A Media Tips Q and A with Kari Barber, a Professor and Documentary Filmmaker
“I wasn’t born with connections or confidence so some of it’s just like me going, ‘I’m going to choose to do this …’” Interview and Photo by Zaidee Shaw.
Kari Barber was born and raised in Oklahoma, where she got her BA in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. After working as a journalist in Arkansas, Asia and Africa, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she received her Masters of Fine Arts in filmmaking and electronic media from American University. Kari, who describes herself as someone who struggled intensely in the beginning of her career, has seen her career take off. She is now a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
Q: “Looking at your page on UNR it said that your last documentary you were working on was Struggle & Hope so I was curious since it premiered internationally if you wouldn’t mind talking about that a little bit?
A: So I’ll start with where it went. Its international or world premiere was at the PanAfrican Film Festival in Cannes, France … and then it showed in Paris that same week so it was an exciting start and then it took a long time … I had to recut it for broadcast to a shorter length … But I finally got it on broadcast this February for Black History month.
We’re doing a reception with KNPB and Q and A there on May 2nd. The film is about historically all-black towns where I’m from, which is Oklahoma.
I took an Oklahoma history class in 8th grade, we were required to, in college we were required to, as well, but this story was never mentioned … I didn’t find out until I was a graduate student in Washington, D.C., and my mother-in-law went to see the musical Oklahoma! and in that particular version of the musical, I believe the lead actress was an African-American woman and it was a small paragraph, I still haven’t talked to the actress or the person who wrote that play to tell them that they are the ones who inspired me to work on the documentary, but there’s a small paragraph of how Oklahoma used to be this really multicultural, very diverse state and then in fact there was even an effort to make it an all-Black state or Black-led state, where people could self govern after the Civil War, and I had never heard of that.
So I started reading about this and luckily about 10 years before I began the project, the Oklahoma Historical Society had launched a web project where they wrote about each of the remaining towns and so that really gave the foundation I needed, the research foundation, to be like ‘okay this is something …’
The Importance of Going in Person
I began interviewing people while I was still in grad school, and my husband and co-cameraman on the film Nico Colombant really helped with that a lot. We tried to interview people and do the research, but it’s really hard when you’re in Washington, D.C., to call people in Oklahoma.
You just have to go in person. So while we were moving to Reno because I had this job, we decided to drive through Oklahoma on the way, which is not on the way but we dipped down and went through Oklahoma and spent several weeks there.
I stayed with my grandmother and my family who are still there and we went in person to some of the towns and some of the people we had really tried to interview hadn’t answered our emails or calls, we just showed up at their front door and they were like ‘ oh okay, so you’re serious’ and we’re like ‘yeah we’re serious, we want to do this’ and so that was a really good way to build trust.
I tell students that, sometimes when you get rejected just show up and just say ‘hey I mean it, I really care.’ That’s how we began and some of our initial interviews ended up in the final film actually from that trip which would’ve been 2013.
It took several years of going back to film and to do the post production because it is a really complex story and we also did a website with all of the remaining towns with oral history and photographs and stories. It was a participatory website where people added their own stories which they did and photographed and created a more robust history.
The idea is to counteract that very narrow version of history that had existed before which is the reason I had never heard of the towns, and so that was sort of a historical project in that respect, there was an archival element but really the final film focused on a few people and a few towns and what they’re doing to try and save their remaining towns.
Working on a Multitude of Projects
Q: Wow, that sounds really interesting, how long did that like whole process take you?
A: I guess from initial research in the Fall of 2012 when we first found out about it and started researching it until having the broadcast premiere in 2019, you could say seven years really, from initial idea and initial research … We finished the editing of the first version, the festival version in 2016. It showed in festivals in 2017. It was just a long period to get it on public television.
Q: Even though you just finished this documentary, do you have anything planned for the future?
A: I always have lots of projects at the same time .. like it’s a kitchen and there’s a stove and I’ve got things on different burners and stages. There’s one film which is a criticism of the education system, looking at a particular school in Nevada but really it’s just representative of the larger issues with education… I’m also filming a project about activists and the future of war and the automation of war drones. I’m also getting into animated documentary, which is not something I’ve ever done before but I love animation so while I’ll never become an animator myself probably, I want to learn how to do enough so that I can be a good director of animated work…. I lost a child so it will be on child loss and parent survivors, parents or siblings, I’m not sure yet but that’s going to be an animated film that I plan to work on.
Getting the Confidence to Be a Director
Q: What would you say is the hardest thing about filmmaking or the most difficult for you?
A: I guess every story is so different sometimes it’s so obvious and sometimes it’s not. I guess I go back to my first film and that time for me and anybody especially new coming in is the confidence part especially if you’re going to be a director and maybe this is in particular to women or other groups who don’t see themselves as necessarily always a leader or director and as a director you’re in charge of a lot of people sometimes…
…to have the confidence to say I’m a director, I’m going to direct a film, I’m a filmmaker.
