Producing social justice

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This article was published 19/08/2020 (1944 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Film producer Laura Michalchyshyn’s humble Winnipeg roots include manning the box office of the West End Cultural Centre in the late ’80s, and producing a couple of films for local filmmaker Noam Gonick in the ’90s.

Even when she became an executive of the burgeoning women’s TV network WTN (later the W Network) in 1995, one had a sense her ascendancy was just beginning. 

And so it was. Michalchyshyn’s talent for producing has taken her to the upper tiers of the independent film/TV world in the United States, working as president and GM of two Discovery cable networks before being hired by Robert Redford to launch Sundance Productions in 2012. Last year, she became chief creative officer of New York-based Blue Ant Productions.

But, in a phone interview from her home in the Catskills, Michalchyshyn notes she could never quit being a movie producer. For example, she produced Gonick’s TV doc To Russia With Love in 2014, juggling executive duties in the process.

“I’ve always produced on the side,” she says. “I’ve always had these really exciting media gigs and important jobs where I’m an exec, but I’ve always kept my hand in producing. Even when I was in Winnipeg at WTN, I produced (Gonick’s) Hey Happy! and Waiting for Twilight as side gigs.

“I’ve always been that way, since I was 25.”

Now in her mid-50s, the tendency continues unabated, because for Michalchyshyn, the message has always mattered.

“I may have grown up in Winnipeg, but I’m also the daughter of a social worker and a nurse,” she says. “My family was always very progressive and also very oriented on doing good to others and ensuring equity.

“My parents raised me as someone who had a social conscience and I always remembered that we come from a place of privilege and that our job is to help others,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in films and documentaries that had meaning and had social impact.”

That is how she came to her latest producer’s credit, John Lewis: Good Trouble, a portrait of the gutsy, charismatic civil rights legend John Lewis, looking back on a political life born in the strife of the American civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.

Michalchyshyn says the project grew out of a partnership with director Dawn Porter, whose work she saw while she was at Sundance.

“She had made a film called Gideon’s Army about public defenders that I loved,” she says. “She won a Sundance audience prize and I was just enamoured by this film.

“We became friends. I was producing and she was directing so I said, ‘Let’s find something to work on together.”

That partnership ultimately yielded the four-part Netflix documentary series Bobby Kennedy for President, which premièred in 2018.

“She got a call from CNN saying, ‘We saw that you had John Lewis on your Bobby Kennedy series. Would you like to make a documentary on congressman Lewis?’” Michalchyshyn says. “She called 10 minutes later and she said, ‘Would you like to make a film about congressman John Lewis with me?’”

The result is being screened, beginning tonight at Cinematheque, one of the few physical cinemas the film has booked since the COVID-19 crisis changed the release plan of the film from theatrical to virtual.

“We were supposed to be in theatres and we’ve been doing this virtual cinema program, which has been cool … but not quite the same as being in theatres,” she says. “So we feel very honoured that Dave Barber at Cinematheque is putting it in the theatre. That makes us happy.”

Even more of an honour was working with John Lewis for what would be his last year alive. He died on July 17 at the age of 80, just a couple of weeks after the film was locked.

“It was the thrill of my life, because obviously I got to meet the congressman and I got to meet his team, but also we got to unpack a story of civil rights in America,” she says, adding that the current political reality of voter suppression and rampant institutional racism in the U.S. makes the film tragically topical, “in this era of Black Lives Matter and Time’s Up.

“We will never see such atrocities as are going on in America right now: rolling back civil rights, civil liberties, women’s rights, immigrant rights, everything that we’ve all fought around the world for,” says Michalchyshyn, who became a dual American-Canadian citizen in 2016.

Memories of making the film with Lewis were galvanizing, Michalchyshyn says. 

“I probably cried for two weeks straight, from when he died right to the day of the funeral,” she says. “But I stopped crying a day after his funeral.

“Weeping is not going to help,” she says. “I’m now a part of the Artists for Biden committee.”

“I say that 100 per cent of my time (will be) doing my media job, creating content and producing content,” Michalchyshyn says. “And my nights and weekends and the rest of my time are going to be spent trying to bring democracy back to America.”

After tonight’s 7 p.m. screening of John Lewis: Good Trouble, director Dawn Porter and producer Laura Michalchyshyn will participate in a live Skype interview hosted by Joy Loewen, CEO of the National Screen Institute.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing