Don’t take my Kodachrome away

A little yellow box held the secret to a pivotal scene in Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, the new feature-length documentary by Emmy-winning filmmaker Ilana Trachtman, ’92.

Her movie, currently making the festival circuit, tells the story of one of the earliest organized interracial civil rights protests in U.S. history. It happened in 1960 when picketers targeted the segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park in suburban Maryland near Washington, D.C.

One day, a security guard said to a Black picketer, “Can I ask your race?

His reply: “I’m a member of the human race.”

Trachtman had an audio recording of the encounter. But footage of the verbal duel eluded her.

“I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell the story with just still images,” she says.

Back to the basics

The filmmaker contacted every person she could find who had been at the protest — even if they had been toddlers at the time. Three years after talking to one of those grown-up children, Trachtman got a call from California. The woman (who had been 5 years old in 1960) said that while going through boxes in her parents’ basement, she found a bright yellow Kodak film box labeled ‘Glen Echo Protest, 1960.’

Overjoyed, Trachtman bought a Super 8 movie projector on eBay for $35 and threaded the aging 8mm film through its sprockets. “The production was too broke at that point to risk expensive film restoration if the footage was useless,” she says.

Little did they know.

“When I saw the first frame and the protest, I literally fell on my knees. That toddler’s father had filmed the exact conversation. My piece of audio and her piece of film were synched to each other, and they had been living thousands of miles across the country from each other. Without her finding that and sending it to me, those two pieces would never have gotten married.”

Human experiences that demand telling

The Philadelphia-based Trachtman has a long history of bringing to life human experiences that demand telling. “I am like a heat-seeking missile in pursuit of relatable human stories,” she says. In 1961, the Glen Echo Amusement Park opened its doors to all comers. It is now an arts and cultural center run by the National Park Service.

Trachtman’s time at Michigan sparked her interest in children’s television, and the English major began her career at PBS’ “Reading Rainbow.” She graduated to producing and directing TV documentaries for PBS, A&E, ABC, and other networks. Emmy awards came her way — three for “City Arts,” a show about New York City’s arts and culture, and one for “The Pursuit: 50 Years In the Fight for LGBT Rights.”

Today, as an independent filmmaker, her movies often revolve around social justice issues. Black in Latin America deals with slavery’s legacy in Peru and Mexico. The magazine format Our Heroes, Ourselves, showcases several different kinds of activists, including shrimpers along the Gulf Coast. Her works have also explored a championship high school mariachi band, child homelessness, and the bar mitzvah preparations of a boy with Down syndrome.

The daughter of a Jewish labor organizer, Trachtman grew up near Glen Echo in Rockville, Maryland, a decade after the events there. “I feel obligated to make these movies to leave the world a better place than what I found,” says Trachtman, whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany. “My father was a gentle soul with a loud heart. He cared about justice. He always cared about creativity.”

‘The world needs it’

Obsessed might be an apt word to describe Trachtman at work. Making Merry-Go-Round was a 10-year odyssey. She conducted 150 interviews and used 900 archival images (about 10% of all she found) — and obtained rights for their use. She made the movie on a shoestring budget of $700,000 without full-time assistants.

She says it was her most challenging production to date. “There were so many stakeholders from such different backgrounds,” she says. “Deciding what goes in, what gets left out, who are going to be the main storytellers. I often felt like I was wrestling an octopus.”

Her friend Lisa Hepner, the executive producer at Vox Pop Films, describes Trachtman as the human equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife. “She does it all,” she says.

Trachtman’s favorite directors include Hollywood’s Mike Nichols, who directed The Graduate; Selma director Ava DuVernay; and documentary filmmakers the Maysles Brothers and Israeli brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann.

Trachtman revels in nearly every aspect of movie making — researching, interviewing, editing — but one part of the business leaves her cold: fundraising.

“I loathe it,” she says. “I was raised to believe nice girls don’t ask for money. But it has created deep, meaningful relationships. I don’t have investors. I have funders. Because there’s no money in documentary filmmaking, they care about the theme of the film I’m working on. They agree the world needs it, and they have faith I can deliver it.”

Curiosity, questions, camera

Tenacity and hard work sparked Trachtman’s lucky discovery of that Kodak box. Chance has played a significant role in her work, too. At a retreat during Rosh Hashanah, she suddenly found herself distracted.

“I happened to be sitting in front of a person who had an incredible praying spirit and who did it loudly and off-key and passionately,” she says. When she turned around, she found herself in front of a 12-year-old boy named Lior, who had Down syndrome.

“I could see he had an incredible following,” says Trachtman. “I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, somebody should make a film about him,’ and then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I do. I could make a film about him.'”

The resulting cinema verité film, 2008’s Praying with Lior, took three years to complete and provoked interest in inclusiveness in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities. “Stunning and inspirational” is how The Jewish Chronicle described it. “Ilana Trachtman’s tender look at a modern religious family whose faith is strengthened by the faith of their son and brother should be compulsory viewing,” wrote its film critic.

Ask me anything

Trachtman’s next movie is about 86-year-old Rina Schenfeld, a choreographer and principal dancer with Batsheva, Israel’s national dance company. A lifelong Tel Aviv resident, Schenfeld is a metaphor for the city, Trachtman says. “She’s been through five wars there. She’s a counter-narrative to how we think about aging.”

Interviewing participants in her movies, whether Hispanic teens in Texas or elderly Black activists, is a special treat for Trachtman.

“She has this quality in her eyes where she’s always paying attention,” says her friend Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a content strategist at Boston Scientific. “Nothing’s getting by her. She comes at things from fresh angles.”

She brings genuine sincerity to her interactions, Hepner adds.

“It’s so easy to go in there with what I call ‘the pith helmet’ and stay at a distance from your subject, and Ilana doesn’t,” Hepner says. “She gets to a place with them that is very honest and authentic, and not every filmmaker can do that as well as her.”

Trachtman believes that “when you have a camera and you’re a nosy person, people feel compelled to answer your questions. I’m fiercely, spectacularly attracted to human stories,” she says. “I get my fix, and it’s fulfilling.”
 
 
(Lead image comes from the film’s promotional poster.)