Director Sophie Parens Reframes Surviving the Unthinkable in her Debut Documentary, “Zaida”
Interview by Rachel Cabitt
Three years ago, artist Sophie Parens set out to direct her first documentary on her grandfather, Henri Parens. At age 12, Henri escaped from the Holocaust and went on to become a globally recognized psychoanalyst. After surviving the unthinkable, he dedicated his life's work to the prevention of prejudice through a simple mantra of raising one’s children with empathy. With her documentary Zaida, Sophie reframes one of the 20th century’s most horrific incidents while simultaneously celebrating her grandfather's legacy. Zaida has premiered at the St. Louis International Film Festival and Chagrin Documentary Film Festival and has been selected for both of the festivals education initiatives, Cinema for Students and Illuminate Student Field Trip. In the conversation below, Sophie discusses taking your time, learning how to trust yourself, and the importance of empathy in a world marred by white supremacy, police brutality and COVID-19.
Rachel: Congratulations, you did it!
Sophie: Thank you! Speaking of being unhinged, I don’t know how many plates of cheese dishes we sat over, with me freaking out and you telling me to keep going. So thank you for that.
Rachel: Of course! I’m always down for a cheese plate and wine. Wow, I can’t wait to go back to Sisters.
Sophie: I was literally just thinking, Sisters mac & cheese is really all that’s going to get me going.
Rachel: I know… So you started this project three years ago and during that time you kept asking, “Why is this taking so long?” But now that it’s done, do you appreciate all this time that it took? What are your thoughts on the process?
Sophie: Whenever I get frustrated with how long I took, I bring myself back to two main things. One, I was working full-time the entire time I’ve been doing this film, and over-time, working jobs that started at 6am and ended about 9pm. So when I actually, realistically look at the fact that I was able to do anything during that time, it calms me down. In addition, I had the occurrence of switching my main partner for the project. It was my first time making a documentary, and I learned so much, almost entirely, what I was doing as I went. And one of the biggest parts of that learning curve was how to collaborate in a way that was focused on trusting myself and that took a really long time…
When you’re second guessing yourself constantly, you move very slowly. So it was a lot of a collaborator suggesting something, my self wholeheartedly disagreeing, but not being able to say “no”, and saying, “let’s try it!” And then wasting all of the time it took to try their idea and inevitably going back to mine very uncomfortably. So I would say those are the two things that factored in the most with how long it took. And when I look back on it, I couldn’t have gotten to the film I got to without having gone through that entire process. So I guess it did end up taking the amount of time that it needed to take.
“One of the biggest parts of that learning curve was how to collaborate in a way that was focused on trusting myself...”
Rachel: In a way, the things that we learn, while they might take forever and be very frustrating, are happening for a reason.
Sophie: The way that it’s been reflected to me most obviously is many people have noted their favorite moments as moments that people told me to cut out and I fought for. And that to me has been such an eye-opening experience, because in those moments I was like, the person in-front of me has more experience and more knowledge and they must be right and I must be wrong. And I finally got to a point where I’d rather be wrong, whatever wrong means, and feel that I followed this feeling which is just a necessity for this thing to be here. And the fact that that ended up really working and reaching so many people is really significant and just a lesson of trusting yourself, which I think especially as a female, creator of any kind, is kind of the hardest part.
Rachel: Yeah, I feel like we’re always trying to prove ourselves, and in that process of doing that, we do begin to second guess ourselves. But I also think you bring up a really good point of this idea of collaborator. We always want to collaborate with others, but in a way, we have this inner collaborator within ourselves who sometimes we don’t listen to, or who we push to the side.
Sophie: Totally.
Rachel: I think that’s a really beautiful thing.
Film still from Zaida
Sophie: The way that I think about it, when putting it in those terms of “the collaborator within ourselves”, I think there’s the “logistics police” and then there’s “the maker”, and the “creative force”. And I think that “the logistics police” is really messages that we’ve internalized throughout our entire lives as artists, and beyond, about how to move through a space and how to work and how to be. That’s the voice that wants to replicate the formula that you’ve seen work other places. That’s the voice that cares about the run time and says it can’t be thirty-two minutes, it has to be twelve minutes or it will never get scheduled at a festival.
And then the creative voice is the one that needs to get the story out of the body and onto the screen… It’s creating it as a means of survival, is what it feels like at certain points. You just have to make this thing and logistics be damned. But those two voices, at least for me, are consistently at war with one another. And I didn’t get to a place of listening to the creative, over the logistics, until really truly, the very end.
