NFF director finds critical acclaim with own film
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
After hosting a successful Nantucket Film Festival dedicated to documentaries last summer, NFF Artistic Director Mystelle Brabbee has proven she can walk the walk. Her first documentary was released to audiences last November to rave reviews.

Mystelle Brabbee (right) spent nine years filming Indian courtesans for a documentary released last December to positive national reviews.

"Highway Courtesans," which was nine years in the making, takes place in the Indian hinterlands, in a rural community called Bachara, where a tradition that began with eldest daughters serving as palace courtesans has been reincarnated by eldest daughters servicing truck drivers to support the local economy. Originally intending to explore the lives of all of the working females in the village, Brabbee's film wound up focusing on one "highway courtesan" in particular - Guddi - who eventually incurs community derision for deciding to break with tradition and leave 'the profession' to start a new career with Action Aid International (ActionAid.org), an international development agency that fights global poverty.

"She became a laughing stock to the other girls," Brabbee recounted. "They all said, 'You're kidding. You're going to give up this money to work as a teacher?' Her father and brothers completely opposed her. It goes to extremes."

The film's U.S. premiere occurred at the SXSW Film Festival in 2005. It traveled the festival circuit, becoming the official selection of over 25 festivals worldwide and garnering distinctions like Best Feature Documentary at the 2005 Galway Film Fleadh and Winner of the President's Jury Award at the 2005 Chicago International Documentary Festival. (Brabbee kept the film out of the NFF to avoid a conflict of interests.)

Since the film's Dec. 1 theatrical release, it has garnered really substantial reviews from respected national media outlets, including Salon.com and The New York Times, which included the film as a Critic's Pick. (A copy of the film should be available at Orange Street Video sometime in the very near future.)

Brabbee - who produced, directed and shot the documentary - avoided a fatalistic point-of-view for her subjects, choosing instead to see the women, especially Guddi, as harbingers of modern ideas and the potential for happiness and progress.

In nine years, Brabbee got to know Guddi well, having documented her growth from a girl of 16 to a young woman of 23. They developed a close bond. But since returning stateside, Brabbee said, communicating with Guddi in India is precarious at best - a translator needs to be on the line for phone calls. Though Guddi has allegedly gotten her own cell phone recently, most of those calls over the past few years had to be made to the "town phone."

Brabbee has called without a translator on occasion just to hear the voices of her subjects on the other line. "But if I want to communicate, I can't just call on a whim."

In the midst of all her recent success, Brabbee said, she feels like something is missing, because Guddi is not here to enjoy it with her. "It's bittersweet to think she has no idea that the film debuted and that I had to celebrate this on my own," said Brabbee, who likened her relationship with Guddi to something more than filmmaker and subject.

"I really believe that when you've spent this kind of intimate time with people over a long period, the relationship is not just defined to that of documentary filmmaker and subject. Personal feelings get involved, and there's an affection there - it feels almost like a big sister role," said Brabbee, who lived in an Indian community and traveled to India frequently as a child. "There is such a divide in our backgrounds, but there's also a deep understanding. There are things that Guddi struggles with that are not unfamiliar to me or to my friends. She's just a young girl figuring out how she's going to survive in life and where she's going and who she's going to be with."

Though this is Brabbee's first film, she came to it with fairly extensive knowledge of the independent film industry. Before joining the NFF, she worked as the Director of Acquisitions for article27, a London-based firm that syndicated independent films via Internet portals and video-on-demand providers. She also received a B.F.A. from New York University's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. Her next film, for which she worked with a team of filmmakers, follows a theatre company of children who stutter as they create and perform a play. The film is in post-production.

Originally, this article was meant to play out as a feature, but Brabbee is so earnest and articulate about her film and its subjects - no cultural elitist faux concern here - that it seems right to give her the same opportunity she gave her subjects and allow her to speak for herself.

How did this project begin?

