YouSaid · the spoken record

Skye Fitzgerald

lines on the record: 152
first: 2022-04-20
most recent: 2022-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I live with my mortality, knowing that it's fleeting, that my life is fleeting, and that I'm going to go into the ground just like everyone else, or maybe ashes, you know. So I live with that knowledge every day, but I don't allow it to stop me or hold me up. Rather, I really, it drives me. It drives me to try to get as much done as I can before I go.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would take away the perfect part, right? But I think I've remembered that quote for so many years because I believe in the underlying notion that the blows of the chisel which are the experiences that we go through shape us? Necessarily so and hopefully shape us into a better human being. And in my case a human being that I hope can make the world a little better, you know, through those blows.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh boy. Yeah For me, I can speak personally on that only. And that's that I believe that the meaning of my life is to try to make the world a little bit better before I go. When I was in theater and grad school, directed a play called Shadowlands by CS Lewis And there's a quote from that goes like this We are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men, the blows of his chisel which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that experience of failure, what I framed as just human failure on my part is foundational probably for my work. Like I don't want that to happen again, Legs. I don't want to be that person who watches. I want to do what I can when I can.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“didn't do anything and I watched while this woman died. The hood of the And that experience. Is sort of seared into my consciousness. The fact that I watched and didn't act, I feel is one of the great failures of my life that I wasn't able to act in a moment of need, no matter how small. And from that, I made a decision out of that experience that if I ever found myself in a situation where I had the ability to act and I could act to help another human being in such need that I would act. I wouldn't let fear freeze me. Instead, I would allow that fear to catalyze me into action and do something and intervene in whatever way I could, even if I didn't have the skill set.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was another person from one of the cars lying in the middle of the road, still alive. And then on the hood of the Volvo, Was this woman who had come through the windshield just a mass blood everywhere moaning back and forth? And a bystander ran into the middle of the road and started administering first aid to the person lying in the road And, um, I stood there watching the scene, and every fiber of my being. wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the Volvo and do something anything right just to be there and it was obvious to me that she was she was gonna die But I felt like at least if I ran there I could offer some comfort for her last moment. And right then I Siren started to blare, and I knew that Be paramedics there within minutes that people would come to help. And I froze. I was scared”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably one of the darkest moments was an experience that I had again in my early twenties, and I was living in Southern California. The Pacific Coast Highway that goes north and south along the beach, and there's that little Concrete path that people jog and ride their bikes. And I was riding my bike on the PCH. And I was coming up to a corner on it, and I heard this tremendous crash. And it was really loud. And I came across the corner and it was a car accident, a car crash. It was a multiple vehicle crash. And what had happened is that a Volvo had hit another car. And then when it hit it, it went over the top of the car and hit a Volkswagen van. And it peeled away the top of the Volkswagen van when it hit it and then landed. So three vehicles And it just happened. Lying in the middle of the road was a body decapitated?”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seek first to understand then to be understood as one of them. You know, the notion of proactivity is one of them. It's really, and so I've held on to some of those principles through my life as well, for sure.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, the seven habits of highly effective people? I read that in my early 20s And I found so many of the principles in that book.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Points is, I think his name is Bill Strickland. He was the editor of, I think, Bicycle Magazine. And it's sort of his personal memoir of his experience growing up with a lot of abuse and how that transformed him as a human being. One instrumental book for me that I bumped into in my early 20s, boy, these are all nonfiction. Except for the Princess Bride.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was given the prophet by Kilio Dubraun as a graduation present from my high school English teacher. I still have that book in a special place on my bookshelf because I think it speaks to the nature of human experience, right? And I return to it all the time because there's wisdom there, you know, but there's many, many books.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my training in the theater has served me so well in the documentary world, right? Because it's all about interaction and listening and talking and dialogue, right? And that's what I do in documentaries, right? Is I listen.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Observe, right? And how to step out of your door and if the electricity goes out, right? And you're five miles away from your house, you don't need a smartphone to get home because you've set visual markers for yourself on how to get back to where you live, right? I think we're in danger right now. Of living in a world where if the satellites stop functioning, right, then a whole lot of people have become completely Dysfunctional, right? Because we're so reliant upon the screens in our lives. So I think there's a lot of foundational skills that have nothing to do with technology that we need to learn and everything rests upon those. So I would say learn those foundations, learn how to write well, read a lot, right? It's a different kind of knowledge and wisdom that comes out of that.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know how you're going to react to this given sort of your expertise, but I would say. Down the smartphone Step away from the monitor, right? Because real life. Not a screen. I believe that sort of the foundational skills which are conducive and important to success aren't necessarily those technical skills which we're going to learn in trade schools or university. I think the They're more foundational than that. They're learning how to interact and listen.