Liz Mermin (NYU Anthropology and Culture & Media MA ’97) is a London-based director and producer. She has directed nine feature documentaries, as well as series and documentaries for BBC, CNN, Netflix, PBS, Discovery, Sundance Channel, Arte, and many more, as well as branded content for Sony and an award-winning series of spots for the US non-profit Speak Truth to Power. For three years, she set up and ran the documentary division of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, making character-driven short films on under-reported humanitarian stories.
Interviewer Melissa Lefkowitz is a filmmaker, doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at NYU, and graduate of the Program in Culture & Media.
Melissa Lefkowitz: What brought you to the Culture and Media Program?
Liz Mermin: I had been writing about film. I did the Whitney Independent Study Program, and I had been doing a lot of critical studies and theory. In undergraduate [at Harvard University], I studied literature and postcolonialism. And I'd spent a year in Senegal right after college on a Fulbright writing about Senegalese film, which is how I got interested in film. When I was in Senegal, I became interested in filmmaking because the French had put a lot of money and time into developing Senegalese filmmakers, and I started studying and writing about African cinema and then that segued into issues around the burden of representation, and theory about Black Cinema, Black American Cinema, and Third World Cinema. As I was reading more deeply into that criticism, I saw more and more references to anthropology. I became more interested in how anthropology at that point in the early nineties was engaging with critical studies and the things I’d been reading [while] doing art criticism at the Whitney. So, I was intrigued by anthropology and then, because I had been writing about film so much, I had started thinking a lot about the form. I didn't feel like I should go to film school because I still thought of myself as more of an academic. I was just really fascinated by this idea of being able to learn filmmaking as part of an anthropology degree. So, I applied. And I got in. I lived in New York, anyway, so I figured I’d try it [laughs]. But I wasn't at all sure about it. It was very much a “let's see what this is” kind of thing.
ML: Following the program, what drove you to the next phase of your career and how did you break into the field?
LM: Basically, once I got into the program, I really, really loved the filmmaking courses. I decided I wanted to do more of that, and so my partner - you know how it works at NYU, you pair up for shooting and sound – Jenny [Raskin] and I worked on each other's student films and then we decided we wanted to make a film together. We were both really interested in what was going on with the abortion debate at that point, which is frighteningly like what's going on now. It was a time when there were a lot of clinic bombings and abortion providers were being shot and people were dying. I mean it was terrorism, but no one called it that at the time. We decided to take a year off to just try and see if we could give it a go being filmmakers. We went the fiscal sponsorship nonprofit route. We hooked up with a producer partway through, through one of the grants we got. We just clawed our way through it with little fundraisers, a grant here, a grant there. We paired up with Medical Students for Choice, so it had a social change element from the start which made it more fundable.
While we were raising money for that, we were both working in the field. I got a job working on a public service program for ABC as a producer, which was a dreadful job [laughs], but I learned a lot about television production and then I started working as an editor as well, so I was assistant editing, editing some short films for people and just trying to get as much experience around the industry as possible. But basically, what allowed me to break into television was Jenny and I making this film together. And we did it the same way we had done things in Culture and Media, a two-person crew swapping off camera and sound, and then we’d take turns sitting at the AVID editing together. When we finished, On Hostile Ground was picked up by a distributor and it ended up on the Sundance Channel and having a cinema release - a very small one - but still, it gave us the credibility to then be able to go on and get hired to work as directors, at which point I decided not to come back to NYU.