Guest Post: SFFILM Rainin Grantee Gerry Kim on the Complex Journey to the Screen for ‘I’m No Longer Here’

STORIES WITHOUT BORDERS
by Gerry Kim

Personally speaking, filmmaking has always been an extraordinary exercise in stamina. Pushing through long stretches of rejection while maintaining optimism and confidence for your project requires an obvious passion for the material. The process also requires a safety net of collaborators that you can trust, especially because of the inordinate amount of stress that can easily unwind a delicately constructed production plan — a production plan that often relies on unpredictable schedules hinging on highly combustible financing. I’m No Longer Here was a particularly ambitious undertaking since its story focused on an idiosyncratic, countercultural movement using a cast of mainly non-professional actors, told across two different countries.

Embarking on an Odyssey
I’m No Longer Here, a film that was supported by the SFFILM Rainin Grant, took over seven years to make. It began as a short story that my director, Fernando Frias de la Parra, wrote to express his interest in a unique countercultural movement (Kolombias) that emerged around the socioeconomic fringes of Monterrey, Mexico. It was an area that experienced one of the worst bouts of cartel violence in the early 2010s, but rather than tell another story about the drug war, Fernando chose to write about the transience of youth through the lens of dance and music. It was a story that also expressed the importance of home and community, finding joy and color in an area plagued with political instability and violence. Fernando and I were working together on a commercial shoot in 2013 when he first told me about the project, and as our conversations and friendship evolved, I knew that I wanted to be a part of the film.

Though I’m No Longer Here told the story of a Mexican teenager that faced forced migration into the US, I somehow felt a strong connection with the material. Loneliness and alienation, and the awkward attempts to re-create a facsimile of home in a new country were themes that I witnessed firsthand with my parents, who left a post-war Korea for the United States. They barely spoke English and had no familial connections in Chicago, and I saw their attempts to assimilate into a country where they didn’t quite belong. Although Fernando’s story felt very specific and singular to Mexico, it also carried an emotional resonance that felt heartbreakingly familiar, and I strongly felt it was an essential piece of the immigrant narrative that had to be voiced on screen.

Seemingly Sisyphean Tasks
In 2014, we had the tremendous fortune of being supported by the Sundance Institute during the very early stages of the project, but it took another three years for the first money to come in. With the support of our Mexican producers at Panorama Global (Alberto Muffelmann and Gerardo Gatica), and Mexico’s EFICINE Film Stimulus Fund, production finally began in 2017, where the first half of the film was shot in Monterrey Mexico. Casting our principals was the first important “to-do” on our list, and with the guidance of our incredible casting director, Bernardo Velasco, we found the perfect group of teens to represent the film’s main ensemble: Los Terkos. After locking in our main cast, we had to contend with a city without any real filming infrastructure, as well as unpredictable weather. An incredible crew, pieced together from working professionals out of Mexico City and locals from Monterrey, helped us finish in mid-October 2017, but because of unforeseen overages, our team had to find finishing funds for the rest of the film. Simultaneously, we also had to figure out a way to have our lead actor, Juan Daniel “Derek” Treviño, travel and work in New York City during an unpredictable and hostile political climate.

While these issues forced us into a hiatus on the film, Fernando and I continued scouting in Jackson Heights, Queens to plan for the second half of the film. It was uncertain when things would resume, but visiting potential locations and meeting members of the community reconnected us with what had originally inspired us about the film. Hearing stories from undocumented immigrants and seeing how their experiences affirmed the themes in INLH gave us the energy to keep pushing forward.

