By Michael Blanding
features
Jeremy Levine is standing in front of his Production I class in Suffolk’s Samia Academic Center, showing an old black-and-white Buster Keaton comedy. “This is a film called Sherlock Jr.,” Levine tells the dozen or so students paying rapt attention to the silent movie. “He’s a film projectionist and—as Buster Keaton often does—he gets himself into some trouble here.”
On screen, Keaton literally walks into a movie, and then is forced to navigate a changing landscape as the film cuts to different scenes. He sits on a bench only for it to vanish, leaving Keaton sprawled on his back in a crowded streetscape. He steps off the curb and almost falls off a cliff. He peers over the cliff and suddenly finds himself surrounded by lions.
While Keaton’s experience is extreme, what happens to him happens to characters in every film we watch, as directors and editors cut to different camera angles and entirely new scenes, expecting the audience to follow. “There’s often a total physical displacement, and sometimes we move from one time period to another as well,” Levine, an assistant professor of communication, media, and journalism, tells his students. “In 1/24th of a second, we are transported in space and time. And we accept this—it just kind of washes over us as we’re watching film and TV. Why does this work?”
For the rest of the class, Levine deconstructs that question—challenging students to think about a medium they’ve grown up with and see it in new ways. It’s all in preparation for them to make their own films, and use the tools of writing, shooting, and, yes, editing to create their own unique stories.
“The biggest takeaway we want to consider is digging into the head of the character whose point of view we are in, asking what are they feeling in this moment in the story,” he says. “Your job as an editor is to flow with the audience and create a rhythm of ideas and emotions so the film almost becomes an extension of your viewers’ own thoughts and feelings.”
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Photographs by Michael J. Clarke
It’s a new way of thinking for students, some of whom are exploring how film accomplishes its art for the very first time. And yet, Levine isn’t just talking the talk. In his own 15-year career as an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and a two-time Sundance Institute fellow, he’s used cinematic tools to communicate big ideas about race, class, and politics in America. At the heart of every one of his films, however, is an emotional resonance with a character whom the audience comes to understand and identify with, causing them to see issues in new ways.
His 2021 short film The Panola Project focuses on a Black woman named Dorothy Oliver, who lives in the tiny town of Panola, Alabama, and recently set out on a singular mission: to try to get all of her neighbors vaccinated.
Levine heard about her story more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, while he was teaching classes at the nearby University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Most of the time, he admits, he and his partner and collaborator, Rachael DeCruz, spent their time on the couch “doomscrolling and being sad about the state of the world. We were kind of searching for a way out of it.”
For Levine, that meant searching for stories—and when he came across Oliver’s in a newspaper, he couldn’t resist it. Unable to find a working phone number for her, Levine and DeCruz decided to just drive out to meet her. “We literally walked into her convenience store while she was on the phone trying to get someone signed up for the vaccine,” Levine says. They talked for three hours—an unnerving experience for Levine, who hadn’t had a conversation that long for a year—but by the end, he knew he’d found the star for his next film. “She is a force of nature,” he says enthusiastically. “She brings such light. We were immediately blown away by what she was doing.”
Within months, they had finished their short documentary, which follows Oliver as she wheedles, cajoles, and begs the residents of a town of 350 people to commit to taking the vaccine, accompanied by a jaunty roots music soundtrack.
Beyond making a feel-good film about a determined woman, Levine and DeCruz also had a larger story to tell. Despite the prevailing media narrative of vaccine hesitancy among African Americans, they found very few people in Panola were unwilling to get the shot. Instead, they were held back by lack of opportunity—with the nearest hospital 40 miles away from a town where few had cars. “Deliberate policies have been enacted throughout our country’s history to lead Panola and other communities to be in the crisis they are today,” Levine says.
Ultimately, Oliver succeeded in her quest, helping to vaccinate 99% of her fellow residents, while Levine and co-director DeCruz succeeded in bringing her story to vibrant life. Late last year, The Panola Project was selected from more than 10,000 entries to be one of 13 short documentary films screened at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival—the holy grail for independent filmmakers. On Sunday, May 1, Levine and DeCruz will present their documentary at the Independent Film Festival Boston, and Oliver will be on hand for the screening and a panel discussion.
The honors validated Levine’s instinct when he and DeCruz first met Oliver, that if they were drawn to her story, others would be too. “I tell my students, filmmaking is a never-ending journey of discovering what we are drawn to—listening to that thing inside us that gets hooked on a story and won’t let go, and following that,” he says.
Selected for Sundance
“Filmmaking is a never-ending journey of discovering what we are drawn to—listening to that thing inside us that gets hooked on a story, and following that.”
