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People Uncounted: Aaron Yeger’s Interview by Don Schwartz
Roma children in the Czech Republic in filmmaker Aaron Yeger's striking first documentary. photo: courtesy A. Yeger
DIRECTOR AARON YEGER'S FIRST FEA-
ture, a documentary about the oppression, persecution, and genocide of the Roma people in Europe, “A People Uncounted”, is a hit.
It has been picked up by First Run Features; it is currently being screened theatrically in the United States; and it is being distributed in Canada and Europe—along with being made available to educational institutions.
Considering the gravitas of the subject—ongoing attacks on a group subjected to genocide in Europe only 70 years ago— equally remarkable is Yeger’s age. He began production of “A People Uncounted” at 27.
During our first chat a few years ago, Yeger sounded like an enthusiastic college student speaking of his latest lacrosse playoff game. But, in the last four years, Gandalf the Grey has resurrected as Gandalf the White.
Not only does “A People Uncounted” cover a deeply disturbing topic, it does so with superlative filmmaking, seemingly by seasoned veterans.
Except for editor Kurt Engfehr (who edited "Bowling for Columbine" M. Moore, 2002), producer Tom Rasky and executive producer Lenny Binder, however, the team was all twenty-somethings from Yeger’s film school, the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University.
Yeger was born, raised, educated and still lives in Toronto. He began playing with cameras in elementary school, and never stopped. He graduated in 2006, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Studies, and has been working in various aspects of media production since.
We started our discussion with his first attractions.
Aaron Yeger breaking the journalistic separation with one of his Roma subjects. photo: courtesy A. Yeger
CineSource:Aaron, what drew you to the world of documentaries?
Aaron Yeger: In high school, I was doing these comedic documentaries with one of my friends. When we got an assignment, the result of which would normally be some sort of written paper, or standing in front of the class and giving a presentation, we would make these videos.
We would always bring a comedic element into them. I remember really enjoying the fact that the class would laugh, that they would actually look forward to these presentations. I didn’t really identify them as documentaries at the time, I just saw them as funny videos with information in them.
I do have a distinct memory of the first documentary I saw that illustrated that a documentary can be every bit as entertaining and have the same emotional breadth as fiction, that was ‘Bowling for Columbine’.
I ended up doing a project about that film; and the interesting cyclical thing here is that the editor of ‘A People Uncounted’, Kurt Engfehr, is the editor of ‘Bowling for Columbine’ [Michael Moore, 2002].
So, I got to tell him that story when we first met—about how his work was partly responsible for making me want to work in media in the first place.
But at the time I didn’t really feel this distinct commitment to having a career in filmmaking. There were other things that were interesting to me—like architecture, graphic design. It wasn’t really until it came time to do university applications, that I realized this was the thing that I had the most interest in.
And that same friend of mine, Jonathan Popalis, he and I ended up going to the same film school together. He and I were together in grade 4 until the end of undergraduate school, [laughs] doing this all together all along the way. That was a lot of the genesis of it.
When I started at film school, my ambition was to do fiction. I was fixated on the idea of doing scripted drama—and was not into the idea of having a career in documentary.
I did have an influential professor, Alexandra Anderson, though, who predicted that I would—especially after a particular project I did, a short documentary comparing two forms of protest for affordable housing in Toronto.
What kind of film program did you take? Did you have a major, a minor?
'A People Uncounted''s producers, Tom Rasky and Lenny Binder, were nominated for best Documentary Motion Picture Producer of the Year by the Producers Guild of America.. photo: courtesy A. Yeger
The way the Ryserson program works, there’s no major or minor. It’s a four-year specialization program. There’s some liberal arts courses to a small degree, required to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts. But, for the most part, 90% of it is filmmaking—both academic and hands on.
It’s a fairly unique program because it combines all of the academia from a university film studies program with all of the hands-on from a college professional school.
It becomes as intensive as you want it to be. The course requirements aren’t necessarily extreme, but the more ambitious you are, and the more you chose to take on, the more you get to do. It’s forged a lot of good friendships and career collaboration opportunities as a result.
Most of the work I’ve done in the seven or eight years since finishing university has been with fellow Ryerson graduates—either working for them, working with them, hiring them.
Of the core creative team that did ‘A People Uncounted’—producer Marc Swenker, cinematographer/director of photography Stephen Whitehead, and post-supervisor/assistant editor Karen Harnisch—all graduated Ryerson.
Other members of our production crew I met through Ryerson are our sound recordist Adam Parsons, camera assistant Robert Tagliaferri—a lot of people involved in that production were through Ryerson.
Having seen ‘A People Uncounted’ and learning how young you are, and your team, I’m amazed at the gravitas of the film. I would have expected older filmmakers. Would you take me to the beginning of the project, it’s genesis?
