NOT SHY: Suzanne Niedland, TEL 1988, MAMC 2004, has shown Miss Lil's Camp in 16 film festivals, including this one in Jacksonville.
Alum maximizes
documentary’s exposure
By Boaz Dvir
Most graduates leave their schoolwork behind. Not Suzanne Niedland, TEL 1988, MAMC 2004. More than a year after receiving her master’s degree from UF with a specialty in documentary, she continues to invest a great deal of time and money marketing Miss Lil’s Camp, which she created with Anberin Pasha, MAMC 2004, for their master’s project. She’s placed it in 16 film festivals and two events. And she screened it at November’s opening of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum in Little Rock. Along the way, she’s won recognition and awards, developed into an independent producer, and raised awareness for the late Lillian Smith, a Southern writer who battled racism long before the civil rights movement.
The documentary tells the story of former campers who return to Laurel Falls Camp in Clayton, Ga., to recount their days with Smith, who indoctrinated them with tolerance.
“Miss Lil’s Camp touched our audience on many levels,” said Jan Holmes, chair of the Through Women’s Eyes film festival in Sarasota, which showed the documentary in April. “It reminded us of the many brave people who fought segregation in the South in the early part of the 20th century.”
Palm Beach County Film Commissioner Chuck Elderd, TEL 1971, who recently invited Niedland to serve on his board, gives her credit for working overtime to show Miss Lil’s Camp to as many people as possible.
“If it wasn’t for Suzanne,” he said, “this piece of history might be lost forever.”
Niedland refuses to compromise on the integrity and quality of the work. For instance, at the recent Ashland (Ore.) Independent Film Festival, she “jumped up and stopped” the screening as soon as she noticed problems.
“The color was bad and the sound was awful due to a faulty projector,” she recalled. “I had a backup master and was able to screen the film on DVD. I was worried the audience would be annoyed, but they applauded when it started over with good sound and color.”
The following month at the Jacksonville Film Festival, all she had to do was smile as Miss Lil’s Camp played with no mishaps to a full house at the restored African-American landmark performance hall, the Ritz Theatre. Later that day in the same venue, she participated in a panel discussion with her former teachers, Documentary Institute Co-Director Churchill Roberts and Associate Director Cara Pilson. “Suzanne is really good at promotion,” Co-Director Sandra Dickson said.
She’s been spending her own money to submit Miss Lil’s Camp to film festivals and paying her own travel expenses. Pasha, who has been working in Serbia and could not be reached for comment, gave her the green light to run with the project, Niedland said.
“There’s no money in it,” Niedland said. “I’m doing it because Smith is a part of a history that needs to be told.”
To deliver the story to a wider audience, Niedland plans to approach PBS and the Hallmark Channel. But first she must invest more time and money “clearing all the copyrights,” she said. “I have to document every person and photograph in each frame, making sure we have a release for each. It’s pretty time consuming, but nobody would want to broadcast it otherwise.”
In her past professional life as an actress in Los Angeles and South Florida, Niedland learned that success has little to do with talent. It’s all about creating one’s good luck.
“I don’t see closed doors,” Niedland said, “only opportunities.”
At the same time, she has enough experience to avoid jumping at every chance. She’s selective about the film festivals she chooses. And she knows when to say no. For instance, she declined to turn the 26-minute Miss Lil’s Camp into a 60-minute or 90-minute documentary for a broadcaster.
“It works right now,” she said. “[While watching it,] no one looks at their watch.”
Her approach is unusual for a novice documentary producer, Roberts noted. “The biggest problem with students is that they can’t stand to cut.”
It was Roberts who sparked Niedland’s interest in the Documentary Institute, when he spoke with her at the annual Homecoming alumni breakfast in Weimer Hall. “I really clicked with him,” Niedland recalled.
Joining the master’s program, she said, just “made sense.” She sought “A to Z instruction and to be able to one day teach.”
In 2002, as she prepared to move from South Florida to Gainesville, where she had spent the mid-1980s as an undergraduate, her excitement gave way to apprehension. The technical aspects, in particular, intimidated her. “I couldn’t program a VCR,” she said. She also needed to take a creative approach to avoid writer’s block: writing while editing.
Then there was her age. She turned 40 during the two-year program. “I felt like everyone’s mother,” said Niedland, who founded and still publishes The Unofficial Doc Institute Alumni E-Letter.
She had no regrets about leaving acting, in which she had decent success in commercials, theater and television, to go back to school.
“When you get to a certain age, you start to examine your life and your future,” she said. “You ask yourself, ‘What am I doing to contribute?’ Documentaries are great. They inform while they entertain, they open eyes, they change perceptions.”
She had a feeling a documentary about Smith could do just that when Pasha proposed it. She saw only one problem: It was a historical piece, and she wanted to do an observational one.
“But I knew that historical was the teachers’ forte,” Niedland said. “It all fell into place under their supervision.”
Niedland plans to continue making documentaries – historical and/or observational – in the Miss Lil’s Camp genre.
“I’m drawn to stories about women,” she said, “brave women, courageous women.”
Two projects she’s considering involve such protagonists: A non-Jewish woman who ended up in a Nazi labor camp, and an American educator who works with women in Pakistan.
Niedland is building a reputation as a filmmaker who shines a light on women’s issues, said Holmes, who asked her to serve as honorary artistic director of her film festival, a fundraiser for the U.S. Committee for the United Nations Development Fund for Women.
“Suzanne will be giving us advice about films and directors to contact as well as advice on the organization of our film festival,” Holmes said.
If she keeps this up, Niedland just might find herself one day becoming the subject of a documentary, Elderd said. “She’s changing the way the world looks at things.”
