Monthly Archives: January 2017

Diane Weipert: creating compelling stories about women

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University researchers studying Latina immigrants in Los Angeles estimated that 24 percent of housekeepers and 82 percent of live-in nannies have left kids behind.
– from “The Nanny’s Child,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, May 6, 2014

When Diane Weipert first moved to San Francisco, she gravitated toward the Mission District because, at that time, she said, “It felt like Mexico.” The writer, director, and producer had spent a great deal of time in Mexico and Central and South America, and thus developed an affinity for Latino culture. “There were panaderías, peluquerías, joyerías, and lavanderías everywhere. I fell into a kind of bohemian scene of Latino locals, lots of artists and poets and musicians,” she recalled. “I was often the only gringa around, but I was happier in that world than anywhere else in the city.”

Diane’s son, Theo, at Mission Playground in San Francisco.

Diane continued traveling for long stretches of time. “By the time my son, Theo, was born, many years later, the city had changed,” she said. “Thousands of Latino families had been driven out of the Mission by the rich techies that wanted to live there. Almost everybody I knew from the old days was gone.” Gentrification had taken over with trendy restaurants, designer clothing boutiques, and gourmet coffee places occupying neighborhood storefronts. “I was pushing around a janky, secondhand stroller past high-end baby stores and flyers advertising expensive music classes for toddlers – I felt out of place,” she revealed. “But the playgrounds and rec centers were filled with Mexican and Central American nannies taking care of little blond kids, feeding them from BPA-free containers and stainless steel water bottles. And they never judged my obvious lack of money.”

Fluent in Spanish, she spent time with them talking about their kids. “I realized how lucky I was; I was watching my own little guy playing in the sand while we talked,” she said. While these women were taking care of other people’s children, their own children were being looked after by a patchwork of neighbors, friends, or family. Some of the nannies confessed to Diane that when they came home from their jobs, they were too exhausted to enjoy their own children. “They were the inspiration for ‘Niñera,'” she explained, of the short film’s backstory.

Diane directing on the set of “Niñera” (photo credit by Audrey Gloeckner-Kalousek).

LUNAFEST is the first film festival for “Niñera,” a story that “looks at the bitter irony many nannies face: raising the children of strangers for a living while their own children are virtually left to raise themselves.” The LUNAFEST premier in late September was the film’s coming-out party, so to speak. Its entry, however, comes at a time in our history where, as Diane describes it, “the world is primed to enter another dark age.”

“Those of us fighting for light are searching for the most effective ways to channel our energy and advance our struggle,” she said. “The best way I know how to do that, at the moment, is by telling stories that – hopefully – invoke empathy, even from those who have been swayed by a toxic ideology. Most people who are anti-immigrant have never had a meaningful relationship or encounter with an undocumented person. They exist only as an idea, and that ‘otherness’ makes them easy to demonize and dismiss.” But there’s hope, Diane insists, saying, “The only way I know how to push against it is by making stories about real people who everyone can empathize with – engaged in universal struggles – people that we’re all rooting for.”

Still from Niñera – Georgina feeding William.

The vagabond writer with ties to Latin America
A Spanish and Anthropology major at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Diane spent a year abroad, studying at the University of Seville in Spain. She saw Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodriguez perform live and became “obsessed” with his music. “His lyrics completely changed my sense of language, of what was possible with music as a means of expression,” she shared. “In fact, learning Spanish opened up a vast, beautiful world for me.” Diane was influenced by Cuban, Chilean, and Argentinian music of the 1960s and 1970s. Her favorite authors at the time were Garcia Marquez, Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. And the Latin American poets, filmmakers, visual artists, and muralists made a lasting impression on her.

Diane with friends in Baños, Ecuador.

When she returned to Boulder, she completed her thesis on the Tarahumara Indians of the northern Sierras in Chihuahua, Mexico, where she conducted fieldwork. Upon graduation, she edited and wrote for a bilingual weekly newspaper in Southern Colorado, but after a year, she hit the road for a year, starting out in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and traveling as far south as Puerto Montt, Chile. “I made my deepest and longest lasting friendships in the eastern provinces of Cuba, where I spent a month with artists and writers,” she said. “I was the only American most of them had ever met, and at the time it was like being a rock star.”

Diane at the Mexico City premiere of Sólo Dios Sabe.

