Photo by Matthew Turley
A Fearless Producer
Geralyn Dreyfous fights for meaningful dialogue
By Melissa Bond
Geralyn Dreyfous would like to change the world. And maybe she already has. One of a handful of people who’ve changed Salt Lake City’s cinematic landscape, Dreyfous hopes to turn Salt Lake into a destination spot year-round for independent and documentary filmmakers. She believes in media that awakens rather than anesthetizes, that promotes inquiry over canned entertainment. She wants to encourage a more discerning consumption of media so the stories that we tell ourselves culturally are stories that shift something inside of us—the kind of stories that make a difference.
Her speech is long and fluid and well honed. She is clear about the power of language. Her past successes include the 2005 Academy Award–winning documentary Born into Brothels, for which Dreyfous served as executive producer. She is an idea and money person. The Writer stares at the globe at Dreyfous’s throat,
imagines it turning. She asks about the money part.
Dreyfous leans back. A small crease appears between her eyebrows, an indication that a story is running through her memory. She briefly fingers the orb and begins by giving the Writer a brief history of her background in philanthropy. Before relocating from Boston to Salt Lake City with her husband, Dreyfous founded the Philanthropic Initiative, an organization that advised wealthy families on strategic giving opportunities. Since then, Dreyfous has founded Impact Partners, a group of investors based in New York and Salt Lake that aims to do for film what the Philanthropic Initiative did broadly. She advises the wealthy to put a small percentage of their portfolio into a media fund. This fund will support films that contribute to education about and discussion of critical social issues. Homelessness, say. Or immigration.
This year, the Sundance Film Festival chose three of the documentaries funded by Impact Partners for its lineup: The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo documents systematic rape in the war zones of the Congo; Secrecy outlines the history of government secrecy and how this covertness can endanger the democracy it claims to protect; and Traces of the Trade, a story about producer/director Katrina Browne’s forefathers, who were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Each film that Impact Partners funds must, according to Dreyfous, satisfy three criteria. It must create awareness of social issues, it must engender philanthropy so moviegoers will have an outlet to participate in combating the problem, and it must, she notes with intensity, be a good story.
Dreyfous found another “stops you in your tracks” story at the Donaldson Correctional Facility outside Birmingham, Alabama. In 2002, the maximum-security prison surrounded by a double row of barbed wire and electrical fence hosted an extended Vipassana retreat, an emotionally and physically demanding course of silent meditation—silence that lasts 10 full days. The meditators were hardened criminals.
Dreyfous served as executive producer for a film made from the men’s experiences. Called The Dhamma Brothers,
after the Dhamma, or dharma, the term for the collective teachings of the Buddha, it was released in late 2007 and has already garnered Best Feature Documentary at the Woods Hole Film Festival and a second place Best Documentary honor at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Dreyfous tells the Writer that the film, to her, “isn’t about prisons. It’s about how you can get freedom.” The story reveals the bars, visible or invisible, that we all live behind. “The prisoners were incredibly erudite. They asked questions that I don’t know I’d have the courage to ask in my own life. And think about the irony of living your life intentionally even though you know that the rest of it will be in prison. There’s no turning back on that.”
The Writer presses, wants to know what it’s like working on films that expose stories that most people resist looking at because they’re simply too painful. Dreyfous mentions Robert Coles, a man with whom she studied and then taught at Harvard. One of the first people to begin talking about the importance of visual literacy, Coles worked with Anna Freud to encourage children to draw in therapy. “He figured out that kids will draw out of a place that they don’t have words for,” Dreyfous says. “He believed that the camera was the same thing, that the camera was a window into someone’s unconscious.”
Dreyfous saw Coles’s approach in Born into Brothels, for which she was executive producer. The 2004 documentary is the story of several children of prostitutes in Sonagachi, a Calcutta, India, red-light district, where documentary photographer Zana Briski goes to photograph the children’s mothers. She befriends the children, teaching them photo-graphy to reciprocate for photographing their mothers. Eventually, Briski sells the children’s photography to raise money on their behalf. Dreyfous says the documentary was genre-breaking because “it told the story through the portfolio of a child’s work. Otherwise, it would have been too overwhelming.” The viewer would have looked through Briski’s eyes instead of the children’s. They would have seen bleakness and corruption instead of kites and the colorful chaos of Calcutta.
It is here that the Writer begins to understand something about Dreyfous. The films Dreyfous has produced and those she presents to Utah audiences via the Salt Lake City Film Center are her personal windows. She looks at the world with an active, acutely engaged eye. She creates windows for people to look into, and she hopes that they’ll see something that will change them. In a media environment that’s chronically oversaturated with blurry content, Dreyfous hopes to cultivate a setting that helps people to not simply look passively at films, but to see.
Dreyfous produced her first film, The Day My God Died, with Andrew Levine, a film studies graduate from the University of Utah. The film is a feature-length documentary that tells the stories of young girls who have been abducted and sold as part of the sex-slave trade in Asia. Levine posed as a customer and took a spy camera into the Bombay brothels known even to tourists as “the cages.” Dreyfous explains that the film’s title comes from the girls. They describe the day they were stolen from their villages and sold into slavery as “the day my God died.”
