trend, and I think it's a positive one, of mixing the political, historical and persona in documentary form. How difficult was it to balance these different threads in this complex tale?

NJ: It wasn't as hard as you may think. In Louisiana, the fishing industry is very political. When I interviewed Ronnie Duplessis, he made the comment that he volunteered to serve his country in Vietnam, came home to make an honest living as a fisherman, and, as he put it,  "The biggest spoke in his wheels has been the government." That's a very telling statement from a proud veteran. So, this industry that is very tied to nature and seems to be so far removed from urban city centers and political fare is quite political. That is so for a couple of reasons, but the most overwhelming is money. Seafood is big business in Louisiana, so it is political whether these fishermen like it or not. Once offshore oil and gas drilling began in the early 1900s, and these two industries began sharing the waters,  it became even more political and has been ever since. So, in Vanishing Pearls, there weren't really threads I had to weave together; it's just the fabric of the story.  

D: What role do you see documentary filmmakers playing in the new world of media, where stories move so quickly, and the media is stretched so thin?

NJ: Documentary filmmakers can continue to carry the torch in a sense. I see the two worlds working together, where the media brings issues to the public's attention, but documentaries see them through.  There is much more freedom in the documentary world to tell full, truthful stories.  We don't have to bend to the pressures of splashy headlines and daily ratings, like the media does.

 We can keep stories alive, like the effects of the BP oil spill on Gulf Coast communities, and see them through to the end. Because this particular story is no longer in the news and images of oil no longer inundate our TV screens, many think it's over; recovery has occurred and the Gulf is back to normal.  That's not true. I believe it is my responsibility to convey that to the public...perhaps until it is true.

D: Can you tell me anything else about the film that you want people to know?

NJ: I want people to know that Gulf Coast recovery is an ongoing story and that things have not gotten better for the fisherfolk of Pointe à la Hache; in fact, they've gotten worse.  Because of these circumstances, we want Vanishing Pearls to be more than a film, but rather, the springboard for a movement to help save these communities.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premiered at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

In the winter of 2012 a community theatre in Birmingham, Alabama mounted an original drag musical, Skanks in a One Horse Town. Skanks follows the actors and creators from rehearsal through performance, at work, at their homes, and with their families. The cast of amateur performers bond to form a family of sorts while creating an unconventional show in religion- and football-obsessed Alabama.

Documentary: How did this film come to be? 

David McMahon: I saw a production of an earlier Billy Ray Brewton original play called We Three Queens a few years before Skanks came to be, and I was struck by how hilarious and irreverent it was. A friend suggested that I follow the making of one of his shows, and when I checked with Billy Ray they were just about to begin rehearsals on Skanks in a One Horse Town, their first original musical. I got very lucky with the timing, so I jumped in.

D: What in your background made you particularly suited to tell this story?

DM: I live in New York, but I grew up in Birmingham and still spend a great deal of time there. I'm fascinated by the city and its traumatic past and its contradictions. I used to be an actor, and I did community theater in Birmingham through my adolescence. I'm grateful for the safe, open-minded world that community theater provided me when I was young. I tried to enter into the process without an agenda, but in some way I guess I wanted to pay tribute to that experience in my youth. And I'm also a huge Alabama football fan! 

D: Did you have other documentaries-or narratives-in mind  as you started the film, and did that change over production and post-production processes?

DM: My editor, Brendan Reed, my director of photography, Cameron Cardwell, and I looked especially at some of the DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus films: Moon Over Broadway and Company: Original Cast Album. Brendan and I were lucky enough to see Jane at Film Forum last winter and to hear Pennebaker and Albert Maysles speak, which was great. I also told my DP to check out Gimme Shelter and a few other concert films for the look of the film. 

Both Spellbound and a film called Sounds Like Teen Spirit, about the junior version of the Eurovision contest, were inspiring in their ability to humanize the characters circling around an event, which is something that we wanted to do with the Skanks cast.

And of course Waiting for Guffman, which I love, was on our minds. As we edited Skanks it became clear that we were in some way trying to defy the Guffman-esque expectations people have of community theater. 

