The first thing I did was I bought a C-100 camera, two lenses, and a shotgun mic. That’s it. I don’t know anything about cameras, so I’m kind of proud of the fact that on my crew’s day off, I had to grab this one shot of a wharf at sunrise, and it made it into the film. It’s even one of our marketing stills!
My first principal photography shoot was a whopper. I had to capture the ceremony honoring our silent heroes, Arthur & Paula Schmidt, in the Gardens of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. These ceremonies are punctual and work like clockwork. The place was crawling with press and their respective crews. I didn’t get to yell “rolling” or “cut.” My crew and I either caught what we needed or we didn’t. We got three days of footage, and I think about 60-90 seconds found its way to the final cut. I learned a lot from that shoot, from my crew and all the press. I adopted the policy of not yelling "rolling" or "cut" moving forward.
As I was trying to envision how I would tell the story, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. Inspired by the brilliant Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, I let the stories stand on their own inviting our imaginations to do the heavy lifting rather than showing the visual atrocities of concentration camps. Then I saw a short film, Matan Rochiltz’s marvelous Have A Message for You, that used animation so skillfully and elegantly that I had an “aha” moment.
'UnBroken'CREDIT: Greenwich Entertainment
But first I had to interview my Mom, so we played Scrabble to get her stories; my Aunt Gertrude and I made noodle kugel together... Aunt Ruth was a force to be reckoned with—she launched into a story when she opened the door! But it taught me to make sure the camera was always on when I rang a doorbell.
Then we went to Germany. My Uncle Alfons had written a 40-page document in honor of my family’s 50th anniversary of emigrating from Germany. I gave that document to my production coordinator, Faith Strongheart, and she made a road map. That’s how we created our journey—I retraced the siblings’ steps from Berlin, to their hiding “place of refuge,” as Alfons would say, to their remarkable escape and on toward their new lives in America.
In order to put myself in UnBroken as the narrator, I actually “under” researched. I know that sounds crazy and might feel financially irresponsible, but, with the road map of locations I was excited to capture my discoveries as they were genuinely happening which, for me, is the heart of doc filmmaking. It is also the heart of great acting. The stage is more forgiving. The camera doesn’t lie.
My first editor, Hanadi Elyan, screened over 200 hours of footage with me. She created our workflow, we flagged transcripts and she taught me how to let the footage itself tell us what the story wanted to be vs. me putting my agenda on the footage. Jumping ahead to my lead editor, Aaron Soffin, he came in to wrangle a really solid rough cut edited by Dina Guttman. Aaron asked exceedingly challenging and sensitive questions and together, we crafted UnBroken into the story we have today. Aaron is an extraordinary storyteller and our collaboration is in every frame. Partnered with our original compositions by Jonathan Snipes and the animation and graphics by the team at MISFIT and editor/designer, Nat Toppino, we caught the attention of producer Doug Prochilo and, as my uncle says in the first piece of narration you hear in UnBroken, “there are no rational explanations for miracles, but here we are.”
'UnBroken'CREDIT: Greenwich Entertainment
All I can say is be careful who you hang out with on Third Avenue in Bill Esper’s acting classes in NYC back in the 80s because those hooligans just might turn out to be your greatest champions. Well, that’s Doug.
I remember my doc professor, Kristy Guevera-Flanagan at UCLA said to all of us, “Love your subject—you will be living with it for at least five years.” I laughed and extolled, “There’s no way!” Well, it’s been seven years from the moment we visited Mom’s place of hiding when I decided to make UnBroken. Seven arduous, creative, maddening, and breathtaking years. I should have known it would take seven years given the spiritual significance of the number in the bible and our story. I’m not religious, but my birth grandmother, Lina, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943, was. We had our world premiere at The Heartland International Film Festival on October 8th, 2023, and our international premiere at the House of Tolerance Film Festival in Ljubljana Slovenia in 2024. That’s beshert. Lina’s working her magic from beyond.
I would say that if I have a superpower as a first-time director, it’s that I hired people who know so much more than I do—I listened to them, got inspired by what they had to share, and then made my own decisions, unapologetically, based on intuition, a curious mind, and a very spiritual heart.