On February 7, 2019, HDS kicked off its second annual film festival with a screening of the critically-acclaimed documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018). The film’s executive producer, Geralyn Dreyfous, appeared via Skype following the screening for a discussion with the audience about the film and its star, television legend and Protestant minister Fred Rogers.
Dreyfous, a longtime supporter of HDS, said that working on the film and learning about how Rogers used his “influence to minister and educate a generation of children,” has inspired her to reflect further upon her own privilege “as someone who gets to determine where resources go to finance films.”
Dreyfous has been involved in the production of dozens of documentary films, including as executive producer for Born Into Brothels, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. She also generously allowed HDS to screen two of her more recent documentaries, The Judge (2018) and Lessons From a School Shooting: Notes From Dunblane (2018), at this year’s festival.
HDS also welcomed back alumna Michelle R. Jackson, MDiv ’09, to screen her film, Another Slave Narrative. It was Jackson’s first time on campus since she graduated a decade ago, so many of her former teachers were in attendance to welcome her back.
Using transcriptions from the 1936-38 Federal Writers’ Project, Jackson’s film features a multiracial cast of actors who together perform the narratives of six formerly enslaved people. Acknowledging that her film is doing something different from most other films about slavery, Jackson hopes that the structure of her film helps audiences recognize that “it’s all of our responsibility” to carry these stories of slavery.
Following the screening, HDS director of admissions Angela Counts facilitated a discussion between Jackson and the audience. Counts had screened her own documentary, Breakfast with Abu, during the inaugural HDS Film Festival in February 2018. Counts asked Jackson how she has been able to use her HDS education as a filmmaker.
“Divinity degrees are not so common in Hollywood, and I would say that what I’m really grateful for is that this degree is inevitably a pastoral one,” Jackson said. She then explained that her training has allowed her to have compassion for the characters that she creates, and it has helped her to recognize the dignity of actors, even when directing them has been difficult.
“I try to have a pastoral approach, and I try to be kind and meet people where they are at,” she remarked.
The festival also featured the films Life Swam Away Like a River, directed by current HDS student Bernadine Mellis, MDiv '21, and Dawnland (2018), directed by Adam Mazo, who joined the audience for a discussion following the film, which tells the story of the trauma inflicted upon and experienced by the Wabanki people in Maine, and the state’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The festival closed with a screening of Lessons From a School Shooting: Notes From Dunblane (2018). HDS supported the development of the film, and while some members of the School community attended its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring, it was the first time that most members of the audience had seen the film, which focuses on the friendship that develops between the pastor of a Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, Connecticut, following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and a pastor from Dunblane, Scotland, which experienced its own tragic school shooting in 1996.
Director Kim A. Snyder traveled from New York City to be with the audience, and she spoke about what it was like to work on this project in the midst of creating her feature-length documentary Newtown (2016).
—Bridget Power, HDS correspondent