Reflections on the Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellowship from Leslie Nipkow
With the opening of submissions for another year of the Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellowship, we’re pleased to bring you reflections on the remote 2022 Sundance Film Festival experience from last year’s Fellowship recipient, Leslie Nipkow, writer of SALT OF THE EARTH!
When I answered the phone to hear Cassian Elwes say, “You are the winner of my fellowship,” I went from invisible to seen. I dumped a thousand-pound backpack of doubt. I sat up straighter. I probably also said some ridiculous things because, eighteen months into the global pandemic and five months after Hurricane Ida blew the roof off, I’d abandoned all chill. I wrote myself a quick post-it note: “BE COOL.” Reader, I was not.
How could I be? Sundance is the indie mountaintop, and Cassian has a decades-long history of sherpa-ing great writers, directors, and films to the summit.
He wanted to talk about my script, SALT OF THE EARTH, which happens to be my love letter to indie filmmaking. SALT is based on the true story of three Blacklisted filmmakers who decide that, since they’re already being punished, they might as well commit a crime, and set out to make a social justice movie outside the studio system — an indie.
“It’s about what we do,” said Cassian, and we both started crying. He got it. And I was going with him to Sundance, or I would be, if Sundance hadn’t decided the day before to cancel the in-person festival and go all-virtual. I was eighty percent disappointed and twenty percent relieved. To go from one person at a time at a six-foot distance to movie theaters, restaurants, and parties with everyone I’ve ever wanted to meet is a big shift, not that I wouldn’t give it a go. (Does the Park City Oxygen Bar take reservations?)
Cassian is a treasure trove of experience and generous with all of it. I have a thousand hard-core, specific questions for him, but they could wait. This was our getting-to-know-you call, so it was all about why and how we became filmmakers, his inspiration for creating the fellowship, his support of female screenwriters, our families, pandemic survival strategies, and, of course, my beloved New Orleans. He’s a mensch’s mensch who loves the movie business, and I’m incredibly fortunate to have access to him.
It’s not only Cassian. Franklin, Megan, Kate, Claire and the other rock stars at the Black List introduced him to SALT OF THE EARTH— twice. This was the second year my script was shortlisted for his fellowship. The Black List krewe has changed my life this year, although they constantly remind me that I did the work; they just amplified it. They don’t realize their support of me and SALT OF THE EARTH has kept me at the page (and the query email grind) even when it feels impossible to convince the gatekeepers to read a (kick-ass) period drama about immigrants, feminists, and outcasts by a (kick-ass) fifty-year old female screenwriter. Like I said, I went from invisible to seen in [a decade plus] a moment.
As promised, my Sundance pass arrived almost immediately, and I dove into the massive Program Guide. I’d had a welcome eighteen-month break from FOMO but as I went over the schedule I was seized by desire to see absolutely everything. (Except horror. I get scared.)
I divided my selections between documentaries that piqued my curiosity, narrative features with stories that grabbed me by the thumbnail blurb, and films by writers and directors I admire, then ranked them in order of must-see-now. In my downtime, I could watch unlimited shorts and panels. These I color-coded, then transferred the entire scheme to a spreadsheet. (I was either a four-star general or a line producer in a previous life.)
Once I reserved my screenings, I ordered a set of Sundance ’22 sweats, a pandemic uniform upgrade. In New Orleans we call that a lagniappe, a little something extra; we all need a little something-something after eighteen months spent watching the world through windows and face shields.
While my Sundance didn’t include hanging with the filmmakers or the rush of sitting in the dark watching movies with other people, if I’d been in Park City, it would have been physically impossible to make it to eleven narrative and nine documentary features, not to mention all the shorts, panels, and Q&As I “attended.”
All week long, I was surprised. I started by clicking onto LAS PALMAS, a short by Swedish director Johannes Nyholm, billed as “a middle-aged woman on a holiday in the sun.” When a year-old baby crawled into a miniature bar populated by puppets, overserved herself, wreaked havoc, then passed out for an emergency nap, my mind blew open. I would never have thought of doing that.
Next, the image of late volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, tiny and silhouetted against an enormous wall of fire in Sara Dosa’s documentary FIRE OF LOVE, was seared into my brain. The film was assembled from the Kraffts’ vast store of archival footage and made all the more powerful by the knowledge that the couple would soon be physically consumed by just such an explosion.