D: Was there anything about the story that surprised you along the way or did things roll along as expected?

DM: What surprised me the most was the strong community that the people in the play had built, and the similarity of their stories. Many of the performers were from conservative or evangelical families and the theater provided them a safe, supportive place that wasn't always available to them in the church.

At the same time I was surprised by the conflict that some of those families were experiencing. I think it is easy to dehumanize people that think differently from you. But when I talked to Gail Keith, Chuck Duck's mother, I was struck by her torment, her genuine pain over her sons' homosexuality and its conflict with her religious beliefs. 

I was also surprised at how funny the people were. I have hours that we had to cut that are a riot.  

D: Did you know the characters before you started shooting? 

DM: I knew Billy Ray. We had worked together at Birmingham Shout, which is the LGBT film festival in Birmingham. A few of the others I had seen in plays around town, but I did not know them. But they were all wonderfully open to me and my crew, and we since have become friends. Several of the Skanks, so to speak, will attend the premiere at Slamdance. 

D: Do you think that your film will lead to Skanks on Broadway?

DM: How I wish! Skanks in a One Horse Town is perhaps a little too out there for Broadway, but I think it would flourish Off-Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway. The play itself was anarchy, and a delight. 

D: What else can you share about the production?

DM: I tried to use as much local talent as I could. The crew across the board was Birmingham-based, as is Flannery Hooks, who is a character in Skanks and composed the original music for the film. I was pumped to be able to find such a depth of talent in Birmingham. A special thanks should go to Alan Oxman, one of our producers. Alan gave us great feedback on the film and really helped us to sharpen it.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premiered at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

If You Build It, the latest film from Patrick Creadon, is a departure of sorts from his previous works, I.O.U.S.A. and Wordplay. Whereas Wordplay takes as its main character a passion, in the form of crossword puzzles, and features a number of high-profile figures—President Bill Clinton, filmmaker Ken Burns and pundit Jon Stewart among them—to articulate this passion, and I.O.U.S.A addresses a national crisis (the debt) and enlists the services of two Baedekers to help us understand the magnitude of this issue, If You Build It is a decidedly smaller film, with arguably larger ambitions.

The film takes us to a small town in rural North Carolina, where designers/activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller relocate, at the request of the school superintendant, to introduce their innovative means of education to local high school students. Despite resistance from the school board to help fund their initiative, Pilloton and Miller get to work, and over the course of a year, they take ten students through an intensive design-and-build curriculum whose intent is empowerment, transformation and ownership. By the end of the year, the students have built a farmers market for their community—and more so, have come away with a sense of the power of a progressive educational model.

Creadon and producer Christine O'Malley discovered Pilloton and Miller through television writer/ producer Neal Baer, who had recommended Pilloton's book, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, to them. When Baer learned that Pilloton and Miller had been offered a chance to put her theory into practice in North Carolina, he thought that documenting a year in the life of this teaching experiment would be a great story for Creadon and O'Malley to follow. "I'm a gigantic fan of This Old House," Creadon says. "We felt this was This Old House meets The Breakfast Club. I just loved the idea of teaching young people how things worked and then giving them an opportunity to take that knowledge and plug it into their community and build something the town has always needed. Our only concern was, What if everything goes according to plan? What if there's no conflict to the story? Well that wasn't a problem at all. The first day we got there, all hell broke loose."

Pilloton and Miller may have had the blessing of the school superintendent, but the school board wasn't so willing to embrace change, let alone pay the couple a salary; they survived on grants and credit. "The school board looked at what Matt and Emily were trying to do and thought these kids are not going to be able to handle this," Creadon explains. "This is college level, if not graduate school level, stuff. You're teaching it to kids in a very poor town in an underperforming school district, and they were being thrown a very sophisticated, very challenging curriculum. That's a large reason the school board pulled their funding: ‘This is just going to be a waste of everyone's time, so let's pull that class and put the kids back into the computer labs and just drill information into them like we do for the rest of classes.'"

With Creadon and his crew on the scene to document this initial tension, one would think that Bertie County was getting a double-dose of interlopers. And for both filmmakers and teachers, it took a while to build a sense of trust.

