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Directors Statement

Forget Me Not follows three unwed mothers staying at a shelter in the countryside on Jeju Island – in South Korea. Each one has to decide if she wants to keep the baby or give it up for adoption. I am one of the 200.000 South Koreans who have been internationally adopted to the Global North since the Korean War. I grew up in the Danish countryside in a loving family, but when I was 20 years old I started to look for my mother on my first trip back to South Korea. I did not find her.

There was one thing I could not understand: What circumstances drive a mother to relinquish her child for adoption? The more I thought about it, the less I understood.
The question made me return to South Korea again and again, and it has moved me to look for women facing the same dilemmas as my mother. I was driven by a strong wish to understand how decisions about adoption are made. This started a journey that uncovered my own story but most of all it revealed a pattern of how women and their children are treated, when they do not follow rules of marriage, kinship, and sexuality.

In 2013 I discovered over 50 shelters for unwed mothers in South Korea. A shelter is a place where women seek refuge from their everyday environment in order to hide their pregnancy until they give birth. In most cases they come without a hope of actually keeping their baby. This is why it was such a breakthrough for me to find Mrs Im – the founder and director of the independent shelter called Aesuhwon.

Mrs Im wanted to give the women a chance to stay together with their children – Aesuhwon was completely different and such a contrast to the rest of society. She understood how the women and I – as an adoptee – share an emotional bond due to the circumstances of our lives, although we were strangers.

This is also the reason I got accepted into the shelter and why the women shared their worries and dreams with me during the most difficult time in their lives.
Making this film has allowed me to understand the contours of my mother’s situation. She was not a single case. International adoption is a consequence of a much larger governmental issue that systemically violates the basic human rights of family preservation. Not out of poverty but because of societal norms that devalue and erase unwed mothers and their children.

– Sun Hee Engelstoft

Far from the larger-than-life figures and their cartoonish displays of hyper-masculinity that you may expect from professional wrestling, what Gaea Girls reveals is a different side to the sport than you might be used to—in more ways than one. A documentary from Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams that premiered at TIFF in 2000, the film revolves around GAEA Japan—a joshi puroresu (Japanese women’s wrestling) promotion—and the life and training process of a group of hopeful teenage girls who aspire to become professional wrestlers for the company. The film’s main figures are Saika Takeuchi—a shy, bubbly and young trainee, striving to pass her tests and make her professional debut—and Chigusa Nagayo, a legend of the business in her mid-30s, and the founder and head trainer of the dojo. The focus on these two figures indicates one of the main themes of the film: idols and role models, and how they may shape the person you become in a big way.

To get the full context of the importance of this theme, it’s also crucial to understand the impact that Chigusa had on Japanese teen culture at that point, and how joshi wrestling, as a medium, represents its idols. Gaea Girls does a great job at contextualising this for the viewers—even those completely clueless about the reality of wrestling. In showing highlights of one of her matches, the film also foregrounds Chigusa as not just the head trainer and a parental figure to her students, but as a seasoned competitor. As a teen in the mid-to-late-80s, Chigusa was part of the legendary Crush Gals—a wrestling tag team that took Japanese pop culture by storm, much like Hulk Hogan in America. Enthusiastic whilst also violent and rebellious, The Crush Gals represented a brand of wrestling directed specifically at teen girls—a truly foreign concept to the West at that point. Joshi wrestlers are portrayed as true warriors, who engage in bloody affairs, while never sacrificing their unique femininity.

“When you see the wrestlers in the ring, they are so alive, they shine. I want to be like that,” young Saika confesses early in the film. The chance of becoming a pro wrestler gave Saika an opportunity to stand out—while the profession can be a prime outlet for expressing inner adolescent rage and the frustration of growing up, it can also be a means of transcendence. It offers a chance to be role models themselves, to be like her trainer and idol Chigusa—rocking, storm-like specks of light that live, breathe and thrive in the ring, and overcome ordinariness. “In the ring, I can become someone who is noticed,” she remarks.
Despite being defined by dreams of spectacle, the bulk of the film is not spent in the limelight. Instead, we spend most the time in the dojo, a remote and rural area where Takeuchi and other trainees endure the hardships of training. One of the triumphs of the film is precisely this dichotomy—an effective and palpable balancing of the spectacle and the behind-the-scenes, of the overwhelming noise and the quiet remoteness (where the only sounds you hear are the echoes of bodies hitting the ring mat). Longinotto and Williams achieve this without ever feeling heavy-handed, instead letting the images speak for themselves.

The narrative arc of the documentary is built around the big tests that Takeuchi needs to go through to determine if she’s ready to be an official member of the company. These consist of a series of one-on-one matches against more established women, and it is when we see Takeuchi’s first test that the film truly takes a darker turn. Apart from the violence of the older competitors towards the young Takeuchi, when it becomes too much for her to handle, Chigusa also displays horrifying acts of emotional and psychological abuse. She slaps her, yells at her to give up and tells her that she’s useless, as Takeuchi sobs and begs to stay.