The 11th Hour
To secure Derek’s work visa, we had a dedicated team of immigration lawyers at Milstein Law Group who organized our petition paperwork for him. They secured conditional approvals from Homeland Security to allow him to work in the US, but there was a final hurdle that Derek needed to clear, which was an in-person interview at the US Embassy in Mexico. Having never left his hometown of Monterrey, Derek was truly out of his element and was denied a visa after his first two attempts. Following his second interview, we were told that one of the reasons for Derek’s petition denial was that his estranged father had tried to illegally cross years earlier, and that reason was being used against Derek’s petition. It seemed incredibly unfair, but faced with a final interview attempt and the risk of jeopardizing US production, Panorama, Fernando and I called every contact that we had access to. I finally met with my Congresswoman’s office, Representative Yvette Clarke, who has one of the largest immigrant constituencies in the US. A signed letter from Rep. Clarke, along with a letter from IMCINE (federal agency that funds Mexican films) turned out to be the final pieces in getting us approval. Two months out from production, Derek was allowed to travel for the first time outside of Mexico.

In regards to financing, we used the footage we filmed in Mexico to craft a rough cut and trailer to attract additional financing partners. We also drew interest from a few distributors as well, and as our production window quickly approached in the late Spring of 2018, a potential deal with Netflix materialized. Miraculously, we were able to secure cash flow for the final leg of our production a couple weeks out from the start of production. During that same period, we received the news of being awarded SFFILM’s Rainin Grant, which capped a deluge of good news after a drought of uncertainty that made the film’s future feel anything but guaranteed.

Approaching the Finish Line
After wrapping production in the summer of 2018, Fernando and our editor, Yibran Asuad, spent the next year in the edit room, and later that fall, we began figuring out our film festival plan. After being shortlisted at several festivals, it took us another year to make our world premiere at the 2019 Morelia International Film Festival, where we won Best Film and the Audience Award. For Fernando, the cast, and crew, the awards were validation for all the hard work and sacrifice that was invested into the project, and it was especially moving to witness an incredibly emotional response from the first audience that saw the film at Morelia. The film went on to win several more prizes, including at Cairo International Film Festival, and landed on several top-ten lists in Mexico for 2019. 
 
We were finally gaining momentum on the festival circuit before COVID-19 ravaged the global community, and one of the festivals we were looking forward to most was our US premiere at Tribeca Film Festival. This would have been a second homecoming for the film, but like all other spring festivals, Tribeca suspended its program, and thus sharing the film with our NYC cast and crew was put on hold. However, we are extraordinarily fortunate to release the film worldwide on Netflix, and we’re hoping to plan for multiple community screenings once theaters open up again.

As I have told Fernando and many of my colleagues, working on I’m No Longer Here has been one of the most challenging productions that I have ever been a part of. But it has also been the most rewarding film that I’ve ever been involved with, and I couldn’t be more proud of the incredible work that our team has done in telling such a profoundly humane story, one that feels so necessary during a time when so much inhumanity is being expressed by our political leaders. Films like this one are why I chose filmmaking as a profession since storytelling has the potential to equip artists with political agency, helping audiences foster a perspective outside of theirs, and ultimately, help bring more empathy into a world that desperately needs it.

Gerry Kim is a Brooklyn-based producer whose previous films include Iris Shim’s The House of Suh (which premiered at the 2010 Hot Docs Film Festival and was sold to MSNBC Films), Jennifer Kroot’s To Be Takei, (2014 Sundance Film Festival premiere, released theatrically by Starz Digital) directors Esra Saydam and Nisan Dag’s Across the Sea (winner of the Audience Award at the 2015 Slamdance Film Festival, released on Amazon Prime), and The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, winner of the Audience Award at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival and distributed worldwide by Netflix. Kim also has helped produce long-form content for several companies, including Red Bull Music Academy and Mastercard. In 2014, was selected as a Creative Producing Fellow of the Sundance Institute for I’m No Longer Here, written and directed by Fernando Frias de la Parra. I’m No Longer Here won Best Film at Morelia International Film Festival, Cairo International Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Cinema de Tarragona, and Zacatecas International Film Festival. It was selected to screen at the 2020 Tribeca and San Francisco International Film Festivals, and has just been released worldwide on Netflix.

For more information about SFFILM’s artist development programs, visit sffilm.org/makers.

