STEPHANIE GARDNER AND 33 AND ME

The director and producer sits down with us to talk about her new international travel documentary series.

We sat down with Stephanie Gardner (also one of our contributing writers) director/producer of 33andMe to talk about her documentary series and to Introduce the 33andMe festival. Following the interview six of the filmmakers will share some of their recommendations of treasured films from their countries. 

So good to see you, Stephanie. So let’s get into the project. Tell me how the whole documentary series came about?

So as you know I’m an independent filmmaker, a writer and director. And when I was approaching my 33rd birthday, I had this idea to travel to 33 countries. To meet and get to know and interact with other filmmakers my age. So I decided to travel to 33 countries to meet 33 year old directors in each country. And so that started this larger project, the 33andMe film project, and it was meant to be like a cross-cultural exchange, but of ideas and to learn about these filmmakers – who they are, what compels them to makes films, how their country or their society impacts their storytelling? 

Why are they overcoming all these many, many obstacles to make their films and get their stories out there? So that was the crux of the project. 

I had just come off of putting on this short one-off kind of weekend film screening in my hometown in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. So I wanted to do that in a bigger, more impactful way. And always knew I wanted to have a film festival element of the project. And so I started it as this idea that once I reached the 33rd country, I’d come back and screen all the films of these filmmakers I met. 

So 33andMe traveled the world for five or six years. We were filming a docu-series where each country is its own individual episode featuring a 33 or 30 something year old film director from that country then taking a cultural deep dive into the landscapes, the peoples, the stories, the culture, the history of that country. 

And so now we have multiple seasons available of these individual episodes from all over the world. 

Were the filmmakers difficult to find at all? 

Once we decided, pretty much from the start, we weren’t going to be so literal about the 33 we kind of opened it up to filmmakers in their 30’s. It was really more about this specific generation of filmmakers around the world. 

Oftentimes, I would spend months researching, looking for the person, finding the right one. But with Cuba, for instance, with the limited internet and all of that, it was just much easier to go and be there on the ground. 

How did you decide which countries to explore? 

So basically it was really important to me not to just do rich predominantly white Western European countries or whatnot. Yeah, so basically I wanted to hit the entire world in proportion like in proportion to the regions of the world. So I started with a map and basically dividing up said: okay we can have this many number of European countries. 

And also what was important to me was an equal number of men and women filmmakers. But then I realized, after the first eight or so countries, only a few of them were women and that I really had to be a little more proactive about making sure those numbers even out. 

And also on a side note we had some specific requirements that was my starting point. I wanted them to live in the country that they were from. I really wanted to be visiting these people who either by choice or circumstances were in their home, the countries they were from and making films and telling stories of their society. 

Were there any countries that were especially challenging to shoot in?

Zimbabwe was really hard to shoot in because we really couldn’t do much on the street, just because of the timing of when we were there and the political regime that was in the at the time. 

Egypt was one of the hardest. People actually find this really hard to believe, but Egypt was one of the hardest because of again, the regulations, government censorship. Just because even if you’re a tourist, not even with a project like ours, even with a regular tourist, it can be hard to film or photograph because they have specific rules, even at the pyramids and things like that.

If you bring in a camera bigger than a cell phone, first they’ll charge you, and we were always willing to pay the fee, but then you’d pay the fee and they say, but you can’t bring this type of lens in, and you can’t bring a tripod in and you can’t bring this, and you can’t bring that. And the rules seem to be arbitrary depending on the whim of the person. Anytime we went to a tourist place with the tour guide, we had to have police escorts.

Then the other places, for instance, Ghana was actually really hard to film not because of government restrictions but just the people don’t want to be filmed. You can respect that, but even just having your camera out on the street can be seen as an offense, or like foreigners here to exploit them, which of course is not our intention and we wouldn’t even be necessarily pointing the camera at a person, but at a building. 

It was one of my favorite countries. I love the people, the energy. It’s really this fantastic creative vibe, happy place. But oddly, despite that, it was one of the harder places to film. 

Interesting. Sorry, to circle back, but did you end up getting any footage of the pyramids? 

Oh, yeah, we got beautiful footage of the pyramids and the tombs, all of it. We just had to struggle around the rules and the restrictions. And because it was COVID we lucked out in a couple of ways. One, there was absolutely no tourists around so when you see are footage, it looks like we’re the only ones there. Sometimes we were literally the only tourists in one spot. It was incredible. Other times we were one of three or four. And so it felt like we were this major movie who had rented out the space all to ourselves because you couldn’t see any extras in the background. It was kind of funny. 

But I prefer the word traveler to tourist because a traveler is trying to engage as much as possible. It was important to me in terms of digging deep into understanding the history and where present day society is and what are the main issues facing these filmmakers in their home societies? What are their hopes, dreams, and desires for themselves and for their countries? Where do they want to see change? 

Romania was another country which I wish we could of seen more of, but we never left Bucharest. 

A lot of films are shot there, do you recall any films or shows shot in Romania?

Christie Puiji [?}, he did The Death of Mr. Lazarrescu, which is considered the start of the Romanian New Wave and Raddu Juod he’s still making a lot of films. He just had a release I think in Cannes or Venice this year. But there are lots of Hollywood films that have shot there. I think McCabe and Mrs. Miller was one of them because they have big studios , they have a support structure, and they have really good tax incentives. 

An example of a contrast to that Romania experience, is let’s say Uganda. I actually spent six weeks instead of six day there. We spent a lot of quality time with our main filmmaker there, but we also had time to explore so many different aspects of the coutry. Uganda is really interesting because each region is almost like a different kingdom. And they each have their own cultures within the greater borders of Uganda, which the British European colonists kind of made. 

We also go to do a trek to see the gorillas. And we got to go to the same waterfall where the African Queen was shot, the Katherine Hepburn starred movie. 

Hepburn and Boggie. Aren’t they on a boat the whole time? 

Yeah, the whole movie. We took a boat trip to the same spot where they were filming, and there’s these giant waterfalls there that are also in the film. 

We had all kinds of experiences there. Our car broke down, and we met the really nice Ugandan family who invited us to their sister’s wedding. So I actually got to be the guest of honor at their sister’s wedding, and it was really amazing. And where the wedding was right outside this gorgeous lake with this landscape that they used as a plate shot for Black Panther, the movie. The movie itself wasn’t filmed in Uganda, but they used this plate shot from this lake to create the world of Wakanda. 

I’d love to see all that and the wedding.

And Patience, our Ugandan filmmaker will be at the festival. But I think the latest stat is we are screening 70 films from 36 different countries, maybe 38. So every 33andMe country has at least one film in the festival. Some of them are short and some are features. 

So we have Patience from Uganda, Ether from Iceland, Atsun from Mexico, Stacy-Ann from Jamaica, Ray from Guyana. We have an actress from Columbia. She’s actually acting in the feature film we’re showing. They’re all going to be there in person. 

Aside from the screenings we also have tons of other events and panel discussions led by various people on topics like ethics in filmmaking and filmmaking as revolution. We’re also going to give a presentation about markets and distribution from all the indie filmmakers point of view. Oh, and cultural coffee events where you can meet the filmmakers at local cafes and boutiques. I’m also very proud of the Master classes I’m bringing in. For instance, we’re bringing in a post-production sound guy, Stuart Stanley who worked for Warner Brothers for forty-two years as a post sound editor. His credits include Reds, The Good Shepard, Blue Bloods and all these incredible films and TV shows. He’s going to analyze clips from their films and talk about different elements of sounds from dialogue tracks to wild tracks to full music to everything! ▮