"I think when you're around two really great teachers, that doesn't take a long time," Creadon notes.  "After a few weeks the kids realized, ‘Matt and Emily are really committed to us, and what they're teaching us is really cool.' As far as our team, on every trip to North Carolina, I traveled there with one other person. When I'm shooting, I am the only person in the room because I shoot all my own stuff, and I don't use an audio person. I usually put a lav on one person in the room, then I have a wide angle lens on my camera with a very good mic on top of it, so I'm right next to where the action is. I've been shooting in that style for a very long time;  I'm just very sensitive to trying to fit in."

To facilitate the filmmaking process and help achieve access and trust with the students, Creadon gave cameras to the students so that they could document their process as well. "We did that for two reasons," he explains. "One, we wanted to take away some of the mystery of cameras and shooting and let them understand that their footage is every bit as valuable to the story as our footage. The other reason we did that was from a practical standpoint: We were in North Carolina about one week out of every month, but if something was going to be happening and we knew we weren't able to be there, we would have one of the kids shoot it for us. Putting the cameras into the hands of your subjects is something we've never done before, but we're in a moment in time where that makes a lot of sense: Cameras are very inexpensive, and we wanted the kids to feel ownership of their own story, just as Matt and Emily wanted the kids to feel ownership of the project they were going to build."

"I'm a filmmaker and I'm going to be spending a lot of time with these kids," Creadon continues. "What can I teach them that they might also be able to use later in their life? If you teach them how to tell a story with a camera, that's a pretty important skill set. I did take some time to show the kids how to make good frame and how to ask questions; their footage turned out to be incredibly valuable for us. The movie is a product of this theory that Matt and Emily had about design and building and being able to take ownership over those things. That shouldn't be a one-way street; it should be a two-way conversation."

While the idea of collaborative filmmaking took root in the late '90s and early 2000s with such documentary projects as Senior Year, American High and Chain Camera, with cameras and content outlets so ubiquitous now, being in front of or behind the camera is practically the default mode. "Unlike any project I've done before, for If You Build It, there's not a sense of, ‘OK, everything we're going to do is going to be on camera, and then we'll turn it off and everyone can take a breath.' The kids just ended up being who they are, whether cameras were rolling or not. We really didn't see a difference  between the way they reacted on camera versus off. I've been shooting long enough to know that that's not always the case; in fact, that's rare. But with this story, because we spent so much time with them and earned their trust, the camera disappeared and I was just another teacher or classmate."

Creadon wasn't entirely alone in the shooting process: George Desort is credited as the director of photography. "This is the first time we worked with another shooter," Creadon explains. "We felt that the passage of time was an important character in the film. With any sort of new educational model or curriculum, you're never going to see overnight change. We wanted to try to capture the passage of time in the movie, so we hired George Desort to do all that really beautiful time-lapse photography. We also really pulled back quite a bit on motion graphics in part because we didn't want a professional graphic designer's work to overshadow the creative work that the kids were doing.  But the timelapse photography could almost be what our motion graphic has done in previous works."

Most of the funding for If You Build It came in around the time of the film's world premiere at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The Kendeda Fund, for example, whose main area of interest is education, is underwriting a tour of the film to 30 cities. If You Build It premiered January 10 in New York and makes its Los Angeles premiere January 24, with subsequent runs in cities across the US through March 23 (For a complete list of the screenings, click here.).

"The release of this film is much more independent than the releases of the other films that we've done," says Creadon. "But I think it's going to be as effective. We've cast a really wide net for partners—architecture groups, education groups, schools, universities, public interest design groups, etc. We have dozens of partners around the country who have adopted the movie, and they're helping us. I'm dieing to see what kind of audiences we reach. There's nothing better than to walk into a theater have the lights go down and your movie plays. To me that's the most rewarding part of all of this."

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.

Editor's Note: As the doc world braces for the annual pilgrimage to Park City, we at documentary.org will be spotlighting some of the films that will be premiering at Sundance and Slamdance. Filmmaker Michael Galinsky, a longtime contributor to Documentary magazine, whose film Who Took Johnny will be screening at Slamdance, has interviewed a plethora of the Park City Class of 2014, and we'll be posting these interviews over the next ten days.

