Unapologetic and Uncensored: Using Documentary Film to Tell the Stories the Media Doesn’t
The creators of ‘Socialism: An American Story’ and ‘Citizen Koch’ on the importance and privilege of working in documentary film.
Kickstarter just turned 10. This creator-to-creator conversation is part of a series that celebrates past projects and introduces a few new ones. Read more here.
In 2012, documentary filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were set for a PBS premiere of Citizen Koch, their film following Republican politics in Wisconsin in the wake the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United and emerging Tea Party figures like Governor Scott Walker and political investors Charles and David Koch.
Then, unexpectedly, they lost the finishing funds promised by public film distributor ITVS.
“The institution that was set up to support the vision of independent filmmakers, precisely to make sure that diverse voices and perspectives are heard on the public airwaves, took away our funds because of the pressure of right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, who we discovered was a major PBS funder and was on the board of PBS’s two flagship stations WNET and WGBH.” says Deal.
In search of a “lifeline,” Deal and Lessin took their film to Kickstarter, where they not only found funding, but the support of more than 3,000 backers. The New York Times and the New Yorker helped get their story to a wider audience. “I don’t know what else we would’ve done,” says Deal. “The film got out there because of the success of that campaign.” The film played in hundreds of cities theatrically, and you can now find it on iTunes and Amazon Prime.
Director and producer Yael Bridge also understands the hard work behind funding political films. She’s currently running her second Kickstarter campaign to finish post-production on Socialism: An American Story, a film that traces the roots of Socialism back to the early days of the Republican Party in the U.S. and provides more context for what the movement actually means in today’s political moment. The film was inspired by the outpouring of support for Bernie Sanders’s unsuccessful 2016 bid for the U.S. presidency: “It seemed like a bunch of people just voted for a Socialist,” says Bridge, “but not many people knew what that word meant.”
We connected Bridge, Deal, and Lessin and asked them about the importance of documentary film, the power of crowdfunding, and what the future may hold for political filmmaking.
Kickstarter: You’re all documentary filmmakers who focus on politics. I’m curious how you first got interested in this line of work?
Tia Lessin: My first direct experience with documentary filmmaking wasn’t behind the camera, but in front of it. I was working as a labor organizer in the ’80s and a documentary crew from the BBC began filming a campaign I was running. I probably asked them more questions about what they did than they asked me. Then I saw The Thin Blue Line at the local arthouse theater, then the next year Roger & Me came to town, and the year after that Paris is Burning — and I was hooked. I left the labor movement to work on the other side of the camera.
I spent years learning everything I could about making documentary films — as an assistant editor, an associate producer, an archival researcher. I had the privilege of working with some of the masters — Michael Moore, Charles Guggenheim, Arthur Dong, and Barak Goodman. Michael took me under his wing and then entrusted me to produce his TV show and five of his films, including Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 11/9.
The films Carl and I have directed — Trouble the Water and Citizen Koch — are part of the tradition of social issue documentary — raising questions about the political moment that we’re in. We try to impact audiences — not by educating them but by engaging them emotionally, creating work that takes them on a journey. These are difficult times right now, very dark times. We take a cue from Michael Moore — we look for humor in tragic situations, we ask questions that make people in power uncomfortable and we are unapologetically political.
Carl Deal: Tia’s the reason I do this. I met her when she was coming off of the [labor organizing] work and we were both interested in impacting public policy. We worked together in a nonprofit for a bit, and then she started working in film and I was working as a journalist. We moved to New York five years later and began working together.
I was always envious of what she did. Long-form storytelling gives you the ability to create something with not just social integrity, but artistic integrity — not to sound cliché, but something that can be enduring and last. That interested me. So I was really grateful when she invited me to join her on Bowling for Columbine. The rest is history for me.
Yael Bridge: I’d always been political and politically aware and kept up with current events and activists in my own right. I never meant to merge that with my filmmaking. I wanted to make more highbrow, boring, inaccessible, artsy documentaries that I thought smart people made that I liked to watch.
It feels like this is the only thing to be doing right now in this current climate. This is the work that needs to be done.
—Yael Bridge
This is where I landed, and at this point it feels like this is the only thing to be doing right now in this current climate. This is the work that needs to be done, these are the messages. This is a skillset that I have and am so passionate about. I feel really lucky that I’m able to combine my passion with my career.