Diane has been in the film industry for more than a decade. Before that, she described herself as a “consummate vagabond and writer” whose stints with temp jobs and freelance writing paid for her travels. When the freelance writing assignments dried up, she went on to get her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she discovered her passion for fiction writing. When she was living in San Francisco, she volunteered as a driver for local film festivals, gravitating to the Latino festivals, where being bilingual gave her an advantage. “I would pick up directors from the airport and we almost always hit it off. I’d show them around the city, we’d have dinner and drinks, and often discuss our creative projects,” she revealed. One such excursion landed her a screenwriting gig when a Mexican director asked her to write the script for his film, Sólo Dios Sabe, which stars Diego Luna.

Diane never stopped traveling to visit friends, “migrating back” to Mexico City and Cuba, where she realized she was happiest and felt at home in the Spanish-speaking world. With her light hair and fair skin, however, throughout her travels she was called gringa, gavacha, gidi, colorada, cruda, chabochi, yanki, yuma. “The gist of all of these words was ‘outsider,'” she explained, which made her realize that while she felt at home in Latin America, she didn’t really belong – it was not truly her culture. And yet, she pointed out, “I didn’t feel quite at home or entirely myself in my own culture either. That feeling of being unmoored between worlds caused an identity crisis that lasted for years, and is why so much of my work deals with issues of identity.” And because she has been so immersed in the culture, the world that she has written about so intimately is from the Spanish-speaking, Latin American perspective.

With friends in Las Tunas, Cuba.

Boyle Heights: self-identity versus cultural identity
Diane’s latest project, Boyle Heights, is set in 1973 and based on the illegal tubal ligations performed on Mexican women by USC County Hospital after the women delivered their babies. “That part is all true,” she pointed out, of the sterilizations that the women unknowingly gave consent or that were forced upon them. “It happened to many, many women [regardless of their ages] and it destroyed their lives,” she said. In 1975, a group of Latina women brought a class-action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan. While the judge ruled in favor of the county hospital, the case paved the way for improving the education and process around patient consent, especially for non-English speakers. Renee Tajima-Peña’s documentary about these women, No Más Bebés, premiered February 2016.

Still from Boyle Heights.

In the fictionalized Boyle Heights – a neighborhood in East Los Angeles – Valentina, a 20-year-old immigrant woman, is sterilized after delivering a stillborn baby. Her husband leaves her when he discovers they will never be able to have a family. Undeterred, Valentina recruits her opinionated Chicana activist neighbor Maya to help her find her husband. “At its core, Boyle Heights is a coming-of-age story about how Valentina’s experiences with Maya open her eyes to a world she never knew existed, and the many different ways that a woman can live her life,” Diane explained. “It’s about self-discovery.”

When she first heard about the sterilization of Mexican women in East Los Angeles in the 1970s, the horror she felt and her obsession led her to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Chicano Studies Department, where she sifted through all the depositions and interviews. “What was striking was how the women, almost to a person, said they no longer felt like women,” Diane noted. “According to the anthropologist who interviewed them, their main cultural identity was being a mother. As someone who is obsessed with the idea of identity, I thought a lot about what would happen if everything you expected to be in your life was suddenly taken away.” The questions are heartbreaking and painful: Who would you be then? What would you do? “The important thing here is that this is not a fictional question. There were many women forced to face it, which is horrific,” Diane said. “The freedom comes from finding my way into this world through fictional characters and guiding their stories. The women who were affected in real life weren’t granted this luxury.”

Theo and Diane on the ferry.

Complex female protagonists
In a Filmmaker Magazine profile, Diane related an anecdote about a Hollywood manager who treated her dismissively after learning of her pregnancy. That incident happened years ago when she was a “hip-pocketed indie writer in a pond of big fish clients.” Diane pointed out that the industry has changed considerably, notably in the last couple of years. Early in her career, in order to get a reading, she was advised to use her initials instead of her first name when she submitted an action thriller script she had penned. “Now they’re actually looking for women who can write action and who come up with strong female characters,” she marveled. “I was actually told to take off my initials and put my name on the title page.” Studio programs are paving the way for up-and-coming female directors to have the opportunity to direct network television episodes. “And brilliant women directors like Ava Duvernay and Jill Solloway are reaching out to female writers and directors to help bring them up as well,” Diane said.

Diane Weipert.

She credits social media activism and the “wonderful, relentless criticism” of Hollywood and the filmmaking industry for its long-time discrimination against women and people of color. While slightly trending upward, the number of and percentage of women in various positions in the industry is “abysmal,” according to Diane. “But the pressure is on,” she declared. “And hopefully it’s a current that continues to flow in one direction until we see nothing less than parity.”