Guest Post: SFFILM FilmHouse Resident Jason Sussberg on Redefining His Relationship to His Doc Subject

LONG-TERM THINKING IN THE TIME OF A PANDEMIC
by Jason Sussberg

I was invited to be a FilmHouse resident at a time of profound change in my life. My directing partner David Alvarado and I just started our third indie feature film We Are As Gods, on the extraordinary life of Stewart Brand, editor of the counterculture’s bible The Whole Earth Catalog and president of the Long Now Foundation, whose mission is to nudge humanity to think longer term — 10,000 years to be exact. The film we made centers on Stewart’s biography and his most recent mission, which is to bring back extinct species using biotechnology. In January of 2018, only two months after we started developing this film, I became a dad, which nudged me personally to think longer term for my son’s future. I presumed having a FilmHouse residency at the time was perfect timing, as I wouldn’t be traveling too much during my FilmHouse tenure being a new dad and all. However, that ended up not being the case, since the film on Stewart took us to Europe, far Northern Siberia, and all over the country from Stewart’s boyhood cabin in Michigan to West Texas: the site of The Clock of the Long Now. The clock, built by the Long Now foundation, is a monument meant to last at least 10,000 years. It’s a massive mechanical artifact, larger than the Statue of Liberty, housed in the core of a mountain, and most importantly for us as filmmakers, it functions as the film’s ultimate scene that pretty much sums up Stewart’s life.

Since the pandemic de facto canceled the film’s release into the world, I’ve been reflecting on the raison d’etre of the clock. Our film explores the clock in two scenes, but the film’s main drama is about resurrecting extinct species. That said, it’s one chapter of Stewart’s life that deserves more time and exploration than we were able to accomplish in our 95-minute movie. The clock is a mythic icon and a true engineering feat — how does one build anything that is meant to function for 10,000 years? The mission of the foundation that Stewart envisioned back in the ‘90s was to counter civilization’s revved-up and “pathologically short attention span.” As Stewart sees it, civilization is incentivized to think and behave in the short-term. As Stewart’s friend and Long Now Foundation co-founder Brian Eno says, “Everybody was talking about the opinion poll in the paper tomorrow, or next week’s shareholder results, or at best the next election which was four years ahead. We now had all of this power and no concept at all of the future that we were going to be building with it. That was what the clock grew out of.” As Eno sees it, the clock is a provocation to get humanity to think longer-term and behave more responsibly. (As an aside, we had the pleasure of collaborating with Brian Eno on this movie, both as an interview subject and in that he created the beautiful, timeless, and indelible original score. Not farfetched to say that this is the highlight of my life as a filmmaker.)

Our film chronicles Stewart’s ability to make trippy thought experiments become culture shifting realities, starting first with the photograph of the whole Earth. After an insightful LSD trip, Stewart started an ad hoc campaign to provoke NASA into releasing a photograph of the whole Earth. Stewart thought that humanity would become more ecologically responsible if we could see how small, fragile, and alive the planet is. It worked — shortly after the campaign, NASA released the image of the whole Earth and that kicked off the modern environmental movement with the first Earth Day in 1970 — whose 50th anniversary we just celebrated this spring. The clock is intended to do what the photograph did for the green movement, but for time and responsibility. The hope is that the clock will last all 10,000 years, come nuclear war, asteroid, climate catastrophe, or pandemic.

The idea of the clock originated from his friend Danny Hillis, but Stewart literally wrote the book on it and the philosophy of long-term thinking. I read the book shortly after I graduated from college in 2004 and I was sold on the philosophy, though I’m sympathetic to the criticism and not naive to the controversy. I think humanity would act more responsibly to the planet and each other if we had a longer time frame in mind. At the time, my concern was environmentally motivated because of climate change. Obviously our COVID-19 reality has everyone thinking about how this could have been avoided, or at least ameliorated with less death and devastation. It’s my reasoned belief that had we been thinking long-term, governments, corporations, and large philanthropies across the globe would have been better prepared for a pandemic and mapped out several scenarios for recovery. We need to apply long-term thinking not just on an individual consumer level, but at large scale on a governmental and ecological level.