How did you end up deciding to use Kickstarter for your respective projects?
Carl Deal: We brought Citizen Koch to Kickstarter because we needed a lifeline. It was an unusual situation because we had three months to finish the film and we lost our big chunk of finishing funds.
Tia Lessin: We were invited to premiere our film at Sundance and then the financial support and the broadcast partnership for the film was withdrawn.
And that was due in part to the content of the film?
Tia Lessin: To be clear, the film wasn’t about Charles and David Koch. We made a film about working-class Republicans in Wisconsin, which was ground zero in the Tea Party’s war against progressive values. They were NRA members and they were also union members. They were speaking out and organizing against the right wing extremists overtaking their party.
David and Charles Koch created and funded the Tea Party which is why we called the film Citizen Koch. We can draw a direct line from the Tea Party’s victories in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2011 and Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election. The film was a cautionary tale.
Carl Deal: It was defunded by PBS because even some of our most cherished public institutions are corrupt. Period. That’s my opinion. I’m still a little bit angry about this. Funds from the institution that was set up to support the vision of independent filmmakers — precisely to make sure that diverse body of voices and perspectives is heard on the public airwaves — were taken away because of the pressure of the right-wing billionaire, Charles Koch, who we discovered was a major PBS funder and was on the board of the two PBS flagship stations — WNET and WGBH.
Kickstarter didn’t care, and we had quite a successful Kickstarter campaign. We met our goal in three days, and then we doubled our goal by the time it was over. We had a great story to tell and that really helped us.
Tia Lessin: Even more moving to us was that we had 3,400 backers. The support ranged from $1 to $5,000. The average pledge was $50. That meant a lot to me because it’s really the small-dollar donors that are going to take down these large-monied interests. We saw that with our film about the uprising in Wisconsin and we saw that with the Kickstarter campaign itself.
Yael Bridge: We did Kickstarter for early production just because the funding for this film was really, really hard. We started this project two years ago, right after Bernie [Sanders]’s failed presidential bid. It seemed like a bunch of people just voted for a Socialist but not many people knew what that word meant. It was hard to convince funders that this was a worthy cause because he failed. [Socialism] was still very much a dirty word. Kickstarter was really helpful in the beginning, just getting us through so much of the early production.
We’re doing it again, but it’s very hard. I think one of the things that Carl and Tia touched on that I think is really important to us is the democratizing nature of Kickstarter, saying, “Okay, there might not be a lot of rich Socialists out there who want to fund this film, but there are a lot of working people who want to see this message out there.” I think that’s a really powerful message — these smaller donors, they are what’s going to change the discourse.
Tia Lessin: I agree. We were told that it would just be our smaller network of friends, colleagues, and family members that would donate to a Kickstarter campaign. But we learned that the support was far wider than that.
I remember I was sitting in the café one afternoon with my son, drinking coffee, a rare break from Kickstarter campaign emails, and I saw on my smartphone that this money was pouring in to the campaign. It was like watching a slot machine payout, it was amazing. And it was from people we’d never met. People who read the New Yorker expose, heard about the film, wanted to see the film, and also wanted to take a stand against censorship and put their support, their dollars, into democratizing media.
Yael Bridge: It can be hard to get outside of your own personal bubble. To have a platform where you’re not just asking your friends and family and the people in your own community, but to have something that they can share, and that those people can share — it can spread into these other corners that you might not be able to access individually.
Tia Lessin: It was a hard decision to be whistleblowers against ITVS and PBS. It wasn’t very popular with some of our funders and some in the documentary film community that had relationships with ITVS. We stuck our necks out, and so it was a huge morale boost to get all this support. Not just the money, but offers of support, kind words — people understanding that this wasn’t just about us and our struggle to finish a film, but this was a national fight about the right-wing takeover of our country and our media — a fight we are still having today.
Making creative work is hard in general, but documentary film seems especially hard because it’s such a long haul. There are so many ups and downs. On hard days, what are the things that make you want to quit? And how do you move past them and keep going?
Carl Deal: The thing that I hate the most — I think everybody hates this — is fundraising. It’s unfortunate that there’s not more public money available to support artists of any kind, but there just isn’t. We’re a scrappy bunch.
