Shaking Up the Stories

Bill Benenson ’67 took a 14-hour journey by Jeep 250 miles into the interior of Brazil. His Peace Corps assignment was in the sertão of Bahia, a semi-arid region in the northeastern part of the South American empire equivalent to the Australian outback. Its scrubby landscape, not far from the equator, was host to a boom in diamond prospecting from the 1850s to the 1930s. But in 1967, he encountered an outpost that had once been populated by tens of thousands of people and powered by electricity, yet by then, was reduced to a desolate ghost town of just hundreds of people living by candlelight.

While a student at Columbia University School of General Studies (GS), Benenson majored in comparative literature. He wrote short stories, and with the guidance of his professors, experienced a “tectonic shift.” Prior to his enrollment at GS, dyslexia had plagued his educational experience. Columbia helped him reprogram his approach to learning and enabled him to absorb ideas that previously had been out of his reach.

When Benenson stood in the midst of that bleak corner of Brazil, he had an epiphany. “I had to make a film about it,” he said while concurrently admitting that he did not know how to make a film. But from his undergraduate studies, he understood storytelling, and he knew how to take photos. So, born from the proverbial lightbulb was a more than 50-year career of documentary and narrative film making. Diamond Rivers, which was shown on WNET/PBS in 1977, was the thought provoking result of his fascination with Brazil’s flirtation in diamond prospecting and the environmental and social traumas left when it collapsed.

Benenson, in partnership with his wife Laurie, has since created and/or produced more than 30 films that examine the human condition and consider misunderstood issues and underrepresented people. Among their successes are the award winning documentaries Dirt! The Movie and Kiss The Ground. Fantastic Fungi, now trending on Netflix, further reflects his work as a passionate environmentalist. “I was called,” he said.

Isaac Zablocki ’03 echoes this same sentiment. A lecturer and writer on cinema, director of film programs at Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, and the director and co-founder of ReelAbilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival, the largest disability film festival in the world, Zablocki has gravitated towards making films and curating motion picture festivals that impact change since serving in the film unit of the Israel Defense Forces before enrolling at Columbia. His work, in fact, recently garnered the prestigious Impact Award at the JCC, where he has cultivated a notable center for cinema for 17 years.

“Our film programs such as the Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival and the Other Israel Film Festival, are ultimately about social questions,” Zablocki explained. “I encourage our audiences to dive deep into the themes of the films and explore the messages they offer through discussion and action.” According to Rabbi Joy Levitt, Chief Executive Officer of JCC Manhattan, Zablocki has inspired people from around the globe with his faith in the medium of film and its power to change the world. She recently described him as a film guru, leader, and innovator.

Another leader and innovator that came out of Columbia’s film program was Zablocki’s contemporary Erik Courtney ’00, founder of the Columbia Producers and Directors Club. “When we formed the group,” Courtney said, “We got some resistance from the student council who thought the club would be a personal resume builder for us to fund our own films, but we wrote into the constitution that the officers of the club don’t make the movies but would mentor the members who would be the filmmakers. It was a smart sacrifice … because we learned from mentoring others.” And it led to Courtney’s next move, which was landing a coveted spot in the UCLA School of Film and Television’s Producers Program. Since, Courtney has worked in motion pictures in many capacities, including as a visual effects artist, recently on the television show Star Trek: Picard.

Courtney aims to examine the patterns of humanity over generations and seeks to take big stories and drill them down to something intimate—both through the narrative presentation and the technology. A notable example of this is The Persistence of Dreams, a short that documents the moment President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. “Everything changed with a gunshot. Booth fired on the biggest laugh line of the play—an actor killed the president on the funniest line! It’s the transition you didn’t see coming—from joy to terror to sadness,” explained Courtney who filmed the four-minute re-enactment for IMAX. From this project Courtney and his co-creator obtained a patent for a method they invented called Large Format Negative Repurposing (LFNR) that recomposes large format media into a video stream suitable for more conventional viewing methods.

