Most of the filmmakers I interview talk about responsibility. They understand how generous an act it is to entrust someone with your story.
This responsibility takes on a different flavour when the subject is someone they were already close with, such as a friend or a family member. And this scales up again when the subject matter is personal, difficult, or intimate.
This is where we find Hannah Engelson’s Jonah Stands Up (2016). When they met in the New Orleans creative scene in 2010, Hannah was drawn to Jonah Bascle’s way of looking at the world.
A fearless and incredibly funny artist, comedian and disability activist, he was a compelling central character, pushing creative, social and political boundaries against the backdrop of his muscular dystrophy.
Hannah first filmed him as part of her MFA thesis, then ran a successful Kickstarter to fund a six-month shoot. But during that time, Jonah’s health worsened, and he sadly passed away, aged just 28.
Hannah’s film is unflinching – one long scene at a crucial doctor’s appointment is borderline unbearable. With this sort of access, the weight of responsibility must have been enormous.
But there’s a flip side to that. Because she knows Jonah so well, she’s able to capture the different sides of his personality in an incredibly rounded way. The film doesn’t flit between comedy and sadness, rather it blends the two together into something distinct, and richer because of it.
Hannah’s beautiful film proves that light and shade both feel more intense in the presence of the other.
I spoke with Hannah over Zoom. You can see more of her work on her website.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I met Jonah at a film meet-up group in New Orleans. This was a little aspirational at the time, but I told him I was a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. And he's like, “Oh, I'm making a documentary about myself.”
I thought he was joking. He was filming a lot of sketch comedy videos, but he was also filming his doctor's appointments and things like that. It was a joke, but it wasn't a joke. That was sort of his sense of humour.
I saw him do stand-up and he told a joke where the punch line was that his doctor was trying to kill him. He was essentially telling a room full of people that he was going to die, and they all laughed.
There was just something so interesting about that. He knew how serious it was, but I don't know if anyone else did.
In general, I like to be able to straddle a line between super funny, silly, and goofy, and serious, existential, and dark. I like those extremes, and so the films I make live in that space. Jonah lived in that space.
He was also very endearing – people loved him. You see the funeral scene at the end, everybody came out for it.
What were the biggest challenges?
I mean, it's sort of stating the obvious, but I found myself making a film about my friend who was dying.
When you first start out as a filmmaker, you think of the hardest part as being the technical aspects. And then as you start making films, you realise it's actually the emotional part, and the moral part of making a film.
What does it mean to witness things unfolding in front of you with a camera? And what responsibility do you have in telling someone else's story? I don't take that lightly.
What would I do differently in making the film today?
I probably wouldn't have done anything differently. The nit-picky cinematographer part of my brain can point to some little things, but they feel really minor. The reality is, I feel really proud of it.
There was stuff he had filmed, and the stop motion animation, so it had a kind of DIY aesthetic. Now I want my work to be a bit more polished, but for this project it weirdly works.
What are you most proud of?
Watching it at festivals in the audience, people laughed at his jokes, but they also get emotional at the end. I think that encapsulates his particular humour and personality.
I also think he would have gotten a kick out of the film. When I make documentaries, I want the style to reflect the person that it's about.
Stop motion animation mixed with live action is not my style. That's his style – he loved animation with live action. To me, if you're making a film about a person, and specifically an artist, you want to take in their style.
How did it change you?
That's a very hard question, because making the film is wrapped up in being there for my friend when he was dying.
I think what ultimately changed me as a person has more to do with knowing Jonah, and being a part of his life, and then being a part of the process of him dying. The film is, I guess, part of that, but it's hard to separate those two things.
In the process of him dying, because I was there also making a film, I had to actually be pretty present and watch. Maybe in the past, when people I knew were dying, there's the tendency to want to check out a little bit.
I would like to think that's pretty normal – it's hard to watch and it's hard to be there. But being there with a camera forced me to really pay attention.
You see that in the film, at the doctor's appointment where it’s implied that this thing that he’d been worried about happening, was happening. I thought I was going to stop filming at that point.
I remember the first day he was in the hospital after that appointment, I showed up without my camera – I left it in the car. And then I walked into the room and everyone's like, where's your camera? I'm like, okay, I'll go get it…
There was about six weeks from that appointment to him passing away. And I think the fact there was a movie being made, meant that something else was happening besides what was actually happening, which was obviously really upsetting and depressing.
I think the process of making this film did cement me as a filmmaker, in my mind. Because we all show up in the world in certain ways, and this is how I did at that time.
After he died, I was grieving and it was really hard. I thought, well, I'm still going to do this. I'm still going finish this film.
What do you do after someone dies? There's not really much you can do. And this was a thing that I did. Like, I'm a filmmaker. And this is what I do.
Just as Hannah and I were wrapping up our conversation, she asked if she could add one more thing. The final scenes of the film show an animated rocket soaring into space. It’s a neat metaphor, or so I assumed.
“He actually was sent to space,” Hannah explains. Jonah’s brother emailed someone working with NASA and they agreed to release some of Jonah’s ashes on an upcoming mission.
A fitting postscript for Jonah, and a delightful way to end our interview.