Peabody award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand tackles some of the most pressing issues of our time — from the climate crisis and systemic inequality to love, grief, and the transformative power of parenting. In addition to her documentary work, Helfand co-founded Working Films and Chicken & Egg Pictures, where she was Creative Director for a decade. She received a United States Artist Award in 2007, is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch, and has taught at NYU, SVA , UW/Madison, and Wayne State University.

“Love & Stuff” was scheduled to screen at the 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. A digital version of the fest has been organized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Love & Stuff” is screening in Hot Docs Festival Online, which launched May 28 and is geo-blocked to Ontario, Canada. More information about the program and how to tune in can be found here.

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

JH: “Love & Stuff” is a multi-generational love story told in the first person. It starts with the death of my mother, and all the “stuff” that comes with it, namely her stuff, boxes and boxes of it, many of which ended up in my cramped New York City apartment. 

My grief is forced to take a back seat when, on the way to the first Passover Seder without my mother — the one I was dreading and could not imagine how I would get through — I get the phone call from my adoption agency, a call I have been waiting for and praying about for years. A healthy baby girl will be born the next morning and the birth mother is interested in me. It’s been just over seven months since my mother died and my house is filled with her stuff, I’m three months shy of 50, I am a single, an independent filmmaker with a lot of moving parts, jobs, and projects — and if I don’t say “yes,” I will not get another chance.

This is an opportunity for me to really look at the transformative power of parenting, our — for sure my own — complex attachment to “stuff,” and what it is we really need to leave our children. 

W&H: What drew you to this story?

JH: I have been making first-person films since 1990, when I was diagnosed with DES related cancer, and had to have a radical hysterectomy at 25 years old. I went home to my parents’ house to heal, and I brought along a video camera. It became a witness, a reminder to myself and my mother, that our experience — her guilt, my grief — was not only not private, but in fact a critical part of the public record.

I shot for five years and that film turned into “A Healthy Baby Girl.” That film, its sequel “Blue Vinyl,” and its epilogue “EK VELT: At The End of the World,” all taught me some very important lessons and skills about the very real and potentially transformative power of humor, irony, humility, and transparency. I transferred those skills to addressing and exploring the climate crisis. My mother was pleased — “at least climate change is not my fault — well, not mine alone, anyway.” I gave her a very long break, despite a sweet cameo in “Cooked: Survival By Zip Code.”

I had no intention of making a film about my mother’s experience with colon cancer. But when it was clear that we were facing the end of her life, and that we were going to do everything in our power to insure that she lived a very good death, I moved back home to be with my mom. We called our hospice Chez Hellfand Hospice. I started to post our experiences on Facebook. The response was warm, loving, supportive, and deeply interested.

I realized that I was offering people a window in a world they would have to ultimately enter too. I started to realize that “parenting” your parent at the end of their life is a blessing, and a universal right of passage. So I pulled out my iPhone and started to shoot some important conversations with my mom. 

I know for a lot of people, when something really painful happens, they want to keep the world out; I am the exact opposite. I would rather look at the tough stuff with company, especially when I know that the very thing that is causing me anguish has or will cause them anguish — like walking into your dead mother’s apartment to pack up all the stuff she and your late father have accumulated over the years, the stuff she begged you to go through with her before she died, and you didn’t.

I am a “stuff challenged” person on a good day, but when you add love and death to that? Forget about it. So when it came time to really go through all that stuff, with my brothers and on my own, I called in a crew — good friends to be my witnesses and my creative collaborators. I called Daniel Gold, who I have worked with for years, and I said, “Let’s make art out of the last things my mother touched. Her lipstick, her gum pick, her $7,000 hand-made bridge, her shoes, her elephant collection.”

I couldn’t do it alone. I needed a witness, and that simple desire to not be alone with the “stuff” led to this film. 

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?

JH: I want to help people reconsider the existential problem we all share: time. 

I am half a century older than my daughter, and I think about this often. Just like I do in the movie, I often find myself thinking in multiples of 10. When she is six, I will be 56. When she has her Bat Mitzvah, I will be 63. When she is 20, I’ll be 70. When she is 40, I’ll be 90. How can we value the time right here and right now, instead of worrying about the future? The present is all anyone has — I forget that. 

