New director takes helm at Full Frame

Deirdre Haj was appointed as director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in January after Peg Palmer departed from the helm following the 2009 festival. A documentary producer and well-connected Hollywood ex-pat, Haj moved to Chapel Hill with her husband, who is the producing artistic director of Chapel Hill’s Playmakers Theatre, in 2006. Andrew Hibbard spoke to the new director shortly after her appointment.

What are your goals for the festival and how do you hope to see it grow?

The first thing I want to do is not change anything. In other words, to watch how the festival unfolds and see where we are this year. The festival continues to grow annually, both artistically and financially, so part of what I’m going to do is just observe, because it was really up and running before I got here. Every year, the staff sits down and reviews what works, what could maybe be done differently, and I of course will be a big part of that.

As we move forward, I would love to see our year-round programming broaden because it’s pretty narrow at this point. I’m very excited to look at possibilities of us working educationally in the community. That means acquiring grants and money to support that. I feel very passionately—and there’s data to support this—that putting cameras into the hands of youth keeps them in school. And I think we really need to be a part of that, especially being here in Durham.

Although it was a media agreement, the loss of the New York Times as a presenting sponsor last year was a big hit for Full Frame. Likewise, it’s a difficult time to step in as director given the economy. Do you have plans to seek new sponsorship, especially at the presenting level?

We’re going to be fine, but it’s hard for me to say. We’re very much fine where we are, but there’s always room for growth and new relationships to be made, and I’m eager to make those. The time frame is such that when I came in, that can only be mitigated so much for this festival. That’s a question I’d be eager to answer a year from now when we’re going into next year’s festival.

The Times loss that happened last year is just a changed relationship, and that’s true across the sector. For everybody literally in every arts organization. I’m optimistic—confident, actually—we’ll make new partnerships. That’s part of why I was brought on. I have different relationships with people in the sector than people who have been here before.

What are those relationships?

I was a consultant with the Motion Picture Association [of America] for the last couple of years of my consulting. Because of that, I know a lot of people in the entertainment industry, both in the independent world and people that were signatories of the MPAA. Just knowing those people—you know people who know people who know people. That’s how entertainment business works, frankly. A lot of that has to do with long-term relationships from when I was a producer of documentaries, and some of those have to do with people I know at production companies who not only make documentaries but are on the boards of other festivals, to people who are just long-time entertainment industry stalwarts, who I’ve been lucky enough to call on in years past and will continue to do so. I’ve worked with private companies and taken them out to festivals before and sat on the other side. I’ve worked with clients to see if this was the right festival for this corporate client. It’s a mechanism I understand very well.

How did you come into being interested in film and grow into a career producing documentaries?

I was always interested in film. I started my career as an actor but intended to go to film school and was seen in an audition by Ed Sharon, who was one of the executive producers of Law & Order and is married to Jane Alexander and of course ran the NEA, and he told me, “You need to be trained.” So I went to SUNY-Purchase, which of course in the years I was there, it was known as the Purchase Mafia. So I was in school with Edie Falco and Ann Tucci and Wes Snipes and Parker Posey. It was such a small program yet so many people just immediately came out and worked.

So I was in New York those years and then on a TV show. And even when I was a regular on Dallas, the late Leonard Kapsen said, “You’re a lovely actress but you’re really a producer.” I would sit on the set and say, that’s not written properly and don’t you want to light this. I saw the macrocosm and not the microcosm from the acting standpoint.

A few years later, when I wanted to make that shift, the job that come up for me was producing a documentary on Hollywood and tobacco. And that film was Scene Smoking [2001]. And I knew so many people, I was able to get a lot of very very prominent people on both sides of the issue to come on camera. And I think a lot of people were surprised that you could have a film about smoking and get Sean Penn on camera to talk about it. I was meant to do that kind of a job. That film alone drove 10 years of other work for me because it was really dialectic. It drove so much dialogue that I was then one of the key people involved in adding tobacco to the rating system but at the same time standing up for the First Amendment and believing that an R-rating was not what was called for, which is what a lot of the health groups are calling for. With that film, I ended up really getting known in that circle.

I ran a production company for a while because I had a child and really wanted my own freedom. I did something for the television academy. I did some more work for the CDC and was known as someone who could really stand between the public health sector and the entertainment sector. I would use my connections to, for example, if a state agency wanted to promote a certain issue, I would say you can have a PSA that wouldn’t air until two in the morning or tell them we could get that as a storyline on say Grey’s Anatomy. So we would go in and talk to the writers who are always eager for a new story idea and say, have you looked at it? Here’s the science behind it and here’s the agency behind it. And everyone was happy.

