Conscious Choice: Standing Loud, Standing Proud

June 2007

Standing Loud, Standing Proud

Documentary filmmaker Suree Towfighnia carries forth Chicago’s great storytelling tradition

by Keri Lynch

The day after Suree Towfighnia decided to become a documentary filmmaker, she found a video camera hidden in a bush while walking to a bus stop in Santa Cruz, California. At the time, Towfighnia was a student at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she was a double major in history and Latin American studies. She went straight to her apartment and told her roommate, “This is a sign and I’m going to do this and I don’t care if nobody understands.”

That was in 1993. At the time, documentary film was emerging, but much of it was about subjects that didn’t interest her. “Documentary film was not something people said they were going to do in 1993,” she said. “I was more into engaging character portraits and social documentaries not boring History Channel stuff or nature pieces.”

She ended up doing two things she never planned to do: move back to Chicago and attend the documentary film program at Columbia College. With 2,000 students, Columbia has the largest film program in the country, but Suree was most excited to learn from the head of the program, Michael Rabiger, who literally wrote the book on documentary filmmaking, Directing the Documentary, now in its fourth printing. It was good timing; Rabiger would retire at the end of her first year.

Seven years later Suree Towfighnia would sail into the spotlight with her 2006 Studs Terkel Award-winning portrait of Tampico, a musician who plays in Chicago’s subways. Earlier this year she released her follow up feature, Standing Silent Nation, which will air on PBS’ “Point of View” this summer. The film follows the impoverished Lakota Indians efforts to grow non-psychoactive industrial hemp on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota — sovereign native land, which resulted in an ongoing series of raids by the federal government. It is possibly the only major film initiated as a college project to reach this level.

While serving as the technical coordinator of the documentary center at Columbia, she met Courtney Hermann, who would go on to produce Standing Silent Nation, and Russell Porter, who is now the head of the documentary film program.

“Between the three of us, we revived and changed the emphasis of the program,” Porter said. “Suree helped make the documentary center a nice place to hang out. Now it’s a cultural center for documentary as well as an instructional place.”

After completing her own coursework, Towfighnia taught at Columbia. In “Visualizing a documentary” she taught students to see the world through a camera and open up to different perspectives.

Curiosity, determination, interest in finding the truth behind the surface, and the ability to gain other people’s trust, are all skills needed for documentary, says Russell Porter, citing how “extraordinary” it was that Suree gained Tampico the homeless musician’s confidence. Towfighnia has these qualities in spades, with a little added patience because the work takes time.

“It’s sifting the world through your funnel and hopefully bringing out representations of the truth, including emotional, physical and factual truth,” she said.

In the reverse of the male-dominated feature film industry, the nature of documentary filmmaking seems more appealing to women. Towfighnia said there are eight women to two men in documentary classes and at film festivals. “I don’t know if we’re compelled to tell people’s stories or if we’re more engaged with the world or what it is, but there are definitely opportunities and a comfortability for women in documentary.”

The impact of independent films, particularly documentaries, has changed as technology allows them to be made and shared easily — all over the world. “People are recognizing the potential of documentary to be a witness to the world that isn’t otherwise reported or documented,” Towfighnia said. “And everyone can supposedly make a movie now with this technology. But should everyone make a movie, that’s always my question. That’s where the challenge comes. I see a lot of films where you question how the filmmakers manipulate truth or what their politics and motivations are. We have to have more conversations about these issues and ideas and not just accept a film but also ask who made the film and why.”

These days, Towfighnia is mentoring and teaching filmmaking to young people on the Pine Ridge Reservation and to fifth graders in Chicago Public Schools. In addition to working with PBS to air Standing Silent Nation in July, Towfighnia is arranging more screenings in Chicago and Evanston. She plans to stay involved with the White Plume family featured in the film and continue to work in South Dakota. And she will continue to follow her passion for documentary as a vehicle for social consciousness and change, wherever it takes her.

For more information on Towfighnia and her films, including upcoming screenings in Chicago and Evanston, visit prairiedustfilms.com. Standing Silent Nation will air July 3 on PBS. Visit pbs.org/pov.

Keri Lynch is a graduate student of journalism at Columbia College Chicago, and an intern for Conscious Choice.

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