Here's an interview with Theo Love and Trenton Waterson, whose Little Hope Was Arson premieres January 17 at Slamdance.

When Theo Love and Trenton Waterson set out to collaborate on a film about a string of church fires in East Texas, they knew that the film would turn on ideas related to faith. We talked to them about faith and Little Hope Was Arson.

Documentary: How did you come to be involved with Little Hope Was Arson?

Trenton Waterson: Theo Love and I had mutually respected each other as short filmmakers at the time when we came across this story that had been published in the Texas Monthly magazine. Theo and I crossed paths not just as mutually aggressive, ambitious filmmakers but also as filmmakers with faith-based backgrounds. We instantly connected with this story's themes and layers, and we knew that this was a film that would shake audiences of faith, or of no faith.

It was the perfect story for Theo and me to collaborate on for our venture into feature-length storytelling.

D: What was your process in terms of gaining access to the story, and when did you start your work on it?

TW: This was a process! We know there'd be a road ahead of figuring out the story rights and, more importantly, gaining the trust of the locals in East Texas who might've considered us "Hollywood wackos," for all we knew.

We wanted to approach gaining access to the story in a way that relayed our sincere intentions as filmmakers not to exploit this story (from any perspective)—rather, to tell this story through the perspectives of all involved, even though conflicting faiths, world views and opinions are evident throughout the film.

To gain access to the story, we initially reached out to Christy McAllister [the sister of one of the arsonists]; it just felt right to do. As anyone who has seen the film can tell you, Christy was stuck between a rock and a hard place in the film. Our hope was, if we could talk with her and earn her trust, she would help us connect with the families of those involved, in addition to the law and firefighters. Our first conversation with Christy turned into a three-hour phone call! We quickly bonded with her, and we were lucky to earn her trust.

Our research trip was early spring 2012, and Christy helped us meet all the right folks in order to set up our interviews and filming. Filming took place in April 2012.

D: Did you have a cinematic model in mind when you set out to make the film?

Theo Love: I was heavily inspired by the great documentary The Thin Blue Line, even though we didn't have the budget to do the re-creations that Morris did with his film. I loved the fact that through traditional talking-head interviews, he created a huge sense of suspense. I wanted to give our story that same feeling. In many ways our budget restrictions dictated our stylistic approach, as we only had 10 days to shoot the entire film. We returned to Los Angeles with only 29 hours of interviews which, compared to other documentaries, is quite low.  

D: What was the process of structuring your film?

TL: Because our initial intentions were to create a screenplay based on the story, our documentary was inspired by traditional narrative structure. There were three main components to this story: the crime/investigation, the churches and the arsonists. At that time, the State of Texas was not allowing us to interview the arsonists in prison, so we were left with a difficult task of linking these three angles together without our main characters present. About halfway through post-production we started to see a through-line emerge in Christy McAllister, who surprisingly had a huge part to play in the actual investigation. We had always been fascinated by her story, but when we realized that she was the key to unlock the story, it was a big breakthrough in the edit bay!

D: If you set out with a plan of action, did that plan change as you got into editing, or did you script it out in advance?

TL: Our first idea was to tell a story of church arson from the perspective of the one lighting the match, but due to a lot of red tape, we didn't have access to the arsonist. At the time this was heartbreaking to me, but I soon realized that this limitation forced me to learn more about the churches themselves. I grew up in a very religious environment as the son of lifelong missionaries in Southeast Asia, and I have always struggled with western Christianity's obsession with large church buildings. I have to admit that my first reaction towards these burned churches was more judgmental than sympathetic. But once I began to sit with the church members and hear their stories, my perspective changed. While I still have many strong opinions about pop church culture, I tried to create a film that reflects their complexities instead of just another over-simplified portrayal of faith. Ironically, it was because of the completion of this draft of the film that the State of Texas reconsidered our request and allowed us to interview the arsonists in prison. In many ways, their voice is presented as an epilogue to the story.  