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, but it's free food, right? And free lodging because there's a bunk on the boat. But I do that. Not intending to stay broke, right? But based on a foundational belief that if I bring to bear all of my sort of, you know, quiver of creative arrows to it, right? That I can create something of value, right? In the world, but hopefully also financially, that then I can sell to someone. And every time I've done that, Lex, I've gotten into the black So it's a risk, and I have to have a certain risk threshold financially to do that, but I believe so deeply in these stories that I'm willing to do that. I didn't have to do that with Hunger Ward. Luckily, I had funders for that film.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before Hunger Ward. I would just take a flyer on my films, right? Where I would just say this, this meets the so wet threshold. This is a story that has to be told. And I want to tell it. And then I could just go shoot it. And usually on credit, usually on a credit card, right? So based on a belief that a lifeboat was done that way. 50 feet from Suria was done that”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are lots of machines to celebrate them, but they're just not as always accessible as YouTube, right? I mean, as soon as you write me that check for a trillion dollars when I walk out of here, then I'm going to put all my films on YouTube because then I won't have to worry about selling them in order so I can make the next film. Because, you know, film is not just an art. It's also an industry And that tension between the two is a constant interplay that is a reality for me. So I always have to think about how can I access the largest audience, but also go out and shoot the next film So that longevity question is also an issue and the finances are part of that sort of equation that I constantly have to rewrite over and over again.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to chase it, yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess from an economic standpoint, the answer to that is pretty clear, right? It may not be what people want to watch. Maybe people want to watch reality. Maybe people want to watch. Animal rescue shows, right, here in the US, which is exactly why in part, I think it's so vital that we continue to do stories on things that aren't about flowers and puppy dogs, right?”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is streaming. So, you can either go through a paywall or you can watch it with ads With Big Macs interspersed Sometimes”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the whims of war test people in those ways, right? They ask of you things that you may not even know were going to be asked of you. And then it speaks to who you are fundamentally as a human being.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ferry them into the back of his car And then drive them to the hospital where they would receive operations. And then he would bring them back if they wanted after they'd healed and recovered back to Syria, if they wanted to return post-recovery. And, you know, he didn't get paid for that. He would spin his own money to do it because he saw other human beings in need. And it's like we were talking about earlier. That's heroic, right? That's selfless. That's aspirational for me, right? Here's someone who is spending their time on the planet. Doing something of value and good to other human beings.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With sort of the guards in the no man's land between the Syrian guards and sort of those who lived in the middle area. And then also with the Syrian guards at the camp. And he would drive out there daily and bring them food, talk them up and build relationships. And so every day he would bring these guards food and build relationships with them. And what that meant was eventually he had this avenue of access to and from the camps. And so he started using it. And he would drive this avenue of access through the three layers of guards each day. And then they would open the gates for him because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes. And he would receive the most desperate medical cases that were coming from all over northern Syria, right? To receive medical treatment. And he would, as you see in the film, he would...”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in that instance, you know, I thought of him as the Turkish Schindler, right? Because here was human being who, of his own volition, no one was paying him to do this, but he was spending much of his time. He was just a local businessman who really saw the need in the camps right across the border, 10K away. And he saw the medical need in particular and how hard it was to get people in desperate medical conditions across the border where there was a clinic just right across the border, but because of the security and the layers of security, they couldn't get out by themselves. So he took it upon himself as a Turkish person to build relationships with the Turkish guards, which was relatively easy. And then he built relationships.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was early in the Syrian uprising. We return to the Syrian-Turkish border with a Syrian American orthopedic surgeon who is volunteering operating on refugees as they float across the border from Syria to Turkey. And it was an attempt at the time before a lot of films had come out about the conflict to really show again The effects of the war on civilians. You've heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now, but people knew there was a major conflict in Syria but didn't really understand the form that that was taking and the impact it was having. And so we embedded into the, at the time it was the only clinic in Turkey that was sanctioned by the Turkish government to treat Syrian refugees. And so we filmed there with surgeons as they operated on war victims. And we also went into Syria into some of the camps as well.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to avoid the friendly police people all over the world. But in some instances, it's important to be proactive, right? And make sure that they know what you're doing before you do it. So it's all about the context and the situation. For example, working in northern Yemen, you couldn't film for five minutes if you didn't have paperwork because you'd be taken away. So you have to make sure you have all those permissions ahead of time.