Samara Grace Chadwick has spent more than 15 years working in the field of documentary film throughout Europe and North and South America, primarily as a filmmaker, editor, and festival programmer. She is currently Senior Programmer for the Points North Institute and the Camden International Film Festival, and formerly worked with the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, the RIDM festival in Montreal, and Philip Gröning Filmproduktion in Berlin.

“1999” will premiere at the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival on April 28.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

SGC: When death haunts a high school in a small town in the late 1990s, everyone is forever transformed. In this gentle, prismatic film, I return to the town I fled as a teen to re-immerse myself in the memories still lurking there, in its spaces and within the dusty boxes of diaries, photos, and VHS tapes.

“1999” is not a ghost story, but the ghosts are palpable at every turn. The snow-covered streets, the school’s hallways, and lockers are preserved as in a dream. The absences left by the relentless teenage suicides still shimmer with questions, trauma, and regret.

I encounter people who are as breathtaking as they are heartbroken, and, finally, 16 years later, the community strengthens itself by sharing the long-silenced memories.

Ultimately, the film weaves together multiple voices in a collective essay on how grief is internalized — and how, as children, we so painfully learn to articulate our desire to stay alive.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

SGC: I was definitely drawn to the story, though it was largely by impulse, instinct, and for a long time very difficult to put into words. Now the words I use, in retrospect, shift from time to time: it’s hard to say exactly what drew me, except I think this is the way it is with all traumas and difficulties in our past. It is a process to acknowledge them, and regardless of whether you do, they will exist within your life and shape the person you become.

So I think that as I turned 30 and was embarking on the next stage of my life — one that is less about my own individual pursuits and freedoms and more about finding home, anchoring myself in family, finding love — it was important for me to establish a sense of origin, to return to where I was from, and to get to know some of the ghosts that were still lurking there.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

SGC: I hope they will feel less alone. I hope they will feel closer to the person sitting next to them and to whoever they came to see the film with. “1999” is a film about community. It invites the audience to join us in a process we all embarked on together while making the film — finding words to share a traumatic experience with one another, finding solace in that act of sharing, and breaking free from the crippling isolation of silence.

“1999” is also a 1990s high school film: it embodies the resilience of teenage rebellion and celebrates the depth of lifelong friendships. I really see the film as an ode to adolescence — it taps into the exceptional imaginations of teenagers, young people whose spirits are still roaring and have not yet been captured by adulthood.

1999 as a date for me represents not only the cusp of the millennium, the cusp of 21st-century politics, but also, for all us kids of the 1980s, the point when our lives tipped into adulthood.

1999 was haunted by a general amorphous sense of dread. We knew we were headed into an unknown world, one that felt hostile; we knew, too, that we were going to be increasingly asked to compromise the world we wanted, in our teenage idealism.

1999 was also the year of Columbine, which happened the same week as one of the central deaths discussed in my film. The film outlines a symbolic tension between how the adults and the teenagers each responded to the crisis. Lately, we’ve all been in awe at the wisdom and eloquence of the Parkland teenagers, and I think there is something to be said for the inherent, unabashed, uncontained, uncompromising life force of teenagers.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

SGC: I wish I had known more about the legal framework of filmmaking. In my case, the question of rights and errors and omissions insurance came into play once the film was already rather far along. It is such a strange territory, music licensing especially. And it operates with its own logic, a logic I oftentimes found completely mindboggling and — let’s face it — exasperating.

My film was conceived with the idea of having a ’90s soundtrack: I asked Acadian musicians to reinterpret classic music from the 1990s in Chiac, our local dialect. We initially had music by Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd, the Cranberries, Radiohead. In the end, the rights for just one song, partial use, were going to be more than my entire director’s salary for four years of work! So, working with lawyers, music supervisors, musicians, and the excellent composer/artist Cyril Hahn, we found creative ways of navigating the landscape of rights.

It all turned out beautifully in the end, but it would have spared us all much sweat, tears, and stress rashes to have considered rights earlier on while we were still in the edit suite constructing the film.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

SGC: I worked with a series of exceptional and powerful ladies to help get this film funded. Sarah [Spring] and Selin [Murat] at Parabola Films in Montreal were the force behind the funding, which came in from 17 different partners, some smaller and some more significant.

We worked with the National Film Board, which supported us from both the anglophone studio in Montreal and the francophone studio in Acadie, where the film was shot. We also had a broadcaster, Radio-Canada, that supported the film from the very early stages. And two years ago, we pitched the film at the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland, which led to us working with Aline [Schmid] at Beauvoir Films, who helped us not only get broadcast and theatrical distribution in Europe, but also, thanks to our co-production with Switzerland, we were the first Canadian film to receive Eurimages support.

As far as insights go, I recommend working with producers, absolutely, especially for such an emotional project. Their work in financing the film helped me keep focused and present. I loved working with women, and I loved how Parabola Films already had a strong policy of transparency and deep respect and models for true collaboration in place. There was integrity and consistency throughout the process.

W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at Hot Docs?

