Sasha Waters Freyer

Born in Brooklyn in 1968, Sasha Waters Freyer makes non-fiction films about outsiders, misfits and everyday radicals. She trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and digital media. Most recently, she has crafted lyrical explorations of motherhood, documentaries on the New York of her youth, and essay films on the cultural and political legacies of the late 20th century. In 2016, Sasha was honored to receive the Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium. Her past projects have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, Big Sky, Havana, Videoex, and Ann Arbor Film Festivals; IMAGES in Toronto, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Union Docs, the Pacific Film Archive, L.A. Film Forum, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, as well as the Sundance Channel and international cable and public television.

Sasha’s films have been reviewed in ArtForum, The New Yorker, Variety, IndieWIRE and Mother Jones; her writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Ethnos and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video. She has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the NEA (2007, 2015), the Graham Foundation, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. She is the Chair of the Department of Photography & Film at VCU, the number one public art school in the United States.

Interview with Sasha Waters Freyer

Conducted on Monday November 20, 2017 7:30AM

Me: Was there a particular event or time that you recognized that filmmaking was not just a hobby, but that it would be what you do to make a living?

‪ Sasha: That is an interesting question. I would say filmmaking is affiliated with what I do to make a living, which is teach at a University, but it is not directly responsible for most of my income, if that makes sense. It's central to my professional/academic career however, and I did work in film, as a researcher and Associate Producer, on other people's films before going to graduate school and going into teaching. I don't think there was an "aha!" moment for me, so much as exploring different options, and landing on the one that felt like the right balance (teaching), which would allow me to continue to make my own creative work, especially since my work exists outside the mainstream and mainstream markets for the most part.

Me: my next question is when it comes to your projects, it harder to get started or to keep going? What was the particular thing that you had to conquer to do either?

Sasha: I would say this question has different answers at different times in my life. I made a film called "You Can See the Sun in Late December" that started as an "assignment" for myself because I felt lacking in motivation: I decided to "force" myself to shoot every single day in the month of December, not knowing what it would be, or even that it would turn into a film. There have been other times, when I have started off very excited about a documentary project and thrown myself into research and then ended up not making the film at all...not so much from losing interest, as from feeling like I learned what I needed to learn in the research process and the making part was no longer necessary for me. Every long documentary (1 hour +) has taken me 4-5 years to complete, and each time I finish one, I think: "I'm not doing that again, only shorts from now on!" And then, each time I start a new one, it's like I've tricked myself into thinking: 'This time will be different, it can't possibly take 4 years AGAIN!" but then it does! But by the time I'm 2 years into it, I may as well keep forging ahead.

Me: What advice would you give to someone who wanted to have a life creating film?

Sasha: Think about and interrogate your own definition of "success," for sure. It can and probably will change over time, but having a sense of personal goals - 3 year goals, 5 year goals, 10 year goals - even if they don't look like the conventional measure of success can be a good roadmap. Write as much as possible - journals, notes, whatever. Having a supportive partner and being part of a sustaining creative community is helpful too.

Me: Have you ever had a lesson in life or an experience that has inspired your work? If so, what was it and which film did you create from this experience?

Sasha: Many, many many. "Chekhov for Children" is a personal documentary inspired by an unusual experience I had in grade school - being part of a group of young people involved in a staging of "Uncle Vanya." "Our Summer Made Her Light Escape" is one of a few films I've made "about" parenting (I say "about" because this film is pretty experimental and so it's subject is somewhat elusive). "Burn Out the Day" was a direct emotional response to leaving Iowa in 2013 for a new job in Virginia and the crisis of moving my family half-way across the country. Even my current project, a biography of a photographer named Garry Winogrand, is inspired by my own interest in his work when I was a college student majoring in Photography, and is shaped in part by a feminist orientation towards balancing parenting and artistic practice.

Me: Is there someone in particular who has inspired you to take the career path you’ve decided on? If so, who and why?

Sasha: I have been fortunate to have a number of women filmmaker role models with whom I've either worked for studied with, or met, including Barbara Kopple, with whom I had my first internship, Lynne Sachs, who was my professor in graduate school, and Gunvor Nelson, who was Lynne's professor when she was in school, and whose work I love, and who I met when I lived in Sweden for 6 months. The "why" part of this question is harder for some reason...maybe just seeing that one could make unconventional work and that it would find an audience - the it might be really important to that audience - was an inspirational factor.

Me: What would you describe the category of your work to be, since you mentioned earlier its not very mainstream?

Sasha: I work broadly in non-fiction filmmaking, with work in documentary, experimental and essay-film forms.

Me: For your work in these categories, how long does it take you to get the materials you need for a piece? Is there a specific strategy you have or a particular artist you prefer to work with more than others?

Sasha: For my short, experimental pieces, I am usually shooting, editing and doing the sound design myself, although more recently I have branched out into collaboration on sound. Length of time varies - on some project, the parameters might be clear. For example, a film I made called "An Incomplete History of the Travelogue, 1925" uses a finite amount of found footage from 1925 that my husband found in a thrift store. The writing, optical printing and shooting of animated titles took some time, but the materials came together relatively quickly. Other films might evolve over years - for example (again) "Burn Out the Day" was completed in 2014, but the footage of the burning house, which comprises much of the film, was shot in 2008. I just didn't know what to do with it until much later.

Me: Where did you attend college for both undergraduate and graduate? Did you study film for both? or was an emphasis on film something you decided to pursue prior to your college career?

Sasha: No, I thought I wanted to be a writer, but really, I just enjoyed reading more than I enjoyed writing so I never went in that direction. I earned my BFA in Photography at The School of Visual Arts in NYC (where I grew up), and my MFA in Film & Media at Temple University, in Philadelphia. Filmmaking evolved out of my interest in photography, and also in storytelling.

Me: Some of your work revolves around motherhood and the unmasking of child innocence, what drove you to pursue projects in this category?

Sasha: I think the experience of motherhood, from the point of view of mothers themselves, is radically under-represented in art and culture. Mothers are seen through the eyes of children or partners or through the lens of marketers, but their own individual and collective experience exists very much on the margins it seems to me, so that interested me, and felt like part of a contemporary conversation I might contribute to in some way.

Me: Do people ever criticize you for your work? How do you take that criticism and do you incorporate some changes into your next piece of work?

Sasha: ‪I am super open to lots of lots of feedback while the work is in progress, especially with the longer documentary works. I edit over many, many months and take that critical feedback process very seriously as it has been hugely helpful in my work. Just listening to smart viewers, who you trust, explain how they feel about a shot or a character, or what they think a statement means can really help me to see something with "fresh eyes." Criticism of work once it is complete influencing the next work. I'm not so sure, because each project evolves so differently. Oh but I just thought of one example, a really great friend of mine told me after seeing "Her Heart is Washed.. etc," a 2006 film of mine, that I was not very good at voice-over and I should think about other strategies, and I came to see that she was right, and no one else had been honest enough to say so! While "Chekhov for Children" made in 2010 had some minimal VO by necessity, that's it! No more VO for me.