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably an occasion you should do it right, and you know, and strangely that I think that's why. Think that's if there's something unusual about the work I do in some part, it's because of these types of stories, right? They're hard to access, but you also have to have a threshold of willingness to do them when you can't, you know, there is no guarantee of physical safety, right? And maybe that's why you should do them.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the US, which I don't pay tribute to. I believe as a natural human emotion, it's an alarm bell that I need to pay attention to, right? And I think rather than pretending to be brave, I think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place to keep you alive. And I think it's a matter of Not letting the fear arrest you, right? And allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have a Deathwish. I try to mitigate risk however I can, however I can. But one of the ways I can't do it in a conflict zone is by having armed security with me. And the reason for that is because, especially in a place like Yemen, right? If you have arms security, you become a target in a way that if you're operating under sort of the auspices of international humanitarian law, I actually have more protection. So I don't bring security. If you're working in northern Yemen, for example, You're going to have someone from the de facto authorities with you anyway, the entire time you're there. So the authorities are with you in form anyway. Regarding fear. Yeah, of course. I mean, fear is a natural human emotion, right? And I think we have a weird. Minds”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead, we're going to get it fixed beforehand so that we can walk through a different line and have no one look at any of our equipment. That's a pretty good trade off in my mind.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to ask yourself are the rules just and why are they in place? So for example, coming into the airport in southern Yemen, right? If I just tried to walk through the airport with all my equipment, even with all the permissions beforehand like we had, without having a fixer at the airport beforehand to make sure we didn't go through the standard line, we would have been caught up for three hours at least negotiating over our equipment and eventually paying a bribe to get it through. That's just reality In a place like Yemen. And so, of course, knowing that, right, having talked to colleagues who had taken that path previously, I took a different path. Well, we hire a fixer beforehand to sort it out beforehand, right? Rather than spending three hours of our time and paying a series of bribes,”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, absolutely. And we don't want to become, I don't want to become clinical in my film, certainly.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that kind of pulled him out, and he went and got his camera and started filming again. But that gives you a sense of sort of this world that we had to live in in order to get the story done”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“24 hours, right? And at the end of that first day, I remember looking over on the deck and seeing Kenny help people up from the ladders to walk them back, right? And his camera was nowhere to be seen. And so I walked over to him and I just grabbed him by the shoulders and said, Kenny, where is your camera? And he didn't know. He had no idea where his camera was, right? And so I just said, Kenny. We're here to do what you're doing. We're also here to film it, right? To make sure that we document what is unfolding in front of us so that we have a record of it, right? So we can bring it to a larger audience. So you need to go find your camera so we can also document it.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to live that duality, right? Of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously. And the greatest example I can share of that was with my director of photography in that project, Kenny Allen. Kinney's a big guy. It's like he's got like arms like tree trunks. And he, because he was so physically able and strong, the head of mission really tasked him to be on the zodiacs to pull people out of the water because he could literally with one arm reach down and just oftentimes pull someone out, right? Whereas usually it would take two or three people. And so when we were at the height of triage and there were people in the water all over and rafts were sinking, Kenny was out pulling people out of the water. And this went on for like...”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were going back to this idea of access and how that's so fundamental to my approach. We were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation on this Sea Watch vessel, which was 30 meters long. And we were two of a crew of 15, right? So we had to multitask all the time because the only reason we were on that boat was by agreeing that if needed, we would do whatever necessary, right, to help, right? And so it was very active on multiple levels. We were making decisions each and every day that were Not only filmmaking and creative decisions, but also decisions about how”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found that inspiring. I found that inspiring that this group of volunteers was doing something that our leaders wouldn't, right? And it was something as basic and simple as saving human beings. And I thought there was an inspiring story there. And as it turned out, there was.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nation states hadn't really stepped up to address it and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers often drowning in these flimsy crafts that were pushed off from the shores of Libya because the EU wasn't doing its duty to patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint. And so the net result of that was that this whole sort of like humanitarian community sprung up and it was civil society based that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers to just ensure that fellow human beings weren't drowning simply put. And one of those was this small little NGO called SeaWatch which when they discovered what was happening just cobbled together a coalition of volunteers bought a research vessel retrofitted it and motored down off the coast of Libya to start pulling people out of the water. And again,”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lifebo Really seeks to sort of lift up and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the Mediterranean when it was at its height. 