If You Build It, by Patrick Creadon, follows activist-designers Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller as they set up Studio H–an innovative shop class engineered to teach students the fundamentals and virtues of humanitarian design–in Bertie County, the poorest county in North Carolina. Check out our chat with Pilloton about the film here.

Pilloton and Miller’s radical approach to education back in 2010 has now evolved into Project H, a non-profit currently partnered with REALM Charter School in Berkeley, California, where the Studio H program is taught to over 200 students (there were only ten in the first class in Bertie).

When the 108 eighth grade students at REALM were asked what they wanted to build for their senior project, they decided on building a school library, since they don’t have one. The library will house over 3,000 books and use stackable X-shaped shelves they designed themselves called “STAX”. They’ve chosen the name “X-Space” for the library (awesome), and have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the project. It’s earned over $55,000 of its $75,000 goal in just a few days.

This past Saturday night at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, California, Joan Lubamersky presented Pilloton with a Certificate of Recognition from State Assemblyman Marc Levine’s office following a screening of If You Build It. Pilloton, a native of the area, was clearly touched. “I’ve been crying for the past 15 minutes,” she said with a proud smile, wiping tears away.

“I love architecture,” Pilloton said. “In my mind, there’s this venn diagram of math, social studies, history, reading…whatever. Architecture, for me, is the thing in the middle that makes everything else relevant. You can learn any of those subjects through beautiful architecture.”

For more information about Project H and the film, visit projecthdesign.org and ifyoubuilditmovie.com

If You Build It, an uplifiting documentary directed by Patrick Creadon (I.O.U.S.A., Wordplay), follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, who in 2010 moved to Bertie County, the poorest county in North Carolina, to set up Studio H, a forward-thinking shop class designed to help students learn to not just build “stuff”, but to build things that help enrich their community and their lives.

Pilloton and Miller taught the kids how to weld, draw up blueprints, and as a class project they even designed modern-looking chicken coops. The biggest class project, however, was to build a structure to house the town farmer’s market, an endeavor that would push everyone–including Pilloton and Miller–to their limits. The entire school year was captured by Creadon and his crew, and though the experience was fraught with obstacles and high emotions at times (Pilloton and Miller were forced to give up their salaries by the school board, which wasn’t receptive at all to their innovative curriculum), it ultimately instilled in the students a sense of accomplishment, ingenuity, and ambition, and gave the town a beautiful structure (now called the Windsor Super Market) that would boost its floundering economy.

Studio H is now in its fourth year, with Pilloton implementing the program at REALM Charter School in Berkeley, California. She sat with us in San Francisco to talk about the first time she built something, why she chose to move to Bertie, engineering Studio H, how other educators have received her unorthodox teaching methods, and more.

If You Build It opens February 28 in Landmark Theaters in San Francisco and Berkeley, and will have a one-day screening at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, which Pilloton will be attending in-person for a Q&A.

Do you remember the first time you built something?

Emily: I grew up on Mt. Tamalpais, so my parents’ backyard was the forest. My youngest sister and I would go out into the forest and build random stuff. I remember having an intense relationship with the natural world. We had tree houses and forts and all that good stuff, but we also had this room which was like this rec room/game room/storage unit. It was this hodgepodge of a room. We had this one toy in there called “Quadro”, which I don’t know if they make anymore, but it was this building set with red tubes and black elbow joints. It was pretty big–each of the tube pieces were 14 inches long. You could build anything! It was all right angles, and so you’d build these cubes and then build others that grew off of it, and there were these squares you could snap on top. That was basically my whole childhood, building structures out of this Quadro set. Legos never did it for me.

Why not?

Emily: They were too tiny. Didn’t like Micro Machines either. Give me the big bricks! (laughs) But, playing with Quadro was one of my first creative memories. Another memory is, on Sundays, we’d go to church, and then I’d go to open houses with my dad and critique the architecture of these homes. Then, I’d come home and draw floor plans of my bedroom and rearrange all of my furniture. (laughs) I guess the mix of all of those things meant I was destined to go to architecture school.

And you went to Berkeley.

Emily: It was okay. It was a great primer as to what architecture was. I remember at the orientation for that program, the dean at the time, Mike Martin said, “Only 15 percent of you are going to become architects. This program is about a visual understanding of how to see the world.” In that way, it was exactly that. But I left Berkeley feeling that it was really theoretical, and I wanted to build stuff. So I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, which at the time had zero curriculum and 100,000 square feet of shop space. That was the best two years of my life.

What made you fall in love with Bertie County?