I want “Love & Stuff” to inspire people to spend mindful quality time with the people who matter to them most — especially now during this pandemic, when people are alone together on Zoom, FaceTime, and Skype. It’s hard to talk about the end of life. It’s easier to talk about stuff. I know you can do both and along the way attach meaningful stories to stuff you have grown up with but just never asked about. 

Along the way, stories connected to stuff will give way to directives about life, love, how to give what to whom, and how the end of a good life should be lived. That is what I hope people will think about and do. 

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

JH: The most challenging part of making “Love & Stuff” was finding the overall structure and supporting it with a narration that held just the right tone, feel, and voice. On one level, we knew we had a longitudinal story about the end of a life, the beginning of a new life, and a transformation from grieving daughter to present mother. We had scenes for much of this, as I had been shooting and we were concurrently editing scenes and trailers and more scenes and more trailers for a while.

But the big breakthrough for this film happened when we brought in the archival footage. My very brilliant editors, Marina Katz and David Cohen, who also did the op-doc for the NYT, were able to look at years and years of footage with a fresh, intuitive, and creative point of view. They found ways to use the family footage to create dynamic portals between the past and the present that play like amazing hallways that move the viewer through my life.

We took risks, we experimented, and we ultimately created and found a language and a form that made the film come alive — made the film start to talk back to us. That is the most exciting part of filmmaking — when your film is alive enough to talk back, tell you what it needs, beg for humor, demand silence, challenge you to be more authentic, honest, reflective, not too reality TV and not nostalgic, at least not in icky way, which can happen with a film where one of the most dramatic moments takes place while making chopped liver with your mother’s mother’s meat grinder. But that took a long, long time — many, many iterations, structures, and some very hard moments where we simply had to let go of images, characters, and scenes we loved, but were just not part of the final structure. 

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

JH: “Love & Stuff” was initially conceived of as a series. The NYT op-doc was our proof-of-concept. Theo, my daughter, had arrived, literally while we were cutting that short. We picked up the story where the op-doc had left off, me striving to make a room and a home for Theo. 

The logline was: “Grieving her beloved mother and living amidst 63 boxes of dead parents’ stuff, one transformative ‘yes’ turns filmmaker Judith Helfand into a 50-year-old new mother.” I built a team around that concept. I felt like we were on the cutting edge. There was all this talk about “series being the future,” there was lots of talk about how important it was for filmmakers like me to diversify their portfolio, and there was nothing like this out there. I was stoked.

We raised grant money; the biggest grant we got was from Artemis Rising Foundation and Regina Scully, who loved the idea and wanted to see it fly. She actually suggested that I think about nine-minute films. We had enough money to shoot, edit core scenes, and make a reel that showed transformation over the course of a year. But we were not able to get a “yes” from a platform. We stayed the course and the vision for a while. My team grew to include three producers — myself, Hilla Medalia, Julie Parker Benello — and a mighty dynamic group of women Executive Producers. All we needed was a platform or a commissioning editor — even if the platform didn’t fund the series, that would be what we needed to get equity investment.

Oddly enough, no one wants 100 percent assurance that you will sell your feature, or have a home for your feature, before they fund you with grants or equity. That is a risk that investors and foundations are willing to take. But much less so with a non-fiction series, at least back then in 2015 and 2016. The trouble is, if you want to make a truly authored series, independent of a broadcaster, you need a tremendous amount of money. That funding just doesn’t exist yet. To make a series, you have to sell it outright to a platform, which is difficult to do for any filmmaker desiring creative control.

We recognized that the opportunity for funding this as a series was limited and might not ever happen. That said, there was a lot of love for the project; everyone cried, laughed, talked about their own grieving process, and/or picked up their phone and called their mother. We were encouraged by multiple colleagues to reconceive of it as a feature length film. That was hard for me. But once we did, we were invited to pitch the film at the 2017 Sundance Catalyst Forum, which was held in September. This was a turning point. There is nothing like being part of a highly selective curated cohort of 12 vetted pitch-ready films meeting up with a highly curated cohort of potential funders and investors at the Sundance Resort for four days. It was an amazing opportunity, catalytic for sure.