D: When James Ellis [a Youth Minister to the arsonists] said, "Getting slapped in the face by your hypocrisy hurts like hell," what did you think?

TW: Yeah... such a sweet, sober moment in the film...

James Ellis is an incredibly honest, sincere and vulnerable man. We hadn't initially planned to interview James, and it was a chance meeting that we could sit with him and hear his perspective.

The way that these arson fires changed James' life is phenomenal, and it's a brave moment in the film when James' is willing to humble himself in this way, noting his own hypocrisy hurt so much. When you go into shooting a film, especially a documentary, your footage is always bound to surprise you, but we surely hadn't prepared for any of the local pastors to be so honest and dig so deep into their hearts as James did for us with his interviews.

It's James' openness and vulnerability that ultimately supported most of the themes and questions Theo and I hoped to raise through producing this film. We are grateful to him for his honesty.

TL: In many ways, James is the only character in the film who truly changes. His perspective on ministry and his life's purpose was radically altered by the fires, and you can see it in his eyes and through quotes like this. Hypocrisy is a word that is often thrown around in conversation about religion, but what is truly inspiring about James is his humility in turning the word on himself. It's a lesson I think we can all learn from, especially those of us who call ourselves Christians.  

 Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premieres January 17 at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

Editor's Note: As the doc world braces for the annual pilgrimage to Park City, we at documentary.org will be spotlighting some of the films that will be premiering at Sundance and Slamdance. Filmmaker Michael Galinsky, a longtime contributor to Documentary magazine, whose film Who Took Johnny will be screening at Slamdance, has interviewed a plethora of the Park City Class of 2014, and we'll be posting these interviews over the next ten days.

Here 's an interview with Jesse Moss, whose The Overnighters, premieres January 17 at the Sundance Film Festival.

Filmmaker Jesse Moss has a long history of making subtle but challenging documentaries.  His brings his most recent film, The Overnighters, about a pastor in North Dakota, struggling to shelter an influx of people who have moved to the state, desperate for work. We recently talked about this complex tale of "faith, redemption, community and betrayal."

Documentary: How did you come to make this film?

Jesse Moss: I originally went up to North Dakota for a television network. That project fizzled. But the place astounded me. The scale of transformation in the small town of Williston, North Dakota was extraordinary, and I felt like I was touching a live wire that arcs back through American history to mythic American boomtowns like Deadwood and Dodge City. When I met Pastor Jay and some of the men sleeping in the church, I knew I had to start filming, but I had no idea where the story would take me.

D: How long was the production process? How many trips did you take to North Dakota?

JM: I made 16 trips to Williston over two years. Each trip was between five and eight days, so roughly 80 days of production. For the first six months of production, I slept in Pastor Jay's Church, largely out of necessity: All the hotel rooms in town were booked solid by oil companies. I worked alone in the field, as producer, director, cameraman and sound recordist, which accounts for the intimacy of the film.   

D: Did you have a sense of where your film was going as you shot it, or did it start to really come together as you went through the footage?

JM: I had some sense that a story was emerging around Pastor Jay's dedication to helping The Overnighters and the emerging conflict with his congregation, his neighbors and the local newspaper about that decision. But I spent a lot of time filming secondary characters, some of whom are not included in the final film. There were a lot of characters to juggle, and finding the right balance, and allowing Pastor Jay's story to drive the film forward required a lot of experimentation in the edit room. I will say that hugely important themes emerged only very late in the edit, and that scenes and characters I was sure would be in the final film were dropped. Credit goes to my editor, Jeff Gilbert, who brings a sharp eye for story and dramatic construction, a real rigor to his method and a willingness to tolerate my wild and ornery impulses.

D: Like any doc, you start to get close to the characters, and you want to treat them with respect.  At a certain point you must have struggled with how to handle the main characters' comfort with the camera and how that perhaps clashed with other people's comfort. As an example, the scene where the pastor talks to his wife must have been a real challenge

JM: I spent a long time building my relationship with Pastor Jay, his family and the other men in the film. Working alone helps in this regard. So there was a strong foundation when the story took unexpected and painful turns.  

