With “Sandy,” his personal video essay on family history, climate change, Hollywood films, and not learning from past mistakes, Dylan Hansen-Fliedner offers a wide-ranging contemplation of his views and frustrations with America’s history and present. We asked him how he became interesting in filmmaking, how this project evolved, and its collage-like mix of elements…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background and how you first got interested in movies, and/or documentary / video essay work?

I don't really remember much of my life before being obsessed with movies. My parents were both big movie heads, and going to the theater or the video store was a weekly ritual. I'm not exaggerating in Sandy when I describe the ways the movies infected my dreams. One of my earliest movie memories was meeting Jason Mewes of (Jay and Silent Bob) at my barbershop while they were shooting Dogma near my hometown. That was really cool because it made me realize people were making movies right nearby and it wasn't just some far-off Hollywood thing.  My grandfather (featured in Sandy) always had his video camera pointed at us too. 
Before college, I hadn't seen many documentaries, aside from blockbuster Michael Moore docs like Bowling For Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11. I studied poetry and film theory so Sandy kind of joins those two interests together. I didn't really get interested in documentary that heavily until I took a class on editing taught by two doc filmmakers, David and Nancy Novack, who I still work with today. At that time, I got really into filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Hollis Frampton, Ross McElwee, Chris Marker, Moyra Davey, and Agnes Varda via another professor, Timothy Corrigan, who has done a lot of work researching and writing about video essays. I also got to make a video essay instead of just a final paper in a class I took with Meta Mazaj, who let me explore some far out theory, and that's when I really fell in love with the form. 

What initially drew me to docs was how they have a capability of existing somewhat outside of the largely commercial driven film economy, which requires huge budgets and movie stars (although it feels like docs are moving more in that direction now). Audiences are a lot more forgiving of lower quality footage and narrative detours when they know it's a documentary. I made a micro-budget fiction feature with some friends called Driving Not Knowing right out of college that did pretty well at festivals, but we couldn't find anyone to distribute the movie because it didn't have any celebrities in it. With a doc, you can tell your own story or someone else's story without as much concern for whether or not they are famous. I also just love finding the story in the editing process rather than writing out a script. It's just how my brain works for my own material. I still love heavily scripted movies; I just haven't directed one. 

2) What’s the origin story of this project? What were the early stages of inspiration? How quickly did it start coming together?

I started thinking about Sandy when I heard the song "Oversteeped" by my friends in the band littler. A lot of the footage in Sandy was used for a music video for that song. Whenever I was home on the Jersey shore, I found these houses being raised on stilts really haunting. Hurricane Sandy hit our town hard, and I was surprised people would pour all this money into rebuilding when the science says the seas are only going to get higher. My buddy Kenny Suleimanagich owns a 16mm camera and I told him I wanted to capture these houses on film and he was really into the idea so we shot the 16mm stuff back in Summer 2016. I had the early idea for Sandy in the back of my head while we were shooting. All in all, it took 2 years (on and off) from the start of filming images to locking in the score, edit, and narration. My buddy Jay Jadick did the score really quickly once I was ready for it. He played live to the picture in one take like Neil Young did for Dead Man, and I really think it is an essential part of the movie.

While we shot the film, I was working on the Leo DiCaprio climate change documentary Before the Flood, which had a huge budget and was shot all over the world. It made me start thinking about how I pictured the effects of climate change on my own life and how to depict that feeling in a much more lo-fi, personal context. When I started writing the film, I had a rule in place for myself: focus on evoking a feeling rather than describing a solution. Because of the typical fundraising strategies for feature documentaries, there's been more of a focus on a movie's "impact" over the last few years. In other words, if your movie doesn't describe a specific thing people can do, it isn't seen as very valuable to most funders. I wanted to work against that tendency by making a diary/essay about how this specific moment in climate science/politics made me (and a lot of my peers) feel rather than trying to offer any advice. I also think the issue is a lot bigger than saying "don't use a plastic straw" or "don't eat meat" when only a handful of corporations are responsible for a vast majority of carbon emissions. I don't think individuals should be asked to take on that burden of guilt so billionaires can stay rich and avoid changing. I wrote the first draft of the movie in a fit of despair after Trump won and before the latest UN report came out about us only having 12 years to turn the climate around. I thought about changing some of the narration when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released her amazing plan for a Green New Deal, but it seems like top politicians of both parties are working against that. I'm leaving the film as it is because my feelings haven't really changed in the longer scheme of things, and I don't want to date the film too specifically. 

3) There’s an interesting mix of elements here, family history merging with movies/home video collaging, and an editorial on climate change. Can you discuss a little bit how these elements coalesced together?

The mixing of formats was the idea from the beginning. I wanted the movie to feel like a scrapbook or personal collage. With social media and the Internet, we are constantly writing larger trends into our own personal narratives and we're more used to mixing media and formats because we do it all the time on our phones. A topic like climate change really does seem to find its way into most aspects of our lives so I wanted to capture that level of information overload from all sides. If you really start thinking heavily about what needs to be done, it can lead to some wild thought spirals. I wrote the poem/essay based on the images I had amassed over about a year while thinking about the film. I work on much higher-budget documentaries as my day job so I wanted to remind myself I could make something compelling for a couple hundred bucks instead of millions of dollars.

One of the worst problems with climate change messaging is this focus on apocalypse. The popular imagination of climate change is much more in line with the disaster movies I mention in Sandy, but the actual effects of climate change are already happening in real time all around the world. It's a very slow moving apocalyptic event, rather than a single disaster. So I wanted to unpack that dissonance a bit. We understand so much of the world through movies, and sometimes that undermines the very real and very bad things that are happening around us because they don't measure up to what we've seen in movies. What we don't talk about enough is how climate change is tied into the rise of authoritarianism around the world. The refugee crisis has only been made worse by things like drought and flooding that accompany climate change, and we're seeing a rise in reactionary nationalism and fascism as a result. Because I wanted to make a personal film, it made sense to me to weave my grandfather's experience fighting against fascism in the 40s to this current crisis. 

4) What’s a documentary you’ve seen recently, new or old, that really blew you away, and why?

I really loved Robert Greene's Bisbee '17 because it brought a past historical tragedy directly into the present and really connected the continuity in a bold way. His movies always push against the boundaries of what you are "allowed" to do in documentary, and the risk he took with this one really paid off. I love when a film can really punch you in the gut and make you realize the past is still present. 

5) What’s next for you?

I've been trying to get funding to finish editing a feature doc about my dad's campaigns for Brooklyn and Manhattan DA in 2017. Sandy was kind of a practice run for developing a personal voice in narration and exploring family memories. Other than my day job editing other people's movies, that's what I'm focusing on for the time being. 

Contact Info:

Email: dhansenf@gmail.com

Twitter: @dylan_hf

Instagram @dylanhansenfliedner