CR 029: Nadia Gill on Documentary Filmmaking and the Importance of Listening
The producer-director discusses her work on the award-winning short film, “Planetwalker.”
For more than a decade, husband-and-wife team Dominic and Nadia Gill have used their love of the outdoors and passion for the arts to produce meaningful and moving documentary films. In 2024, their short film Planetwalker premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, where it won an Artistic Vision award. It has since been shortlisted for the Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Short Film category.
The film tells the story of Black environmentalist Dr. John Francis—also known as “Planetwalker”—who, after witnessing an oil tank collision in 1971, decided to give up motorized transportation, instead choosing to walk everywhere. Soon after, he took a vow of silence and spent the next 17 years walking the United States and choosing to listen rather than speak.
I recently chatted with Nadia about the making of the film, her transition from law to filmmaking, and what she learned from telling Dr. Francis’ story.
SANDRA EBEJER: I read that you began your career as an attorney. How did you make the transition to filmmaking?
NADIA GILL: It happened because of my husband. He was an environmental consultant who worked for a big firm in London, and I was an entry level associate working for a law firm out of law school. Essentially, he paved the way, because he quit his job and did this thing that he always wanted to do, to live this dream of being an artist and a filmmaker. It intersected with me when I was taking a backpacking trip and time away from the law. I met him, and I was fascinated by his life story. For the first time in my life I realized that I could have a very different profession than the one that I thought I would be in. Even when I went to law school, I wasn’t one of those people who set out to determinatively be a lawyer. But law school has this way of herding you into the field. You go there thinking, “Oh, this is just going to be a great tool,” and then you leave wondering if you have one of the top jobs in the law firms and getting paid the most money. I luckily only got trapped in it for a second before meeting somebody who had already broken free. We got together, and I rode my bike across the country with Dominic, which was a life changing experience. During that time, we decided he would move to America. But I was not the kind of girl that would marry somebody for a visa just to try a relationship. So instead, I decided to open up Encompass Films and sponsor him to get a visa as an artist to come to this country. That’s how we founded Encompass Films. I worked for about another year and a half as a lawyer before I got the courage to quit and do this full time.
The two of you have produced and directed so many different types of projects. How do you go about deciding which stories to work on?
I think every filmmaker starts off with a zone and then gets bored of it and figures out how they can extend from that, while still being within a place of understanding that they can come from on a subject. I’m probably not making a film on astrophysics, because I just don’t have the preexisting tools with which to grapple properly with the subject matter. For Dominic and I, it’s a bit of a marriage in our choice because he comes from the environmental science background and rock climbing and extreme sports, and I come from pop culture, culture, history, politics. I first jumped onto his brand because we were building something that was very much his art front and center, and so we did a lot of work in the branded content space with action sports and adventure sports. And we did bring a new twist to it at the time—always more focused on human-rich stories of individuals, not hairy-chested Everest climbers, and trying to find ways that people all over the world were plugging into the outdoors.
After a bit of time, we settled more in the environmental space because it felt like a larger social issue, a more intellectual endeavor, and a richer panoply of stories. The environment touches everything, so you can see yourself telling a story and have a basic understanding of how the systems work that influence the environment, but there’s a million ways you could plug into it. So that’s what Encompass Films is about. And [Planetwalker] certainly fits within that niche. It was very exciting, because it’s an adventure story, but it’s an environmental story, but it’s a human condition story. We loved all of the ways that it intersected our previous work and helped us grow as filmmakers.
I want to congratulate you on the film being shortlisted for an Academy Award! How did the project come about?
Well, it was Covid, and I like to say we were blessed because we got unemployment insurance, which was usually not available to self-employed people. When you’re a filmmaker, you’re constantly pitching, but you don’t have time to develop projects which maybe you can’t see someone buying right away. It’s always by the hair of your chinny chin chin—you’re cobbling together a budget to figure out how you’re going to tell a story, so you don’t always prioritize the stories that need more time. Covid actually granted us that.
I found John’s story in one of those summations, like “10 African Americans You Should Know in the Outdoor Space,” that were appearing after George Floyd was murdered. People, I think, were really doubling down and looking inward at the various cracks of our society in which we could do better and think about more diverse stories that have been forgotten. And it was only a couple of lines. It wasn’t even an in-depth profile, but it stuck out to me, and I was immediately attracted to it. I took it to Dom, and he was a bit more skeptical, mostly because he’s British and British people are more skeptical, but also because it’s an investment when you tell a story, and you are putting yourself on the line. You don’t know who’s going to fund it, and you’re going to spend way more free labor. I had brought him many stories before which he has regretted doing [laughs], but in the end, he did not regret this one, and I think it turned out beautifully.
Documentaries can use so many different methods to tell a story, such as talking head interviews, reenactments, and illustrations, which you use beautifully in Planetwalker. How do you decide how a story should be visually told? How do you know when to use illustration, for example, over another method?
The animations in this film were a cohesive concept from the beginning, as opposed to the re-creations, [which] were more coverage oriented. We had it in our heads for a long time that there were parts of John’s story that could really come alive through animation specifically. Our editor, a wonderful woman named Niq Lewis, introduced us to an animator [Remy Ndow] who I don’t think we ever would have found because he lives in Belgium. We looked at his work and thought he had imagination, but we had no idea the level of originality and creativity that he could bring to this film. But what we did know going into it was that there was a spiritual and metaphysical aspect to John’s story that I think can be really limiting if you are just using documentary tools to try and express to the audience. It was clear that John’s story had a sense of wonder and imagination and metaphysicalness to it that we needed to deliver. So we thought of the animation and bringing that aspect to the world, and Remy is the person who really got the psychedelic aspect. And I love that it’s psychedelic because John’s story is also. He’s a character of the ’60s and ’70s and born out of the hippie movement.
