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“Our Work is More Akin to Writing”: Editor Jeremy Stulberg on Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

Several Black musicians are standing in the grass playing guitars and keyboards.Still from Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The sounds from Chicago that would forever alter dance music get an overdue documentary treatment in Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. The film is directed by Elegance Bratton (The Inspection) and screens in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres section.

Jeremy Stulberg (Growing Up Coy) served as editor for Move Ya Body. Below, he discusses the process of finding the personal story within the raw material and explains why documentary editing is like writing, which necessitates a new way of thinking about the work.

See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Stulberg: I have a long working relationship with Move Ya Body: The Birth of House’s executive producer Roger Ross Williams, who brought me to the project and introduced me to the visionary director Elegance Bratton and his whip smart producer Chester Algernal Gordon. And as a queer person who grew up in the ’90s, I’ve been a huge dance music fan for decades, so this was an incredible opportunity to dig into the origin story of one of my favorite genres. My colleague Kristan William Sprague did an incredible job taking the film to a rough cut, and I picked up where he left off.

I have 20 years of experience as a documentary editor, writer and storyteller, so I come to every project with the desire to tell a character-driven story. Vince Lawrence, a key participant in the film, is one of the earliest originators of house music, but he also has a personal story which reveals so much about the deep racism and prejudice that runs through our American culture. In our earliest discussions, I expressed my desire to elevate that story as much as possible.

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Stulberg: My goal as a documentary editor is to dig deep into the raw footage and listen to what it tells me about the story that it wants to tell. The film already had a shape when I began thanks to Kristan’s meticulous work. But when I dug into that raw material, specifically Vince’s interviews and vérité footage, I had a deeper understanding of what motivated him to get involved with the music scene in Chicago. There was a more personal story to be told. And so the goal became to imbue the film with that quality.

Ultimately, the film tells a story about the cultural appropriation of the house music genre. That element of the film was always there, but Vince had a very personal stake in it. My feeling was that this element of the story had room to evolve through our storytelling process. Vince directly experienced cultural appropriation, and ultimately there were profound personal consequences. I wanted to elevate that component of the story as much as possible, because I experienced it as tragic in its larger societal implications. It was deep!

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Stulberg: We went back to basics. We watched the raw material with fresh eyes. My job as a doc editor is, in part, to help filmmakers look at their footage with clarity and precision. It’s so easy to get lost in a sea of footage. Our job as editors is to be a proxy for the audience and remind the filmmakers what is special about the footage, why they’re making the film, and how we can elevate it to its highest potential by working together.

It was incredibly rewarding to collaborate with Elegance and Chester. Together we workshopped ideas for scenes before I began to cut. Then Elegance gave me the space to build out sequences, and then once he had watched them, we had some deep, philosophical discussions about how to make some of the bigger intellectual takeaways of the film manifest through Vince’s personal stories.

Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?

Stulberg: My mom is a New York City public school teacher, and every Saturday when I was a kid, she took a film class in Manhattan. One day when I was a teenager, I joined her, and I was hooked. I went on to study film at NYU, where I took a class called “Documentary Traditions” with a teacher named George Stoney, who was a Depression era documentary filmmaker. He showed us films by avant-garde artists like Stan Brackhage. I remember Stoney screening the film Window Water Baby Moving, in which Brakhage vividly documents the birth of his child. The idea that documentary montage could be a transcendent, life altering experience really moved me. When I graduated, I had the privilege of working with feminist documentary filmmakers Rose Rosenblatt and Marion Lipschutz, who taught me the craft of editing and the joy of creative collaboration that can take place in the sacred space of an editing room.

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Stulberg: Avid. I go back and forth between Avid and Premiere. I’m agnostic.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Stulberg: To be honest, I don’t think of my work scene by scene. Yes, as editors, we tend to break up our work that way for valid logistical reasons in the editing room, but I find that thinking of each individual scene tends to minimize the broader, deeper storytelling work that editors and filmmakers do. As documentary editors, our work is more akin to writing than anything else. And I like to think of our contribution more broadly as storytellers. For example, would you ask a writer which chapter was the hardest to write, or which sentence? Probably not, because you’re thinking more of the story as a whole. I would encourage everyone within our industry to start to redefine these preconceived ideas of what documentary editing is. It’s important for the general public to understand what we do.

Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?

Stulberg: While there’s a tragic story about the way societal racism manifests for individuals, there’s also so much sheer joy in this story. It’s also the story of Black and queer American excellence and innovation and creativity. I love that this element is at the core of the story because as a young queer person, I found so much salvation through house music on the dancefloor. It was a gift that Vince and his collaborators gave to a generation, and it has given me so much personal gratification to help tell that story.

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