Li: Welcome Jon Kaufman and El Sawyer to Future Memory. Jon: Thank you for having us. El: Thank you, cool name. Li: So what's your origin story? How did Jon and El become Ming Media? Jon: It's an interesting story and there's not really one particular magical spark, but it definitely was an organic process from my perspective, right? El his own journey and perspective with it, but I never really considered filmmaking as a career at all when I was younger, I never wanted to be like a Hollywood person, never wanted to direct or anything like that, but I was always interested in storytelling and especially advocacy and just trying to combat the narratives that I knew were false. I didn't know how to do that. And then it wasn't until I went to Temple and took a class, which was, I forget the name of, it's something around community media, which was a film class. I wasn't a film major at all, didn't study a film at Temple, but this class took me to the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philly where El was teaching video production to neighborhood youth. And that was my first real exposure to filmmaking was this model that was completely outside of the traditional structure of what we consider to be like mass media and filmmaking in Hollywood storytelling, and just kind of fell in love with it. The idea that it was probably 2007 and cameras were just starting to get a little more accessible. Editing software was just starting to get a little bit more accessible to people. And so it was really this moment where I felt like, "Oh wow, this is something I could do." And I saw the power of it with what El was doing with kids in the neighborhood and just to be able to tell their own stories. Then I graduated Temple, El hired me to take over his position, actually The Village as the video instructor there and started teaching there, and I taught there for many, many years. And then we started doing our different projects together. At the time, I was just hustling music videos and whatever I could do to pay the bills with video. And I think our work really kind of solidified around 2010 or so when we started working with the Department of Justice in the US Attorney's office here in Philly to make Pull of Gravity. And that's what really kind of solidified our work and sort of joined us as a partnership and took our work to the next level. And we started Ming shortly after that. But that's a short version of it, and El has a different story for sure of how he got to The Village. Li: Right? There's always two sides to first encounter. El: There's three sides actually. Yeah, that's a good rendition. I think from that perspective, from my perspective, as you would see in "Pull of Gravity", I was introduced to film while I was in prison, and I had never wanted to be a filmmaker either. I was stabbed while I was in prison, and I didn't think I was going to go home. And there was an internal video crew inside the institution, and my plan was to kind of work my way onto the video crew in an event I didn't go home to basically make videos to send home to my son at the time. Not to be dramatic about it, but just like- Li: Like the archive of, yeah. El: ... or a suicide note. I mean, it could be a lot of different things that way in event that I wasn't going to be there, it was something I would leave to him and I would sneak it out of the prison. And I did. I did about 10 videos. In that process, I was on the video crew just to get access to the cameras, and I had a chance meeting with Glenn Holsten, who was a Philadelphia filmmaker that came into the institution. And at no point, like I said, I was only on the video crew for that access to the cameras. And then he was accompanying Lily Yeh, who's the founder of the Village of Arts and Humanities into the institution, and he was documenting her work. She started a program at Graterford Prison, and in that he was allowed to come document her and her work there, but he wasn't allowed to bring camera crew or equipment. So they asked the camera crew internally, did anybody want to assist with him and nobody wanted to, and I volunteered to do that and it changed my life. So that was my sort of coming into film and even knowing that that was even an alternative that way. And in the process of doing that, I felt like there's this interesting quote, John Hendrick Clark, this author, and he said this quote, he says, "It's your duty to fashion your lived experience as a tool for liberation." And I feel like that's ... My elders used to say [inaudible 00:04:21] used to say that all the time to me. And I felt like in a lot of ways when I came home, that was my thought is how can I use my lived experience and who I am and my skillset to actually give other people the opportunity that I didn't have? So coming home, doing film with Glenn was really just like interning and trying to figure it out, navigate like that. And I had a job at the Village, and Lily Yeh gave me the opportunity to basically provide training and support to youth there at the organization and folks in the community teaching them what I knew about film. And I was kind of learning it as I go. And I did, so for a number of years and then in comes Jon, and this partnership I had with Temple and the professor at the time, Jon's professor, to bring that class. They had to learn along with the class that I was teaching at the Village. And it was love at first sight. I love him like a little brother or like a brother, honestly. And that's been our relationship ever since. Li: Well, that's a perfect segue to this next question about your relationship as working collaborators. What's your collaborative style like and would you say you've developed any kind of shorthand or secret language to get more effective with your process? El: Yes, and yes in every way, but I'll let Jon jump in on that. What you got, Jon? Jon: Yeah, there's a lot to that honestly, because I think neither one of us is really trained in any sort of traditional way. El, like he said, his first exposure was in Graterford, in prison using equipment that was probably way outdated and with very limited sort of technical training. But obviously Glenn was super helpful to him. And then for myself, I didn't study film in any traditional way. At the time I probably couldn't have named one director in the world besides Spielberg or whatever. I didn't know anything about that film world. I think just the fact that we don't come from the traditional filmmaking world has always been our thing where we're humans first. We just engage with people as humans and want to always take that approach where it's not about extracting a story or like, "Oh, how can we make the most exciting or dramatic stuff?" It's more about connecting with folks on a really human level and less about telling their stories, but really giving them a platform to tell their own stories and assisting people telling their own stories. We sort of see ourselves as a vehicle and as a tool for folks to leverage their own storytelling. So our process is super collaborative and sometimes to our detriment, it can be hard. It's not linear. None of this stuff is linear. And I think traditional production is like, oh, you write a script, you shoot it, you edit it. But we work with real people with real stories and a lot of our stuff, most of it is around trauma and very traumatic stuff and very heavy stuff and dealing with equity and violence and poverty and racism and it's really, really heavy stuff. So it's really important for us to connect with people on a really natural level first before doing any filming. We come from different backgrounds. I grew up in Germantown in the 90s, but I didn't grow up in poverty, but I experienced a lot of violence in my neighborhood and violence in the home and all kinds of stuff. And in college I tried to look at that experience through lens of urban studies and sociology, and I was like, "This is b******t, putting people into categories, just labeling people." I was like, "This is b******t." The academic approach to looking at what I was trying to understand about my experience growing up was not working for me. And then I think the sort of community filmmaking was just a way of like, "Oh wow, this is it. This is a way for real people to tell their own stories with some assistance from their own perspective," I think. So it was really just powerful to realize the power and the gap that community storytelling and community media could fill, not just in my own understanding of the world, but I feel just missing from the conversations that are happening in the newspapers and in mainstream media, so yeah. Li: Exactly. And are there additional folks that are working with you? Do you have an expanded team? Jon: We used to have a larger team. Covid kind of had us downsize a bit, but our main producer is Gabe Wiener. He's an amazing producer, filmmaker. He's been in Philly for about 15 years now, so he's our primary producer. But we work with a lot of folks all over Philadelphia and around the country and around the world too. But yeah, mostly we staff up as needed for different projects, but we could run down a huge list of names that are Philadelphia folks. But no, it's a collaborative effort, right? We work with so many different people and we're super grateful. It's not a solo sport. There's so many people. We've been talking about our film Music Vets, which we'll get to later, but when the credits roll in one of our films, there's like a hundred names or something of people. So yeah, that's the short answer. El: And to the point of just like you're saying secret language or how we operate together, a lot of it's nonverbal, like I say when I say Jon and I are like brothers, that's not an exaggeration at all. A lot of times it's so nonverbal. And then to bridge that to our team, a lot of our team either learned from us or learned with us, and I always look