The reenactments, as opposed to that, are areas in which we have interviews as the basis of the storytelling—and we do like to stare at people. I recently watched the Martha Stewart documentary, and they covered every interview with archive, and I was like, “I’d actually like to see these people who are talking.” And especially in John’s world, they’re so characterful themselves, and they have such a history with him that I wanted to take a moment to recognize them as unique individuals. But even within that space, sometimes you want to help the audience imagine something rather than just see a talking head. So the animation is the internal journey of John, and the re-creations are scene organized—like, this is giving you a mental picture, not an interior picture, of what John’s experience was at that moment.
On the Encompass Films website, it states that one of the best things about your work is interviewing and learning from people who have lived through difficult experiences. What did you personally learn from working on this film?
Because I’m a lawyer, I’m obsessed with policy. And really, policies are the way we fight about issues. What I learned from John’s story is that we have to create the culture that we want to get the policies that we want, and sometimes being obsessed with outcome misses the deeper point about creating a culture that will sustain the point of views that we want expressed in the world. I thought about how much culture is upstream from politics, and how much more time is worth dedicating to creating a culture that we want for our system, rather than just always fighting about the policies and the outcomes that we want to see. I actually think the more we fight about those, the worse the culture gets. So we’ve actually inverted the best mechanism for creating the world that we want. I think John reminds us of that.
There are so many ways you could tell someone’s story. What is the process like when you and Dominic are mapping out a film? Do you wait until you have footage, or do you go into production knowing the angle you want to take?
With John’s story, he’s a 78-year-old man now, so it’s mostly a story in retrospect, which lends itself to a lot of pre-production work where you can find out most of the stuff before you roll any tape. That isn’t always the case with films that we make. If you dig into some of the short films available on our website, some of them are a little bit of pre-production and a lot of finding out in the moment, what is the story really about? But with John, we got to construct the way we wanted to tell the story before we even got our editor to begin sorting through footage, just on the basis of the interviews and what we knew the stories were from the pre-interviews.
We thought very deeply about the structure in terms of laying the themes chronologically down. Like we go through John’s background growing up, which has a lot to do with his racial existence. And then we go through building his environmental influences, which came at the second stage of his life. And then we can bridge those two to create this intersectional idea of environmentalism that he was helping birth in the late ’80s in the academic institutions. And then from there we could go on to, when did John really come to his cultural based conclusions? Which, of course, circles back to the hippie movement.
We put in that song by the Youngbloods, “Get Together,” which everyone knows, but it’s actually very meaningful to John, because the very first time he gave up riding in cars was to go to the memorial service of a community member, which was 17 miles away at a nightclub where the Youngbloods were playing and “Get Together” was their title song. We couldn’t put the story in, but we’ll put the track in. But if you listen to the track, it reinforces John’s whole belief system. He went on this whole journey to tell people what he already knew—we need to be full of love and human kindness.
Is there anything professionally that you and Dominic haven’t done that you’d like to attempt?
This is the first time we used animation, so this was a big step forward for us. We’ve used some rotoscoping and VFX to a degree, but this was our first time committing to it. So that was a huge, exciting part of growth for us. I would like to do a scripted hybrid, and I thought this would be a good film for that, but I’m so glad we chose animation. There’s just been a few filmmakers, I think, who really do a great job [with scripted hybrid]. I think they often end up looking like high-end reenactments, rather than getting a real script and a real documentary and trying to dovetail those things together. I think that’s still an uncharted territory for a lot of filmmakers. But I would have to find the right story for that. Everything is story first. And I do think that, from my experience in this journey, I want to pick better stories, because John’s story is so good, so the material that we have to express our art from the foundation is significantly more exciting. I think those stories are out there, and you have to look for them, and you obviously have to get access.
Planetwalker is available to watch online and has been screened in numerous festivals. What do you hope people get from the film?
John’s story has been around for a long time, but why are we the first people to tell it, and why now? I think it’s very much meeting the moment that we’re in. I just received an email from someone in the Academy that had watched it, and they said, “What an amazing film in our very dark times,” and that’s essentially what we wanted to do. John listens, and I think listening is a problem we have in our society. We are righteous. We’re so filled with righteousness. It’s not even just the left is righteous; the right thinks they’re righteous, too. We’re not understanding what it is that the other person is picking up about the human condition that is so important to them, and we often belittle and squash their experiences and feelings because it doesn’t resonate with our experiences and feelings. John went on this incredible journey where he listened to people for 17 years before he decided he had something to really say, before he quote-unquote found his voice. And I mean, I can barely stay quiet for a day; I don’t expect everyone to go through that. But if there’s something I wish people could take away, it’s that in this moment, they would be better off listening to people and really trying to hear what they’re saying, to come to a place where we can heal our society and begin to move forward in a positive direction, instead of a destructive direction, which it feels like we very much are in right now.
To learn more about Encompass Films, visit their website.
To learn more about Planetwalker, find it on Instagram.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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