Just a little bit of background. After completing film school, a couple of my friends that I met a Ryerson, Marc Swenker and Stephen Whitehead, the three of us endeavored to make a feature film together—a scripted comedy-action movie type thing.
So, in the course of trying to raise money to shoot that movie, we came close, but did not succeed at the time. But, through Marc we did get an opportunity to make a documentary for the first time—as professionals.
Marc and I became co-directors of the project, and Stephen as the director of photography. The three of us set out to make a documentary about Chuck Berry called ‘Chasing the King’—an exploration into the origins of early rock ‘n’ roll.
We worked full time on that project for a year and a-half before it got put on hiatus. And when that got put on hiatus, that timing perfectly coincided with an opportunity to do another project.
A gypsy survivor of the Nazi holocaust against them. photo: courtesy A. Yeger
So, with ‘A People Uncounted’, the origin of that project began not with me, but with the other producer, Tom Rasky; the executive producer Lenny Binder; and Robi Botos who went on to become the composer of the film’s score. The three of them—as musicians and friends—conceived of the idea of doing a documentary about the Roma people and the Holocaust.
That came out of a conversation they had one day. Tom and Lenny are both children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and Robi is Roma. He came here in the nineties as a refugee. He’s a Romani composer and musician of Hungarian descent.
Robi had just seen ‘Schindler’s List’ which impressed him as both a film, and he really loved the music. But, he remarked to his friends that it’s unfortunate that his people still don’t have an equivalent to tell their story.
They had a conversation about this, and Tom and Lenny learned that Robi lost members of his family in the Holocaust, and that the Roma people had basically been a footnote in Holocaust history.
Tom helped Robi and other members of his family gain citizenship in Canada, back in the late nineties. And CBC television did a story on them. So, Tom knew about it somewhat. He and Lenny Binder were passionate about telling that story—and also finding a way to bring in the broader issues of racism and xenophobia.
The three of them decided [and said] then and there, ‘let’s do a documentary on the subject,’ thinking that would be the best way to get that story out to the masses—rather than trying to do a dramatization film like ‘Schindler’s List’.
None of the three of them were filmmakers; but Tom Rasky is a cousin of mine. He knew that myself and my friends and colleagues had been working on this documentary about rock ‘n’ roll, and that I was taking a career trajectory of being a documentary director. [He] approached me with the subject.
At that time, because that other project was being put on hold anyway, we all joined together. So myself, Marc, and Steve joined Tom, Lenny, and Robi; and the six of us became the core team to do ‘A People Uncounted’.
From there, the story began to expand as we did further and further research, and particularly when we decided that to do justice to the history of it, we’d also have to look at the contemporary situation.
The best story we could tell would be the film that would compare and contrast the past and the present, and show how we’re doomed to repeat these tragedies of history if we don’t learn about them in the present.
Gypsy musicians, like this violinist from 'A People Uncounted', still dominate music in Europe, despite prejudice. photo: courtesy A. Yeger
How did you personally connect to covering a story of genocide?
On a personal level, I was thinking that I would like to do a documentary or fiction film on a subject that was both meaningful on a humanitarian level, and that has an activist element. There’s always been a part of me that has been political, and had an interest in activism.
I was thinking about working on a film project that had a real genuine depth to it—something about the story that’s being told that is enduring and meaningful, that sheds light on a subject that people don’t know enough about. So, I already had this brewing desire to do that kind of project, but didn’t know quite what subject I wanted to do.
When this idea was presented to me, I immediately jumped on it. I have a personal family connection with the Holocaust through my grandparents and various great aunts and uncles, but especially my father’s parents who are both Holocaust survivors. My grandfather appears briefly in the film.
I had that connection to it, I understood a bit about that subject. I knew vaguely that the Roma people were also victims of the Holocaust, but I did not know significant details about it. So, I said, ‘Okay, let’s start doing some research on the subject and see where the story lies.’
I would say everyone involved would probably agree with this sentiment: for me, the more I read about it, the more I realized ‘It is crazy that this film hasn’t been made before. It is absolutely absurd that we are getting to be the first to do a theatrical feature film documentary about this subject. That’s crazy. And we would be crazy not to do it.’
It felt immediately like something bigger than ourselves—not just the story we wanted to tell, but a story that needs to be told, and if we’re not going to do it, then who is going to do it? It became a big passion project for everybody involved.
With every step of the way, the project expanded. This was partly a privilege that we had because of the people we were working with, because of our group, and the fact that we were all on the same page as far as making a movie in this way.
So, as the director, I’m very privileged to have had the opportunity to do a documentary in this style—and this style being what I would refer to as a traditional model of investigative documentary filmmaking.