Seeing these scenes play out, as raw as they can be, hit you with the harsh reality of joshi wrestling’s training process; but through them, we also begin to understand the mentality behind this notion of “tough love.” Chigusa confesses that these girls are like children to her, though while she feels the responsibility to push them to reach their dreams and be as great as they can be, she also wants to give the audience as strong and believable a show as possible. She is brutal as the head coach, but shows herself extremely proud of what she does—seeing her method as an act of love, for both the girls and wrestling as an art form in its own right. Having witnessed Takeuchi’s will to stay, Chigusa eventually decides to give her a second test, and it’s this faith that lies behind all of her brutal training methods.

The next time we see the young prospect, she’s different: no longer bubbly and naive, but more rugged and adult, with scars visibly on show. Takeuchi appears more determined than ever to fulfil her potential and give everything that she has in this second test. All the abuse and rejection from her idol turned her into a brewing storm, ready to be unleashed—it’s either this, or the burden of crushed dreams.

Her final encounter in the test ends up being against Chigusa herself. By then completely battered, Takeuchi is constantly forced down to the mat, but she keeps getting back up with all her might. It’s absolutely enthralling to watch, serving as a cathartic, nail-biting climax to the film, despite not even being Takeuchi’s big professional debut. No crowds cheering for their favourites, no spotlights and no extravagant fictional storylines behind the matches—it’s as raw and real as it gets here. One may even forget that they’re watching a documentary, since the scene plays out like an emotionally demanding conclusion you may expect from epic fiction: displaying titanic efforts of fortitude and will. Part of the reason this comes off is that the filmmakers share a perfect understanding of what’s inherently captivating about pro wrestling. Their framing of scenes and how they let things play out creates a dynamic between the viscerally real and the staging as a vehicle for storytelling. What we get out of it, as a result, is a thrilling and fascinating story of master vs student, naturally unfolding before our very eyes.

At the end, having been frustrated and tested to the limit by Chigusa, Takeuchi passes and shows herself worthy of debuting as a pro in front of the whole world. Her debut match is treated more as an epilogue, but what truly stays is her post-bout interview. When asked about the wrestler that she admires the most, young Takeuchi, with a haunting and hardened look in her face, answers “Chigusa Nagayo.” This goes to show how normalized this type of upbringing and the traumas linked to it are in this culture. It’s a culture where idols and role models cyclically breed contempt from their admirers with punishing abuse, creating a system—dangerously embraced by those who emerge from it—where every drive to succeed is rooted in fear.

Moments like this is where we realize how poignantly Longinotto and Williams’ contemplative directing has worked. They effortlessly introduce the wider context, and deeply hone in on these women’s burning desires and the forces that drive them—both individually and with respect to the culture they exist in. The film is a testament to the power of cinema: its ability to immerse you in a different reality, and to greatly enhance our understanding of its subject matter (as obscure and foreign to the viewer as it may be). Gaea Girls is a masterful feat of storytelling in documentary filmmaking—a meditation on the cultural significance of our idols, the means to reach their heights, and the irreparable scars that we may suffer along the way.

Award winning writer and Oscar® nominated director David France (“How to Survive a Plague,” “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson”) continues to bring important LGBTQ issues to the fore in Welcome To Chechnya, his searing documentary about an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Russian republic of Chechnya.

Employing a guerilla filmmaking style, France takes us inside the fraught, day-to-day workings of an underground pipeline of activists who face unimaginable risks to rescue LGBTQ victims from Chechnya’s brutal government-directed campaign. In a republic where being gay or transgender is unspeakable, the LGBTQ community lives in the utmost secrecy and fear, under threat of detention, torture and death, often at the hands of the authorities. Extensive access to a remarkable group of activists – from the Russian LGBT Network and the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives – and alarmingly brutal footage of abuse, bring to light the underreported atrocities and the dangers of exposing them.

Since 2016, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved campaign to “cleanse the blood” of LGBTQ+ Chechens, overseeing a government-sanctioned effort to detain, torture, and execute them. With only faint global condemnation and no action from the Kremlin, a vast and secretive network of activists takes matters into its own hands. Countless numbers of victims have been killed, and hundreds more are missing.

In this environment of prejudice and hate, an ill-equipped and underfunded coalition of LGBTQ activists mobilizes into action despite having little experience in such dangerous work. Offering a secure hotline to call for help and a wide-reaching network of support, the activists provide temporary shelter, safe houses and urgent safe passage. They risk their own safety by meeting with survivors, smuggling them through checkpoints and out of the country.

The film features several gay men and women who come forward in need of aid and tells their stories with astounding candor and bravery. To protect the identities of those fleeing for their lives, France alters their voices and uses adopted pseudonyms. He also deploys a groundbreaking new digital “face double” technique that has never been used before in documentary filmmaking. Visceral and haunting, the survivors can talk without fear of reprisal, and their ordeals can be heard first-hand.

By the close of the film, 151 people have been located with the help of the LGBTQ pipeline. Yet 40,000 others remain in hiding, in need of protection.