Rachel: Definitely. I think so much of what you learned during this process is now just the beginning of everything that you’re going to create through the rest of your practice. This is kind of setting it in stone. Now you’ve seen what you can accomplish.
Sophie: Wow, thank you, I hope so. I really do hope to be able to carry it with me because it is something I’ve seen in so many other areas of my life. Towards the end of the process I would hear myself asking, “Am I crazy, or does this make sense?” And I realize that’s kind of how I move through the world in general, just being like, “Am I totally wrong and stupid, or do you agree with this?” But I'd love to get to a point where I don't have to ask that question and I can just be allowed to think things and feel things and want things and do things and you don't need to turn to whoever is next to you to validate that it's OK to move. I hope that that continues to be a thing in filmmaking and creating, to just trust that instinct and not have to go through all of that wasted time of just ignoring it or pushing against it and just indulging it immediately. Because when it comes up, it's there for a reason. And it's usually right.
Rachel: Yeah, exactly. In college you majored in theater and now your goal in life is directing, and that's what you love so much. But that shift was bringing up insecurities in your practice. Our backgrounds of where we come from, even if we might not be doing that directly now, have so much influence on us, theater for you, for instance. Do you see that in how you create?
Sophie: I wouldn't have ever found filmmaking if I didn't direct theater. I didn't know what directing was. And saying it now sounds insane, but I think for most of the women I've spoken to, it's not really an option that was put in front of us. I was an actor and it didn't occur to me that I was ever able to step into the role of more power in that space. And I got to a point where I was so frustrated by feeling like a pawn and feeling just so disrespected and moved around by directors and just scripts in general that felt shitty. I wanted to make my own stuff. And for whatever reason, I felt called to filmmaking.
I was a theater student and it was our time to decide what we wanted to do for thesis and I said, “I want to make a film. I want to write it and act in it, and produce it and co-direct it.” And they said, “this is a theater program.” And I said, “I'm gonna do it.” And they said, “yes,” which was nothing short of a miracle. So I came to filmmaking directly through theater. And I think understanding theater and directing in that medium for a long time felt totally insufficient for film. I felt because I didn't study it, I had no right to do it. And I do still struggle with the very technical aspects. But you do need to learn at some point. And I'm very lucky to learn through my collaborator, Taylor. I often say I've gone to the Taylor Washington Film School because he truly has taught me everything as we've gone. From having me be a PA on his sets, to teaching me as we've been moving, how to build the camera and all that stuff...
“I felt because I didn’t study it, I had no right to do it.”
But now when I look at it, I think having a theatrical background absolutely lends to film in the sense that storytelling is storytelling. And I think in film, you have so many gadgets and gizmos and fancy things to make art compelling and to make stories pop and meaningful. And in theater, you have such fewer tools. So learning how to create with the bare minimum has absolutely helped me, especially in the doc world.
Rachel: While you were learning along the way, you were also telling a story that is so important and close to your family. So while you personally may have felt that you didn't know what you were doing, you did know what you were doing, because this is a story that only you know and you wanted to tell. When you first had the idea, what was Zaida's reaction?
Film still from Zaida
Sophie: Well, the impetus for making the film were the riots in Charlottesville. I had always kind of flirted with the idea of making something about his story, but it was a very deep down kind of dream. And then Charlottesville [happened] and it was one of so many headlines with white supremacy as the undertone. And it just felt incredibly urgent all of a sudden, I felt like I had to do it. And at that time [my grandpa] was 89, turning 90 and just realizing how few survivors are left. And so I think because I went into it with such an urgency and a confidence, my family was kind of like, "OK, I guess so!" But no one really had any reason to believe that I would end up doing what I did, having no experience in the field.
But they were very supportive and they let me film our Passover Seder, which is truly the most insane thing you can do to your family, have three camera people walking around while they're praying and eating matzah. So that's truly support in its most beautiful form. But he was really pleased and honored and moved by it and continues to be and was also very supportive in the hopes that it would be something that I could use to prove my ability and to have as a piece under my belt. And I think he also felt in the same way that you said, that I was the person who probably saw him in the best light to be able to tell his story in a way that was honest and personal and also digestible.
Rachel: Essentially his goal in life is spreading this message of raising generations to be empathetic and to just be good people. In a way, this documentary is just continuing his legacy and bringing that message into in a modern day form.