“My greatest goal is to create compelling stories about women,” Diane said. “I’m interested in working in many different genres, but the common denominator will always be the complex female protagonists.” With the majority of writers and directors being men, “a plague of cultural misconceptions about what a girl or a woman is supposed to be” has existed since the advent of the film industry, according to Diane. “In the eyes of the vast majority of male writers,” she noted, “a woman’s singular purpose in any story is sex appeal.”

Diane on the set of Niñera (photo credit by Audrey Gloeckner-Kalousek).

“Women are half the population and we’re tired of it,” she said, of the portrayal of women in film. “We want to see ourselves represented on screen kicking ass and saving the world, too, not to mention having complex interior lives, interesting jobs, and multi-dimensional personalities.” Luckily for us, Diane has a mission: “As a writer-director, I want to bring these stories and characters into existence while retaining control of that vision and maintaining its integrity.”

Note: You can see Diane’s short film at LUNAFEST East Bay’s screening on Saturday, March 18th, 7:30pm, at the El Cerrito High School’s Performing Arts Theater. You can also meet her at our VIP event and following the screening. For more information, click here.

Frederike Migom: the art of mixing art and social engagement

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True art, art that comes from the center of a people, from their very core, is inherently political.
– Beverly Smith, American artist

Frederike Migom.

While Frederike Migom’s “Nkosi Coiffure” – one of this year’s LUNAFEST film festival’s official selections – is, on the surface, about a woman who escapes into a hair salon in Brussels after a fight with her boyfriend in public, the short film pays homage to her Flemish mother’s unlikely friendship with her Senegalese friend. Whereas her mother is reserved both emotionally and in appearance, her mother’s friend is the exact opposite. “It was really interesting to see them relate,” she said of the two women. “It was really beautiful to see both of them together.” The Belgian filmmaker and actor was also inspired by her family’s connections with Africa – her father was born in what was once the Belgian Congo in Central Africa, and her brother studied in Senegal. Although her brother passed away while in the West African country, Frederike noted that positive things came out of her family’s tragic loss.

The idea for “Nkosi Coiffure” (2015) grew out of photos that her mother had sent to Frederike in a text message. Her mother’s friend had convinced her to go to the hair salon where she worked to have her makeup done and extensions woven into her hair. The photos surprised and amused Frederike because, as she related, “that was so not my mom.” Over a cup of coffee with her mother’s friend, Frederike laid out her vision of building a story around her mother’s salon visit for a short film. She knew that writing the script would be difficult because it wasn’t her culture. “It was going to be a challenge to portray the community honestly and with respect,” she said. So together, she and her mother’s friend wrote the script.

Still from “Nkosi Coiffure.”

Fusing art and social engagement
Frederike shot on location in a Congolese neighborhood hair salon, and “Nkosi Coiffure” premiered at a small African film festival in the same neighborhood. Brussels is home to a tight-knit Congolese community. “It felt important,” she said, of her choices in location and screening, “. . . to bring people together.” While mixing art with social engagement is more apparent in her other work, it’s still inherent in “Nkosi Coiffure.” And yet, Frederike insisted, “I did not want my film to be political at all because I don’t have the desire to do that.” She went on, “There are a lot of ways to tell stories that involve or hint at these themes without actually trying to exploit them or to pretend that I have the answers – because I don’t. All I know is that we’re all here in this city together.” In Europe, she pointed out, many films about immigration often focus on the problems of immigration for host countries. “But I want to tell a positive side of the story,” she said. “We’re going to have to learn how to live together.”

Still from “Nkosi Coiffure.”

“Si-G,” her first documentary, which premieres locally at the end of February, embodies her fusion of art and social engagement. By happenstance, Frederike was watching a local news story about students at a school and was intrigued by a girl in special needs education who performed an impromptu rap. She originally wanted to write a fictional story about Cansu, who gave herself the rapper name of Si-G. As she awaited word on government funding to make the short film, she got to know the girl better. Cansu had recently moved from a small town in the Netherlands to a small apartment that she shared with her father and sister in Brussels. “Rap for her was a need,” Frederike explained.

Cansu rapping in “Si-G.”

Frederike connected Cansu with a hip-hop workshop at the local library and filmed the event. The rapper who led the workshop became Si-G’s mentor and the two ended up collaborating on a song. When funding didn’t come through, Frederike decided to make the short film a documentary, taking a look at rap from a kid’s point of view. At that time, terrorists had attacked Paris in multiple locations and the news media reported that the terrorists came from Cansu’s neighborhood in Brussels. Soon after, the area received international scrutiny and negative press. “She’s had to be on guard a lot, but she just had this really energetic, positive story to tell,” Frederike declared. “This rap comes from the heart and it’s a way to express yourself.” She believes Cansu can be a role model to the kids in her neighborhood and to adults, too, with the film being the messenger that shows them: “Don’t judge these kids.”

