Author, journalist and documentary-maker Holly Morris’s most recent film, Exposure, follows 11 women from the Arab world and the West as they ski to the North Pole in a powerful story of resilience and global citizenry. The American is touring the film here this month in association with the recent Doc Edge film festival.
You fill your life with adventure, telling stories from Cuba, Chernobyl and Iran. What were your early influences?
My parents were both sportscasters. Mum was also very active politically and Dad had been an NFL footballer player, so I grew up with an appreciation of the outdoors and an awareness of the power of media. We lived on a quasi-farm outside Chicago, in Illinois, so it was a sort of suburban, regular, middle-class American childhood where we also rode horses and ran around barefoot.
Were there hints back then that you’d grow up to become a globe-trotting film-maker?
The most notable thing we did was when I was in third grade. It was 1972 and my parents pulled me and my three siblings out of school for a year. I was about seven, and my older brother was 17. We toured east and western Europe and the then Soviet Union in an old Ford Econoline van we called the Blue Beast. I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, but I see it now as a ballsy move. Our parents weren’t hippies, either, but that presumably set certain things in motion. It definitely taught me to look at the world fearlessly, which is not a given in an American childhood.
How direct was your path to making films?
I wasn’t too sure what to do with my life, so after high school, I went to college in Colorado, and in 1987, I was the first student to graduate with a women’s studies degree. I also became very politically active. In my twenties, I moved to Seattle to work for Seal Press, because they published feminist books that interested me, on everything from domestic violence to poetry. I spent many years in Seattle and became the company’s editorial director.
While there, you edited a series called Adventura Books. While they’re ostensibly about travel, to what extent were you looking to make broader social commentary?
Those books focused on women, travel and the outdoors. They were also about international politics and the environment, because I believe that feminism and politics, travel and fun can live together, and that adventure isn’t necessarily just a frivolous thing. Feminism and politics needn’t be humourless drudgery, either, and I try to reflect those values in my work.
You made your first full-length documentary, The Babushkas of Chernobyl, in 2015. What led you there?
After leaving Seal Press, I hosted Globe Trekker, a London-based PBS travel show broadcast worldwide. For the Ukraine episode, we covered the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and I stumbled across a community of older women living inside the exclusion zone. Once home, I kept thinking about those women. Their stories were endlessly fascinating, so I went back to write a longer investigative piece for New York magazine and fell further in love with them, so I went back to make the documentary.
How did you make such a light-hearted story in a place like Chernobyl?
I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of those women, through a more human, less-salacious lens. Which is partly why Babushkas is the funniest Chernobyl film ever. Not that it’s inappropriate or insensitive, but the women who drive the story have incredible senses of humour, in spite of all they have suffered.
In your TED talk about the film, you say you’ve moved so often, you feel closer to your laptop than any patch of earth. How do you maintain a sense of home when you’re on the road?
While making Adventure Divas, a PBS series, I spent time with India’s first female cop, Kiran Bedi, who later became India’s first female chief of police. Back then, there was a fair amount of corruption. To combat that, she got the entire police force meditating and doing yoga every morning. I bring that up because she talked about the notion of anchors, because at a certain point you have to find the centre within yourself, whatever that may be. Whether it’s yoga, surfing or your laptop, that becomes your anchor, your true north, and your home. For the past 18 years, my daughter has also been my anchor, in a good way. But she’s just finished high school and is soon to leave the nest, so my life, and my sense of an anchor, will surely change.
Making long-form documentaries has to be gruelling, from conception to completion. How do you persevere when the going gets tough?
With documentary culture in America, there is little government funding and it can take a long time to raise the budget, so things can move quite slowly. But if you make it through the gauntlet, you probably make a better film, because you’ve spent more time with the characters over many years, and the story has simmered. Knowing that helps when you start on the next project.
How did you come across the all-female North Pole expedition you follow in Exposure?
In 2016, Felicity [Aston, the expedition leader] put out a global call for applicants for her Euro-Arabian North Pole expedition. A thousand women applied and 11 ended up going. Felicity’s vision was of ordinary women, many not even athletes much less polar-ready, aiming for true north together. My little secret, because I’m not sure if Felicity knows this to this day, is that I applied and was rejected, along with 989 other women. Rather than take the rejection personally, I kept tracking the project until the time felt right to propose the idea of a documentary.
You and your all-female production team skied to the North Pole, too. How was that?
I have a perverse attraction to not knowing what’s going to happen next. I also like taking on what seem like impossible projects, but producing on the ice was hugely stressful with plenty of suffering – from securing funding, to ensuring the safety of the team, to making sure our equipment didn’t freeze. I fell apart many times and many things went wrong, but making Exposure was also a huge privilege, and there were also times I was completely lit up by the reality of where we were. Adventure usually tends to operate on that dual-track system.
Such a journey would have been rich in epiphanies. What did you learn?
I’m an American who made a film about a group of women from the Arab world and Europe. Women who are all extremely different in terms of culture, religiosity, secularism and feminism. As a result, the film embodies notions of diversity and global co-operation, as the women had to literally come together to survive. Exposure is also an incredibly strong film with regards to climate. When you’re skiing over melting sea ice and hear it crack beneath you, the existential threat of climate change becomes all too real.
Exposure screens at Lumiere Cinemas, Christchurch, on August 7 and the Roxy Cinema, Wellington, on August 9. A Q&A with Morris will follow both. After, the film will be available on Doc Edge’s Virtual Cinema until August 31.