D: Have the subjects seen the film? If so, how did that work out?

JM: The pastor has seen the film and I am hoping he will be able to join me at Sundance.

D: What are you hoping to get out of Sundance?

JM: I'm excited to present the film to an audience. There is so much to talk about—faith, redemption, community, betrayal—I know the conversations will be interesting, and the beginning of what I hope will be a long conversation.

Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premieres January 17 at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.

Editor's Note: Kate Logan's Kidnapped For Christ, an IDA Fiscal Sponsorship project, premieres July 10 on Showtime. The following is an interview with Logan that we published in January on the eve of the world premiere of her film at Slamdance. 

Kate Logan was a 20-year-old Evangelical Christian when she went down to the Dominican Republic to make what she thought would be a heartwarming short film about a religious boot camp. She wanted to make a film that affirmed her faith but instead ended up challenging it. 

Documentary: Tell me about your background as a filmmaker.

Kate Logan: Throughout my childhood I was always running around with our family's camcorder making silly little videos, but my favorite thing to do was to stop random people on the streets and ask them questions. In retrospect, I give my parents a lot of credit for tolerating this and for letting me get kicked out of stores and office buildings for filming. In high school I convinced my teachers to let me do an independent study in documentary film, and I used the 10-minute film I made in that class to get myself into film school. It was in college that I began my first feature documentary,  Kidnapped For Christ, which I wouldn't finish until nearly seven years later. 

After film school, I worked on a couple of reality shows and documentary series, which allowed me to learn how things work in the real world (no pun intended). I also traveled to Port-Au-Prince to help produce a film on the history of Haiti. I then went on to work with the independent distribution team that brought Harry Shearer's film The Big Uneasy to theaters. Recently, I worked on Showtime's controversial documentary on the infamous gangster rap mogul Suge Knight, directed by Antoine Fuqua, as well as the upcoming Independent Lens/PBS documentary One in a Billion. 

Kidnapped For Christ is my first feature documentary that I've directed and produced, and I'm very excited to see where it goes and how people react to it. 

D: You went into this story thinking that on some level you would be making an advocacy piece about the camp. Talk about the process you went through as your ideas changed about the facility.

KL: When I originally got the idea to make this film, I had no idea that anything controversial was going on at this school. I envisioned a short, heartwarming story about rough-and-tumble kids coming together to learn about another culture and work through their issues in a safe environment away from the bad influences back home. 

My first clue that things might not be what they seem was when I got in contact with some former students of the school. They told me some very disturbing stories about abuse that they suffered there. However, most of them had been there 10-20 years ago, so I wasn't sure if any of those things were still going on, or if these were just isolated incidents. 

Once I got down to the school and started filming, it wasn't long before I realized that not much had changed over the years. The points and levels system, the punishments and the lingo were all exactly as the former students described them. Even the staff admitted that the program hadn't changed much over the 35 years they had been operating. I saw for myself that students were given humiliating and degrading punishments even for small offenses. For example, on one of my first days filming I saw a girl scrubbing the steps to the school all day long, and she was reprimanded for "taking a knee"; she was told that she could not rest on her knees while scrubbing. So basically, she had to take a stress position for over six hours while scrubbing in the hot Dominican sun. There was another girl who had to scrub an empty pot all day while facing the wall. I was told that this was her punishment for not having a good relationship with her house mother. These things were just the very tip of the iceberg, but they gave me insight into the culture of fear and intimidation that the staff created. 

D: It seemed as if you got a lot shot and then had to figure out how to both make your footage into a film, and how to resolve the story.  Sometimes as a documentary maker you just have to have patience to wait for a story to come together.

KL: We shot about 90 hours of footage over a total of seven weeks on campus, and then, for a number of reasons, we had to put the project on ice. The first reason was that all of our main characters were still at the school and most were under 18, so we had to wait for them to come home before we could talk to them and get their permission to use their footage. Two of our main characters didn't even get out of the school for another couple years after we left. Without giving away too much of the story, I can also say that there were some issues with the school finding out that I was helping to get a student out after he had turned 18, and then threatening legal action to stop production. On top of all of that, at the time I was 20 years old, and I didn't even have the money for the hard drives to put the footage on, much less pay for post-production. 