Directors Statement

In my work as a journalist and author over many years, I have focused closely on the stories of outsiders and people who society has pushed to its margins – the disregarded, the ignored, the hated.

When I turned to documentary filmmaking, I chose outsider activism as my subject. My first film, How To Survive A Plague, documented the work of early AIDS activists, ordinary people with no training who marshalled the intricate details of virology to change the course of the epidemic. Next, I opened up the story of early gender radicals in THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON, which chronicled not only the founding of the modern LGBTQ movement but also the founding of the first transgender rights organization in 1970.

Welcome To Chechnya completes this trilogy. It follows a group of ordinary humans who have done something extraordinary, and asks the question that has long preoccupied me: What makes a person assume enormous risk and responsibility when others might turn the other way? What does it take, in other words, to be a hero?

When I left their underground pipeline for the last time, knowing I could never go back once it became known I was reporting on their work, I wept with gratitude for the work they are doing. And for the opportunity they gave me to witness bravery of the most unvarnished kind: selfless, humane, and entirely queer.

About The Production

“If they don’t kill you, you’re a winner” David Isteev, LGBTQ activist, Russia.

In early 2017, filmmaker and investigative journalist David France read frightening news accounts revealing a campaign of torture and murder targeting gay men and women under the direction of leaders in Chechnya, a republic of Russia. The story quickly disappeared from the headlines. But that July, The New Yorker published an article by Masha Gessen (“The Gay Men who fled Chechnya’s Purge”) which revealed that this campaign was ongoing, a government-directed effort to “cleanse the Chechen bloodlines.” France explains, “What Masha revealed was that it was a coordinated, top-down campaign to identify and then exterminate LGBTQ Chechens.” The Kremlin was not intervening with Chechen leaders and international condemnations were going unheeded. Local activists, meanwhile, were left to take matters into their own hands.

Only a few days later, with Masha Gessen onboard as Executive Producer and with the help of Russian producer Askold Kurov, France arrived in Moscow on an initial fact-finding mission: set to stay a weekend, he instead stayed a month. “It was such a frenetic time and people were so deeply engaged in the work of saving peoples’ lives that we just started filming the first day and kept going,” he says.

He gained the trust of David Isteev, crisis intervention coordinator for the country’s largest gay-rights group The Russian LGBT Network, and Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center for LGBTI+ Initiatives, who brought him into the workings of their covert operations helping the victims of abuse in Chechnya. Members of their groups operate a string of secret safehouses and provide security as well as psychological and financial support, sometimes even new identities and lives outside of Russia. The work is dangerous and highly secretive.

France was impressed with the fearlessness he witnessed, “This is a film about incredibly heroic activism being carried out by the community itself, people who felt called upon to respond because the larger mechanisms of society were doing nothing. None of those people had any reason to believe that they would be brave enough to carry this out, yet they took it on at great risk to themselves.”​

Producer Alice Henty joined France’s team later in 2017 and felt strongly about the material. “I also was aware of the purge and I was horrified by it, and shocked that there was so little out there about it. Initially, we had no idea who the characters were going to be, but it just sounded like it had the making of a really strong piece of advocacy filmmaking.”

France returned to Russia several times over the next eighteen months to meet with the survivors as they made their way through the underground pipeline. With the permission of all involved, France and Kurov filmed nonstop. They spoke to several men and women who endured unimaginable violence as well as those who had escaped. But they participated on condition of anonymity because of threats against (and sometimes from) their family back home. France didn’t want to film the survivors in shadow, or with their faces obscured, as he felt this risked detracting from their humanity. “What I proposed to them, and what they were brave enough to accept, is that they let me shoot them without restriction, with a promise that I would find some way to disguise them afterward. I wanted to see what it’s like to be them at this terrible time… to convey the tragedy and the bravery and the perseverance of their lives,” he explains

France and Henty spent months researching and developing possible approaches to protecting their identities without obscuring the emotional truth of their experiences. After numerous failed attempts, they felt they had discovered two possible solutions. To test them, they approached Dr. Thalia Wheatley, an expert in human empathy and the ways that humans connect. She put the VFX images into a study involving 109 students at Dartmouth College and reported a clear winner. Developed by Ryan Laney at digital effects company 300 Ninjas, Inc., that approach involves digitally masking the many subjects in the film using A.I. and deep machine learning. It is like DeepFake but turned on its head: rather than manipulating someone’s image to appear to be saying something they didn’t, this approach allows the victims of this terror to speak their truths – while wearing someone else’s face. France and his team recruited people in the US – mostly New York-based LGBTQ activists fighting the rise of global anti-LGBTQ sentiments – and asked them to lend their faces as an act of activism to shield 22 people from grievous danger. They filmed the “face doubles” on a blue-screen stage, turned the footage into algorithms that through machine learning have been digitally stretched over the film’s subjects. Likewise, “voice doubles” joined to make the subjects entirely untraceable.

By turning the sinister DeepFake A.I. on its head, the filmmakers allow these individuals who have been silenced to speak their truth. “Without this,” adds France, “they would still be shapeless forms in the shadows speaking with machine voices”.

