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What you’ll hear in this episode:

• How Amy Bench managed a career change from engineering to filmmaking
• Why Bench makes the films she does and how she finds what stories she wants to tell
• Advice to other humanitarian filmmakers

About a week into Amy Bench’s career as an engineer she knew it was time for a change.

“I think oftentimes big events sort of make you think about your life you question your direction that you’re going and so for me, 9/11 was like a kind of a wake-up moment of okay is this where I want to be is is what I want to be doing?” Bench tells Great Society host, Constance Dykhuizen.

Turns out, engineering was not what she was supposed to be doing. So, she spent the first couple years of her career as an engineer taking art classes on the side and believe it or not, it was her painting teacher that sparked her interest in filmmaking.

In the years since her dramatic career shift, Bench went to film school at the University of Texas at Austin and now works full time as a cinematographer and filmmaker with multiple documentaries and features under her belt. Her latest film, A Line Birds Cannot See, is an intimate look at the life of a Guatemalan immigrant in the United States. The film enjoyed a successful festival run winning awards at SXSW, Oak Cliff Film Festival, and more. She has also been twice nominated for the Kodak Excellence in Cinematography Award.

Listen to the inaugural episode of Great Society, a podcast where host Constance Dykhuizen is joined by members of the Great Societ a.k.a. social impact founders and leaders who are dedicated to causes bigger than themselves. In future episodes, Dykhuizen and her guests tackle issues like food justice and social entrepreneurship. If you like what you hear, be sure to share the show with a friend or colleague!

Great Society is a founding_media podcast created in partnership with Constance Dykhuizen.

Host: Constance Dykhuizen

Guest: Amy Bench, photographer and filmmaker

 

Transcript:

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hi everyone welcome great society podcast a show about the people who are working elevate the voices of others my guest today is any mention Austin based filmmaker and cinematographer we talked about you manage tarian filmmaking and how you know which stories to tell here’s my conversation with Amy 

thanks so much for joining us today I’m so happy to be here thanks for having me Kim I’m so I want to talk to you today because you’ve taken something that you’ve done professionally and use it to raise awareness for things that you care about tell me a little bit about your background and what led you to humanitarian filmmaking and photography it’s been quite a long journey  I actually started my career in engineering yes yeah and it was  September eleventh happened basically I think it was a week after I started my job as an engineer and I think oftentimes big events sort of make you think about your life you question  your direction that you’re going and so for me September eleventh was like a kind of a wake up moment of okay is this where I want to be is is what I want to be doing  and I did stick with engineering for a couple of years but during that time I worked on ways of exploring different career paths  so I I was studying art at the same time as I was working as an engineer and I was developing my photography skills and I worked for a couple years because I wanted to make my education payoff  basically I wanted to take it to give it my best go and make sure that it was really something that I wanted to move away from before I quit so there was an art instructor that I had at the Rochester institute of technology I worked in Rochester New York  after college and R. I. T.  is a great art school and if they accepted me as a as an undergrad the art student even though I was a full time engineer and had an undergrad degree already and it was just a great experience of exploring self expression 

so one of my instructors that are eighty Clifford one who’s still an instructor there he’s a painter and I was taking a painting class with him we were talking about my work and he mentioned that I could be an artist because I was very sensitive and he just put it so plainly and simply and I had never thought of it that way I I’d always been interested in art for me I as a young child and I didn’t really know how to execute that or or how to realize that because I didn’t have any role models in my life that we’re pursuing that path to

did you feel like you needed to be an engineer is that what took you in engineering yes I felt like I needed to be doing that  I needed to make money I needed to support myself and that was a clear indirect way of doing that and art was something that was more of a passion button but harder to harder to fall back on harder to make a life and a career out of but when he he kind of validated my experience as an artist even though I was a young was twenty one I think  I was young at the time is validation helped me and he also said that you don’t necessarily need to make work that’s political and I thought that was interesting because I A. you know we’re hearing great society talking about how to use your work to elevate people and to increase the quality and so Clifford and I were talking it’s funny because in art school you call people by their you call instructors by their first names and where as an engineering school you call everybody by their last monitoring kindergarten so clever and I were talking in and he said you know you don’t have to make work that’s political and he didn’t mean by that don’t make political work I think what he meant is any work that you do is inherently gonna be political because it’s coming from your point of view and that felt very liberating to me  it was there that I explored the idea of filmmaking it’s funny in a painting class that that’s where I would come up with that but he had a story board as an exercise of storytelling so we had to draw I think a series of four images because normally you can see tell a story and three images before is a little bit more difficult so it’s kind of like a stretching your brain a little bit and I just fell in love with that exercise and those words have stuck with me 