It’s not quite the same as journalism because it is clearly subjective story-telling, it’s clearly filmmakers choosing where they want to focus, but it is somewhat journalistic in the sense that you gather as much material as you can on the subject. You let the process dictate to some degree the trajectory of it, and you don’t know at the onset what the finished product is going to look like.
It’s not something that was completely scripted or plotted out at the beginning. It was kind of like, ‘What is our value system for this film? Who’s stories do we want to tell? What areas do we want to focus on? What countries do we want to go to?’ And we gather as much material as we can.
Aaron Yeger. photo: courtesy A. Yeger
We ended up shooting something in the neighborhood of a hundred hours of material—and in addition to that, of course, there’s the animation, archival material, etc. Of the stuff that we shot, I can’t imagine more than one percent of it made it into the film. The goal was to gather as much material as we could with some idea in mind of story we wanted to tell.
But it was largely shaped in editing through a very lengthy process of sculpting of the story out of this big block of marble and chiseling it away. Figuring what to cut out was the difficult part, not so much what to put in because there was a lot that we wanted to put in. It’s a story that could go every which way, there’s a lot to say about it.
We had this kind of story-telling burden right off the bat that we had to give some basic primer of who the Romani people are—we couldn’t presume that someone watching the film would even recognize that this is a distinct ethno-cultural group. We had to explain who they are; and, at the same time, we wanted this to stand on its own as a documentary about the Holocaust, and elevate the Roma from being that footnote or that appendix on the subject.
We also thought it was important that if someone who had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the Holocaust ever having happened—believe it or not there are plenty of people that know nothing about it whatsoever; although in Canada and the United States, there’s at least some education on the subject in public schools.
We wanted the film to be something that could stand on its own, that someone who knows nothing about the Holocaust could watch this documentary and not be confused.
That meant that we had to provide some general context of the Holocaust—and the Second World War in the film—told from a Romani perspective. Rather than just honing in on very specific details, we needed to make a story that could stand on its own. So, it became very difficult to decide what to cut. The first cut of the film was maybe three hours long, and it took us months to get that down to the 99 minutes of the finished piece.
What was most important—from the beginning—was finding a way to act as curators, so to speak, for these survivor testimonies. The most important mandate of the project was to find Romani Holocaust survivors, and allow them to tell their stories—in a way that they were comfortable with, and in a way that would illustrate what had happened.
At the beginning, in terms of deciding the scope of the film—where to go, the schedule and the geography of it—was led by where we could find survivors who would tell their stories. Any country where they were, that’s where we would go.
And so, the extent to which we were able to tell other aspects of this—through scholars, activists, other community members, and to tell the contemporary story—was partly led by the places that we were going to gather these survivor testimonies. From there the story gradually expanded, and it became increasingly difficult to fit it all in.
We came back from our trip to Europe—I mean we did some filming in Canada and the United States, as well—but most of this was shot during a six-week period in central and Eastern Europe, in the form of a road trip where six of us were driving around in a van through eight different countries.
We came back with such strong stuff—I mean we were hoping that we would get three or four survivor testimonies, and we managed to get 18. We came back with such strong materials that we realized we wanted to bring in a ‘ringer’ [laughs] to help us edit this.
A ‘ringer’?
That’s a sports expression. The person who’s the superstar. We were all proud of the work that we were doing, but we were young. At the time that we shot this movie—that was 2010, I was 27—we decided that we should, if we could, get a very experienced documentary editor.
Rather than looking for someone from our own peer group of equivalent age, we would go for someone who was a seasoned, experienced, and award-winning documentary editor to help us not only shape the story out of so much material, but to make sure that it’s accessible to a mainstream audience because, ultimately, that’s what would make this a worthwhile endeavor. People would want to watch it.
We were very fortunate to get to work with Kurt Engfehr who is a genius at dealing with heavy subject matter in a way that’s accessible, and even finding moments of ironic humor in that subject matter, and using content from popular culture to tell such a story.
That was a fantastic experience—not just towards shaping this film, but an experience for myself as a filmmaker, getting to work with him, kind of like a mentor.
I remember when Marc and I met with Kurt for the first time. I brought a binder with a paper edit of the story that I’d spent a couple months on. Of course, we had material in nine languages. It took forever to get it translated and transcribed.
We showed up with this binder, and we were meeting with him to describe what we were hoping to do, and he said, ‘So, what archival do you have?’ And we said, ‘We don’t really have any. We were planning to tell this story just with the material we shot.’
And he’s like, ‘No. No. Doesn’t work. Can’t do that. From what I know about this subject, you can’t do that. You need archival, you need representations of Gypsies in popular culture, how they’ve been shown on television, music, and movies, and throughout history.'