The dangers in participating in the project were great, and the filmmakers took the utmost care to ensure everyone’s comfort level with being part of a film that will be met with controversy and hostility in many parts of the world. Henty adds, “We gave everyone a choice as to whether they wanted to be hidden or not and most of the activists said they didn’t. We continued to check back in to make sure that still stood, their logic being that they want the visibility, that actually protects them.”

Filming such sensitive material in Russia and Chechnya also brought about huge personal risks for France and his team. They were careful not to draw attention to themselves in any way, operating inconspicuously with crews no larger than two. “We selected a tourist camera, an over the counter consumer Sony that we beat up the way a tourist camera would look beat up. We put tape on it, we covered all the lights so that no one could see the thing blinking and we wandered across the country appearing to be sightseers. In addition, we left cameras in the various safehouses for people to film themselves. For extremely dangerous shoots, we used GoPros and cellphones – about 8% of the film is shot on cell phones,” says France. Footage was triplicated and moved out of the country on multiple encrypted drives. No images traveled over the internet, and no footage remained in the country.

France knew he had incendiary material in his hands. But he felt strongly about getting these underreported stories out to the world. One such story is that of “Grisha,” a 30-year-old Russian who was working in Chechnya when he was detained and tortured over a period of 12 days. With the help of the LGBTQ underground pipeline, he escaped to Moscow, where he has tried to bring the anti-gay campaign to light before the Russian authorities. Met with delays and stonewalling by the courts, Grisha, along with his boyfriend and several family members, has been relocated to another (undisclosed) country. He continues to fight for justice in the European court system.

Not all the people that France met with have been so lucky. “Anya” is the daughter of a high-ranking Chechen government official and was being blackmailed by an uncle about her sexual orientation. Staying would be extremely dangerous. Her only recourse was to escape the republic, but the journey proved insurmountable. The network moved her from shelter to shelter, parking her temporarily in a neighboring country, in an apartment she could not leave, not even to shop for groceries, because Russian authorities were hot in pursuit. As distant countries were being petitioned to take her, members of the local LGBTQ community covertly saw to her daily needs. But after no visas had materialized almost six months into her holding pattern, they returned to her secret apartment to find her missing. Her whereabouts are unknown. The news is sobering but producer Henty recognizes the importance of not backing down from the harsh realities of the fight. She notes, “It’s a serious crime to be gay in 70 countries and in eight of them it is punishable by death. Totalitarianism is trending and it’s a hard thing to face but this is part of it.”

To drive home the extent of the atrocities, France and his team made the difficult decision to include horrifying video footage of torture and murder in their film. France comments, “It’s important to look at what’s happening. This is footage made by the people conducting these crimes for the purpose of either reporting their crimes to their superiors or to keep as trophy videos of their despicable acts. I want the footage to expose them as well.” (The victims in these scenes have also been disguised.)

Once the film is released, the filmmakers hope that it can reach the people it seeks to help. Says Henty, “I hope that as many people as possible get to see it. I want world leaders to be moved to take action and I want the people in Russia who are enduring this atrocity to know that we hear their suffering.” France adds: “That’s why we want to show the power and strength of gay men and lesbians and transgender people and the lessons they can show all of humanity about what it takes to triumph.”

Ultimately, France is grateful to the fearless participants who trusted him with this urgent, timely story. His hope is that the film will shine a light on the ongoing persecution. But he also says it depicts what it takes to be a true champion of liberty. “It’s a movie about heroes, really, people who are called upon to do heroic acts. It shows how no problem is so towering that it can’t be approached, and solutions can’t be found. It’s about what it takes to affect change.”

In Mexico City, the government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. This has spawned an underground industry of for-profit ambulances, which are often run by people with little or no training or certification.

Midnight Family is the story of the Ochoa family, who started an unlicensed EMT business in the late ‘90s after buying a retired ambulance from Oklahoma. Using their network of police contacts, the Ochoas pay a 300 peso (17 USD) bribe for every accident call sent directly their way. When lucky enough to arrive first to the scene, they charge patients 3800 pesos (185 USD) for transport to a hospital. For the past 20 years, this lively and likable family has just been able to make ends meet in this line of work.

Unlike many competing ambulance operators who push ethical limits much too far – extorting helpless patients or refusing to transport people in critical condition who don’t have means to pay – the Ochoas have tended to be a trustworthy exception within this fraught industry. As desperate patients wait for hours when government ambulances are nowhere to be found, the Ochoas arrive quickly, filling serious medical needs. They charge only when patients can reasonably afford the costs and spend much of their time supporting people who would otherwise be left without any care at all.

Our story unfolds as the status quo of the Ochoas’ business is jeopardized by increased local police vigilance. Although some private EMTs do engage in illegal and abusive practices, the cops frequently target private operators to get bribes rather than to enforce the laws governing independent ambulances. As EMT businesses risk being shut down, the Ochoas must find a way to get enough money to legitimize their ambulance or they too will lose their only means of making a living.