Emily: It was a love-hate relationship. (laughs)

What was it that made you choose to stay there? Because you and Matthew were flying back and forth for a while.

Emily: Yeah. We were back and forth between the Bay Area and Bertie County for about a year, and we did four big architectural projects with the superintendent there, Dr. Zullinger. He’s the one who invited us. It wasn’t so much that we fell in love with the place. We just had a better understanding of it and a better idea of what was possible. We built four playgrounds, three computer labs, a weight room for the football team, a county-wide graphic campaign. We felt that, if we’re going to talk about design in this place, this school district, it has to be in the classroom. It wasn’t so much falling in love. It was, “This is what we owe to these kids.”

Matt and I were coming to this place with really big ideas and a different skill set that didn’t exist there. We got to know some of the kids. They’d ask, “What’s architecture school like?” or, “Can you teach me how to weld?” We realized, yeah, we can teach you all of those things. And we should. If we’re really going to make an impact here, we have to be in the classroom with kids.

Like you say in the movie, Bertie County is a “rural ghetto” where the most brilliant kids always leave to move on to better things. Talk about this “brain drain”.

Emily: Sitting here in the Bay Area and trying to imagine what the rural South is like, your brain goes to all of the stereotypes. “It’s poor. It’s black. It’s a food desert.” All of those things are sort of true, statistically, but it’s also a really beautiful, small-scale place. There are its saddest stories, but on the flip-side there’s also something beautiful, quaint, and intimate about a town like that. The whole county is less than 20,000 people, only 25 people per square mile. It’s kind of stuck in this rut of historical baggage. I think the impacts of hundreds of years of slavery and institutionalized racism is very much still alive and kicking.

You experienced this?

Emily: Oh my god! I’d go to the post office and up having a conversation about slavery at 10 in the morning on a Tuesday. I’d have these “Where am I?” moments. You realize that the entire county needs a therapy session. There are a lot of things that have never really healed, and that comes out in different ways.

There definitely is a “brain drain”. There’s a guy, Ron Wesson, who you see in the film and is actually now the county commissioner. He talks a lot about how, the first thing kids that do well in school and get into any college want to do is get on the first train out of there and never, ever come back. Why would they? Part of our charge was to create those reasons for these kids to come back and to take pride in this place that they call their hometown.

What was the process like of creating the curriculum for Studio H?

Emily: We had ideas as to how things were going to turn out, but then we’d start doing it, realize it was all wrong, and throw it out the window. We’re in the fourth year of teaching the Studio H program, and we’ve definitely gotten better at writing a course map for where we’re going, but the way we get there is totally unpredictable. Because of the nature of the work, we were going to build a piece of civic, public architecture for the town. There were so many variables. Would the mayor give us this plot of land or this plot of land? Would the town council give us x, y, and z? Would a tornado come and destroy 7 houses and kill 14 people? (Which it did.) There were all these moving parts. In a normal classroom, you can control pretty much everything. In a class like ours, where we’re building something for the town, with changing conditions and all kinds of constraints, pretty much nothing could be scripted. The best thing we could do was to be adaptable and listen to what our kids were telling us. They were the ones who suggested we build a farmer’s market.

So that was their idea.

Emily: Yeah, totally. As soon as they said that, we were like, okay, now we know what the “thing” is.

Is that scary?

Emily: Not anymore. A part of my job now is doing professional development for other teachers, and that’s the biggest, scariest thing for them: letting go of control. Like, it’s August, you have to get to June, and most teachers will say, “By June, my students will know these 16 standards.” We’ve never had that approach. We’re like, “It’s August. We’re going to build something by June, and we have no idea what it’s going to look like, but it’s going to be really fun.” That’s a very different mindset for teachers to take, but for students, they think it’s great, because they have a voice. If they want to build a floating island in the middle of the bay, it’s like, “Great! Here are your tools!”

Did you build an island in the bay with your students?

Emily: No. (laughs) That was just the craziest thing I could think of. We have an 8th grade class right now, and they don’t have a school library.

The school in Berkeley?

Emily: Yeah. It’s a charter school in their third year called REALM. A lot of these kids are English language learners, and some of them left another school district because it just wasn’t working for them. Our 8th graders said, “We’re the first graduating class, and we don’t have a school library. Can we build it?” We said, “Yes! That’s the coolest thing ever!” So that’s their project. If we had scripted a curriculum, maybe they wouldn’t have had the audacity to say that.

You’re instilling this audacity in them.

