While working on her documentary Poster Girl, Sara Nesson ’97 spent long stretches of time with no one but herself, her subject (Iraq War veteran Robynn Murray) and her camera. “I was off the map while working on the film,” Nesson says. “That’s sort of the nature of being a documentary filmmaker. You disappear. You go into your little documentary hole as you’re filming your subject. In my case, it was three years from beginning to end.”

Though she had emerged from that creative isolation several years ago, gained backing for her film from HBO and put it before the public, Nesson found herself on the map at an entirely new level when Poster Girl was nominated for an Academy Award in the short subject documentary category.

“It’s been crazy to say the least,” she says. “I really need a personal assistant to help me manage my life over the next couple of weeks.” Amid the flurry of e-mails, phone calls, screening requests, and planning for a trip to Los Angeles (dress is purchased; tentative acceptance speech, drafted; date, her mom, secured), Nesson found time to answer a few questions for her alma mater. She squeezed in a cell phone conversation with UVM Today last Wednesday while walking from her apartment to her studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Back door beginning

Before Brooklyn, Nesson lived in Burlington, where the path to Poster Girl began, quite literally, in her backyard. Her apartment was on Hayward Street, just a block up from the warren of funky old Pine Street warehouses that are home to many artists’ studios. In 2006, on one of the city’s Friday Art Walks, Nesson visited Green Door Studio, where Drew Cameron, an Iraq War veteran, created the Combat Paper Project, in which veterans use scraps of fabric from their military uniforms to make paper.

Their work would eventually become the subject of Iraq Paper Scisssors, a Nesson documentary that is currently in post-production. “Any time the veterans were doing something interesting at the studio, they’d call me. I would just grab my camera and literally go through my backyard down this tiny trail through trees and shrubs. I’d be at the studio in about three seconds and could just shoot whatever I needed to,” Nesson says.

While working on Iraq Paper Scissors, Nesson and Cameron collaborated with others to create a weeklong artist’s retreat on Martha’s Vineyard for thirty Iraq veterans. It was there that Nesson met Robynn Murray, quickly forging a bond with a young vet who had a compelling personal story and the courage to lay her life bare to the camera. When producer Mitchell Block saw the early footage of Murray, he convinced Nesson that the young woman was a story unto herself; with Block on-board as co-producer, the filmmaker shifted her attention to Poster Girl.

“Focusing on one female veteran whose voice is so powerful is sort of my MO,” says Nesson. “Because through her voice so many thousands of voices can be heard. Robynn was so selfless in that way. She understood from the beginning why we were making this film.”

Part of the solution

An Art/English double major at UVM, Nesson recalls an influential course, “Shakespeare on Stage and Screen,” which she took with Professor Tom Simone in spring 1996. She was drawn deeply into the way directors such as Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier told their stories and made art out of their films. During a subsequent study abroad trip to Italy, Nesson gathered the footage for her first attempt at a documentary — the story of an expatriate American sculptor blacklisted during the McCarthy period. After returning to UVM, she edited it in the Bailey/Howe Library media center.

That maiden effort was rough, of course, but Nesson had made a film and discovered a path. “I found that I loved the process of being out there with a camera and learning about the subject through direct experience. Making that film completely opened my eyes to a part of our country’s history that I knew nothing about,” she says. “It was all through the lens of this camera that I learned it. That’s what really turned me on.”

Though Nesson says she didn’t come to UVM with the thought of becoming a filmmaker, she had a strong genetic predisposition in that direction. Her father, Robert Nesson, is an independent producer and director whose work has, to a large extent, focused on creating social change. Nesson credits her dad with being her greatest inspiration and recalls a hike in the Green Mountains when he spurred a shift in her thinking and career in film. “My dad was complaining about how my generation was doing nothing to stop the war in Iraq, and he was really pissed off. He quoted Huey Newton: ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ He wasn’t pointing that directly at me, but I did take it personally,” Nesson recalls.

Nesson’s work at the time didn’t lack for distinction or ethical credibility, with credits that included editing on “Born into Brothels,” the 2004 Oscar-winner about the children of Calcutta prostitutes.  But her father had a point. Nesson realized she had a prime opportunity to tell the story of the veterans in the Combat Paper Project and address broader issues for Iraq vets struggling with post traumatic stress disorder.

The Academy Award nomination and the potential of taking the big prize opens doors for Nesson as a filmmaker to be sure. Immediately on the horizon, the possibility of developing the Hollywood version of Poster Girl, a project that has drawn the interest of producers Tony Bill and Helen Bartlett.

Nesson is also pleased with the visibility the Oscar attention will bring for the original documentary itself. After the Academy Awards, she’ll do a tour that will include a screening for high school and college students and activist groups in an 800-seat theater in Santa Barbara, Calif. HBO will air the film next fall. It’s just the sort of exposure she could only dream about when her father’s rant in hiking boots set her on the road to bringing veterans’ issues to the fore.

“I just think there is this huge disconnect between civilians and veterans,” Nesson says. “We need to come together and create a dialogue. Because there is no way we’re going to be able to help our veterans if we don’t understand them better.”

Producer Jon Kilik ’78 nominated for 'Biutiful'

Prolific film producer Jon Kilik’s work is also up for an Academy Award on Sunday night. The UVM alumnus is co-producer on Biutiful, nominated for best foreign language film. This is the second time that a Kilik collaboration with director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has been nominated for an Oscar; Babel was among the nominees for Picture of the Year in 2007.

Kilik will visit Burlington and UVM March 27 and 28 for screenings and discussions of his latest project, Julian Schnabel's Miral. A benefit screening of the film -- to be its first showing in Vermont -- will take place at Merrill's Roxy Cinema in Burlington on March 27 at 6 p.m. Kilik will introduce the work and host a Q&A following the screening. Proceeds will benefit film studies at UVM. On March 28, Kilik will visit classes on campus, showing and discussing Miral as well as other films he's produced.