so I ended up quitting my job eventually after three years to the day three years to the day was my last day and I moved back to Texas and I worked on a film in east Austin actually called house of elegance and it it’s a short documentary on a hair salon which no longer well actually does exist but the building has been sold to you T. actually it’s a historic building  and I made house of elegance and I used that film that it’s basically a a short documentary on  African American hair salon they use that phone to apply it to the university of Texas and study filmmaking and that’s sort of how I got started in my career so you’re currently juggling work as a professional cinematographer while making your own films and photos and then also being a mom  

how do you balance that tension between needing to make a living as a filmmaker but then also wanting to make projects that you care about so it has taken me once I graduated from film school I began working in camera departments of various films I moved to New York City actually before I even graduated and I interned at measles films which if you haven’t heard of Albert measles you may not know his name but you’ve probably seen some of his works he and his brother  were known as the measles brothers and they shot films on the Beatles on Marlon Brando  the on the rolling stones and number of seminal work say they made grey gardens  and I ain’t got my start there and I worked for probably five years before I really made another film on my own and it’s because I was create pursuing a creative career I needed to get to a point where I could support myself before I can take time off to make my own projects so that is still that balance is still something I have to think about on a daily basis  working in a creative field is fairly competitive and it takes a lot of heart and a lot of sweat to get through to take to get work to make work happen and so there’s not always a lot of time to make your own work if you if you’re trying to support yourself so it’s it is a it is a constant juggle  I will say that so it’s become now that I’ve had kids it’s three things that I’m drug juggling but all three kind of works symbiotically because the films that I work on for money as a career I I’m lucky that I’ve been doing this long enough I’ve been a filmmaker for about ten years now I’ve been doing it long enough that I I have more options so I’m able to turn down work where is when I was first getting started I was seeking seeking and hungry and needed to work on whatever I could but I can choose projects that align with my own moral compass and  speak to things that are you I care about so my my personal work in my professional work overlap a great deal and I think my kids fit into that too it is a lot of work being a mom but it’s something that also fuels me creatively because they give me a lot of love and compassion in return and so if I if I feel exhausted from work if I see them they kind of reading reinvigorate me so it’s just a it’s a constant evaluation which I think is healthy for anybody to do to step back every now and then and ask is this project something that I care about and something I believe in is it moving me in the right direction 

so your most recent photo series is things we left behind about refugee women and  I’ve only been working on is aligned birds cannot see is a story of a young girl coming to America from Guatemala how do you choose stories that you work on that’s a really tough question  because I I don’t I don’t find stories easily but what what inspired me to do this work was I had been working as a cinematographer for number of years and hadn’t been doing a lot of my own work I did a series of photographs after my son was born as a way to kind of re enter the workforce and to challenge myself creatively when he was about four months old I have two children and when he was about four months old I started photographing and so that was kind of kick starting me back into creating my own work again and I’ve always been having like an ear to the ground to to discover new ideas and for projects took to work on and it was a it was is she series of short films that I worked on with Jessica Goudeau who I met on that set we did S. a series of three shorts called ask a Syrian girl for teen vogue and that was in twenty sixteen and that sort of opened my eyes to a whole community of people that live in Austin that I wasn’t aware of refugees and the plight of refugees and the ideas of immigration were all abstract ideas to me until I met these amazing young women I think they were rate age is there age ranges were from fourteen to maybe twenty so they were very young but very eloquent in speaking about their culture speaking about the religion speaking about misconceptions and it was really moving to me and as a cinematographer I am responsible for the lighting and the camera and and collaborating with the director and and this was a case where I felt like I would love to learn more and explore more on my own and so that prompted me on a search to go into the community and meet more refugees and make work about them and so that was the beginning of the photo series things we left behind which is a series of portraits of women and objects that they either have here with them or they left in their home country and I did a series of interviews with them to all in their own native languages so I hired translators 