2016. And it came to be for many reasons, but one of those reasons is Colleagues in the NGO community really shared with me that when the borders between Greece and Turkey were shut down that the flow of Assyrian asylum seekers was initially going across from Turkey to Greece was going to shift westward across the Mediterranean. So I started to research that and discovered that was exactly the case. And then further stumbled upon the fact that”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't want to cinter myself in these stories. It's not about me, right? I am so unimportant. What is important is what's happening, what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon, and right? And I think it's selfish and narcissistic to push myself into these stories unnecessarily. Now that said, I think there is some small value in what you're saying just to remind viewers that there's obviously a filmmaker at play. So sometimes the way that I do that is just like through a question on camera. I'd allow the audio to live of a question or during a conversation I'm having with someone so they can just hear how it's posed, for example, right? And to me, that's enough.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you know, I don't do that. In a big way. But I actually, there are subtle moments where I allow that presence to live just for a second. I hate belly button dogs. That's what I call them. I don't know. where someone just Studies their own place in the world, right? I think.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At night, knowing that regardless of how the film would have been different if I hadn't made that choice, I made the right choice as a human being. So I think of it as being a human being first and a filmmaker second in moments like that.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice. We could film someone drowned in front of us, or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water. And so that's what we did. We put our cameras in the bottom of the zodiac and just started pulling people out of the water. And, you know, if I was wiseman, right, according to his paradigm, then we should have just filmed. I didn't anticipate that moment beforehand. I had no sort of foreknowledge that I was going to find myself faced with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian. But there was no question in my mind that I had to put my camera down and pull that fellow human being out of the water. And I don't regret it at all. So I've come to a different place. I've evolved to what I believe for the kind of film that I do is more appropriate, right? Like I can go to sleep.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the first three days of that rescue mission? You know, we came upon over 3,000 people, asylum seekers, floating in flimsy rafts in the water. And we were on the zodiacs and we were filming. And within the first couple hours, you know, we would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape. And people would be pushed off and people would jump off and people would fall into the water. Some of them couldn't swim”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside basically the bowels of an insane asylum or a mental health institution. And I bring up Wiseman because he is really the godfather, so to speak, of direct cinema or cinema verite. Early in my career, I really. Believed in what he expressed as the place of the Verite filmmaker, which is simply fly on the wall, which is only observational nature, right? And I believe that that's how I should be as a nonfiction filmmaker, that I was there only to bear witness to observe and not to intervene in any way, shape or form. And that was the sort of foundation for how I operate for many, many years. And then some things happened. So one of those things that happened was I filmed lifeboat. And during the course of filming lifeboat, which covered rescue operations in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya,”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, back to one person at a time that we keep talking. We keep coming back to that theme on some level. So this could tie in interestingly to one of my favorite films, actually. So the last two films that I would mention from my top four list would be the third Eastern Bloc one would be a film called Immortal in 2019, which was shot in Russia by a Russian woman that sort of, you know, examines the place of the state in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state. I mean, that's my own synopsis, but that's one of my takeaways from the brilliant 60-minute doc or so. Again, Russian filmmaking is really quite, quite good and powerful. The fourth one would be a Frederick Wiseman film, Tidicut Follies, which was filmed in the US decades ago.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the story becomes, it didn't start that way, but during the course of the story, the filmmaker comes to understand that this is actually modern-day slavery. And rather than just allow it to be actually enables and assists this woman to free herself from slavery and become a free woman.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both the feature links. Yeah, it is just brilliant and it, I think, has yet to find distribution here in the US. You know, but it's a perfect example of what they call verit ⁇ or direct. Fiction film”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to put it out there, I don't think there's any way to say that they're objectively the best fee. Documents all the time, but for me, and you may find this interesting given your background is that I think. My top three are all from Eastern Bloc actually, so Aquarella by Kosogovsky, Victor Kosogovsky is one of my favorite and was a couple years old now, which is sort of a meditation on the place water has on our planet and on our lives. I think a woman captured that I mentioned, which was shot in Hungary.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask questions, have them ask questions, come to a complete understanding before you even know whether they understand what you're asking, right? And then in that case, if someone's illiterate, then you have that conversation, you sit down and it takes a long time sometimes, but you have to do it. And then if they still want to participate and they give you their consent, they can't sign a piece of paper, right? So then you just do in their native language direct consent to camera in their language.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, you know, the large broadcast companies have this formalized process where they present a piece of paper The subject reads it and they sign it and then you have permission. And that's irrevocable. So it'll hold up in court. That's not how I operate, right? And so it's just. For example, that doesn't work if someone's illiterate and can't read that piece of paper. What if they don't know how to sign their name? So instead, you have to have a conversation.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source