Filmmaker Hillary Bachelder likes messy stories; messy, gray area sort of stories

Hillary Bachelder made her directorial debut with Represent, a documentary created in response to the 2016 election about three women running for political office.

The documentary follows Maya Jones, a young Black woman running for mayor of Detroit at just 22 years old, Julie Cho, a Korean immigrant vying for a state representative seat in suburban Chicago, and Bryn Bird, a mother of three campaigning for Township Trustee in rural Ohio. 

With another intense Presidential election right around the corner, we sat down to chat with Hillary about why she decided to create Represent, where she is today, and of course, Kartemquin’s ethos — creating documentaries for democracy. 

Kartemquin: Can you share a bit about where you’re from and your career as a filmmaker?

Hillary: I grew up in a small town in Maine, and then went to school at Northwestern. At the time at Northwestern, they didn’t really have much of an undergrad documentary program, they just had this one class you could take and that’s how I found out that I wanted to work on documentaries. There wasn’t really anything else to do after that class in college, so I applied to the Kartemquin internship three times before they let me in the door. 

After my internship, I still didn’t have any experience in post production or editing at that point, but the guy who was running the post department was this lovely gentleman, Matt Lauterbach, who asked me, ‘Do you want to be an assistant editor? We need some help with this film on Muhammad Ali and I said, ‘I will learn how to do all the things.’ I would come in at 7 p.m. and work until 2 a.m. and I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Aaron Wickenden would send me a very nice email that was like, ‘Hey, Hillary, really appreciate all the work you did last night. There were a couple things you did wrong.’ I made every mistake at least once until I never made the mistakes again and then kind of just got sucked into the Kartemquin world and ended up doing post-production stuff on staff for a few years.

Kartemquin: You’re now based in Taos, New Mexico. What’s the film community like there?

Hillary: Taos has 6,000 people. It’s so fucking small. I made the pitch to my partner during the pandemic: “let’s do something that’s completely different from Chicago. Let’s move to the tiny town, and if it’s too small, then we move to Santa Fe. If that’s too small, we move to Albuquerque, you know, but let’s try the kind of scary, crazy thing first and see if we like it.” It’s funny. I definitely flattered myself into thinking, like, ‘oh yeah, I’ll be a big fish in a small pond.’

But, I moved out here, and I’m a non-existent fish in this pond, which is totally fine. About six months after we moved out here, there was an incident where the US Forest Service was starting what they call prescribed fire. The fire got out of control and turned into this massive wildfire spanning 340,000 acres, the largest in the state’s history.

It burned through all of these historic rural mountain communities and a devastated kind of way of life out here. I’m filming people on sort of both sides of this issue, doing that kind of delicate balance. It’s really like threading the needle; how do we hold both of these things as a society and say both of these are valid and actually find a way to coexist and work together and move forward.

Otherwise, we’re all very screwed for our climate future. It’s gonna be a really big, old, messy story that people in New Mexico are going to have really strong opinions about, and it’s already been challenging to navigate. I just hope that people walk away feeling slightly more open minded.

Kartemquin: The word coexist has been on my mind lately. Aside from political conflicts, I think we all have conflicting parts within our own identities that we spend our lives trying to iron out until we reach peace or reconciliation. Seeing that play out in stories is healing, even when we don’t reach peace politically. Is that why you made Represent? 

Hillary: It was 2017, right after the 2016 election, and I was having a lot of big feelings, as I think many progressive folks, especially progressive women, were having, too. I got to the voting booth on election day in November 2016, and it’s not like it had escaped me that Hillary Clinton’s name was also Hillary for the two years that she’d been running before that.

When I stepped into a voting booth and looked at a ballot for the presidency and it said Hillary on it, I just started sobbing. I was so surprised that I had such a strong reaction to just that tiny, insignificant shred of representation. Obviously, her being a woman was the larger piece of that representation, but connecting to her name in that way, and in that moment, was way more significant than I anticipated. 

Afterwards, as everyone was processing a Trump presidency, I was really holding onto the need to make some media around representation, and ultimately, women in politics. That’s when things kicked things off.

Kartemquin: Do you feel like you would make that film today, knowing how polarizing the environment is? 

Hillary: The film follows three women including Myya Jones, who is running first for mayor of Detroit at age 22. We had Julie Cho, who’s running for state representative in the suburbs of Chicago, and Bryn Bird, who’s running for Township Trustee in rural Ohio.

We had these three women in three very different districts, very different types of offices, very different backgrounds. It took me well into the film to articulate what really connected the three of them. Midway into editing, I unearthed this idea and thought, ‘Oh, I think what really connects these three women across the two parties and three states, is that they’re all really running on their own terms, and they’re refusing to compromise important parts of themselves.’ 

That felt really important and central to the story that we ended up ending up telling: How can we rewrite this idea of what we think a politician is? Myya refuses to dull the edges of any of any parts of her identity.

Myya embraces her identity as a young Black woman and even creates a campaign music video to engage young voters. Bryn challenges the notion that women cannot share power on her local board, bringing her children to campaign events and embodying her role as a mother and politician. She wasn’t going to hide her kids. She wasn’t going to hide that from her constituents.

Julie faces pressure from the Republican Party to align with its platform but insists on maintaining her own beliefs, rooted in her family’s experiences in North Korea. She’s such a fascinating, conservative woman. She is a Korean immigrant who is being told by the Republican Party, ‘you need to align with us on all these issues or we’re not going to endorse you.’ She refused. She said, ‘I believe what I believe, some of those things are being really fiscally conservative.’ 

Kartemquin: Like everyone’s individual lens informs their politics.

Hillary: Absolutely. All three of them received the same messaging from people in power, ‘to be a successful politician, you need to look and act and perform X.’

All three declared, ‘No, I’m bringing my whole self to this thing or not showing up at all.’ That is why this idea, win or lose, becomes really potent and powerful messaging to other people watching that and thinking, ‘How do I consider the politicians in my sphere? And also, could I ever do this thing myself?’

Kartemquin: What did this production and Kartemquin teach you about filmmaking? 

Hillary: There’s a lot that I learned at Kartemquin; it was just like the next step of school for me. One of the things that stuck with me, both through Represent and now my latest film, is something Gordon says a lot, “We make, we make films about people we like.” That’s the Kartemquin ethos and it’s a big driver of their stories.

They’re not trying to make cheap hit pieces. When I’m looking for candidates on both sides of the aisle, I’m bound to disagree politically at times with my protagonists, but I need to just fundamentally like them, as a person, right? And partially that’s because I want to feel good about who I’m representing and putting on screen.

Partially, it’s because you spend hours and hours and hours of your life with your protagonists. For most of us independent filmmakers, those are unpaid hours. Why would I get out of bed every morning and drive four and a half hours to Detroit or six hours to Ohio to spend days with people I don’t fundamentally like and care about?

Find ways to watch Represent here and follow Hillary’s work Backbone Films.