Emily: Yeah. I want our students to feel like our classroom is a place where they can say the craziest possible thing, and we’ll take them seriously.

I love how malleable your program is. Have you spoken to other educators about your methods, and have they been receptive?

Emily: Yes and no. I think a lot of what we do runs counter to what almost every teaching certification program teaches. In other words, the way that most teachers are trained is totally opposite of what our classroom looks like, in good ways and bad ways. I’d say we’re horrible at classroom management. You walk into our class, and it’s really loud. But I swear to god they’re being productive! It just doesn’t feel like a normal classroom. There are a lot of educators that are now saying, “This isn’t working.” There’s something to creativity, to messiness, to letting kids be kids. Kids are already brilliant, and we’re the ones stifling them. So, how do we break down that foundation to allow them to be these creative people?

You see design thinking in more schools now, and I think that’s a really good start. But I also really want to see schools shooting for the moon. Like, “We want to build a floating island in the bay!” I think there’s this constant, “Well, we can’t do that because x, y, and z.” That’s one of the most broken things about school systems, this defeatist attitude. “Everything’s broken, so all we can do is tweak around the edges.” Someone needs to just blow up the core and start all over.

When the Bertie school board cut most of your funding and you chose to give up your salary, was that a difficult choice to make?

Emily: No. It was never a thought. I kind of love thinking back on this, because it just gets me really riled up. Dr. Zullinger was hired to fix that school district. He started doing these audacious things, but in doing so ruffled a lot of feathers. We were one of his pet projects. The school board ran him out of town. The other thing is that, the school board is one of the only political strongholds that the African American community holds tightly. Almost all of the other municipal positions are held by older white men. It becomes this weird “civic vs. school board” thing. But, the school board cut everything Dr. Zullinger ever touched. When they said that they were tearing up our contracts, they really expected us to leave, but we said, “Fine.” We were sort of playing chicken for a minute, but it was never a debate. We didn’t think of leaving once. We had our students. The school board thought we were in it for the money. Screw them.

The camera crew wasn’t there every day to film you guys, but were there bad days where you just didn’t want them around?

Emily: That was the hardest year of my entire life. First of all, I’m a half Asian woman from California living in the deep South. That sucked. There was this deep moment of reflection where I was like, “I am all of these things. I’m living in this place. Here’s what I can control, and how am I going to make the most out of these moments with these kids? Everyone else can bite me.” I was training for a marathon at the time, and I had stuff thrown at me. It was crazy stuff. But we also had neighbors that would bake us stuff every day. It was this weird polarity.

One day, one of my students called me a useless bitch, kind of jokingly. I didn’t know what to do. I just started crying, got in my car and went home. It was my first time teaching, as well. Everyone in Studio H was out of their comfort zone, and that’s what I think is beautiful about the film. We were all really uncomfortable a lot of the time. On days where I’d be really confused, I’d communicate it to my students. I think that kind of vulnerability created a really wonderful sense that we were in it together.

Do you still talk to them?

Emily: Oh yeah. I talked to one of them just the other day. They’re nightmares and the most amazing human beings at the same time. The thing I love most about them is that they were so underestimated by everyone, and then they blew them all away. They’re like local heroes now. My one student, Eric, emailed me recently and said, “I was in the grocery store and this woman came up to me and said she recognized me.” He told her that he worked on the farmer’s market, and she said “Bless you!”

If You Build It trailer

Facing Fear, a short film by Bay Area resident Jason Cohen, just got nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. It explores the nature of forgiveness through the story of two men, Matthew Boger and Tim Zaal. One night when a 14-year-old Matthew, who came out at a young age, was roaming the streets of West Hollywood, he was jumped in an alley by a group of punk neo-Nazis and beaten nearly to death. He remembered one of the persecutors clearly. 26 years later, he and Tim (who had now left that terrible lifestyle behind) met again, and were faced with the impossible challenge of forgiving another (Matthew) and forgiving oneself (Tim). They began doing presentations across the country about the incident and how it affected their lives, and face the fear of forgiveness to this day.

Cohen invited me to the Saul Zaentz Media Center in Berkeley, California, where the film was produced (it was shot in LA). In a building where a slew of great films were worked on (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Amadeus, just to name a couple), I chatted with him about what’s so scary about forgiveness, giving a former neo-Nazi skinhead a fair shake, the advantages of the short film format, Matthew and Tim’s relationship today, representing the Bay Area at the Oscars, and more. Following my interview with him, I spoke with editor Tom Christopher about his experience with the film, which I’ve included below.

