Real People | Real Stories

I love documentary film. I love it. I don’t really remember the transformation—the process in which I decided that I loved documentary film so much that I felt compelled to let go of my teaching career and learn how to sling a video camera around. I had a great teaching job—a dream job really. I adored the middle school girls I taught at the Julia Morgan School for Girls and they adored me. I was good at it and had a degree that said I knew what I was doing. It was a huge, difficult decision to leave, but since then the world has opened up so big.

Although I have taken a few classes and workshops, I don’t have any kind of certification in filmmaking. And yet, I am doing it. The key here is that I am not alone. My husband, Scott, and I are in this thing deep and together, deeply together. He is the one that makes all the hard stuff seem like no big deal. “Oh, we can totally do this, “ he says. And, apparently we can.

The learning curve has been tremendous. For the past three years, I have been swimming in light and aperture—seeing in both moving in still pictures—making up stories with the frames. A major shift from lesson planning.

This trip to Nepal…somebody pinch me.  could not be a more perfect fit. I feel like I am getting to have my cake and eat it too. I not only get to travel with my video equipment, I get to tell a story about girls. Girls and education. This is the subject I feel as passionate about as documentary film. I can tell a kick- ass story about girls. Yeah.  I have never met a Nepali girl before and I can hardly wait.