To have the confidence just to say those things is actually not that easy, and so my first film I tell people, it is called Baking Alaska and I shot the whole thing and thought it was terrible and I put it in a closet and I didn’t bring it out for a year because I thought it was stupid and it was only when I was talking to somebody else about it one time when they said that sounds like a really good, really interesting film and I said no it’s stupid and they said try it, just editing it and so I tried it because they asked me to make a film out of what I had done and it went on to show in two (Oscar) Academy qualifying festivals and I was like …‘oh, it won a ton of awards’ and I think that if my first film hadn’t gone way better than I had anticipated, it got distribution in … like 60 languages, like I really did well and I was shocked to be honest, I never thought it was going to do that well.
If my first film had had stutters or had not just been smooth sailing when I started trying to send it to festivals and things like that I think I would’ve given up maybe but that’s not the right thing to do …
So I think to me that’s the hardest thing is the confidence, I don’t know, I wasn’t born with connections or confidence so some of it’s just like me going … ‘I’m going to chose to do this’ and for whatever reason it worked out so I have to believe in myself now because it did work …
Being a Woman in the Industry and Working with Your Partner
Q: Do you think being a woman in this industry has hindered your ability at all?
A: There’s challenges, there’s real challenges, but what I find is that actually and I don’t feel like this is the answer for everybody and it’s not like a universal truth but just from myself I find I typically like to work with a lot of females in the people that I hire… editors, assistant producers, designers, graphic designers… I try to hire women and it’s not to say that men can’t work well under a female director, I’ve just found that I’ve had more challenges with people who really argue with me all the time or just try to override my decisions and I was like ‘hmmmm, I have trouble with that’ so that’s one thing that I do find that I typically gravitate towards hiring women just because I feel like there’s less drama, like I don’t have to worry about your ego … I do find that women filmmakers hire me more and I hire them more and there’s a lot of support amongst us because of the challenges of not being taken seriously sometimes by men …
Q: Is it difficult working with your husband, Nico Colombant, or do you like working with him?
A: People often ask that as professors but the funny thing is is that we worked together before we were ever a couple, so it’s a weird thing being married to your partner because we went through all of the challenges of any work partnership long before we were a couple … you know kind of getting over those humps and stuff, we did that before so that was kind of a good thing I guess but no … we were excellent work partners and we decided we liked each other so it sort of isn’t hard because it was always natural.
We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and we compliment each other well, there’s things that he does really really well and things I do really really well and we know what those are. So it’s like sometimes if we’re going to a certain kind of filming like it’s going to be this situation or that it’s oh well that’s you … because you’re better at that kind of thing than I am or no it’s me, it’s my thing….
I do the pretty stuff, landscapes, certain interview shots, anything like that, I do that. He does anything that’s dangerous, anything that’s like gritty and really physical … I don’t like that. I’m just over that kind of stuff, but he’s better at it, he’s stronger than I am … he can hold a camera in riots and whatever, he’s good at that stuff, having to be confronted by police, that’s him…
Another thing we learned when we tried to edit the film Baking Alaska together, we both edit and have edited other films but when we tried to edit it together we quickly realized that was not good for our marriage, so we ended up having to hire an editor, not because we can’t edit but because it was the best thing for our marriage.
Q: “Would you say filmmaking is something you’re passionate about since you do so much of it in your career?”
A: I look back and I realize that I’ve been doing it my whole life. As a kid I used to have my parents video handycam and I would like shoot all these different things and then I would have two VCRs and I would push play record, play record so I could edit that way.
I thought I was just making things that were fun and I would always ask my English teachers in high school or whatever assignment I got, could I do a video instead of a paper and usually they’d be okay whatever, okay fine and I thought I was being lazy in getting out of work and then I majored in journalism and I was doing all this writing and I was like well I can write, but I’m not having fun, and then when I started taking video classes I was like ‘oh this does not feel like work.’
I think it’s the emotion in it, it’s just so much emotion … and I was hooked on the emotion … I just love the act of shooting video and interacting, it forces you out, to talk to people and it forces you to be outside and doing things you wouldn’t get to do or think of doing otherwise.
And then it just shocks me and I have to get used to the idea that someone pays me to do this, but every time I was like ‘somebody’s paying me to do this, seriously, you’re going to pay me to do this, this is …’ I mean it’s hard work but it’s fun and that’s I think the part that I love is that I’m still shocked to this day that people pay me to do these things.
Q: “So I’m going to be graduating next semester in December and so I still struggle with like what I’m passionate about, what I’m going to do in life and so I was curious if you had any advice for a young person like myself about how to figure out like what they’re path is in life?
A: I didn’t figure it out until the last semester of my senior year. I tried a lot of different stuff in college but nothing was really that exciting to me and it’s actually, some professor paid for me to go to a conference because they thought I was good at video and it was this women’s video conference … They paid for me to go and I only went because it was free… That’s when I decided that I wanted to be a camerawoman or something like that. And that has continued throughout my whole career now … I think the only advice I have is my mom always said to me …
If you follow what you love you’ll eventually succeed, not immediately but eventually. If you just keep doing what you love and try to follow what you love it does work out for the best … it may take longer but it does work out.
