Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker. Her 2016 feature documentary “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” won the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, was nominated for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards, and was broadcast on PBS’s “Independent Lens” in 2017. She is the author of the book “Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America,” and her writing and criticism have been published widely. Story was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.
“The Hottest August” premiered at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival on March 8.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
BS: “The Hottest August” is a film about living and coping under the shadow of climate change. It takes as its point of departure the city of New York over the course of one month – August 2017 – to create a kind of tapestry portrait of how we, as a society, are doing right now.
Made up of intimate conversations and public events that unfolded over the month, the film offers a lens through which to think about the effects of living in a time where the future itself feels increasingly foreclosed.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
BS: I was interested in what feels ineffective, at least for me, of so many “climate change” films. And the key frustration is that they tend to hinge on the assumption that we don’t know how bad things are. I think differently – I think we do know how bad things are. So the question needs to be reframed.
How come we can’t seem to do anything about it? How can we knowingly preside over a collapsing planet and oversee our own imminent extinction? The film re-casts its gaze. It asks us to look at ourselves, in all our complexity, absurdity, contradiction, and our desire to thrive and survive, and make some of the links between what we are doing to the planet and how we are treating each other.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
BS: I’d like people to consider the question of what kind of society makes the destruction of the planet possible, and how we might collectively re-think the ways in our current economic and political systems are currently organized. I realize this is a tall order! But the point, for me, of making this film, is to invite a kind of reckoning. Not just to make people feel bad or hopeless, but rather to make them see issues of the environment as fundamentally social in their causes and consequences.
For me, the biggest insight I took away from a month of shooting was that people feel paralyzed in the face of climate change because they feel alone. We feel isolated. We think and feel as individuals, and thus our power feels very small. There is no future in this aloneness. We have to think of ourselves as a society and take some collective power back if we’re going to re-imagine the future as something that has possibility.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
BS: Describing the film and its structure was difficult, as it’s neither a character-driven film nor an information-driven film. It is a very different kind of so-called “climate change film” than people are used to seeing – one more about people relating to themselves and each other than it is about glaciers or carbon emissions.
Because the structure was an open question even after our production process, another challenge was just deciding on the arrangement of scenes, subjects, and images. It’s a mosaic, really, in which the audience is led through a series of situations and encounters, and that openness was both a gift and a challenge in the edit room.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
BS: The majority of our funding comes from public television – PBS’s ITVS program in particular. The rest of the funding comes from a mix of grants from visionary funding bodies – Cinereach, Sundance, Field of Vision – and a little bit of private investment from interested individuals as well.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
BS: I come to film primarily out of a love of music, literature, and photography. All of these art forms were a big part of my solace and community as a teenager and in my early 20s, and I think I decided to become a filmmaker when I realized cinema was this tremendously dynamic art form in which all of these other media could come together in a kind of complex, delicate dance.
I was living in Montreal when I began making my first experimental Super 8 films, and was part of an artistic community rich in independent music and performance. I found a lot of inspiration in my friends and neighbors, who would start bands even when they didn’t necessarily know how to play instruments very well, just because they craved the community and the creative outlet that music offered. I find the same things in cinema.
Making a film is this incredibly exciting pretext to embark on an adventure, have conversations with strangers, collaborate with other artists, and then put something out into the world that people can engage, interpret, and find meaning in on their own terms.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
BS: Just make your film no matter what is both great advice, and bad advice. It’s great in that one learns by doing, and I certainly would not have started making films if I wasn’t part of a DIY music community in which everyone I knew just went ahead to tried to make things regardless of whether or not they were granted “permission.”
On the other hand, this advice assumes a lot – that making films doesn’t involve real time or money, for example, or that the person wanting to make things doesn’t have anything to lose by just jumping into a project. It is advice that can be especially burdensome for people without privilege, for whom so much depends on being able to make an income or avoiding debt or supporting a family.
There should be a way of both offering this advice, but also offering support and infrastructure so that makers can pursue their films not independently, but interdependently, regardless of personal wealth or already existing social connections.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
BS: Try your best not to internalize the doubt or skepticism you might get back from the world. In my experience, sexism often plays out at the micro level – the authority of women and the vision of women directors isn’t given as much credit by people in the industry, whether crew, funders, technicians, or others. “Are you sure you want to do that?” is something I’ve heard a lot, and it has a way of undermining one’s confidence. Don’t let it!
Surround yourself with people and crew that can support your vision and your mode of making. And search out other female-identified crew members when you can, as the industry has a way of making things more difficult for them as well.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
BS: Two that come to mind immediately: “News from Home,” directed by Chantal Akerman, and “O’er the Land,” directed by Deborah Stratman. These are both filmmakers with incredible vision and commitment. They offer their audiences the space to come into their own insights, feelings, and thoughts in their carefully crafted and assemblies of images and sound. Without recourse to sentimentality, both filmmakers allow humor and rigor to co-exist, for intimate and oblique landscapes to yield profound ideas, and for cinema itself to be reimagined anew.
W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?
BS: I think it’s slightly too early to tell. I see both progress and backlash, and that’s concerning. I do think the movements have opened up the space for sexism to become a legitimate subject of debate and concern again, but I just hope it’s not at the expense of producing new cleavages and false dichotomies between kinds and forms of “acceptable” vs. “unacceptable” sexist behavior and structures in the field of cinema making.