Brabbee: I grew up in an East Indian community when I was young, so I always knew I wanted to make a documentary in India. I don't know why I decided that it would be India, which was challenging to tackle. … I had a friend, a photojournalist living in India - we studied Indian dance together when we were little - who give me an article on Bachara. At that time, which was the beginning of the Internet, it was difficult to get more information on this place specifically. So I went back to India to try to find them with pretty much just my camera and this article, which described Bachara as kind of a lost tribe in a way. The article described them as a matriarchal community, where the eldest daughter worked as a prostitute, but the girls were revered in that they had a special and empowered position in their community, and this was a totally foreign concept to me. And that's the subject I really wanted to tackle and to celebrate. I was naive in my initial approach. I was sure that this was a film that I was going to make - about this matriarchal community as it was described in the article. It never occurred to me that this article was someone's interpretation of this community. …

So, I found them after stopping into different regions. And for three years, I tried to make the film and I was very myopic in my approach. I only turned my camera on images and filmed things that supported my theory. Then, I cut the film in 1998, and it didn't work. It was thin. I knew there were some untruths in that film. So at that point, I decided to open my lens a little wider and ask harder and different questions, which coincided with Guddi emerging. She presented herself to us. She said, 'Come talk to me,' and that's where the story decided to take off in 1998 and 1999.

How did you overcome the cultural divide to become something of an insider? Or did you ever feel like an insider?

I would certainly say, the first several years, the role was definitely one of filmmaker and subject. But even in that role, I spent years trying to gain their trust, and I had everything possible working against me. Being an outsider, things in general could be very alienating. As much as I tried to fit in, I knew I would always be an outsider. Even after nine years, I was not a fly on the wall. …Any shot you see in the film, you have to imagine there are 25 to 50 kids behind the camera; they never stopped following us. During these quiet moments, when we were trying to get interviews, these tiny, little heads were popping into windows and doors. To try to get any kind of intimate moment with Guddi and the girls, we'd have to drive two hours away. This became a ritual of ours; we'd go on these walks, find a place, sit down and we'd start talking. And then the weather would act up, or the wind would act up, or there would be ants. And it would always be during some amazing, powerful moment, like when Guddi wanted to talk about her first customer, you know, and it would be powerful stuff, but not the best footage. But over time, we did develop a relationship that was not one of filmmaker and subject. Towards the end of filming, it got to the point where I'd come back to New York, and she would ask if I'd call her every Sunday to keep up the relationship, which was logistically not necessarily an easy thing to do.

Were you able to keep in touch?

There was a while when I kept in touch more frequently, but this last year, her number has been out, so we've fallen out of touch for a whole year. I've just now found out where I can reach her again, and as it stands, I'm supposed to talk with her next week with the translator.

How do you think your relationship with the girls in the film affected your objectivity as a documentary filmmaker?

In terms of objectivity, there's a certain time when you do get so intimately involved, and that's when a great editor comes in who's never been there and wasn't living it with you. I would show my editor footage, and he would say, "Yeah, that's great but it's not translating on film." And on the inverse, he would find things, scour through the footage and find little, tiny snippets of material, that I had overlooked, because it seemed inconsequential when I was filming it.

Looking back after nine years, is there anything you wish you'd done differently?

Part of my largest regret when I watch this film is that there's a big part of me that wishes I could have gone for a complete year to get into more of the nuances of Guddi's life and the Bachara community and see what would happen for a long period of time. Because in the end, the power of the film lies in the longevity of time. But as a first-time documentary filmmaker, no one is raking in the dough. I had to work, and my day job was the Nantucket Film Festival. And as the years went on, my time to work on the film became less and less as the festival grew and became all-consuming. I'd have to put the film back on the shelf, and then pick it back up again and say, "Okay, where was I last year with 'Highway Courtesans?'"

How much do you think you influenced Guddi's decisions throughout filming?

With Guddi, I would not presume that I changed the course of her life. I think Guddi had everything in her to take the steps she took. She was interested in change. She was a person interested in something other than what she was living, and she was going to take any opportunity that came her way. … She began grabbing onto other things, whether it was a boyfriend or a documentary film crew. And when she would see footage from previous trips, it was affirming to her. Being asked certain questions opened her psyche, but I think Guddi was hell-bent on finding other opportunities. Our presence was

just affirming a path she was already on. I

For more on the film, go to www.highwaycourtesans. com.