INTERVIEW: How Documentary Producing Lab Fellow Bryn Silverman Shaped 6 Years of Footage Into True/False Hit ‘Pinball’
Applications for the Film Independent Documentary Producing Lab are now open. The deadline for non-Members is May 4th, while Film Independent Members have until May 18th.
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Documentaries can be known to have long shooting schedules. It takes time to get a participant comfortable living their life with a camera crew around. For True/False Film Festival hit Pinball, and its Producer Bryn Silverman the challenge was even greater.
The team wanted to make a coming-of-age film with its participant, the Iraqi refugee Yosef Al Windawi. After years unsettled and traveling from Iraq to Jordan and Egypt, Yosef and his family finally settled in Louisville KY, and started to live a suburban American life. The filmmakers connected with him and his story while shooting another film, and decided to make a new project based on his life living between two worlds. To fully capture that coming-of-age experience, Silverman and Director Naveen Chaubal shot with Yosef and his family for six years.
After capturing all that, Silverman brought a rough cut to the Film Independent Documentary Producing Lab, where she was able to hone the film with the help of mentors and her cohort. We spoke with her about that experience, and what it takes to follow a thread for over half a decade.
Tell me about the genesis of Pinball and how you got involved.
I went to Louisville for the first time to shoot a short film with director Naveen Chaubal, who’s my collaborative partner. It was a experimental short doc at a school bus racetrack in southern Indiana.
In the making of that short, we were casting non-actors going around to high schools in Louisville. That’s where we met Yosef. He was in this after-school drama program.
We put together a little teaser, and he came up to Naveen and he was like, ‘hey, I kind of look like the kid in the teaser. I think I’d be great for this role’. So we cast him in that short.
In doing that film, we got really close to him and his family. He and I bonded over our love of soccer and played a lot of soccer together. Naveen and he really bonded over growing up straddling two cultures in suburban America.
When we approached him about making a feature about his true story, he said, “I never thought my life was that interesting.” That was the beginning of a conversation that just has not ended.
Since making that short, Naveen and I moved to Louisville. So now we live here full time. This film completely transformed our lives and informed the filmmakers that we are and want to be.
You’ve been following Yosef for a while now. How long exactly?
We filmed with him for about six years.
What were some of the unique challenges of producing a documentary that goes for that long?
I think the film called for time. A lot of docs do call for that amount of time just to build trust, have real meaningful relationships with the people that we’re filming with, spending time together when the camera is not there.
I think what it meant was working within our means. We’re a really small team. For those six years, it was Naveen and I on the ground running sound, camera, everything.
And then a couple of months leading up to our premiere, our team quadrupled because we brought on a music supervisor, consulting and story editors and all these folks to help us get it over the finish line.
But I think it was a juggling act because on the one hand, films just kind of require the time that they require. And then on the other hand, of course, it’s really expensive. It was this balancing act of figuring out, what is this process asking of us emotionally and physically, and then how can we make that happen financially?
Tell me a little bit about your relationship with your director Naveen, and how you first worked together. How do you complement each other during production?
Yeah, we met in film school at USC and L.A., then worked a lot together after school over maybe seven years. And then the short Pinball was our first foray into directing and producing our own work.
We have this dynamic of having really in-depth conversations, by each other’s side for all of it. We’re partners in real life, too. We’re married, we got married in Louisville a couple of years ago.
We are just really good communicators, I think, and have very complimentary personalities. He directed this and I produced it, but I direct as well. And he produces my work. And I think there’s this interesting give and take.
He’s much more soft-spoken and I’m like, let’s get out there and go do it. I think I’m more introverted, ironically, than he is. But in a lot of ways, we have balancing energies.
Something that a lot of people have been responding to is the sequence in Egypt. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Yosef and his family were in Egypt before they got asylum in the US, so many of Yosef’s early childhood memories are of Egypt. They’re Iraqi American, but Egypt plays a big role. It was always a goal of his to go back to visit Egypt.
He and his sister Azraa went together, and they invited us to come, which was incredible. It was just the four of us, and we spent two weeks, in Egypt together.
It was really, really hot, hard to get around. We weren’t filming all day because it was just physically impossible. Azraa and I got sick. But then there was this undercurrent of discovery and excitement happening, especially for Yosef, because he started to recognize places. He would FaceTime his mom and dad and be like, ‘where did we live? What’s the address of the apartment where I grew up?’
At one point, Yosef and Azraa are having a meal together that Yosef remembers from his childhood, and Azraa takes a bite and also remembers it. It’s this spark. It lit them up and I think inspired them and inspired us to show what the experience of revisiting childhood can feel like.
And I think for them, that’s so multilayered and so complex. And there’s so much, I think, trauma and tragedy that they’re grappling with in those scenes in the film. But then they’re so young and excited and fun and love to joke around with each other that there’s just a lot of different emotional layers playing at the same time.
And I think that happens throughout the entire film.
Where were you with the film when you applied and what made you want to apply to it to the producing lab?
This is actually my second time applying. I knew I was going to apply again because there are so few resources for doc producers out there like this.
It is such an essential resource for doc producers to connect with each other and to stay inspired, be acknowledged and have spaces where you can talk about your craft as a producer. We talk a lot about directors’ craft, but producing is a craft too.
With Pinball, we had a rough cut. We all watched each other’s work samples in the lab, and it was so incredible to hear from the cohort and from our mentors.
You have a certain idea of where you think you are in the process because you’re so close to it. In the lab, it was like getting this feedback of like, ‘Oh, wait, we thought we were here, but maybe we’re over here’. It’s feedback that you don’t always want to hear because I thought we were further along. And then it just sort of blows that out of the water in the best way.
We ended up finishing the film within six months of the Lab. And I think that was to do with the lab. If we didn’t get that consolidated amount of intentional feedback. There was so much attention and care about what we were trying to do and then others were contributing their own creative insights to that.
What is a piece of advice that you would give to someone who is applying to the lab this year?
Keep applying if you don’t get in. Also, look up the past cohorts and contact those people and talk with them. I feel like people who are drawn to producing tend to have a real community driven mindset. Most producers that I’ve reached out to always respond with open hearts and are like, ‘I hear you. This is hard. Let’s do it together’. I did that the second time applying, reached out to people who had done the lab in the past, and I’m glad I did.
Also join the Documentary Producers Alliance. I’m on the board!
Applications for the Film Independent Documentary Producing Lab are now open. The deadline for non-Members is May 4th, while Film Independent Members have until May 18th.
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