The film, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Foundation, has been shown on PBS. Dreyfous’s aim in making the film was to highlight the subject so people would begin talking. Dreyfous leans toward the Writer, her blue eyes flashing. “Not every film is a call to action,” she says, “but it should be a call to inquiry.”
Why these documentaries instead of others? the Writer asks. Why these particular windows? Dreyfous pauses only slightly, and then leans against the back of the chair. Her gaze is straight and clear. When she was young, she tells the Writer, she was sexually abused. Her confession is factual and without self-pity or sentiment. It is a window.
Dreyfous says the documentaries were, of course, a working-out of personal issues. But more than that, they were an exploration into issues of power and how it manifests in the human condition. “When people abuse their power, as a teacher or a priest or as a member of Congress or a rabbi, I find [it] despicable.” But her hypothesis, she says, “is that people do bad things because something bad happened to them that never got resolved.” And the most important question is how to break that cycle. She’s clearly answered that question for herself. You break the cycle via storytelling and dialogue.
Dreyfous and Nicole Guillemet founded the nonprofit Salt Lake City Film Center in 2002 as a way to increase conversation along the Wasatch Front. Guillemet had been co-director at Sundance. Dreyfous, armed with the belief that independent films and documentaries were finding their niche, approached Guillemet with an idea. What if they could bring independent films to Utah audiences year-round? For free? At existing venues like the downtown library and the theater at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center? The idea was to aggressively target new audiences for independent cinema and to create dialogue that would bring together groups from diverse backgrounds. They’d have panels, speakers, guest artists. They’d connect films to natural constituents. Is the film about an Afghani kid? Reach out to the Afghani and Muslim communities. Have a dinner. Let people break bread together.
Five years later, they’ve outgrown their original venue, opened a new office on Main Street, Salt Lake City, and have a master plan that has the potential to turn Salt Lake into a destination spot for filmmakers and film buffs alike. “Imagine it this way: New York City, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles,” Dreyfous smiles. “Why not?”
Dreyfous’s fundraising know-how and global vision is what’s driving the Salt Lake City Film Center’s master plan to turn the old Utah Theater, a 65,000-square-foot, 1,800-seat art deco theater on Main Street into a film center that could become a national model. And because of development downtown, there’s unilateral consensus among the LDS church, the city, the county, and the chamber of commerce that something has to be done on that block between 100 South, 200 South, Main, and West Temple. Dreyfous envisions a model that could be likened to New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts: the ballet, the theater, and film, all within several blocks’ radius.
She pictures the film center as both museum and hip cultural center. “It would be the kind of place where films get made, films get seen, and where the archival life of film in Utah would be on display. All under one roof.” But there is one big stumbling block. Dreyfous imagines that for this to work, the Salt Lake City Film Center and the Salt Lake Film Society—two groups with complementary goals of promoting film quality, diversity, and appreciation—would need to merge. They differ in that the Salt Lake Film Society (SLFS) sustains the Tower Theatre, a historic art house in the city’s 9th and 9th area, and the Broadway Centre Cinemas, while the Salt Lake City Film Center creates events throughout the valley. And the film center’s programming is free.
And while nothing is officially on the table yet, SLFS’s executive director Tori Baker believes a film institute or center could be a boon to the community. She is, however, cautious. Baker’s vigilance comes out of concern that, with a merger, something might be lost. She’s an ardent protector of the art house as a voice for the community. But Dreyfous is positive. She doesn’t foresee loss and she’s focused on that hybrid vigor. She believes that as far as indie programming goes on the Wasatch Front, two arms are better than one. And she believes that if they’re working together, they can leverage the film community to a critical mass.
In October of 2007, the Salt Lake City Film Center organized a private advance screening of The Kite Runner, a film adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Afghani-American Khaled Hosseini. The event was part of the center’s community-wide immigration symposia and included an Afghani dinner at the Rodizio Grill in Trolley Square before the showing. People jammed the event.
Dreyfous tells the Writer later that The Kite Runner is an important movie, but that the popularity of the book made the Salt Lake City Film Center’s work easy. What’s as important, she says, is increasing awareness and interest in the movies that don’t have that kind of built-in popularity. This is where her work comes in.
In 2007 alone, Dreyfous produced other four films—Project Kashmir, Waiting for Hockney, In a Dream, and the local short Kick Like a Girl—that she hopes will contribute to an important cultural dialogue. They’re the kind she believes awaken something previously unseen inside you. “There’s the idea of moral inquiry—you see something unexpected or difficult, and you have to decide how to understand what you just saw. This is why good storytelling is so powerful. It helps you remember, or it wakes you up, or it surprises you. Something happens as a result of seeing the story. That’s what makes us human.” She adds, after a brief pause, “That’s what makes us alive.”
Melissa Bond is associate editor and poetry editor for the Wasatch Journal. She is the 2002 recipient of the Mayor’s Artist Award for the Literary Arts and was named the Best Poet in Motion by Salt Lake City Weekly in 2006. Her book of poetry, Hush, was published in 2006. She lives in Salt Lake City.