I’m a geek for lesser-known moments in history, so I watched a double-feature of Tia Lessin/ Emma Pildes’ documentary THE JANES and Phyllis Nagy’s narrative drama CALL JANE, about a group of women in pre-Roe Chicago who band together to provide access to safe abortions. (I wonder if the filmmakers realized at the time that they were making an instructional film for the mid-21st century.) I have several scripts based on little-known moments in history, including SALT OF THE EARTH, so I was fascinated by the two approaches to the same story. The crisp, beautiful composition of Nagy’s frames will stick with me, although, as with LAS PALMAS, it’s not a visual language that would occur to me. I’m messy and intrusive with camera in hand, but I couldn’t have described my style that way before watching Nagy’s film.
Margaret Brown’s documentary DESCENDANT, about the descendants of prisoners brought from West Africa to Alabama on the Clotilda, the last ship to bring enslaved people to the U.S., on a sick bet, forty years after African slave trading was outlawed, is a master class in documentary filmmaking. Once freed, the descendants of the Clotilda prisoners settled in Africatown, Alabama, where they continue to be gaslighted and endangered by the Meaher family, heirs of the ship’s owners, who lease the land surrounding Africatown to heavy industries who pollute their air and water. DESCENDANT is a quintessential example of a film that shines a light on a sliver of history in order to illuminate modern-day injustice, precisely what I strive to do with my work. Margaret Brown’s film will inspire change.
Bianca Stigter’s documentary THREE MINUTES — A LENGTHENING is a detective story and a craft lesson in how to play with time on screen. The basis of her film is a three-minute home movie shot in 1938 by a Jewish-American tourist visiting the small Polish town he left at the age of four. The clip depicts a joyful afternoon in the town’s Jewish quarter as citizens of all ages, excited by the movie camera, vie for screen time. Most of them would die at Treblinka a few years later. Stigter moves through the footage frame-by-frame, looking for clues to the lives captured in those three seemingly casual minutes. This film struck a deep chord in me. My father survived Auschwitz, a fact I didn’t learn until three hours after his death. I’ve spent the intervening years in my own detective story, searching old photographs and documents for clues to my dad’s story (and my own). My very first screenplay was based on that experience; it second-rounded at Sundance, but I put it aside because it felt to me like it was missing something. THREE MINUTES got me thinking about a new way into the story; it’s waiting on my desk. The benefits of my week at virtual Sundance are more far-reaching and personal than I could have imagined.
And then there was the horror. The h-word is enough to frighten me off, but this year at Sundance there were three female-centric horror movies that I couldn’t resist. MASTER, PIGGY, and NANNY were all made by female writer/directors of color. While the films are wildly different in visual style and setting, their protagonists share the experience of otherness. The creators and their leading ladies magnified their characters’ isolation into full-blown nightmares. The opportunity to watch the films of Marianna Diallo (MASTER), Nikyatu Jusu (NANNY), and Carlota Pereda (PIGGY) as a triple-feature lit me up. Subtle, complex, character-based horror can be an emotional arrow to the limbic system. (I realize I’m late to this epiphany.) All three films struck me as instant social change delivery devices, bypassing the intellect but super smart at the same time. I’m always looking for what-I-don’t-know-I-don’t-know. I didn’t know how satisfying it is to lose yourself in someone else’s horrible dream.
I came away from Sundance with plenty of thoughts, but they all add up to one thing: the more filmmakers who get to tell their stories, the more thrilling and illuminating it is to go to the theater. Watching the work of the writer/directors of Sundance ’22 — especially the women — sparked my visual imagination. Listening to them speak about their films and talking with Cassian about making movies, including my own, drove home the fact that I don’t need anyone’s permission to do my work. There is room for many more voices on our screens, including mine. There are lots of us out here, and I can’t wait to meet some of them next year in Park City.
Since Cassian’s call, things are changing. Not only do I have the rock stars at the Black List with their hands at my back, but now I have the producer behind some of my favorite films (including MUDBOUND and DALLAS BUYERS CLUB), reaching out his hand to pull me forward into the sun. His generosity has overwhelmed me with support, encouragement, real talk, real listening, and his infectious love of filmmaking. I am very lucky, even more grateful, and, above all, ready.
I am a filmmaker. It’s what I do. It feels great to say it out loud.
