Documentary filmmakers Matt Barr and Brett Ingram talk about their films, challenging viewers' perspectives and the sacrifices they make along the way.

It's a true labor of love. It has to be.

Matt Barr and Brett Ingram, both professors in the Department of Media Studies (formerly known as Broadcasting and Cinema), acknowledge that filmmaking is a tough art. Sometimes it takes years to put together a feature-length documentary. First, there's finding the subject that speaks to you. Then there's gaining the subject's trust, not to mention all the myriads of details that come together to tell a compelling story.

But both have done just that. And now they are busy getting their latest documentaries out to film festivals around the country and screening their films to audiences closer to home.

They took some time to sit down and discuss their current projects and exactly what it takes to get the job done.

Let's start by talking a little about your current films.

Matt: “With These Hands: The Story of an American Furniture Factory” is a feature-length documentary that looks at the last days of a venerable furniture plant in Martinsville, Virginia — Hooker Furniture Company.

The factory became the star of the show, so to speak. It became the center of the narrative. But all along the intent was to give voices to the workers who were going through this terrible experience of losing their jobs at what had been a really good company to work for, where in some cases generations had been employed. And where they were treated with respect.

“With These Hands” is part of the series of documentaries I'm engaged in doing that really began with “Carnival Train” — that looked at the lives of carnies — to “Wild Caught” — that looked at commercial fishermen and their families. I think the through-line here is the sense of community that is often found with groups of working people who are tied together by their jobs.

Part of what stamped me, the work that I do documentary-wise, is I had jobs — I worked in a restaurant at times when I was in LA and I really got to know and respect the crew back there and I never forgot those people. … I became a carny so I could photograph them and learn their stories and the best way I could do that was to join them. I've been doing this for a long time. I drove a big rig, worked on an organic farm, was a screenwriter in Hollywood, sold camera equipment, I was a still photographer. I feel that working people can have more of a sense of community at times than other people do. With the carnies, we were like a traveling village.

The carnies are tight-knit. It's — in a weird way — like being in the military. You're together. You put together this carnival show and you take pride in that. Those are the issues I want to explore in these films.

Brett: “Rocaterrania” is a feature-length documentary that explores the secret world of scientific illustrator and visionary artist Renaldo Kuhler, who created an imaginary country as a teenager to survive his unhappy, disaffected youth. “Rocaterrania” the movie, the title comes from the name of the country, which is of course Rocaterrania. I was astounded to figure out the history of the country was basically the story of Renaldo's life. And that's the emotional core of this film.

Brett, you once said you were interested in people who have a rich inner life.

Yeah. I would say that's the through-line of my work, how people express their emotions through art, and personal redemption through art.

People who have a rich inner life can sometimes appear quirky to others. I noticed in “Rocaterrania” a lot of compassion for that. You weren't making fun of him in any way. Is that hard to do — to get that across?

Brett: It’s not hard for me because I do genuinely have compassion for them. It's the difference between laughing with, not laughing at. You always have to be laughing with. So there's nothing in these films that the subject objects to. I'm not out to exploit them. In most cases they've already been exploited. I'm trying to lift them up. And say, hey, this person is simply being himself. They are beautiful the way they are.

So there is compassion there but it's just … part of it is to develop trust like that, it takes a lot of time. I started “Monster Road” about 10 years before it was finished. It took a long time to develop that trust.

Would you agree that it takes a long time to develop trust, Matt?

Matt: I do. With “Wild Caught,” I started in '99. I hung around that town off and on as I could for about nine months until the following summer when I began to film. So I really spent nine years on the film from beginning to end.

As relationships deepen over the years, then when you do the interviews, you get deeper answers. It wasn't just about fishing. It was about spirituality. About community. About family. About tradition. A lot of things beyond the actual fishing. Fishing almost became an allegory for life. Of course, fishermen are often poets. They have a poetic streak in them. When they're out there on the ocean, they have a million-dollar view every day. They also can die out there when a storm comes up. So they see the big picture.

Yeah, it's a long-term process and it goes on a long time beyond the film. … You become involved in people's lives. The journalistic gaze is hard to maintain.