Sophie: That was entirely my goal. First of all, thank you so much for saying that. He has spent so much time touring to high schools and middle schools and talking to kids and the thought of him not being able to do that anymore completely shatters me. I felt that having a film could stand in his place so that it could be something we send to schools. I do hope to do some sort of education initiative because, like you just put so beautifully, we need a modern lens. We need a digestible story. As a Jewish kid who saw black and white footage with sad violin music, it just hit me with trauma. And I didn't want to do that to people. Because I think when we talk about these tragedies… people think that they've learned everything that they need to learn, because they know the stats and they know what happened and they say, “never again.” But the reality is that the same issues continue to perpetuate, they just look different.
So what's important to me about him and his message is that no active prejudice or hate or violence is small enough that we don't have to be concerned. Police brutality, hate crimes, white supremacy, all of these things, just because there aren't six million people who will end up in concentration camps, it doesn't mean it doesn't have the same root. And it doesn't mean we don't have to be horrified and it doesn't mean we don't have to be active. So that's the first part of it. And the second part of it is, OK, say we decide to be active… That's so overwhelming. Where do you possibly start? Especially when you're a kid and you're learning about this, how are you taking in this information and making it matter for the world that you live in, not the world that's being talked about? And that's what's always been so amazing to me about his work, is he's taken this incredibly macro issue of prejudice and violence and war, and taken it down to the most micro, which starts with the way that you raise your kids.
Film still from Zaida
Rachel: I think that's a really beautiful message. I mean, we're both Jewish, our education growing up in Sunday school included dreary, horrible black and white videos of the Holocaust. It was all negative, which, of course it's a huge negative! Growing up, kids in school would say insensitive jokes about the Holocaust. It's all just negative. And I think seeing this film and your grandfather's message, it makes it positive in this weird, ironic way, where it's like, "OK, this happened and everybody knows that's terrible. So now literally, what do we do?"
Sophie: I think these things that are so outrageously horrible and bad and sad can be paralyzing. I think it's too much for us to comprehend. And I think that there's a really big sense of responsibility that I feel for not allowing that paralysis to take hold. And filmmaking is one of the ways in which I felt I could at least start to move out from underneath that.
Rachel: It's almost a manual of a way to live. Especially in our current situation, where we're all stuck at home and there's still terrible things happening. We still have a president who doesn't know how to lead a country. And all these innocent people are dying, so what are the simple things that we can do to counteract this? And it's the simple thing of just treating each other kindly and raising generations to counteract this behavior.
Sophie: I think it's interesting that you mention what we're going through now as a nation and as a world, because I look at a lot of the world through a Holocaust lens, I can't quite help it. But the thing that's been consistently striking to me is just the total apathy towards human suffering and loss of life. And the fact that we can be in a world in what we consider to be a very modern time where thousands of people are dying, so many of whom are at a higher risk because of all of these different systems of oppression and how easily people can look away from that. I mean, I get it. It's so tempting to turn this off and to not be in it. But that sort of apathy strikes the same nerve for me, and it makes me think the people who were in that time were looking away too. I mean, my grandpa survived because people didn't. But we have that same responsibility now. And to have a leader who truly just has no concern for human life is too familiar.
“... you can not only survive what appears to be unsurvivable, but you can emerge as someone who fights completely against that, who uses their life to prevent it happening to other people.”
Rachel: People don't really understand the gravity of a situation until it happens to them. That's how it always happens. People don't understand the intensity of COVID, until they know somebody who's sick from it or who has died from it. We have to be shook to our core.
Sophie: I love that you were able to make the connection that so much of his message is just the way you treat other people matters, the way that most of the world matters. And now more than ever, not standing idly by. I think it's a really important part of moving through this time.
Rachel: Yeah, definitely. I think the way that you preface the film, you call it “Zaida”, it's about your grandfather, it's not about the Holocaust. It's about him and how he's built a life and how he's moved forward and how what he went through all those years ago is still appropriate to what's happening today.
Sophie: Yeah, I think it's always been one of the most amazing things, in my world personally, that I've been able to learn firsthand that you can not only survive what appears to be unsurvivable, but you can emerge as someone who fights completely against that, who uses their life to prevent it happening to other people. It's been a constant source of inspiration for me. It feels like an honor and a gift to be able to share that with other people, because it's helped me navigate so many things.