and in that process I also reached out to an organization who is in support of who who Latina and Latino empowerment called Jolt  and they put me in touch with a young woman who had an incredible immigration story and as I was recording her I’ve felt like this is the one this is the person I’d love to make a film about there is something there is a there was a fragility in her voice there was an openness and a trust that is really hard to find with all that I knew was going to be really important to an audience to connect with it’s really hard to to find people that can be that open and honest and she hadn’t told her story that many times she had kept it secret she put herself through college on her own by applying to scholarships she was a daca recipients so she was allowed to get a job after graduation so she’s very lucky but at the same time she hid who she was for so long and so when I interviewed her there was a freshness to her story that translated really well and I think that really comes across in the film 

so when you find a story it sounds to me like you just you start recording from the beginning you don’t look for financing you don’t kind of get ahead of yourself with a project or anything like that you just start recording is that right so I did I did start the project without full financing I think a lot of into independent cinema that’s sort of the the nature of the beast before people find something they wanna see me they want to have a physical proof of concept and so you really have to start making the work before you have funding on board I would say ninety percent of the time as we continue to edit the film and we sought additional funding to finish it are there any rules that apply to military Intel making that don’t apply to making them a feature film or documentary or something like that or anything you need to keep in your in your mind to be aware of I think with any type of filmmaking you have to you have to be very gentle with your subjects 

I think especially if you’re working with a vulnerable population when I interviewed the woman in a line birds cannot see it sort of helped because I was pregnant at the time and I had a very short window that I could interview her so we basically did a series of five interviews over several months and they were all about an hour to an hour and a half long and I kept it short because I couldn’t go any longer because I had a family at home and I was also not feeling well pretty much halfway press for half the pregnancy but it was also I didn’t want to traumatize her by having to relive all of these things I’m not a psychologist I’m not a counselor so I didn’t I didn’t want to do any damage I wanted to be there to to listen and to provide support but I didn’t want to put her through a lot in the process we took it really slow it sounds like your fertility kind of helped you in that moment to kind of honor her fertility or probability and speaking about that story not trauma soon yeah I wouldn’t I would a hundred percent  

and so do you think of your your songs are pure or your photos of having like a point of view are any gender or you kind of spoken about how not you know art is inherently political but do you are you trying to change the audience’s mind or what is the what is the goal of your pieces I think number one the goal is to connect with an audience and and help them empathize and understand in a way that they hadn’t previously understood changing people’s minds takes I think a lot of inputs maybe they see the film maybe they read an article maybe they talked of somebody who’s gone through an experience I think if we if we all add a little bit to the pot then that can change someone’s mind I think if I worry too much about changing somebody’s mind with a particular piece it becomes an advocacy piece rather than M. a film in and ready fine line sometimes with docks especially right I think it’s a fine line but I think if you always go back to story and what is it that’s going to capture the imagination of your audience people ultimately want to be entertained whether it’s an advocacy film or an action movie I think both can be equally entertaining and and I think the more successful a political film is I think the more you focus on story the more if successful a political film will be so I try to focus on story and character individuals and then the under current is hopefully something that will change someone’s mind or change their heart 

what advice would you give to artists creatives filmmakers who are looking to maybe get outside of their normal day job or their normal routine and try to make art  based on things that they care about their outside of their normal I think just starting is probably the best thing you can do so like in my experience it’s taken me from when I graduated undergrad to now almost twenty years to get to a point where I have found that balance of being able to spend enough time in my day making art and raising a family and working so it’s not gonna happen overnight even when you see overnight successes they’re not truly overnight because most of us have been working our whole lives for the school so I would say any amount of time you can dedicate to something is perfectly great and to not lose hope  there’s it art is very difficult because it’s it’s exposing your soul and your heart and there’s a lot of criticism and criticism is is a great thing actually because it makes you better but it’s also hard to digest so just go at a pace that that feels manageable for you  so I would say reach out to other artists as you’re growing for support and just keep making work even lady Gaga I was reading an article has been hand so many times and and she’s come back even artists at that stature have critics and so you just have to keep making work 