The last documentary I worked on was very local about a young man named Philip  Brubaker, who produced that film. That film was Brushes with Life. And this is why I love documentary, because a lot of people’s lives were changed in the course of making that film—Philip himself and a lot of other people who have found connections through art. I’ve always been very passionate about media and its ability to change and affect society. And nothing does that the way documentary does.

How long have you been in the Triangle?

It will be four years in July. We came here from Los Angeles because my husband was asked to be the producing artistic director of Playmakers.

Full Frame is very much national but also very local, especially with the roles Duke and the Center for Documentary Studies play. How do you plan to negotiate this local/national balance?

Obviously the Duke relationship is paramount and that’s not going anywhere. For me personally it’s a matter of getting to know those people. It’s about meeting those most prominent sponsors and asking, “What does this do for you?” What they do for us is obvious. What we can do for them is less obvious. I feel passionately though about Durham, about us being a tentpole in the Durham community. And that’s part of this plan I have for us, hopefully, to move into some educational outreach. There was a summer program run by some of the employees last summer, which was more of a media literacy program teaching youth how to watch film. But I know we have so much more to offer to our neighbors besides bringing in $3 million in four days—and that’s important. It’s vital. At the same time, we are still considered one of the preeminent documentary festivals in the world. And one of the first. It’s important to not only nurture our past but also embrace what our future is. I think a lot of that has to do with that local relationship. I look forward to hearing people say, “Durham equals Full Frame.” It’s a little bit of that mentality you deal with in New York and L.A. They refer to it as the people we fly over. It’s a very careful dance. I’m loathe to push any agenda that a sponsor has about a film. And at the same time, to be able to nurture those films that are chosen. I want to move the festival closer to the marketplace without it losing its soul. That’s really key for me.

We’re a different fest and that has to be protected. Just the way we program our fest is so different and that’s why so many of the filmmakers love us. If you look at that recent piece that was in the New York Times about the film Cool It, which was at Sundance, we’re the only festival quoted. People still know, if you want an opinion about documentary, ask us. And a lot of that has to do with CDS because some of the best minds in the field are in our backyard and are our friends.

From your perspective, what makes Full Frame’s programming unique?

It’s a different kind of committee. The mechanism of it is different. Mostly, it’s less about what the hot film that’s going to get on HBO is, than is this a good documentary in terms of what we know documentaries to be. Does it move you? Does it speak to the human experience? And again, this is why I’m so passionate about the medium. In a documentary, you’re telling me about something I don’t know about—that’s why you’re making the film. That could be something very small in the human experience that we overlook, just simply in human interaction, or it can be something huge like a hidden, horrible corporate disaster happening somewhere that we need to know about or war zones or places we don’t get to travel to—internally and externally. And I think we pay more attention to that than other festivals. And that’s why the filmmakers still come here. It’s why it’s a filmmaker’s festival because they know we’re appreciating the film on that level. Though I love the fact that a good film is a good film and is generally going to get distribution, that’s not why it’s going to get distribution. Plus we just have so much of this. A hundred films is a lot of documentary. That’s why there are just so few doc festivals.

Given you’ve only lived here a few years, how would you characterize your experience in the Triangle?

I don’t think I expected to love it as much as I do. It’s hard to make a case to leave, frankly. The Triangle is the perfect marriage—not in a city, but with the best minds in the world. I’ve largely been a part of the UNC family. It’s stunning to me and not just the people I know through [my husband] Joe’s job but in my neighborhood alone—it’s funny, I host this thing called moms’ night. There are so many stunning women in my neighborhood that once a month, we would go out because I have neighbors who are senior producers at NPR, top attorneys—the most amazing people in my neighborhood. I just sit there and think, wow, these are the most stunning people. Or you’ll meet someone and ask what they do and it’s like, “I’m getting my doctorate in Germanic studies.” This is not a light person.

It’s so intellectually stimulating, and at the same time, I get to ride horses with my daughter on the weekend. So you’re talking about great minds, great schools, a beautiful environment, careful planning by our cities in terms of development, taking care of our land and at the same time growing economically. It’s very difficult to find. That combination of the universities bringing these amazing people to the area and just North Carolina by itself, how beautiful it is, that’s a pretty special combination. And it’s just really hard to beat it.

I brag to all of my L.A. friends about it. I say I have more of a West Coast lifestyle here than I ever had in L.A. I spent much more of my time in the car there. It feels like time travel going out to dinner here. It took half an hour to get anywhere at the minimum. We’re very healthy here. We embrace our outdoor lifestyle which I never had time to do in L.A. It’s a really stunning area.

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