The program is a visionary one. I just wish more filmmakers could have such access. It galvanized our pitch, our vision, and it helped us secure interest, trust, and money, from a range of independent film funders and investors — including Impact Partners, who is an EP on the film, and has been very instrumental in helping us finish and launch.

In the end, it was a combination of grants and equity that helped us make the film. And, of course, making a film is just 50 percent of the story. Now we have to ensure that it is used effectively with the communities and individuals who need it most, which means we have to start raising engagement money.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

JH: 1981, Merrick Long Island. I’m 17 years old and watching “The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time!” on PBS in our den. Pete Seeger is talking about what it meant to be a black-listed artist singing for justice, and I turn to my mother and say, “Mom, that’s what I want to do.” “What? Play the banjo?” she says nervously. “No, I want to make that kind of movie, about real people, doing real things.” 

“Oh,” she says, oddly relieved. “That’s a documentary, honey.” And that’s what I did.

In fact, I was on a trajectory to only make films about people on the front lines of struggle — people I wasn’t related to — when I was diagnosed with DES cancer and went home to heal with a video camera. The last thing in the world I could have imagined or even realized was that there was struggle to explore in my home, on my home, with my very middle-class parents, through our very own point of view and frame of reference. But I would say that this is where I really found my “voice.”

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

JH: The worst advice I’ve received? “Just put it in storage.”

 The best? Keep a production journal. Write every day about your highs and lows, your process, those little epiphanies. Be in conversation with yourself and the material. Whether your movie is in the first person or not, this process pushes you to find the language for the question you’re answering with your film. It pushes you to be honest with yourself and your team. It helps you do the most difficult and gratifying work of being your authentic self. It’s that authenticity that must be your north star throughout the process of filmmaking: the fundraising, production, structuring any of these processes. To make a good film, you must keep yourself.

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

JH: Your own unique, authentic voice is your most powerful asset — stick to it, no matter the style or genre of film you are making.

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

JH: Right now, I am really excited and deeply moved by a new film that was supposed to have its world premiere at Tribeca called “Through the Night” by Loira Limbal.

W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?

JH: Am I keeping creative? Well, I’ve written an op-ed that will be published in The Daily Beast on Mother’s Day. The first line is “Thank G-d my mother is already dead.” I am also in homeschool hell as a solo parent in New York City who has to balance working with keeping my child safe, “whole,” and focused on her virtual school work and engaged. That is the dream, anyway — I might have to make peace with safe and relatively happy. She is in kindergarten, and schools don’t open until next fall.

First, I have to say: I am very fortunate to be able to do my work from home. That said, as a freelancer who is launching one film with “Love & Stuff” and keeping another very relevant film — “Cooked: Survival By Zip Code” — at work and in service, the work has definitely changed. In both cases, I am very focused on how to transform face-to-face distribution, film festivals, and speaking engagements into a virtual programs that are effective, useful, and whenever possible, monetized.

I am also teaching and mentoring filmmakers, and I had to complete my semester online. How do you foster learning and community over Zoom? How do you take documentary production classes, like the ones I was teaching at Wayne University, and make them work in cyberspace? How do you turn a five-day mentorship retreat, like the Chicken & Egg Accelerator Lab that I co-lead with Lucila Moctezuma, into an online Zoom community? This has taken a good bit of creativity and stretching. And it has truly, when I think back to the last six or seven weeks, been very gratifying, albeit very tough, simply because my kid is supposed to be in school from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. 

As far as “Love & Stuff” goes, I am working on developing a virtual workshop for individuals and families focused on how to use this quarantine time and the magic of Zoom and Skype to do “stuff reviews.” Going through your loved one’s stuff with them, while they are alive, even if it is from the other side of a Zoom, could be a really meaningful way to be “apart, together.” It could even be fun. Why not use this quarantine to figure out what really matters? 

“Stuff” can be a great vehicle for these big conversations. As I wrote in that op-ed for The Daily Beast, “My mother had no problem discussing living wills and “do not resuscitate” orders. I did. But maybe, I would have gotten there sooner had I taken her lead and simply started by asking her about the stemware she always hated, but used anyway because my father surprised her with it for a major anniversary.” I am hoping these workshops will become part of the long term impact campaign for “Love & Stuff,” for when lockdown is over and we can show films in theaters — and cry, laugh, and snort out loud together in the same room.