It’s comforting to think that the clock is ticking along somewhere in the desert and will live well beyond this current crisis and many more. Still under construction, the clock is born into the world at a moment when humanity is reminded that civilization is fragile and requires diligent maintenance. Civilization has only been around 10,000 years, which is a blink of an eye in geological time. Even when compared to the scale of our own species (250,000 years), civilization hasn’t been around that long.

Perhaps our next movie will just be on the Clock of the Long Now. If we are to survive as a global civilization and avoid nuclear winters, asteroids, mass extinctions, climate change, and pandemics, we need to think and behave long-term. For me, having a kid jolted me into thinking about the future, but it’s merely the near future of my son’s life and maybe his children (a weird thought since he’s barely two). In the final scene of the film, we see Stewart’s silhouette as he walks through a dark tunnel out of the mountain housing the clock. Over this imagery and sounds of Brian Eno’s score, Stewart says “Generations is a good way to think, but let’s go way longer than that. Once you are holding these longer time frames in mind, it starts to raise the question of what do you do on Monday? Does your behavior start to reflect this larger frame?”

Jason Sussberg is a San Francisco-based filmmaker focusing on art and humanity in the sciences. He started his career working in sports television as a producer and editor for the San Francisco Giants and Golden State Warriors. After receiving his MFA at Stanford University, he and filmmaking partner David Alvarado founded Structure Films, a science storytelling production company. They directed and produced The Immortalists (2014), Bill Nye: Science Guy (2017), We Are As Gods (2020 or whatever) as well as a slew of short documentaries that have broadcast on PBS, TED, BBC, Facebook Watch, and screened at prestigious international film festivals. He is a 2018 SFFILM FilmHouse Resident with this production.

David Alvarado is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with a passion for science, philosophy, and human rights. He is the son of a Mexican immigrant and although he dropped out of high school, his pursuit of filmmaking and his love of science helped him find a passion that changed his life forever. Today, he lives in Brooklyn, NY and works tirelessly to put science back in its rightful place in society.

For more information about SFFILM’s artist development programs, visit sffilm.org/makers.

Guest Post: SFFILM Westridge Grantee Kobi Libii on Making Art During a Pandemic

NON-ESSENTIAL WORK
by Kobi Libii

I’d just gotten back from the store — one of those formerly mundane runs to the grocery store that now has strong Mad Max vibes — and I was sitting on my kitchen floor, crying.

I was surrounded by rolls of toilet paper.

Good news: the store had toilet paper for the first time in six weeks. And none of this doled-out-by-the-single-roll bullshit—a proper 18-pack. Bad news: I was curled up on my linoleum with it, a month into quarantine, not exactly bawling, but whatever you call it when sadness floods out of your body in waves.

I was also listening to a song on my headphones: Only Children by Jason Isbell.

Driving home, I had had a little swagger in my steer. All of my work and prospective work has ground to a halt, so my job for the last couple weeks has been Chief Forager, while my wife has worked remotely, turning the living room into a command center. And toilet paper has been my white whale. Apart from two, piddling rolls from Trader Joe’s a couple weeks ago, I had found none and was starting to take it personally. After all, I’m me. I clawed my way from non-equity open calls to a consistent living as a TV actor. I transitioned to writing and directing and got a feature financed that, before all this, was poised to shoot this summer. I’ve hustled and scraped and made a living as an artist for over a decade now: I should be able to scrounge for something to wipe my family’s ass, supply lines be damned. So, TP in my trunk like a ten point buck, I turned up a playlist of new songs on the ride home.

But I got stuck on one this one Jason Isbell track. Something about it was speaking at me, so on the whole ride home, I just kept hitting repeat, even transferring it to my headphones as I carried the groceries inside.