– Jeremy Levine
Levine has been a storyteller from his earliest years growing up in a Jewish-Catholic family in Beverly, Massachusetts. He still has a cassette tape on which he recorded an interview with his Jewish great-grandmother for a Hebrew school assignment, detailing her experiences fleeing Russia under the cover of darkness to escape antisemitic pogroms. Discovering such a vital part of his family’s hidden past always stuck with him. “Her story would have been lost without recording it in some way,” he says. “It’s important to hold onto that and share it with others.”
While Levine was still young, his father quit his finance job to follow his passion: becoming a theme park reviewer, inspiring Jeremy to think he might one day become a writer himself. He also began getting into film, particularly the documentaries of Michael Moore, who found engaging new ways to tell complex stories to mainstream audiences. His political awakening came during a high school trip to Israel, when he witnessed discrimination against Palestinians. “I had always learned about the oppression of the Jewish people, and how it’s our responsibility not to let anything like this happen again, but then we were forcing these people to live in this one area,” he says. “It felt like such a contradiction.”
The experience lit a fire under him to tell these kind of uncomfortable stories. At Ithaca College, he made his first film, Walking the Line, about violent vigilantes on the Arizona border trying to keep immigrants out—the flipside to his great-grandmother’s experience. He and fellow student Landon Van Soest were encouraged to tell the harrowing story by their professor, Ben Crane, who helped them hone the story and apply to festivals where the film was shown. “He really pushed us and treated us like working professionals,” Levine says. It’s something he now tries to emulate for his own students.
After graduation, he moved to New York, where he and Van Soest followed up their first film with Good Fortune, an Emmy award-winning film that interrogates the failure of foreign aid projects. At the same time, they founded the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, an organization dedicated to nurturing groundbreaking films, while also taking on editing and production work for other clients.
Searching for their next film, Levine and Van Soest heard about an alternative school in St. Louis started by a juvenile court judge to give young people who’d been kicked out of school another chance to earn their diploma. The filmmakers thought it might serve as a backdrop to explore the school-to-prison pipeline, “a set of policies that have pushed children, especially children of color, out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system,” Levine says.
Eventually, they decided to focus the film on a student named Daje who was struggling to turn her life around. “She had so much to say, with this charisma and stage presence that just stole the show,” Levine says. Along her path to graduation, she became pregnant with the child of a fellow student, Antonio, who was criminalized from a young age for stealing candy from a store, eventually landing in juvenile jail.
As they filmed her journey, the filmmakers had to navigate the intense emotions Daje had to deal with in the face of trying experiences. “Something I also like to impart to my students is that we are humans first, interacting with other people—and of course we’re also filmmakers and storytellers,” he says. “But if you are experiencing tragedy and you are not engaged in that, then I don’t know that you should be making films.” Ultimately, their film For Ahkeem won 11 festival awards, including eight for best documentary, and was featured on several top 10 film lists in 2017.
Telling uncomfortable stories
Levine has been a storyteller from his earliest years growing up in a Jewish-Catholic family in Beverly, Massachusetts. He still has a cassette tape on which he recorded an interview with his Jewish great-grandmother for a Hebrew school assignment, detailing her experiences fleeing Russia under the cover of darkness to escape antisemitic pogroms. Discovering such a vital part of his family’s hidden past always stuck with him. “Her story would have been lost without recording it in some way,” he says. “It’s important to hold onto that and share it with others.”
While Levine was still young, his father quit his finance job to follow his passion: becoming a theme park reviewer, inspiring Jeremy to think he might one day become a writer himself. He also began getting into film, particularly the documentaries of Michael Moore, who found engaging new ways to tell complex stories to mainstream audiences. His political awakening came during a high school trip to Israel, when he witnessed discrimination against Palestinians. “I had always learned about the oppression of the Jewish people, and how it’s our responsibility not to let anything like this happen again, but then we were forcing these people to live in this one area,” he says. “It felt like such a contradiction.”
The experience lit a fire under him to tell these kind of uncomfortable stories. At Ithaca College, he made his first film, Walking the Line, about violent vigilantes on the Arizona border trying to keep immigrants out—the flipside to his great-grandmother’s experience. He and fellow student Landon Van Soest were encouraged to tell the harrowing story by their professor, Ben Crane, who helped them hone the story and apply to festivals where the film was shown. “He really pushed us and treated us like working professionals,” Levine says. It’s something he now tries to emulate for his own students.