There are a lot of opportunities out there, and perhaps there are more opportunities today than there were last year and the year before. Even so, you often find yourself in a situation where it feels like you need to justify your idea before you can make it, and then you have to continually justify it. We’re forced to manage our time so we spend more time talking about what we do rather than doing what we do.
Tia Lessin: Yael and I have it harder than Carl because as women artists we have to work harder to be seen and to be heard and to be recognized at every stage — from development through production, post production, and distribution. There’s not only scarcity of funding for social issue projects, but we also face sexism in the industry..
I had a baby at the time that we were making Citizen Koch and we didn’t have affordable childcare. There was no parental leave because we’re freelancers and no affordable childcare because that’s the country we live in. When you’re in the field, you’re working long hours, often unpredictable hours. There’s a lot of travel.
The ability to be an artist, particularly right now, is an extraordinary privilege, and we fight for that right to express ourselves.
—Tia Lessin
I’m not complaining — I’m incredibly privileged to be a filmmaker. Nobody forced me into it. The ability to be an artist, particularly right now, is an extraordinary privilege, and we fight for that right to express ourselves. There are so many challenges with raising money and work-life balance, but at the end of the day, we’re making art and we’re able to speak to people in a profound way. Our films are making people laugh and cry and engage and think about things in a very different way. It’s an extraordinary privilege to do what we do.
Yael Bridge: I have so much I want to ask you about what you just said, Tia, about being a parent and a mother working in production.
I feel really lucky. I feel like I have the coolest job in the world, even though I work all the time and I never see my partner and I never go to the gym. The pitfall of turning your passion into your career is there’s not really much of a work-life balance.
I don’t love fundraising but I do really see the benefit of it, and the way that it helps in all aspects. I like being able to be on a project from the beginning all the way out. I like interacting with people and engaging an audience and hearing from the backers and reaching out.
Tia Lessin: In the rest of the industrialized world there’s public funding for artists, and in the U.S. there’s hardly any, and practically none for political artists, especially now with this administration. We have to raise private money and that is really tricky. A lot of the money comes in at the end of the project when you have the proof of concept and you’re nearly done. It’s really hard to get development money — that’s one way that Kickstarter is a huge gift to filmmakers.
I wanted to ask a lightning round last question: What is your hope for the future of documentary film?
Carl Deal: In 30 seconds or less.
In 30 seconds or less.
Carl Deal: People seem to be freer with how they tell stories now. There are more films being made that break some of the more traditional rules and are more interesting to watch — and more challenging, in some ways — and a little more entertaining. I hope that trend continues.
Yael Bridge: When Bowling for Columbine came out it was so fun and exciting to see documentaries be commercially viable. [In the past two decades,] people have gone from, “I’m going to watch some boring documentary and learn something,” to “I’m going to have fun and I’m going to feel something. I’m going to walk away changed.” [It’s] an exciting time to see how people will take that in new directions.
Tia Lessin: That’s a really good question, because without being able to imagine a good future, what is there to fight for?. We’re not just fighting against fascists, and we’re not just fighting against inequality and racism. We’re fighting for a future that could be profoundly beautiful for our children and our grandchildren, if not for us. But we’ve got to keep in mind what that looks like.
That’s why I’m really excited to see Yael’s film, because in order to look forward you also have to look back. I’m happy to hear that you’re looking back two centuries ago to dispel people’s misconceptions about Socialism.
After a Bernie Sanders presidency, we’re going to live in a country where public funding for artists is mandated, where there’s free childcare and subsidies to working parents. Where the work of artists of color and women artists and LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming artists is going to be front and center — because audiences want to hear those voices, and because audiences are filled with those voices and they want to see their lives reflected on the screen. The gatekeepers are going to understand that their commercial success depends on making sure that those voices are heard. I’m really optimistic about that.
Right now our fight is to make sure that the stories we tell expose the injustices, name the names, and call out the villains — both on camera and off camera. It’s incumbent on artists in this moment, as fascists are in control of this country, to make art that amplifies the voices of those who are fighting for justice. As documentary filmmakers, we are making telling stories that don’t get told in the mainstream media. We can tell stories that go much deeper, with more context, and we don’t have to worry about offending commercial interests.
Socialism: An American Story is live on Kickstarter through May 29, 2019.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