With this increased pressure, it becomes clear that being the warmhearted exception in an illegal and corrupt industry is extremely difficult and complicated. Police officers begin to demand higher bribes, and the Ochoas are increasingly compelled to conduct their business more aggressively and self-servingly, just like everybody else. We follow the Ochoas on a journey filled with ethical dilemmas, as they are forced to choose between the well-being of their patients and the future of their family business.

Midnight Family is a story about doing what you can with what you have. It asks us to consider whether the survival of one’s family legitimizes wrongdoing, particularly in contexts where corruption is the norm. In humanizing one family’s ethically compromised business, the film explores urgent questions around healthcare, the failings of government and the complexity of personal responsibility.

Directors Notes

I moved to Mexico City in December of 2015 and lived around the corner from the General Hospital. Every day, I walked past hundreds of desperate people waiting outside the gate of the overburdened facility, and I slowly grew curious about the state of medical services in a city of 9 million. Though I hadn’t come to Mexico to focus on healthcare—I was there to develop an entirely different film—it was impossible to ignore the sheer force of the emotions I encountered on my daily commute. Without knowing exactly what to look for, I began to explore.

I knew I had found a story worth telling after meeting the Ochoa family. One afternoon, sixteen-year-old Juan was cleaning their ambulance outside the General Hospital as his 9-year- old brother, Josué, clumsily juggled a soccer ball. Intrigued by the idea of a family-run ambulance, I asked them if I could ride along for a few hours. Fer, the father, was quick to agree. What I experienced that night was jaw-dropping—a film waiting to be made.
Over the next six months, I lived in the back of the Ochoas’ ambulance, filming, with gut- wrenching access, Mexico City’s cutthroat underworld of for-profit healthcare. As I soon discovered, this industry was new not only to me but to locals as well. I spoke with politicians, taco stand owners, families and students; almost nobody knew where their ambulances came from or what sort of EMTs were behind the wheel.

The Ochoas became my close friends. I loved being with them and knew they were good people. And yet the more time I spent in their ambulance, the more I learned about darker details of their operation. I discovered that they were not all certified as EMTs and that their ambulance was unregistered and not fully equipped. While they continued to provide much- needed services to a city lacking sufficient emergency care, I saw their financial insecurity begin to affect their treatment of their patients. My sense of right and wrong in knots, I kept asking myself, “What would I do here? What’s the better alternative?” I rarely had good answers, if any at all. And as their frequent run-ins with bribe-demanding police officers made clear, the Ochoas were operating within an inherently corrupt, dysfunctional system, trying to scrape by like millions of other Mexican families.

As the accidents became more serious and the pressure on the Ochoas intensified, the lines I hoped they wouldn’t cross drew frighteningly close. Though often proud of their work, at other times I worried for the patients in their care. This emotional and ethical confusion became the central tension of my story.

Working as a one-man crew, it took months of trial and error to figure out how best to tell this story. The Ochoas’ repetitive nightly routine let me experiment with different styles of shooting and gave me multiple opportunities to work with the feelings and energy that I was witnessing. I wanted the film to be first and foremost a thrilling experience. With my camera, I hoped to convey the physical and emotional roller coaster I was riding every night. I knew that interviews, music and voiceover could pull the audience out of the ambulance’s world and lead

them to judge the Ochoas’ work from a disconnected perspective. I also knew the questions I wanted to explore were delicate. Viewers would have a spectrum of reactions, and showing the situation instead of telling it would encourage a much richer and more nuanced conversation. Inspired by patiently composed ethnographic works as well as drama-filled narrative films, I felt the Ochoa’s story provided a unique intersection of these two cinematic modes, which are often considered contradictory. My aim was to take an audience on a breathtaking ride while honoring my conviction that long takes and distilled observation could offer a bracing form of realism.

In rural Tennessee, Austyn Tester, a 16-year-old newcomer to the live-broadcast ecosystem, attempts to ride a wave of optimism to become the next big internet crush. Teen girls all over the world tune into online “boy broadcasts” like Tester’s, in a 21st- century version of Tiger Beat, where all your fave heartthrobs might actually interact with you online for a minute or two — or more for the right price. But Tester’s earnestness sets him apart, peering wide-eyed into his laptop camera and professing that his female fans matter for hours on end. What’s he selling? Male validation. In return, he asks for fame and a better life for his family.

From meet-ups at the mall to a full-fledged boycrush “roadshow,” girls fork over the cash for the chance to hug and kiss their boy. Director Liza Mandelup documents the rise of the teenage Svengalis who control this economy and offers a judgment-free window into their dealings, dramas, and ultimate success or demise. She counters these depictions of the fame-hungry with interviews from girls whose candid admissions of desire ring painfully true. Tester genuinely wants to make the girls feel good, but will his open heart give him celebrity status and a chance to escape an abusive past and a dead-end town? Or is this new ecosystem built for failure?

