Earlier this week (SHOOTonline, 5/5), production company Nonfiction Unlimited announced that it had signed documentary filmmakers Rory Kennedy and Tracy Droz Tragos for commercials and branded content.
Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam, which chronicled the dramatic evacuation and fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Her previous film Ethel, about her mother and wife of Robert F. Kennedy, premiered at Sundance in 2012.
As for Droz Tragos, she and Andrew Droz Palermo directed Rich Hill, a searing portrait of three boys from a poor rural town in Missouri, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in documentary this year. Droz Tragos’ first documentary, Be Good, Smile Pretty, a powerful film about the loss caused by the death of her father and other soldiers in the Vietnam War, aired on PBS’ Independent Lens and won a 2004 News and Documentary Award for Best Documentary.
Droz Tragos has a family tie to the ad arena–her father-in-law, William Tragos, co-founded TBWA, the "T" standing for Tragos. The director noted that she’s “been interested for a while [in spot directing]. but it’s very competitive. My husband warned me against it, and my response was, ‘Yeah, so haven’t I proven myself already?’ But his point was well taken; sometimes the barriers to entry seem intense in the commercial production world. It seems like such a male-dominated industry. And then I met Loretta [Jeneski, Nonfiction’s partner/EP] at Sundance and she convinced me it was possible.”
Droz Tragos said she is “wide open” to all sorts of commercials. “I’m also very interested in doing branded content, pieces that carry a deeper message about brands and people…If you can move people emotionally, that’s important, and it is something I plan to do in my commercial work.”
Emotion was a catalyst that helped lead to Droz Tragos’ first feature-length documentary, the aforementioned Be Good, Smile Pretty. She recalled, “I was online and just typed my father’s name into a search engine. I’ve done this a million times before but this time I typed in Don Droz instead of Donald Droz, and up came an account of how he was killed, with information nobody in my family had known before, written by a man who had been on his boat in Vietnam and saw him die. This discovery sent my mother into a state of grief, and she started talking about my father in a way she hadn’t before. She started pulling stuff out of the garage that I never knew existed. She had recorded phone conversations with him on reel-to-reel tapes. I never heard his voice before. There was Super 8 footage of us together in Hawaii, when he was on R&R, days before he was killed. At first I just wanted to document it all, preserve it. But after I met the men who served with my father in Vietnam and who were in the ambush that day and wanted to talk about it, the project became more than my own personal journey to know my father, and more about dealing with loss and coming home from war. It became a film.”
A family connection also sparked Rich Hill. “I was driving my first cousin, Andrew Palermo, to the airport and we started talking about our family’s hometown,” recollected Droz Tragos. “Andrew’s a DP and a director. His mother was my father’s sister. They both grew up in Rich Hill, Missouri. It’s a town that was once very proud and is next struggling. So we talked about doing a film about the people there, and we started shooting, out of pocket of course. After a year, we got some funding, a grant from Sundance. We did a Kickstarter campaign. And we also got funding from the MacArthur Foundation, which is pretty special. The film has dark moments. They weren’t funding something that was politically correct and safe.”
Rory Kennedy
Kennedy has produced and directed over 35 documentaries, covering topics from the global AIDS crisis to human rights, domestic abuse, poverty, drug addiction, and political corruption. Kennedy’s films have appeared on HBO, PBS, Lifetime Television, A&E, Court TV, The Oxygen Network and The Learning Channel. Kennedy won a primetime Emmy Award in 2007 for Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, which was honored as Outstanding Nonfiction Special. Kennedy directed and was a producer on Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.
As for what attracts her to the ad discipline, Kennedy observed, “Creatively, advertising is really interesting territory. There are lots of new directions and possibilities in commercials, whereas in documentaries you are sometimes limited. I think branded entertainment is one of those exciting new directions and it obviously has lots of overlap with documentary, non-fiction work. I believe I have a lot to offer the commercial world given the breadth of my work so far. I’m excited to jump in, and I’m thrilled to be working with Nonfiction, which has a stellar reputation. By the way, there is a terrific new wave of women commercial directors out there–I’m honored to be part of this incredible group.
The addition of Kennedy and Droz Tragos gives Nonfiction four female directors, the others being a mainstay at the company for many years, Barbara Kopple, a two-time Oscar-winning documentarian (American Dream, Harlan County U.S.A.), and Jessica Yu (a Best Short Subject Documentary winner for Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien).
Kennedy had some commercialmaking experience prior to joining Nonfiction’s roster. She earlier directed a series of five “Speak Truth to Power” PSAs that addressed human rights and featured interviews with human rights activists.
Regarding what she can bring to spots and branded content, Kennedy related, “Like documentaries, you look at the project and you determine what the project needs and what it wants to be. One of the reasons I love working in documentaries is there isn’t a formula and there isn’t one way to make them. I have particular strengths that can apply to certain campaigns; for example, doing interviews, focusing on the right content in interviews and getting emotion out of people. In other words, getting what is needed out of any situation, interview or verite. I’ll figure it out on a case-by-case basis. Certainly I have plenty of experience over the last 25 years, in which I’ve worked with actors, real people, graphics and animation. I would pull in whatever is needed in any particular commercial project.”
Kennedy and Droz Tragos join a Nonfiction Unlimited spot/branded content roster which includes documentary filmmakers Kopple, Yu, David Gelb, Steve James, Albert Maysles and Stacy Peralta.