For more info, visit facingfearmovie.com

Talk about the relationship between fear and forgiveness.
Jason: We named the film Facing Fear, and when you hear what the film is about, the first, obvious notion is of the victim, Matthew, facing this fear of meeting his perpetrator, which was obviously part of it. But, for us, the rest of it was facing the fear of the process of forgiveness and everything involved in it. It can be scary, and it was scary for both of these people, the victim and the perpetrator, equally. When you hear stories of forgiveness, you’ll tend to sympathize with the victim and assume that they’re bearing the burden of this process of forgiving. We wanted to clearly show that Tim was facing plenty of demons and that the process was as difficult for him as it was for Matthew. Maybe even more difficult at times.

I feel that typically when people see someone like Tim, who’s done what he’s done, they think “monster”. It’s fascinating that half of the movie belongs to him.
Jason: When we started filming, they’d been back in each others’ lives for about six or seven years, so they had been on this journey and were in a good place. They’ll both admit that it’s something they still struggle with today, but for Tim, I feel like he’s struggling with it more. He has other things going on in his life that are still a direct result of his past life, and he’s got a lot of guilt. As he says in the film, there’s an inner struggle that he’s having, forgiving himself for that person he used to be. Matthew has personal issues, too, but Tim’s a really complex person.

I think you said it; when people [learn about] Tim, they think “monster”. But when you meet him, he’s a teddy bear. He’ll admit it. He loves to talk, and he’s very outgoing. You would never–aside from the fact that he’s 6’3 and bald–have any clue that he could have been leading a life like that before. It just wouldn’t cross your mind.

Was your intent from the beginning to focus on both Matthew and Tim’s perspectives equally?
Jason: The intent was that we wanted to show that the process of forgiveness is a two-way street. We wanted to show both of their stories equally. If you sit down and watch the film, they have about the same amount of screen time, which was intentional. We wanted it to come from two perspectives and show that it wasn’t just one person’s story. We wanted to show the impact they had on each other.

The word “forgive” gets thrown around a lot these days, but I feel like most people find it hard to truly forgive.
Jason: Matthew has said, “forgive but never forget”. He doesn’t want to forget what happened. It’s part of him. It’s part of his fabric, and it got him to where he is today. Even though he’s forgiven Tim, it’s always going to stick with him. I think Tim would like to forget it a little bit more. [The incident] defines them a little bit, even though it’s not necessarily what they wanted to be.

Philomena has a similar theme of forgiveness to your film, though that message seemed to be lost on a few of the people I saw it with in the theater. Your film gets straight to the point and examines forgiveness very clearly and concisely. The theme won’t be lost on anyone. Is this an advantage of the short film format?
Jason: We knew we were making a short film the beginning, so our goal was to tell the story in as complete a way as possible in this short window, but still have an arc to it so that the viewer is entertained, for lack of a better term. We wanted to hit on the key elements of each of these subjects’ lives that advanced the story. And then there was examining this forgiveness process and coming to this resolution that is where they are today. Nowadays, with short films, people are seeking them out. Part of that, unfortunately, is that people aren’t going out to theaters to see films as much.

If you’re watching a film on your laptop, cell phone, or iPad, you’re much more likely to watch a film that’s 30 minutes or less than one that’s 90 minutes. It’s how it is, and we recognize that. We want everyone to see our film on the big screen; we worked so hard on it to make it look how it looks, to make it sound how it sounds…we cringe when we think of people watching it on their cell phone. But, our ultimate goal is to get the film out there so that everyone can see it. We have a nice open and get into it in the first five minutes of the film to really suck people in, and if we can keep them…then that’s great. (laughs)

Talk about that great opening voiceover. It’s really compelling. Tim says…
Jason: “I don’t know if I could forgive somebody the way that he’s been able to forgive me.” We start the film with that to say, “this is a film about forgiveness, just so you know”.

When Tim and Matthew started doing their presentations, they weren’t even close to making amends, right?
Jason: We didn’t want it to seem like they were forced into [working together]. They weren’t ready. They weren’t comfortable with each other yet, but they did it. In retrospect, it helped, and it advanced this process that they were in. Matthew would talk about that, just being around each other, stuck on a plane or a car to go to one of these presentations, they just had face time, which is what they needed. They needed to get to know who the other is now as opposed to 26 years earlier. The process of forgiveness isn’t a cut-and-dry thing; it took them 5-7 years to get to where they were.