Mandelup’s feature debut, JAWLINE, distills the most complex concepts about modern- day childhood and a gold-rush teen economy into one fascinating and surprisingly moving human portrait that questions what values we’ve passed onto our youths, and discovers a new and fleeting American dream. Mandelup approaches this peculiar world with an intimate air of BFF confidentiality and finds that as esoteric as the internet and its niches feel to some, boy broadcasts represent modern youth’s starvation for love and acceptance and susceptibility to exploitation — a tale, unfortunately, as old as time.

A Conversation with Liza Mandelup – Shooting the Dark Side of Dreams

Liza Mandelup began her career as a photographer. She traveled around on the kinds of adventures that would bring her face to face with fascinating free spirits — train hoppers, female bikers, club kids — and possessed the confidence to approach them and make them feel comfortable in her presence. Her early photo series are a cataloguing of these wind-swept times and people; it wasn’t long until a prominent casting director spotted her eye for scouting talent.

“I first did a scout for a huge Levi’s campaign, and I realized that the job was something I do naturally in my life, I traveled around and talked to strangers I thought were interesting. I loved finding talent and met people I began making films with while casting for brands. A lot of my early work was made while simultaneously working as a casting scout.” Mandelup explains that the experience evolved her thinking about filmmaking.

“I used to think documentary filmmaking was just that you get access to a doc subject through this magical thing that happened, where you crossed paths, and everything falls into place.” But Mandelup says casting real people for ad campaigns reversed her process. “Instead, I dreamt of subjects and went out looking for them — and thought of potential stories and found people who could possibly embody them. That was my process for making JAWLINE. I’d already done the research. I knew the world and I had the character in my head. We filmed for a while before we even found my ‘lead.’ I wanted to film with him on the first day he decided he wanted to broadcast his life in hopes of becoming famous — and see where that desire took him. Who knows what will happen? That was the mystery: ‘Will it crush him?’ or ‘will he actually succeed and we’ll watch him become famous?’ I pitched that around, and one manager told me they’d found Austyn Tester randomly online. I flew to Tennessee to meet him and we knew right away he was our feature.”

Though JAWLINE is documentary and so necessarily requires off-the-cuff interviews and fly-on-the-wall cinematography, Mandelup has never abandoned her aesthetic sense as a photographer.

“I’m really obsessed with framing and style,” she says. “It’s not good enough just to get the scene. I try to do as many things as possible to make it look cinematic and collaborate with people who work in this space as well. I picture my documentaries playing out like a narrative, but we have all the challenges of chaos working against us. When things actually look good, it feels magical.”

Of course, Mandelup can’t simply interrupt her subjects or DP in the middle of filming to direct them, but she prepares for the moments when direction must be given. “The DP, Noah Collier, and I had so many conversations about what to do with movement or framing when certain scenarios arise. How do you make something look really beautiful when you don’t have any control over what’s happening? But, my crew becomes friends with everybody they film with. Everyone knows that, above all, we’re there to integrate into these people’s lives before and after the cameras are rolling. It allows us to create a blur between personal connection and what we get on camera. Nobody is on the clock. The goal is to make the process seamless.”
Ask Mandelup her style, and she’ll use the word “dreamy.”

“Everything I do links back to dreams,” she says. “I follow people’s fantasies. Their desires and the emotions behind that — the story elements are one thing and we are always working on that while filming and editing, but that emotional layer is something else that I work on making sure never gets diluted. I care about how people are dealing with their emotions, timeless elements that will last long after the technology in the film has gone. I want JAWLINE to feel like a teen girl’s fantasy, an all-access pass to intimacy. To the secret lives of boys. But, there’s also a dark side.”

All this beauty Mandelup creates is a red herring. JAWLINE appears as a pastel fantasy, pretty and pleasant to look at, while telling a more nightmare-ish tale of late-stage capitalism. “We’re gonna paint this fairy-tale world where people are doing really fucked-up shit. That’s part of the concept behind making JAWLINE so bright and dreamy,” Mandelup says. “In this world that I’m documenting, everyone’s exploited.”

Mandelup breathlessly lists the ways in which the “boy broadcast” economy impacted the teens’ lives, how kids all over were dropping out of school to sit in front of a computer screen, leaving them ironically more disconnected, less able to relate to the kids in their own schools and towns, and reality. “People want to be spoon fed the hard facts, but I like to show the viewer what’s happening and the emotions involved and let them form their own opinions.”

Mandelup describes showing an early cut of the film to some people. She laughs when she recounts a comment from one that asked: “Does she know how dark this is?”

“JAWLINE is a reflection of what I saw happening with some teens right now, anxiety and isolation is exacerbated and they’re going to new lengths to cope with it. It’s not just bedrooms painted black. The new teen rebellion is hidden between screens, it’s not as obvious, you have to really go looking into these apps to understand what’s happening here,” Mandelup says.

“But if you’re feeling uncomfortable with it, if you’re wondering what the hell is happening, you’re not reading into it. That darkness is there. The first thing I said when I started this film was: ‘This is fucking dark.’”