I only paused it when I stepped into the kitchen and dropped the toilet paper at my wife’s feet as she paced the room on a work call. There was a vague “tada!” in the way I presented the paper to her, like a cat dragging a dead bird to their owner’s feet. My wife, a deeply patient woman but our sole breadwinner right now, glanced up from the call and gave me the same kind-but-patronizing look the owner would give the cat: “It’s a sweet gesture, just not as grand as you think.”

It should be said that I’ll have no work for the foreseeable future. Nothing I have ever done to make money as an adult is possible right now. None of the side hustles. None of the hard-won hustle hustles. Yes, I’m working on longer term writing projects. Yes, I’m pestering my producers for updates on when we, or anyone, can safely shoot again. But mostly, these days consist of toilet paper runs, half-hearted calisthenics and hoping my wife doesn’t get fired.

This is all to explain why, after my wife wandered into the next room to finish her call, I curled up on the kitchen floor in a puddle of bathroom tissue, put my new favorite song on repeat and cried.

It was a good cry. A healthy cry. A stress-leaving-your-body cry. An I-didn’t-know-I-needed-a-cry cry.

It should also be said that the song slaps. It’s an uptempo ballad about love, loss and the childish audacity of young artists.

It’s also exactly how I feel about making art during a pandemic.

The song is wonderfully ambivalent about what artists do. It drips with nostalgia about the speaker’s early days living “hand-to-mouth” and “bet[ting] it all on a demo tape.” It has great affection for that time — those heady, early days — and great sadness that those years, and some of the people you shared them with, are gone. After all, there are few things as sublime as crafting something you love.

But the song is also skeptical of those young artists, repeatedly describing them as “overindulgent only children.” Too young and high and inspired to understand how short life is and how little their ambition or fights about Dylan really mattered. The implication is clear: there’s something deeply selfish about the choice to make art.

It feels that way right now.

One of the many half-baked ideas that gets passed off as wisdom in artistic communities is the notion that you should only be an artist if you “can’t imagine doing anything else.” The thought goes that the rigors of artistry are so extreme, the career path so exacting that only the pathologically committed could possibly survive. This idea is insane to me. Who are these raging narcissists who, despite having world class imaginations, can’t conceive of other ways to contribute to the world? Teach. Volunteer. Build a Habitat-for-Humanity house, you fucking monsters. And in these times? Who, upon hearing horror stories from ICUs and unemployment lines, could possibly believe that our poetry is a better contribution to the world than what nurses, grocery store clerks, and other essential workers are doing right now? Yes, it’s nice to have Netflix in quarantine, but it’s nicer to have food and N-95 masks. And before you point to the great art in periods of great strife, go rewatch that tone-deaf Imagine cover and see how confident you feel that we, as a population, are the healers society needs right now.

I am not an essential worker. Not in this pandemic. Not even in my own family. For god’s sake, we could wipe with Kleenex if need be.

The hard truth is, pandemic or no, it’s always an indulgent choice to make art. There are always domestic pressures that make a career in the arts “impractical.” There are always global injustices that demand our full-time attention as activists, not dreamers. So in a moment when these realities are undeniable, how can I go back to my desk and write a screenplay? How can I even stand up off the kitchen floor?

Yet, there I sat, surrounded by toilet paper, listening to a song that was, by definition, non-essential. It was wise and full-hearted. It made me feel better.

It wasn’t until the song finished that I could stand up.

Kobi Libii is an actor, writer, and director, most recently seen writing and performing on Comedy Central’s The Opposition with Jordan Klepper and Klepper. Past acting credits include Transparent, Girls, Jessica Jones, Madam Secretary, Doubt and Alpha House, and the upcoming feature We Broke Up. Kobi studied theater at Yale University and comedy at Second City Chicago. As a writer/director, his feature debut The American Society of Magical Negroes has been supported by the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab, Sundance Director’s Lab, and SFFILM Westridge Grant, and will be produced by Sight Unseen (Bad Education, Monsters and Men).

For more information about SFFILM’s artist development programs, visit sffilm.org/makers.