'You need to show actual photographs of these events from the past—not just stories from people who are alive right now telling them—to give historical context. Round up some archival material, and then I’ll start working on this.’
So, he was the driving force behind that element of the story as well. And that worked really, really well. And I’m so happy that he pushed for that.
Seems like this project was blessed, that it found the right people for it.
It did feel like that. Actually producer Tom Rasky has spoken that sentiment many times. Every step along the way, when we would encounter part of the process that’s seemed daunting, it just worked out.
How did you and yours finance it?
The film was financed through angel investors, private philanthropy—they prefer to remain anonymous. But, I can just say that Lenny Binder and Tom Rasky were responsible for putting that together.
Are there any particular experiences from your time in Europe you want to relate?
One of the things that I like to highlight was the experience of meeting the Roma in Europe. In spite of all the representations in the media of gypsies being a mysterious group of people who are not part of the mainstream, that they are difficult, in spite of all the impressions that people have that they are fundamentally different from other people, that is not true at all. This was the greatest part of shooting this movie—completely breaking that mythology.
In every situation where we would meet Roma—whether they were elderly people who are survivors telling their stories, or children, or academics, activists, or scholars—in every case, it was the same thing. They were extremely warm and welcoming, happy that we were there, happy to tell their stories, to speak on camera, they were very comfortable.
Even in a couple of cases where we made contact with people by email or phone, in advance of going on the trip, and they had some skepticism about appearing on camera—not knowing who we were or how we were going to represent them—as soon as they met us, they were completely into it. I’ve never encountered a more warm and welcoming group of people in my life. That was the overriding greatest story from the trip.
And then there are funny/stressful moments that had to do with navigating the area, getting around from country to country. One thing I like to point out is that whenever we’ve been asked, ‘was there ever a time that you felt threatened or scared being there?’—because there’s still this association that the Roma would somehow be that way toward us, the answer is ‘no.’
The only time that I ever felt scared was during a border crossing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the Roma. We were held up at a border trying to drive from Romania, through Moldova, to Ukraine, for about 13 hours.
It was only because Stephen Whitehead, our director of photography, speaks Russian fluently that he was able to negotiate our way through. It was super weird for a rented van with Austrian plates full of Canadians and lots of valuable film equipment to be driving through that border crossing where they had never encountered Canadians before.
We had issues with logistics, getting around; and, on some of these drives Marc and our camera operator Michael Heathcote had to do all the driving because it was a manual transmission van, and none of the rest of us could drive stick. There were terrible road conditions in some places in eastern Europe, so we would have 15-hour drives from one city to the next. Basically, in the six weeks, there was no time off. We were always either filming, sleeping, or driving to the next location.
One thing that’s not visualized in the film—we couldn’t fit it in, but is a valuable learning experience for people to see—in more than one location we encountered places…for example, there was a city in Ukraine called Uzhhorod, a border town, about a hundred thousand people. There’s a neighborhood in that town that’s all Roma, and they’ve lived there for decades, if not centuries—in spite of the myth that they are nomadic, not true. The vast majority of them are settled.
This neighborhood, this little area of a few streets was not paved. The streets were mud, and the rest of the town was all paved. You’d round a corner, and the pavement would just end. These people owned these homes. They are citizens of that town just like anybody else. But, the municipality chose not to pave their roads, where they lived, in homes that they owned. This was truly ridiculous, and we saw the same thing happen in Hungary, in Romania.
In Hajduhadhaz, Hungary, we inquired why their roads weren’t paved, and they said, ‘Well, the town, they won’t pave their streets.’ At one point the citizens in that neighborhood banded together, pitched in money, but they couldn’t find a company that was willing to come to their neighborhood—even if they were being paid in cash. That gives an illustration of the kind of baked-in prejudice toward these people.
There’s a great documentary actually, specifically about school segregation in Romania called “Our School”. So, lack of education, kids who aren’t in school, unemployment, basic services not being provided—roads, health care, access to the justice system. We saw this all over the place. Ample evidence of these problems.
Aaron, you’ve had a multi-layered dramatic experience. You directed your first film, the process of producing it was dramatic, and you’ve had a dramatic success on top of that. How has all of that impacted you?
This project solidified a desire in me to continue to do documentary work, a desire to be politically involved in some fashion—that doesn’t necessarily mean in politics, per se, but to care about issues that are of a political or humanitarian nature.
I don’t know exactly where that’s going to take me next, but I know that I would love an opportunity to do a film like this again in the future. And I think the same is the case for everybody who worked on it. We see documentary cinema as a great form to be working in. A film like this is at the convergence of story-telling, education, activism. We all want to go on doing work like that.