is there anything kind of a practical nature that you would recommend to artists filmmakers creative sick to get going to help them tell stories either process or software or something like that yeah I think I think the first step is to figure out what it what kind of story you want to tell you may not know who you want to tell the story about but think about what kind of story you want to tell insert doing research I always start with the internet  funny enough my first film I found the location based on a list of businesses in east Austin mmhm and I saw the name house of elegance and I was like I have to go there a call to you and I walked in and I had a camera in the car and they let it they let me start filming that day and I had no idea that was going to happen but I would say be prepared and do research and and find try to find work on fine tuning your intuition because I think intuition can is a really powerful tool it’s not something that can be taught but you yourself can learn what what is that what you respond to an end to pick up those cues and then for the technical side of things if you want to be a filmmaker or a painter a lot of people learn different ways but school is a great way four year university is one way but there’s also nonprofits that offer classes there’s drawing classes that are real sorry drawing sessions that you can do and through various nonprofits in town and there’s filmmaking classes that you can do in non profits through a nonprofit in town and I think a lot of cities were lucky in Austin that we have a lot of these resources but I think filmmaking is becoming much more popular because of the digits eight digitization of the medium but I think there’s a lot of ways to educate yourself and the websites like no film school they teach you a lot of technical things and I would say technical is a really important learn it put it in your back pocket and then try to focus on the story and don’t get overly technical 

that’s great advice thanks  are there any stories that you’re looking forward to telling or that you have on the horizon I’m hoping to tell a trio of stories about immigration so aligned birds cannot see would be the first film and I would love to tell a story about a refugee and about an asylum seeker and I’m still on the search for finding the exact rate subject I’ll keep you posted thanks I’m into this is a question that I’m gonna be asking all of our guests and what is success mean to you how do you define it for yourself for your project Sir for your kind of I once a side hustle but for your for your side career of making films about humanitarian films that you care about six S. is is a is a really funny word because I think it can be both it can be both the  a motivator but it can also be something that holds you back if you worried that if you start worrying that you’re not being successful so for me right now success means being in a place and doing a thing that I love and then that’s an internal definition of success and then then it helps to get those external validations like getting accepted into a Film Festival for example or screening a film and having a positive response but I would say the biz biggest success I’ve had with making films about people is showing them to those people and feeling like I’ve changed their life in a way that I didn’t even know possible  when I made house of elegance the woman that I A. interviewed I I basically made the film I was just a fly on the wall with the camera filming ladies getting their hair done and getting their hair washed and it was kind of a comedy and my professor at the time said I think you need to interview pearl who is the main subject of the film and I think okay that’s interesting because I was hoping not to do any interviews but let me see what happens so I interviewed her and and the things she said were just so heart warming and she told me after the interview was over ended up using some of that is voice over at the end of the film it was a good way to end the film she said you know any Intel you made this film until you interviewed me I never realize how lucky I was to be where I was I grew up in the salon I would eat here I would sleep here I would have breakfast here because her mom worked so much and now I realize how lucky I am to have this business and to to be in this place in my life so thank you and that to me was success and I feel like that sort of sentiment has come from the woman I’ve made my current film about she said I showed my mom the film and we’ve had conversations about our lives that we never had before and to me that is successful if you can positively impact somebody in that kind of when it feels great because filmmaking in some ways feels like you’re taking something from someone you’re getting a story out of them it’s it feels like you’re trying to draw things out draw things out draw things out and so when the film is done and you can show it to them and they have a life changing conversation that to me is success 

thank you so much amy really appreciate your perspective and things for the stories that you’re telling them that you’re going to tell some day thank you for having me thanks so much to my guest today amy bench to follow her work you can go to her website in the venture com or to learn more about her film align birds cannot see go to align birds cannot C. dot com we’ll put the link in the show notes the great society team includes me Constance I cues and producer Moran gossip an audio engineer Jake Wallace thank you to everyone it sounding Austin for your support great societies available on Spotify stitcher iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts you can follow me on social media at Constance D. that’s at C. O. N. S. T. A. N. C. E. the letter D. thank you guys for listening