Love in the Time of Live Chat

Mandelup thought her film would be a love story: “I wanted to make a story about teens in love, with the backdrop of technology and how that factors into how they live their lives.”

In her research for niche online communities, she stumbled upon conventions, wherein teen girls could pay to meet the guys they were following online through a live- broadcast app. Mandelup was struck by the “spontaneous, bizarre emotional connections” she witnessed in malls and trampoline parks as the girls rushed to embrace and get a picture with their online crush. The result of that scouting was a short film entitled “Fangirl,” which featured three teenage girls who feel an unconditional love towards their online crush. Mandelup was still hung up on what she’d seen — the frenzy around these boys was akin to what happened with the Beatles. But these boys weren’t peddling art. Their wares were emotional validation.

“I felt like I had to unpack the emotion behind this,” Mandelup said. “The fangirls’ obsession with getting to know these guys through a live-streaming app got me curious: Why these guys? What is so interesting about them? What do they do to cast a spell on hundreds of thousands of teenage girls while being completely regular guys? My immediate thought was that they were giving a kind of love. Connection is all about getting to know someone, being intimate with them, and these boys were doing something on this app that felt similar, live broadcasting day-to-day life, giving girls affection. And for girls longing for this, that kind of interaction, well, it feels a lot like falling in love.”

Throughout the film, Mandelup sprinkles in candid interviews with these girls, who are startlingly comfortable revealing their inner lives to the camera, perhaps a side effect of

a life lived online. Each interview, though disparate, carries similar traits, usually a proclamation that the boys and men in their lives had been cruel or abusive to them, and chatting regularly with some nice boys — though they are strangers who happen to also make money off the girls — renewed their self-esteem and faith in the future.

What’s remarkable is the girls’ self-awareness, the understanding that they are paying for a fantasy. Mandelup thought the boys to be gender-reversed “cam girls” in a sense. “The girls in the film need something that is not necessarily sexual, though. They need love,” Mandelup says. “But for all genders, sexualities, it’s different. The market of it, how desire is bought and sold online. There’s no such thing as ‘fanboys’ in this specific world, for instance, because it’s built on a ‘falling in love’ that doesn’t seem to work in reverse.”

Mandelup mined her own childhood emotions to find an avenue into this world. The process was in a sense similar to that of Bo Burnham’s for the making of Eighth Grade, wherein the story is wholly informed by going to the teens themselves and asking them what they fear or adore, rather than adults simply projecting their best guesses onto the screen, or trying to pigeonhole kids into rigid character confines. JAWLINE and Eighth Grade, though totally different projects, together mark a new-ish form of authentic filmmaking perhaps not seen since the days of Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

“For me, I think the whole process was me tapping into that teen mentality and trying to find common ground with it, through the process of filming and meeting these people.” Quickly what initially mystified Mandelup became second nature to her.

“When we were filming with them, I realized that under the surface, the teenage dynamic is still the same. It just now exists with technology as an extension of the self. It’s creating a hyper version of social dynamics that may have existed in the past — these are age-old emotions on steroids, being fed to you through a constant stream of live- broadcasting.” Mandelup describes the booming economy of boy-chatting to be the “wild west.” But not everyone makes it rich in a gold rush.

“The people profiting are businessmen who’ve hopped from one venture to the next, and they saw this economy happening, like ‘Oh, you have all these girls who follow you, and every time you tweet you’re at the mall, they show up and buy you things?’ A lot of these boys come from nothing and are being quoted numbers that are unrealistic, but both the girls and boys are being exploited. The managers will be the first to tell you the market is capitalizing on teenage girls’ insecurities, and as long as there’s money and fame in it, these boys, represented by these managers, will be there to offer the ‘confidence drug.’”

Even though the focus of JAWLINE isn’t the girls, their voices frame the film. “The girls were more, like, power in numbers. It never felt as though one girl’s story told it all. In the beginning I thought I would have one girl character opposite the boys, but when you notice there’s dozens and dozens of girls feeling anxious, lonely, getting bullied, and wanting to harm themselves, it became obvious they could only be an ensemble.” Mandelup describes them as the “chorus.” With JAWLINE, it’s impossible to see the boys without seeing them through the girls’ eyes.

“In this story, the males are objects of desire,” Mandelup says. “This is Austyn Tester’s story, but through the female gaze.” Despite the industry preying upon their insecurities, however, the girls still hold a power that even they seem unaware of, Mandelup explains. They wield the power to mature out of their momentary desire for synthetic love, but until then, Mandelup says, “Ultimately, they decide who is worth sticking around for.”

Finding Austyn

Mandelup started this film with a two-person crew: Herself and her DP, Noah Collier. Traveling from convention to meet-up to convention, she interviewed hundreds and hundreds of girls in fifteen states but always had her eye on gaining access to the right boy to tell this story.