Still of Cansu in the short documentary, “Si-G.”

The evolving dreams of our youth
When Frederike was a child, she wanted to be a storyteller and thought that becoming an actor was the natural next step. She studied at the performing arts conservatory American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, but she discovered that acting didn’t give her creative satisfaction. So she started writing to stay creative. When her student visa ended, Frederike didn’t want to return home and instead landed in Paris and attended film school. Commitment to being a filmmaker didn’t take hold when she was a student because the school’s technical approach over artistic focus didn’t appeal to her. It wasn’t until she graduated and worked in production that she found her true place behind the camera.

Still from the Flemish feature film, Boosters, starring Frederike.

“I’ve always been fascinated by people’s dreams,” she related. People may have dreams as children and grow up chasing those dreams. Over the years, however, when the prospect of accomplishing those dreams dims, the dreams evolve as people make necessary adaptations, according to Frederike. Her short film “Adam and Everything” (2014) explores that theme – the fork in the road where one must make decisions and then gracefully accept those changes. “When I was an actor in New York, I saw how hard it is and how so many people struggle and you have to make a decision – am I going on with this or am I choosing a more stable life?” she posed.

Still from “Adam and Everything.”

Frederike directing in “Adam and Everything.”

Frederike is continuing to explore that theme. A Belgium television station commissioned her to make a short documentary in Flemish about any subject she wanted to do, so long as it was a personal story. So she settled on filming a documentary on her classmates from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “We’re all 30 now – where is everyone? What are they doing?” she wanted to know. As it turns out, many of her classmates are no longer acting. When they were in the performing arts conservatory, such an outcome would have been deemed a “terrible thing,” she declared. But with lives changing and presenting new challenges and opportunities, she concludes: “It’s okay.” The documentary, she says, is “more about dreams and the question of what really defines success.” Frederike is contemplating making a second version in English after the Flemish version is completed at the end of January.

Beginnings and endings all lead to hope
Communicating and connecting are also themes in her emerging body of film work. “Malakim” (2014), the story about a lonely boy and an angel on the street, was inspired by a living statue dressed as an angel that Frederike spied when she was in Sấo Palo, Brazil. He never moved because nobody gave him money. She wondered: “What if nobody sees him? What if I’m the only one who sees him because nobody is giving him any money?” Intrigued by “loneliness in crowded places,” Frederike explores the desire to communicate amidst the challenge of not being able to connect. While she admitted that “Malakim” is a “dark film” because the boy is so desperate to communicate that he throws a rock at someone, she argues that in the end boy and angel find one another.

Still from “Malakim.”

“All of my films end with a new beginning,” Frederike said. In “Nkosi Coiffure,” the main character, who is making a momentous decision, sees life in a different but positive light after her discussion with the women in the hair salon. Frederike confessed that she had always wanted to be a “complicated, dark artist,” but to the core she has always been a positive person. While there’s a lot of negativity in the world today, she points out, “Life is really a beautiful thing in the end. We’re all together in this, and we need to find a way to live together and find your place in the world. I think my stories, in the end, will always have hope.”

A prototype poster for Frederike’s feature film, Binti, which is not animated.

Frederike is currently working on her first feature film, Binti, about a 10-year-old Congolese girl who has lived her whole live in Brussels with her father and who dreams of being a television presenter. When their undocumented status is exposed, father and daughter run away. Binti meets 10-year-old Elias – a “nature boy,” as Frederike describes him – who has taken to hiding in his treehouse ever since his father had run away with another woman. Binti hatches a plan to get her father and Elias’s mother to fall in love and marry so that she and her father can remain in Belgium and she can still pursue her dream. This family film, Frederike points out, is perhaps her most socially engaged film to date. “I’m very shocked by the deportation of children, especially if they’ve lived in another country their whole life,” she declared. “It’s the most ridiculous thing to spend time and money kicking them out to a place that they’ve never been.” With Binti, Frederike wants to instill hope. She recently received word that the Belgian government has awarded her funds to develop the film – good news, indeed. The grant will enable her to move forward, with shooting expected to commence in the summer of 2018. With the world in uncertain times today, it will be interesting to see what kind of world exists when Binti premieres.

Note: You can see Frederike’s short film at LUNAFEST East Bay’s screening on Saturday, March 18th, 7:30pm, at the El Cerrito High School’s Performing Arts Theater. For more information, click here.