 Melis Birder“Visitors,” a story about women who faithfully travel to visit their loved ones in prison, premieres this month on DOC. Birder told us about the journey she took to make the film.
DOC: Tell us about your background as a filmmaker, did you go to film school, and do you have certain films and filmmakers that inspire you? I studied Business Administration in Istanbul. At the time there was not much opportunity for people who wanted to study films in Turkey. I knew I wanted to do films but it was rather a vague dream as I had no idea what kind of films I wanted to make. So I came to NY in 1994 with this vague but strong enough dream in my heart. I started taking classes from Film and Video Arts and School of Visual Arts but the craft of making 16 mm film was too technical for me. Digital technology was just emerging when I entered The New School’s Media Studies program. And then I fell in love with the documentary form through the classes I took from a wonderful teacher named Deidre Boyle. DOC: Why is "The Visitors" a film you wanted to make, and how long did it take from start to finish? My ex-husband was incarcerated and I went to visit him for 4 years at Clinton Correctional Facility which was located 15 miles away from the Canadian border. The charter bus that I took was leaving New York City every Friday for various prisons located at the far corners of upstate New York. The whole trip lasted for 25 hours. For me when I got on that bus –as a visitor- it was as if I was in a film myself. A surreal and dark film that I had never thought I would be a part of. I had no idea how the prison system functioned in the US and how many people were affected by it. As an aspiring documentary filmmaker, I was looking to what was going on with a sense of responsibility that these stories should be told. But at the time I was mainly focused on coping with that life changing situation of having a loved one in prison. You go through a big emotional and financial struggle. Part of you gets cut off from the everyday reality of your friends, family, co-workers as you start living “the prison life” on the outside. It’s an extremely alienating existence as your whole life starts evolving around these trips. And many women and children – mainly African American and Latino - go through this for many years. I was just amazed by their strength. A year after our relationship ended I found the courage to go back to the bus and start filming. I thought the visitors’ struggle should be honored. Also working on film was a way to heal myself from the traumas and scars of that journey. I started preliminary filming in 2005 for couple of months and put a trailer together to find money. Sundance Documentary Fund funded the project and thus I continued filming till 2007. It took an additional 2 years to edit and finalize the film. DOC: What was the most significant challenge you faced as producer and director of "The Visitors?" How many prison-bound bus trips did you end up taking? Like most independent films, it was a very challenging project from start to finish. The first weekend I started filming, on the bus, I could not even turn the camera on the visitors. I only filmed the road the whole trip. Fear, suspicion and secrecy surround the visiting culture. Nobody wanted to be on the camera - rightfully so. Second weekend, I was afraid if I would actually be able to realize this project. I was sheepishly standing on the bus stop at Columbus Circle with the camera in my hand and two people came up to me - one of them was Denise our main character. She said she had heard I was doing a documentary and that she had lots of stories to tell. And that’s how I started. But it was never easy to do the filming on the bus. Another challenge was to deal with Department of Corrections. I had to film inside the prison’s waiting trailers and visit rooms for the film to be a comprehensive whole. Many organizations and prominent individuals worked with me towards getting permission. At the time the Republican Governor Mr. Pataki was running the office and right up front they gave us a big “NO” with no lawful explanation. When I was visiting my husband, I had seen many times MTV crews filming some famous rappers who were incarcerated at Clinton Correctional but the department was very strict against independent filmmakers. It took me two years to get permission to film inside the prison territories. Only when the Democrats got elected did they give us the green light, however that would be a very limited access. We could only film two hours in three different prisons. To get myself cleared for approval was especially complicated as I was once a prison visitor. Editing of the film was very intricate as well. For almost a year, I got drowned under 100 hours of footage and couldn’t pull the story out. Before he passed away, our executive producer St. Clair Bourne had introduced me to our wonderful editor K.A. Miille. She became interested in the subject matter right away and took on the project even though we had no money to pay her at the time. She did an incredibly good job in putting that difficult story together. It’s not easy to keep the interest of the audience on a film that mainly takes place on a bus. During the completion of this project, I was living between New York and Istanbul and therefore did not have a permanent place to stay. I lived in 11 different apartments in New York during the four years I worked on this film. At one point the air bed that I was sleeping on got blown and I had to sleep very close to the cold floor for some nights. At the time I thought this was the perfect image that represented independent documentary filmmakers’ state. Most of us sleep on a very thin air bed. DOC: Please recall for us a serendipitous moment in the process of making the film. I had come back after 4 years to the very same visit room at Clinton Correctional where I had sat with my husband for many years. This time I was with my camera and I had some correctional officers assisting me. While I was doing the filming inside that visit room, a correctional officer who was walking around recognized me with my last name and called me “Ms. Birder. You’re back.” It was a very emotional moment. DOC: What, in your opinion, are the elements that make a compelling documentary film?
Good story, good team and good luck. DOC: Why are documentaries frequently being remade into Hollywood feature films; and why is the documentary more relevant to American cinema than ever? Hollywood will always make use of a good story. This can be inspired from a documentary or a book or a YouTube video. Today there are much more good documentaries being made than there were 15 years ago. Meanwhile the quality and the depth of non-fiction films decreased gradually. Therefore documentaries are more relevant to American cinema than ever. But I think we need good fiction as much as we need good nonfiction. In short we need good films that will help us to define and re-define who we’re as human beings. DOC: Any new documentary or film projects in the works you'd like to talk about? Today, the most prevalent image that represents Kurdish youth in Turkey is "stone throwing kids" as one of the major outcomes of the 25 year conflict between the Kurdish rebel movement and the Turkish state. There are currently 3,000 Kurdish children, aged 12-18, who are being tried under the terror law, some of whom are already serving long sentences in adult jails. My partner Berke Bas and I want to look at this problem from the point of view of a young Kurdish sport’s team. DOC: Please list some of your favorite documentaries for us. 5 documentaries that recently inspired me: “Waltz with Bashir” - Ari Folman“O Amor Natural”- Heddy Honigman
“Shape of the Moon” - Stand Van de Maan
“Little Dieter Needs to Fly”- Werner Herzog
“The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun” - Pernille Rose Grønkjær
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