Watch a recording of the session on editing personal documentaries with Sam Firth, director of The Wolf Suit and Susan Korda, editing consultant on the film.
Our guests discussed the creative and ethical challenges of making personal films and the importance of collaboration and adaptability when appproaching complex stories, especially around family, memory and trauma.
Sam Firth has been making short films since 2009, many of which have been screened in art galleries as well as film festivals and have won awards internationally. She made The Worm Inside as part of Bridging The Gap in 2011. Sam is best known for her film Stay the Same which involved filming every day on the same beach for a year and won best film at VideoEx experimental film festival, Zurich. Her first film, a one-minute-film called I.D. won DepicT at Encounters Film Festival and the Human Condition Competition at Chicago Film Festival.
Sam’s films all explore our relationship with storytelling and the way our experiences are shaped and constrained by the narratives we create, particularly when we record and edit images. She has looked at identity, memory and our experience of time from this perspective. And the play between content and form is an important aspect of her work. Most of her work has been documentary but she also wrote and directed a fiction film (Creeling, 2015) and originally trained as a screenwriter. The Wolf Suit is her first feature.
The Wolf Suit is a personal documentary that uses the process of filmmaking, reconstruction and editing as a metaphor for how we remember and how we construct stories of our lives exploring notions of subjective and objective truth. The film is prompted by a contradiction between the director’s happy childhood memories and her parents’ conflicting stories. It takes us on an exploration through the past as Sam Firth’s attempts to piece together a single narrative of what happened to her family that lead to the breakdown of her parents’ relationship.
“A bold, often raw piece of work” (Live for Films), The Wolf Suit premiered at BFI London Film Festival in October 2021.
Susan Korda began her career as an editor on Al Reinert’s Oscar™ nominated and Sundance-crowned documentary “For All Mankind.” She edited and was credited as Creative Collaborator on Sandi Du Bowski’s “Trembling Before G-d,” and was a producer on Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s documentary “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.” She is credited on several narrative films, notably the 2020 winner of the Gotham Award for Best International Film and the Audience Award and Best Screenplay prize at the Sundance Film Festival, “Identifying Features,” by Fernanda Valadez.
As a story consultant, Susan worked most notably with Alan Berliner on his films “The Sweetest Sound” and “First Cousin Once Removed.” And this year’s SXSW Audience Award winner “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” produced by the Kunstlers.
Korda’s own work includes the award-winning documentaries “Vienna is Different” & “One of Us” and the short narrative “Salomea’s Nose.”
Susan Korda taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and was a Visiting Artist at Cooper Union. In Europe she has lectured at the international film school, Cologne; Binger Film Lab, Amsterdam and University of Applied Science, Vienna. She guest lectures at the Edinburgh College of Arts and the Sam Spiegel School in Jerusalem. Korda has been teaching at Columbia University’s School of the Arts since 2010.
Currently Susan is developing further projects in Berlin and New York and works as a story and editorial consultant.
