As co-founder of Rada Studio, Michèle Stephenson pulls from her Panamanian and Haitian roots and experience as a human rights attorney to tell provocative stories that speak to personal and systemic liberation. Her films have been nominated for three Emmys. Her collaborative series with NYT Op-Docs, “A Conversation on Race,” won the 2016 Online Journalism Award for Commentary. Stephenson was recently awarded the Creative Capital Fellowship and the Chicken & Egg Pictures Breakthrough Filmmaker Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

“Stateless” was scheduled to screen at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, which has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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

MS: In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army based on anti-black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign challenging electoral corruption and advocating for her stateless brothers and sisters.

“Stateless” is a character-driven magical realist journey that traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, as state-sanctioned racism seeps into mundane offices, living room meetings, and street protests.

Filmed with a chiaroscuro effect and richly imbued with elements of magical realism, “Stateless” combines gritty hidden-camera footage with the legend of a young woman fleeing brutal violence to flip the narrative axis, revealing the depths of institutionalized oppression.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

MS: As a child growing up in a Haitian and Latinx household and diaspora communities in North America, I continued to overhear stories about the history of my birthplace relating to race, color, class, colonialism, and human rights. Those observations formed the basis of how I made sense of the world that surrounded me, especially as those notions collided with the racism, segregation, and discrimination that we faced in our adopted countries.

Those experiences fueled my passion to dig deeper into the consequences of our deeply painful common history of slavery and colonialism and how we continue to internalize such self-hatred.

“Stateless,” in some ways, is a culmination of years of working through storytelling approaches that allowed me to land back home and use a creative way to unearth and express that childhood pain.

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

MS: As a hyphenated black Latina, I felt compelled to express how deeply embedded the racial caste system is in our Latinx communities, and how identity and citizenship are so closely connected to anti-blackness — and yet its discussion either escapes or is superficially misconstrued by mainstream media.

Ideally, I would love for the film to be embraced and deeply covered by the Latinx and Black media to help jump-start a much needed conversation within and across our communities both in the United States and in Latin America. Storytelling, for me, is a way to share experiences in a way that allows us to connect.

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

MS: One of the main challenges has been to engage those personalities whose perspectives and mission differ significantly from mine — the right wing nationalists. Building trusting relationships specifically with people who hold anti-Haitian, nationalist, and racist viewpoints has been a particularly delicate and psychologically trying task. I think my personal connection to the Haitian side of the island has made those conversations particularly difficult for me from a deeply personal perspective.

Going somewhat “undercover,” staying silent during our shooting, takes a toll, but these alternate voices need to be included in our narratives — and in a manner that is not caricatured — in order to tell a fuller story. They are our neighbors, and some cases they are family.

In the case of “Stateless,” I believe the nationalist portrayed in the narrative adds an additional complex layer to the film’s story and to the reality of the island in how race and racism play out in Latin American contexts. On the other hand, I am also disheartened by the depth of the hatred I witnessed and heard, and am not optimistic that minds can be changed.

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

MS: To me, it is clear that independent non-fiction storytelling is not an economically sustainable means of making a living. Access to funding that allows one to stay independent has stagnated with the years. Yet I remain in the field because of this somewhat irrational passion and drive to create, and work towards an independent creative vision that is fueled by the various communities I am a part of. I can’t help myself from continuing to do work and expressing myself through this form in increasingly creatively challenging ways.

Over the years, it has been heartening to see the trust and support I have received from a variety of institutions and individuals, who have put their faith and dollars to see our projects realized — from the National Film Board of Canada, to the Sundance Documentary Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and Open Society Foundations. I am honored and humbled by the expression of trust in my vision.

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

MS: Non-fiction storytelling is the vehicle through which I explore deeply personal notions of race, color, and identity, and their grounding in systemic inequities. I search for a piece of myself in the subjects I encounter and work with. That expression has taken a variety of forms — directing short and long form documentary, non-fiction books, video installations, and more recently immersive media work. I have enthusiastically embraced my platform agnosticism.

Currently, combining immersive media and hybrid storytelling are an exciting next step for me, where documentary work and research intersect with fictional devices and notions of time travel through three dimensional spaces in virtual reality. I have also spent the last few years exploring and investing in process — through a variety of collaborations in documentary and emerging media work. Being intentional about how I create work is key to unlocking and challenging how inequities are unconsciously repeated in my everyday creative practices.

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

MS: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

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

MS: I love so many women directed films for different reasons. The ones that stand out to me that impacted me on my journey were “Salaam Bombay!” by Mira Nair and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Both marked a specific time in my creative journey, teaching me that risk-taking is part of the creative process.

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

MS: It’s a new normal. I am grateful to be safe and healthy — for myself and my family. Mourning the old way of life that is likely to never come back, but ready to embrace and explore new ways of being, sharing, and creating stories.

We have to seize this crisis as an opportunity to put our best selves forward and innovate new ways of building community, resilience, and care for our global family.