Is that what’s special about doing documentaries, especially long-term documentaries?

Matt: I think it is. I really do. I think it's the exploration of ways of life and of the people. It's really kind of like … being a compassionate anthropologist, not that I'm an anthropologist by any means. But I do feel like you're entering your subjects' world and you have to learn all about it. That's exciting. It's exciting to go out on a fishing boat at three in the morning and experience their world. The long-term process is really, really a powerful experience that a lot of people deny themselves. They think they can parachute in like it's D-Day, get the footage and then you're done.

Why documentaries? Why do you take this amount of time to tell these kinds of stories?

Brett: Well, if you're going to make a feature-length documentary, it's got to be something that affects you really deeply.

In my case, I'm looking at more of a microcosm. Matt is looking at a macrocosm. There are a lot of parallels to our work. He's looking at classism and I'm looking at otherness. It's a type of classism that's looking at people who the world has labeled as a freak or an outsider. They're really just iconoclasts. And I identify with that. That's what drives my work: To focus on people that I identify with on some level.

You really don't know someone all that well, know their story, until you really get to know them. That's one of the reasons it takes so long to make a film like this. It takes years to gain trust to get to the parts that you can only get to when someone makes themself completely vulnerable.

A lot of people ask me about the scene with Renaldo in the bathtub. It's one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Renaldo begged me for three years to film him in the bathtub. I kept saying, “Renaldo, I don't want to do it. People will think it's weird of me to do it.” He said, “I must be filmed in the bathtub.” So I did it and it's one of my favorite scenes. It's like the ultimate metaphor for making yourself vulnerable.

Matt: It's a great scene. It also summarizes his whole deal. He doesn't give a flying whatever about what people think. He's his own person. Whatever the world thinks, he's got that.

What kinds of actions are you hoping people take as a result of watching your films?

Matt: I want people to challenge their own attitudes — vis-à-vis classism, the way they look at people who may not be as privileged as they may be.

Classist attitudes are very powerful and often people don't even know they're doing them. You are very aware of racism or sexism — and those are horrible things. Classism somehow can seem more acceptable. People just dismiss people based on what they do and how much money they make or whether they've been to college or not. I've heard wisdom from people who never went to college that's powerful. That's because they've been out there in the real world heavily.

I looked at “Carnival Train” like an ethnographic documentary. It was a look at a way of life, a subculture that will probably die out. So I want to preserve history, too.

With “Wild Caught,” I just wanted to do a portrait of an insular fishing town that had been rooted in generations. But “Wild Caught” became its own weird journey and advocacy piece for fishing communities.

Are you surprised when a film starts taking on a life of its own?

Matt: It is kind of amazing. It just happens.

Brett: I think for me, the previous question, the film being a call to action, is connected to a film taking on a life of its own. In my case, there isn't really a call to action but there is a call to examine our attitudes about otherness and about yourself. At some point in each film the onus is put on the audience. It's kind of like, if you can't have empathy for this person, maybe you're the one who’s lacking compassion and you need to examine that. People have responded to that.

I know you work on projects for such a long time. Do you have any other irons in the fire at the moment?

Matt: Well, for me, I have a 30-minute film that was shot last November in South Dakota, of all places. I went to a conference, hosted by Sen. George McGovern, and was contracted to make a film about the conference and also about the themes arising from it. Basically, the conference looked at the relationship between how to sustain the world's agriculture and how to feed the world's hungry. Almost half of the world's population is what's called food insecure. Meaning there is literally 40 to 50 percent of the world's population worried about food, having enough of it, proper nutrition. It's a shocking thing. Sen. McGovern has spent much of his life working to help feed the world's hungry.

He's the first person I voted for back in '72. I always thought he was a great person — I still do. … Here's the exciting thing — we're hoping to bring Sen. McGovern here for a screening of the film. So that film is called “Hungry for Green: Feeding the World Sustainably.”

I also am working on a nonprofit my wife and I have set up called the Unheard Voices Project. Our goal is to create a digital archive of the full interviews with working people, whether made in the course of producing these films, or just interviewing people because we want to know about them and their attitude, their philosophy about their work.