Fortunately, a few years later, I was able to get in touch with the students I had filmed and get their permission to put them in the film. With the help of Stash Slionski of East Pleasant Pictures, I was able to get a trailer cut and started raising funds for post. I also found some amazing production partners, Yada Zamora and Paul A. Levin of RedThorn Productions, who brought in much needed post-production support and helped me to craft the story. 

Looking back on the process, I think that patience was key. Even if I had had the experience and funds to finish the film faster, I don't know that the subjects of the film would have been ready, especially since they were all teenagers when I started the project. 

D: It seems that the film is already getting a lot of attention in certain circles. Can you talk about working with a subject that is so close to you and so fraught with controversy?

KL: We're very lucky to have a lot of support behind the film from a diverse range of people—the LGBT community, groups of survivors of similar institutions, Atheists and skeptics, and, perhaps unexpectedly, Christians. I really love how we'll get letters of support from both Christians and Atheists, and they'll both say basically the same thing: that it's an outrage that this kind of abuse has occurred in the name of religion. One thing we've always tried to be careful about is not to demonize religion or Christianity, because this isn't a problem that's unique to Christianity. Abuse occurs in hundreds of unregulated residential programs for teens, many that have no religious affiliation.

One thing I've learned working with subjects that are so close to me, and on an issue that's so controversial, is to always remember why I'm doing this film. I've saved several messages I've received from former students over the years, thanking me and the team for making this film. When people criticize me or I start to doubt myself, I just go back to those messages and remind myself why we're doing this, and that never fails to keep me going. 

D: I've seen a number of films this year that are concerned with ideas of faith. Can you tell me about how your own relationship to faith plays a role in the film, and how your relationship to your own faith changed in the process?

KL: When I started the film I was an evangelical Christian and I was attending a conservative Christian college. I don't think I ever would have gotten permission to film at the school had I not been a part of the evangelical sub-culture. Being of the same faith as the staff at Escuela Caribe gave me the access and understanding that I needed to make the film, but it also caused me great personal distress as I struggled to reconcile the fact that people who were a part of my faith were doing things that caused so much harm. 

Intellectually, of course, I knew that people do bad things in the name of religion, but it was much different actually getting to know the people doing those bad things. I saw just how similar I was to the staff members at Escuela Caribe, especially the young ones who came to the school right out of college. I realized that I could have easily become one of them. Escuela Caribe was similar to a cult in many ways. Most people didn't know what they were getting themselves into when they agreed to work there, and once they got down to campus they had signed a two-year contract and were isolated from everyone they knew back home. What might have set off alarm bells back home, started to seem normal at Escuela Caribe. 

I kept hearing staff members describe how God had "called" them to come work for Escuela Caribe. I had used similar language countless times in my life. I had even told people that I felt "called by God" to make this film. But how could God have simultaneously called them to work at Escuela Caribe and me to expose the school as abusive? Obviously someone was hearing God wrong, or perhaps, I began to wonder, God wasn't talking to either of us. After I got home from filming, I couldn't pray in the same way I used to. I no longer trusted myself to hear from God. That was the first major crack in the armor of my faith, to borrow a Biblical metaphor. Over the next several years I began to doubt other tenants of my faith, and eventually I left Christianity all together. Today I consider myself an agnostic, but I still have a deep respect for religion, so long as it's never used to harm or suppress others. 

D: Can you tell me anything else about the film that you think people should know?

KL: I want people to know that this film tells only a few stories about one school, but that there are hundreds of similar programs across the US and abroad where millions of teens have been subjected to inhumane treatment. Some have even died in these types of programs. It's important that the public is made aware of this problem so that we can call upon our lawmakers to regulate residential treatment programs for minors. 

Kidnapped For Christ won the Audience Award for Documentary Feature at Slamdance.

 Michael Galinsky is partners with Suki Hawley and David Bellinson in the award-winning production studio Rumur. Their film Who Took Johnny premieres January 17 at Slamdance. They are currently working on a film about the connection between stress and pain.