Their first encounter kind of defines their relationship. What’s fascinating is that these days, Matthew and Tim often only connect when one or the other is going through a hardship. They help each other through it. It’s like their relationship can only operate at a heightened emotional level.
Jason: They’ll readily admit that they’re not buddies, hanging out on the weekends. They lead very different lives. But they both know that when life is tough and they’re dealing with issues, they can pick up the phone and call the other person. Neither of them had that support structure before, especially Matthew, who was homeless on the streets and didn’t have the support of his family. He’s been able to have Tim as a confidant, [and vice versa]. It’s funny, when they do their presentations, they specifically make a point not to talk beforehand. They want to do it fresh. The way they do their presentations is they just show a short video about their story and open it up to questions.

Was the goal of the film to show that people can forgive in even the most extreme scenarios?
Jason: Not necessarily. We tried to take as objective a look at this story as we could. We’re not saying we want people to forgive or that it’s the right way to go. The goal is to have people talk and discuss, take it back to your own life, and figure out how it plays into your own situations.

Perhaps someone could never forgive what Tim had done.
Jason: Right. We’re not telling anyone that they should. It all depends upon the person. I can’t tell somebody who’s been through something even more horrific than this to forgive. I don’t know what they’re going through. To tell people that “forgiving is the answer” was definitely not the goal. A lot of people have taken that away, and we’re happy! But some people have said, “No. I could never forgive that.” We say, “Great.” As long as they think about it.

Fruitvale Station didn’t get any Oscar love, but the Bay Area’s got you representing for us at the show!
Jason: We’re totally happy that we can represent the Bay Area down there. A lot of people don’t realize that it’s a Bay Area film because it’s all shot in LA. Everything else was done here in Berkeley. It’s not on local people’s radars, but we’re trying to remind them.

[After my chat with Jason, he took me to the room where they edited the film, and I caught a quick interview with editor Tom Christopher as we sat in front of the very equipment he used to make Facing Fear.]

Now that the film has been nominated for an Oscar, how has it changed your schedule?
Tom: First of all, it’s very cool for it to have happened. It’s not something you ever count on or expect. A lot of people have been coming up to us, sending us texts, emails…it’s just been a really heightened sense of communicating with people I maybe haven’t talked to for years.

So you’ve reconnected with people through the film?
Tom: Yeah. People have heard the news, or they want to see the film, or they’ve seen it. We’ve been in about six festivals all over the country and in Amsterdam as well. It’s been interesting. Both Jason and I have reconnected with old peers and friends.

How did you react to the film personally?
Tom: This film would affect me differently every time I saw it. I haven’t worked on it for months now, but I would screen it for people occasionally. I would find that a different part would affect me each time. “This is the part where I’m getting really involved in the story, today.” There are little nodes throughout the film that can grab you. It’s a human story where you can be very empathetic to the people you’re learning about, even though they’re very different from you.

Talk about crafting the film and making it equal parts Matthew and Tim.
Tom: We were really trying to create a single voice. That’s what’s really happening. It’s not just Tim’s story or Matt’s story–it’s coming from a single voice. In editing, I tried to make it so that the men were interrupting each other, cutting each other off while they’re talking. If you were looking at this in film school, you might think, “This guy made a bad edit here!” What I’m trying to do is have them interact in some way, sometimes visually. In an interview, you’re not dealing with visuals that often, but when I was able to do it, I did. There were certain cues that would cause a place to be a great edit. Sometimes it’s a visual cue, like something they’re doing with their hands or their face. If you can interact that way, you build this unified voice, I think.

Was there ever anyone who had a problem with the film giving a voice to Tim?
Tom: On a film like this, you’re working on a very big issue, I think. I’d bring it home with me, and I’d talk about it at dinner. I’d have a lot of interesting conversations with my wife and guests at dinner. They’d ask, “How can you make this work? There’s no way!” I thought, my work is cut out for me. I can’t even get my wife to agree that I’m going down the right path. I realized that there was going to be a lot of resistance to this story, right from the first week I started working on it. It’s not a spreadsheet kind of job; you don’t put things in columns like, “I want 30 seconds of him here, now I want 35 of him.” It’s all about feel. It’s like a piece of jazz, like you’re playing an instrument.

There’s a musicality to editing.
Tom: I tap my foot when I edit. I just do. It’s a natural thing. I’m grooving with the piece. I’ve actually been in movie theaters where people say, “Stop doing that!” I get lost in the moment. This is a job that involves timing. Everything’s timed. What you’re trying to do is find a groove for the piece. The way you do that is with the pace of the cutting and the nuance to how you draw someone into what’s going on. It’s not easy. You have to be experimental.