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to go back)
pharmaceutical industry knowing it was ineffective, carcinogenic and harmful
to lab rats and their offspring. Survival meant a radical hysterectomy.
And then home to my parents “to heal and get on with life.”
Survival meant a radical hysterectomy. And then home to my parents
“to heal and get on with life”. I brought along a
video camera and some painfully rhetorical questions: how did this chemical
insinuate itself into my [once sacred] relationship with my mother, and
a long-held hope of having children? I can still remember and often miss
that 25-year-old girl who had a camcorder in one hand and a catheter in
the other, and the deep belief that she was filming something bigger than
her family.
For environmental activists long struggling to translate the impact
of hormone-mimicking chemicals, A HEALTHY BABY GIRL turned out to be a
communications breakthrough. They needed a relationship-driven
narrative about one generation unwittingly poisoning the next, especially
a disarmingly loving, funny one. And that’s when (17 years ago)
I embraced the cinematic and political challenge now at the center of
my filmmaking and which I’ve had the honor to continue exploring
with Daniel B. Gold, my co-director on Blue Vinyl and Everything’s
Cool [which we just launched at Sundance in January ‘07].
Whether the threat of teratogenic chemicals (like DES),
PVC in building materials or global warming, it’s the same question:
How do you collapse the toxic future into the present, making
the message urgent and entertaining enough for people to take action,
before it’s too late – before they get hurt — before
they lose pieces of their body or their future?
In answering that question I’ve discovered a guiding tenet that
I’ve held fast to for the past 17 years and which I share with those
I teach and mentor:
Every film’s core must contain palpable stakes — an
authentic relationship worth fighting for and a heart at risk of being
broken. That relationship changes with every film I make, as
do the stakes, but it is always there: Whether it’s between me and
mother in A HEALTHY BABY GIRL, between retired mill workers and their
company town in UPRISING OF ’34 which I co-directed with my mentor
George Stoney, between my middle-class family and the individuals impacted
by the toxic lifecycle of our home’s vinyl siding (BLUE VINYL),
or a weary group of self-appointed global warming messengers, a disaster-fatigued
public and a recalcitrant U.S. government (EVERYTHING’S COOL).
Collaboration is key and one of the things I hope to celebrate
and explore on this website. In addition to working with some
of the most brilliant and generous editors, animators, composers and cinematographers
I have had the honor of working with some of the most strategic and passionate
grassroots activists in this country, also artists in their own right.
It was specifically that collaboration between filmmaker and activist
— that inspired Working
Films, which I co-founded with Robert West in 1999 and which offers
free audience engagement consultations to all non-fiction filmmakers who
apply
online [please tell them Judith sent you]. Since then, dreams explored
on film (as in BLUE VINYL) have become reality (My
House is Your House):— the first affordable PVC-free Habitat
for Humanity house and the launch of Unity Homes (a green manufacturer
producing healthy, affordable prefab homes and offering good, healthy
jobs – www.healthybuilding.net).
These realities strengthen my commitment to the work not simply of making
movies, but of forging cinematic tools.
Over the past two years I have also had the true honor of co-incubating,
hatching and launching another venture — Chicken
& Egg Pictures. My co-founders are Julie Parker Benello and Wendy
Ettinger, themselves non-fiction producers, filmmakers, activist-driven
philanthropists and Working Films board members. Together we have created
a fund that provides creative and financial support to emerging and veteran
women filmmakers at strategic points in the development of their non-fiction
and fiction films. That has been a joy and an honor.
And now all I have to do is figure out how to — balance
the joy of rigorous living (and loving my family) with rigorous filmmaking,
mentoring & community-building.
(click to go back)
On Mother’s Day 2007
the Sundance Channel broadcast a very special never-before-broadcast-together
Mother’s Day Triple-feature that spans 17 years of my family “in
the movies”. .
Indeed – it is one long and loving exploration of motherhood, DES
and parenting in the time of chemical exposure and reproductive technology.
Don’t miss... A HEALTHY BABY GIRL and its sequel BLUE VINYL (co-directed
by Daniel B. Gold), followed by the television premiere of the epilogue
EK VELT: At the End of the World. (Yes... Just when you think the irony
is over the Helfand’s finally sell their house and move to... you
won’t believe it!).
7:00pm – A Healthy Baby Girl
8:00pm – Blue
Vinyl
9:40 om – Ek Velt: At the End of the World
(U.S. Television Premiere)
At the same time this triple-feature is
something to ‘schep’ a great deal of ‘nakhes’
(take pleasure and pride in Yiddish), and my father would have,
it is very bittersweet. He passed away seven weeks ago. For those of you
who didn’t know of his passing, or only knew him in the movies,
I am sorry to share this with you on the web.
On the other hand, letting you know about his death in the same breath
as his triple feature is perhaps the most wonderful kind of tribute. This
MOTHERS DAY broadcast, scheduled when he was “well” in December
‘06, is dedicated to him. My dad was my greatest ally and collaborator
and truly a mid-wife to these films.
There will be re-broadcasts
over the next few weeks and BLUE VINYL will screen on the Sundance Channel’s
new series THE GREEN in July.