SGC: It means the world to me. I’m a child of Hot Docs; I cut my documentary teeth at Hot Docs. I first attended Hot Docs in 2010, and I was in a supremely vagabond stage in my life pursuing academia but with an unspoken longing for the concrete and collaborative work of documentary.

I then was hired in 2011 as an associate programmer, and my horizons shot outwards: watching so many films, I became fascinated with the many types of artistic and political practices that all fall under the documentary genre. I haven’t missed a single Hot Docs since!

The festival has been my trampoline, my family; I certainly feel that Hot Docs represents an important nudge towards my making documentaries. Also, Hot Docs audiences! They are known worldwide. I can’t wait to share the film with the people of Toronto. “1999” is a film that is best seen in the theater surrounded by people who are emoting together. It’s a film that brings tears, but also lots of laughs: the whole 90 minutes is like a massage for the heart.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

SGC: This is so tricky. There were constantly moments in the development process, while pitching the film at festivals and meeting with industry [execs], when people’s conception of what the film should be was very different from my own. Because I work in the industry as well — as Senior Programmer at the Points North Institute, Camden International Film Festival — I understand that there can at times be a certain fatigue, both on the part of filmmakers and funders, that can lend itself to simplification and formula.

My film is hard to pin down, and I was okay with that, even if it meant existing outside of certain people’s imaginaries and/or interest. In fact, the moments when I got the worst advice were powerful, because I had to learn to articulate and also sometimes justify what I was doing.

On the other hand, because I felt supported by my producers throughout, and therefore didn’t need distort the film to appeal to all funders, I was able to find the intuitive souls in the field who listened and who loved the project. It was a beautiful way to find like-minded collaborators.

I think that’s probably the best advice I’ve heard and followed: it is so important for me to work with people I really like, admire, and respect. It means that you go into the field with gentleness and integrity — something that is absolutely essential, I feel, when you are asking real people to share their lives with you.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

SGC: Making this film has led me to be more intuitive and to trust my instincts. I think this is a key quality for documentarians: to know themselves and to articulate their impulses and, perhaps most importantly, to be attentive and also affectionate while filming.

There are so many taboos and such discomfort around the subject matter of suicide, and so it was clear to me from the start that the film I was making needed to feel comfortable, safe, and sincere. There were guidelines I set out based on my sense of comfort: to spend as much time as possible with people off-camera, to subject myself to the same process and questioning I was asking of them, to never push anyone to reveal or discuss something they didn’t want to share, and to have a small, gentle crew that was consistent and committed to the project.

So many of the key people in the film were women, but the few men were all magical and completely present. Everyone who contributed to the film had their own reasons for caring so much, and their love for the project and dedication is so palpable in the finished film.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

SGC: So many wonderful woman-directed films! I want to name Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” as well as Brett Story’s “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” because both are Canadian women around my age who have, each in their own profoundly personal way, reimagined the script of documentary. Each of these films carves out new and vivid spaces for how a documentary can be crafted — both Polley and Story yield such creative mastery in an astonishing balance of power and humility, intelligence and affection.

In a tribute to the supremely talented Terra Jean Long, who edited “1999” and is very much a co-creator of the film’s strange magic, I’d like to shout out to woman editors, who have historically always been the behind-the-scenes geniuses of all my favorite films: Françoise Collin, who edited the films of Jean Rouch and Jean-Luc Godard, Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte, who also edited for Rouch, as well as for François Truffaut, Jean Cocteau, and Eric Rohmer, and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who edited nearly all of Werner Herzog’s early films — everything from “Fitzcarraldo” to his sublime documentaries “The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner” and “Land of Silence and Darkness.”

W&H: Hollywood and the global film industry are in the midst of undergoing a major transformation. Many women — and some men — in the industry are speaking publicly about their experiences being assaulted and harassed. What are your thoughts on the #TimesUp movement and the push for equality in the film business?

SGC: I sincerely feel there is a model of behavior that is now publicly acknowledged as obsolete. When I first began working in the film world, it was much more densely populated with a certain archetype: people (generally, yes, men) who took up a lot of space, and whose confidence-to-contribution ratio seemed completely out of whack.

I would describe the archetype as people who by their very presence in a space tend to flatten it. People who have moved through the world without ever questioning themselves and therefore operate without acknowledging realities other than their own. That supreme lack of humility and lack of curiosity is in my mind antithetical to the documentary practice — or at least it should be!

I feel that in the past years, there has been a distinct movement away from praising this type of person. True lasting change will come not only in the form of outright condemnation — of course we’re discussing a spectrum of toxic behavior, and some require vivid condemnation — but also in our collective ability to actually ignore the “bros” and to operate outside their ideological space.

We’re hearing more and more about empathy these days — the capacity to share emotions, compassion for others, to coexist. I believe that often the figures who have been responsible for harassment and abuse lack this basic capacity, for whichever reason — cultural, personal. But the culture is changing: people with empathy, nuance, and a subtler form of power are claiming their voice and their points of view. And in my world, most of these new powerful people are women — and the obsolete are left bewildered in their dust.