After graduation, he moved to New York, where he and Van Soest followed up their first film with Good Fortune, an Emmy award-winning film that interrogates the failure of foreign aid projects. At the same time, they founded the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, an organization dedicated to nurturing groundbreaking films, while also taking on editing and production work for other clients.
Searching for their next film, Levine and Van Soest heard about an alternative school in St. Louis started by a juvenile court judge to give young people who’d been kicked out of school another chance to earn their diploma. The filmmakers thought it might serve as a backdrop to explore the school-to-prison pipeline, “a set of policies that have pushed children, especially children of color, out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system,” Levine says.
Eventually, they decided to focus the film on a student named Daje who was struggling to turn her life around. “She had so much to say, with this charisma and stage presence that just stole the show,” Levine says. Along her path to graduation, she became pregnant with the child of a fellow student, Antonio, who was criminalized from a young age for stealing candy from a store, eventually landing in juvenile jail.
As they filmed her journey, the filmmakers had to navigate the intense emotions Daje had to deal with in the face of trying experiences. “Something I also like to impart to my students is that we are humans first, interacting with other people—and of course we’re also filmmakers and storytellers,” he says. “But if you are experiencing tragedy and you are not engaged in that, then I don’t know that you should be making films.” Ultimately, their film For Ahkeem won 11 festival awards, including eight for best documentary, and was featured on several top 10 film lists in 2017.
Telling uncomfortable stories
After a decade of producing client work to make ends meet, Levine decided to transition into teaching film as well as making it. “It seemed like the perfect vehicle, where I could do what I love to do, and also think with students about projects they found important,” he says. At Suffolk he now teaches two production classes, bringing his experience to bear on helping students direct, film, and edit their own documentary productions.
In addition to teaching students their way around the camera and sound equipment, Levine sees his real role as helping them discover their passion for storytelling. “If you don’t know what kind of stories are meaningful to you, then it doesn’t matter that you know all the ins and outs of the camera,” he says. “I work with students to explore their own history. What are the moments that left a mark on them? What are the issues that they care about?”
When Sayler Coryn Tyson, Class of 2022, came to Levine’s Production II class last fall, it was the first time she’d used an actual camera—because of the pandemic, all of her previous classes had been over Zoom. For her film, she wanted to focus on Boston’s tight-knit Italian community in the North End, where she lived herself. “There are such deep ties among the people there,” she says. “It feels like the whole city is being gentrified but the North End is staying the same.”
Ultimately, Tyson’s film The Good Guy focused on a man named Richard, whose larger-than-life personality and tough-talking pride seemed to epitomize the neighborhood. As he told Tyson and her fellow filmmakers his story, Richard spoke candidly about relationship and custody issues. “I often felt overwhelmed with how much he shared with me,” Tyson admits. When it came time to edit the film, she and her partners struggled to figure out how to present him in all of his complexity, while not flinching from parts of his story that didn’t cast him in the best light.
Levine met with the group after class and had them write out every story thread they had on three whiteboards—putting into practice his lessons on editing to help them find the emotional heart of Richard’s story. Eventually, the filmmakers decided to present Richard’s story in his own words, overlaid with scenes of him creating an abstract painting and a soundtrack of rich Italian classical music—making the story visually captivating and uplifting, in stark contrast to the less savory aspects of his character.
“He ended up loving the film,” Tyson says. “It gave me a lot of confidence that it’s possible for me to find this character and effectively tell his story and be proud of the outcome.” With Levine’s help, the group is working to submit the film to festivals.
Another student, Alec Maskell, Class of 2022, was inspired by Levine’s showing of Errol Morris’ iconic The Thin Blue Line, to meld nonfiction with a scripted reenactment scene in his group’s project: the story of a woman struggling to find herself after having to close down her family’s 100-year-old liquor store during the pandemic. “This idea of blending documentary and fictional narratives really inspired me,” says Maskell, who appreciated Levine’s hands-on experience in advising student projects. “He really pushed us and challenged everybody to produce to the highest standards possible.”
For his part, Levine has been excited by Suffolk’s diverse student body. “Some students are the first in their family to go to college; others are older students,” he says. “I’m impressed at the ways students are able to bring to light specific stories I have not heard so much but are clearly important to them.”
And he’s also continuing to develop his own new projects. One focuses on a wrongfully convicted man released from prison who is fighting to free his still-incarcerated mentor. Another tells the story of a former white supremacist struggling to come to terms with his violent past as he performs as a vagabond clown named Buttons. Like his past films, both use captivating central characters to explore complicated and unexpected stories of race and class in America. “We’re interested in telling these big societal stories,” he says. “But they also have to focus on somebody that the audience is going to want to spend time with for a while.”
Mentoring student filmmakers