“These traveling shows happen all over, and it’s much harder to gain access to them than you’d think,” Mandelup explains. “I’m really transparent with how I pitch everything — this is an indie artistic documentary. I give them my site. I tell them where I see the film going. But this world of the boys, it’s about fame and celebrity. They weren’t trying to get into the art world, and I was coming from that angle.”
Through this process, Mandelup also realized one key element was missing from so many of the boys: She needed to find someone who seemed genuine and who had high stakes in making it in the live broadcast world.
“Yeah, there were times where it felt like I didn’t like the guys. I loved the girls, but finding boy broadcasters that I connected with was a bit harder. I wanted to sympathize with my subject — I couldn’t do that for someone who had bad intentions. I need to want the best for them in order to film with them so much.”

When she finally met Austyn, the lightbulb clicked on.

“We went to Tennessee and met his family and saw the dynamic of his house, and there was a story in every corner.” In the film, we see bunches of kittens roaming around a squat ranch home, framed by clutter and worn furniture. Amid this is a tightly knit

family rooting for a teen boy who’s got a chance at fame he won’t take for granted — he says with wide-eyed optimism that someday he’ll “change the world.”
“When I met Austyn, he was so naïve, in a beautiful way, the kind of naivate that only happens once — before you’re met with reality. He was just utterly convinced that if you dream something big enough, it can happen, no matter what’s working against you. And the odds were against him. His whole family was relying on him, and it was the opposite of what I’d seen with the other boys. He was trying to help his family and help other people. The second I met him, I thought that this film might go, he might be famous, and I was attracted to it.”

Mandelup calls Austyn “genuine” and describes the moments when they would stop filming him as he chatted with the girls, and how he would continue talking to them for hours. But Mandelup asks: “When you want to be real to people, does that serve you in becoming internet famous in a market built on a self-fulfilling prophecy like stardom? The girls are escapists looking for an outlet to try to cure this teenage isolation and disconnectedness — and Austyn happened to give them a love drug. But Austyn has those similar feelings. He can’t connect to anyone in his town, and nobody there acknowledges his dreams. People bullied him and made fun of him. That he wants something more than fame sets him apart from the other boys. But this is also a one- sided economy.”

Austyn’s full story certainly could not be told without explaining his economic background, but Mandelup chose only to show small details of his everyday life. “Nobody pitched Austyn to me like, ‘Oh he’s very poor.’ I met him without knowing his circumstances. I was just told that his character would win me over. But when you come from nothing like Austyn does, it makes it even more compelling that he would get it in his head that he could become famous. There’s no one in his life telling him this is an option — he created this mentality himself.”

In JAWLINE, Mandelup has tried to wrap her head around the new ideal of an American dream. It was imperative for her to cast a kind of Goliath to Austyn’s David, which is how she came across Michael Weist. “When I met Michael, he was 18, and he actually approached me and inquired about what we were filming. When we started talking, he told me he was the CEO of his own multi-million dollar company. I was like, ‘If you don’t have a movie about you, I‘d be shocked.’ I realized this is a teenage world, for teenagers, run by teenagers and the whole economy dependent on teenagers. It’s the epitome of the internet age, the idea that ‘Oh, we’re going to skip everything and be our own ecosystem. I’m going to manage you and run your profits.’ There was no need for an adult in this equation.”

When Mandelup began filming in Michael’s “boy broadcast concept house,” she was taken aback by this world the young entrepreneur had created. “The idea for Michael

was like, ‘I’m gonna have a bunch of boys live in this mansion, and we’re going to broadcast 24 hours a day, and they’ll collaborate on videos, and we’ll make the most content ever.’ The boys had free reign over this beautiful, luxurious house Michael provided, where they could chill and play video games and be messy, while broadcasting their glamorous, fun lives.”

That Austyn, living in a home with shoddy plumbing and sharing a bed with his brother, would somehow dream of fame became less and less mysterious to Mandelup the longer she spent in this world.

“The new American dream is being dangled over you with a carrot. It’s no longer this distant thing. Fame is iconic in American culture. Now, because we all have access to the internet, it feels attainable. Kids are no longer subject to their surroundings. ‘Instead of staying in this town I hate and getting bullied at school life, why can’t I become famous?’”

With JAWLINE, Mandelup was chasing down desire, but she was also searching for this new American dream. She traveled all over suburban america for this film, and everywhere she went, someone asked her to subscribe to their channel or watch their broadcasts. Was the chance of fame just a numbers game rigged for the privileged? And for how long can this whole enterprise be sustained?

“Right now, as I’m talking, this booming economy we shot, it’s probably already dried up. I think it’s already done. This whole ‘boy broadcast’ dynamic, it was just a glitch, a glitch that happened where this concept landed, and there will be another and another to follow it. It was an illusion to begin with. Michael calls it the ‘social media gold rush,’ but the gold was already gone by the time many of our characters were looking for it. That feeling of these boys knowing they are destined for something bigger may never disappear now, even if that economy is gone. What I learned is that to get big in the this world, you skip a lot of reality. The implications of this can get dark. These guys are told they’re disposable, and there’s only a small window for the girls when they think they require this external validation. Still, in every single town we went to, this was the new American dream. They want to be famous and they don’t need to rely on talent to become that. JAWLINE, for me, captures this fleeting moment in time.”