PROJECTS & CREDITS




“Public Lives: The Public Private Past of a Filmmaker’s Kin”
By Joyce Wadler, The New York Times

A writer wishing to make off with the emotional family jewels need only sit back and reflect; for the documentary filmmaker, it is more difficult. Go home for a party with a sound man and a camera and even the most obtuse member of the family will realize something is cooking.

So the question for Terri Randall, who has just been nominated for an Academy Award for ''Daughter of the Bride''—her delicate and moving documentary about the marriage of her widowed mother and the not entirely enthusiastic reaction of her mother's adult children to that marriage—is how did she do it?

Did she tell her 66-year-old mother, Pearl, fretting about what to do with the photos of her dead husband, that she might be confiding to strangers? Did she have any fears that she might— how can we put this?—be exploiting her mother?

In the chaos of her own family, her 2-year-old daughter running around their Upper West Side apartment, her Israeli husband trying to distract their daughter with Hebrew music videos, Ms. Randall, 43, sits at the kitchen counter and reflects.

''It was very difficult,'' she acknowledges. ''When I arrived with the cameraman a few days before the wedding, they knew that I had been a documentary filmmaker for many years, but somehow in my mother's mind she thought I was just making her a wedding album. Then I started filming and did this great interview with my mother and she said, 'This isn't for public consumption, is it?' and I said, 'Well, let's not deal with that right now.' ''

Oh, no! Ms. Randall finessed her own mother?

There is a glimmer of guilt, but not much, the fearful indicator by its very absence of a true artist.

''I didn't really finesse her because she didn't buy it,'' Ms. Randall says. ''It was a little tense. But I knew my intention was not to smear what she was doing, but to deal with my own feelings. I wanted to document something that was very important to me. And they went along with me, you know, to make me happy. ''

Thief of hearts, though finally what can a documentary filmmaker be indicted for?

Ms. Randall's 30-minute film, which was shown on HBO last November, ultimately did not upset her mother. She loves it, or so says the filmmaker.

Nor did the movie make Ms. Randall rich. She worked on it on her own for five years, financing it with her own money, and even now she can meet to discuss it only in the evening—during the day she works on other people's movies. Her office is in the hall. She is somewhat embarrassed to reveal the range of her income. A good year may bring $80,000; in a bad one she earns $30,000.

CAN one make a living as a documentary filmmaker?

Ms. Randall has a ''yes, but . . . '' answer.

''In my mind, there are two different paths I've taken,'' she says. ''On one, I try to work on quality projects where my participation can make a difference, but they're for money. But I also always have to have my own project. There have been two times in my life where I felt I had to make a movie. Once with my father, once with my mother. I'll tell you something. When you make a movie about your parents, you really get to know them.''

Ms. Randall's father, Max, was a self-made man, an engineer from the Lower East Side who worked to give his family the emotional and financial security he never had. Ms. Randall's mother spent most of her time in the home.

Terri Randall, the youngest of their three children, was the rebel, traveling the world, rarely calling home. She studied painting and art history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and got a master's degree in fine-art photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In her mid-20's, Ms. Randall became involved in documentary filmmaking. She met her husband, Avner Tavori, a journalist and filmmaker, while making a documentary in Israel.

At 30, she began work on the first film that would be her own, ''To Know Where They Are,'' the story of her father's journey to Poland to learn what happened to his family in the Holocaust.

''I was at a point in my life when I wanted to get to know my father better, so we went on this journey,'' Ms. Randall says. ''We found people who had hidden members of my father's family 50 years ago.

''We learned that after those people were threatened, my father's relatives hid in a hole in the ground,'' she says. ''They lived there for months, covered with a blanket, until someone gave them up to the Germans. We think they were taken to a larger town where a lot of Jews were shot and buried. We went there for my father to say Kaddish. My father was always my pillar of strength, if I got hurt he took care of me. On that trip, I saw the parts of him that he still needed to heal.''

Ms. Randall's father died in 1989. She was an adult of 34. Nonetheless, the death hit her ''like a ton of bricks,'' she says.

''I had gotten to know him from that film,'' she says. ''I felt we had become good friends.''

Her mother's decision to remarry, a year after her husband's death, prompted Ms. Randall's next film. And once again, documenting a parent, there was a change.

''If you had asked me about my mother 20 years ago, I would have said she was just a woman who stayed at home,'' Ms. Randall says. ''When I had on my professional hat, the daughter could see some pretty terrific things about her mother. I was rebellious against everybody when I was a child. I think these films for me have really been that need to go home again. To take another look at who raised me, with adult eyes.''