Brett: I'm going to spend the next year at least trying to distribute my film to film festivals, which can be a full-time job in and of itself. And then Renaldo and I are making plans to work on a book version of “Rocaterrania.”

I actually have some plans to make a short narrative film next summer. I just need to cleanse my palate a little bit by doing something else.

When you mentioned earlier the difficulties about getting a film made — can you elaborate on that? What are the obstacles?

Brett: Well, there’'s gaining the access, gaining the trust. Having the equipment, the resources, the amount of money, the amount of time. I think the thing that sets it apart from other media, say painting or writing — it costs a ton of money just to get started. And then the whole time you're making it, it's like sitting in a taxi and watching the meter run. Finding the money can be really difficult — especially in these times.

Matt: That's all true. Obviously money. You need to pay someone to compose music. You need to pay people who have expertise.

It ends up being a lot of work trying to get grants and support. Just being able to produce this thing with the long-term view of what you need to make this thing happen is challenging. Finding photographs from a newspaper, archival footage … It doesn't happen quickly. It's a long journey. And I think people don't realize that.

And it's extremely competitive. Brett has had this incredible success with film festivals. It's very challenging to get your film out there. There are a lot of people doing this. And you have to try to find the audience for it.

Brett: Making a documentary, the difficulty is if you can't hear it or see it, it can't go in there. Sometimes I look at my work as a collage artist. If I was a visual artist, I would be grabbing scraps of paper here and objects there and putting it all together in a way that tells a story or creates an image. And that's the way your work is. Bit by bit, finding this bit of newsreel footage from the '30s, finding this, finding that. There's an aspect to it almost like being a detective. Getting on the internet and researching stuff or these documents or footage or sounds.

Matt: The editing aspect can be overwhelming. “Carnival Train” was 140 hours of footage, same thing for “Wild Caught.” Hundreds of still images and trying to make sense of all of them. You're so invested in the project, objectivity can be difficult sometimes. Who's going to watch a 30-hour movie? Nobody. It's hard enough to get people to watch a feature-length movie because people's attention spans are — I can see this especially with my students — on the short side. They want to see bam-bam, gunfire. That's the challenge.

Brett: There's also a business side to it too. Once you finish a film, you're usually just completely out of money if not deeply in debt, even if you've gotten lots of grant money. Both of us are very grateful to UNCG for all the support we’ve received. We've also gone out and gotten grants and donations, but a lot of money comes out of our own pockets. It's a big risk you take, and chances are you won't break even. My goal when I finish a film is to try to break even on the expenses I spend in promoting it, balanced with the income I get from DVD sales, that kind of thing.

I imagine that's something you don't learn in school.

Matt: It's always a challenge, how you're going to raise the money for these projects. Twice now I've done home equity loans to pay for my films. That's the level of sacrifice we're looking at here. You want people to give money to your film and you're not willing to put money in? It's a serious commitment. It's a mission. It's not just a — I'm beginning to sound like the Marine Corps here — but it is kind of like that. You've got to carry the weight for that, nobody else.

Brett: I'd just like to reiterate, too, how kind UNCG has been to both of us. … I have a lot of friends who are independent filmmakers and a lot of them, I think, envy my position because I have a great job, a stable job that I enjoy. And it's not only that I have the flexibility to make films, but I'm encouraged to make them. I have to make them to keep my job (chuckle). That's a great thing.

Matt: It's true. It’s hard to do this if you work a job that takes up a regular 9 to 5 slot. I spent about a decade as a screenwriter in LA and I struggled. … Ultimately, I decided I didn't want to do it anymore. With a documentary you can actually do it. To make a feature film costs millions of dollars — forget it. But, in some ways, both are similar experiences. To be a screenwriter, you spend years trying to get a screenplay produced. And that's what it takes, at least that's what it took in my case. And then to do the same thing with a documentary … You've got to protect your baby, so to speak, that you're trying to bring into the world. And that's the struggle of doing these documentaries. It's similar in some ways to making Hollywood movies. But this way is much better.