“The range of careers in the industry is far broader than screenwriter, filmmaker, producer, and director,” said Professor Rob King, Director of Undergraduate Studies in Film at Columbia. “When you leave Columbia with a major in film and media studies, you can have an education on how to write a screenplay and how to make a film, but more so, you’ll have a deep knowledge of film history and media. The faculty [including luminaries like Loren-Paul Caplin, James Schamus, and Annette Insodorf] and the ethos are more in the image of Sundance than the Oscars,” he said.

2019 graduate Blaine Morris is currently an MFA candidate at University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (USC). During her undergraduate coursework at Columbia, Morris watched more than 200 cinematic works, studied screenwriting, and completed dozens of papers analyzing films—in addition to her participation in the CU filmmaking community, which allowed her to direct, write, edit, and produce 16 films during her degree program.

Morris is currently working for Academy Award-nominated writer and director Charles Shyer as a director/writer assistant, which includes script analysis and other production responsibilities. Additionally, Morris, who is the recipient of the prestigious George Lucas Scholarship that promotes student diversity, continues to write and create projects. She recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund a queer Latinx short horror film that she is writing, inspired by the Dominican folk creature “La Ciguapa.” And while isolating in Florida during the pandemic, she made a psychological thriller, Anne, With Love, which will be completed later this year. “I’m interested in finding the gaps and asking the questions that haven’t been asked,” said Morris, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “I seek stories with an edge and with heart.”

Fellow alumna Larysa Kondracki ’01 also creates evocative pictures that challenge conventional thinking. “We need a shakeup in the stories. How we’re telling them, and what they’re about,” she said. Kondracki’s 2010 breakout work that she co-wrote and directed, The Whistleblower, a drama based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and outed the United Nations for covering up a sex trafficking organization, does just that. In fact, in his review Roger Ebert wrote, “Here is a film to fill you with rage.”

The Whistleblower was an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival and distributed widely throughout theaters in the United States. Kondracki has since written feature projects for Focus Features, HBO Films, Participant Media, and Showtime Entertainment. She recently served as an executive producer on the Amazon Prime show Them: Covenant and directed the pilot episode of Power Book IV: Force for Starz.

Filmmaker Elegance Bratton ’14 is fervent about “shaking up” the stories. “My job is to show the outsiders and the underdogs,” he said. His works such as Pier Kids, which made its television premiere as part of POV Season 34 on PBS on August 2, support his objectives. “I want to be the pathway to worlds that the audience can’t go to without me there. It’s about transporting them inside another’s experience and finding empathy,” he explained.

As a young person, Bratton spent 10 years homeless in the New York area and then five years in the Marine Corps before enrolling at GS. A combat filmmaker and photographer while serving, as an undergraduate, he majored in African American studies. The curriculum gave him an understanding of the generational traumas and family dynamics common in the lives of black Americans as a result of slavery and its aftermath. It helped him gain perspective on his own life, in which his mother, who was orphaned at 12 and had him at 16 years old, kicked him out of the house when he was 16 upon learning he was gay.

“While at Columbia, I realized that my life experience was my capital. I stopped listening to the negative voices of self hatred around my identity of black, poor, gay, and homeless, and began to view the world through my curiosity, through my genius.” Bratton, who earned an MFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts for directing and writing, credits his studies with not only giving him the tools to examine and reinterpret his own life experiences, but also the push and inspiration to think more globally. “Every human being is living some sort of oppression,” he said. “It’s manmade for a specific purpose, and it can be deconstructed.”

With this charge he focuses on work that enables him to raise questions. His latest venture, The Inspection, is an autobiographical drama about a gay Marine Corps recruit. “It’s a dream project,” he said.

Summing up beautifully the thread that connects the drive and creativity of this small selection of the many GSers working in the motion picture industry, Zablocki explained, “We are moved, we learn, and we are changed by movies. I believe everyone should have a place in the sandbox, and when communities are pushed to the side, I have the urge to shine a spotlight on them.” Indeed. One might say the Columbia University School of General Studies motto, Lux in tenebris lucet (The light shines in the darkness), takes on new meaning when considered in this context. 

This article appears in the Fall 2021 print edition of The Owl, the alumni magazine of the Columbia University School of General Studies, with the title "Shaking Up the Stories."