Back to selection
IFW: “THE LIGHT IN HER EYES” DIRECTOR JULIA MELTZER, #1
The last three months of the last three years have been grueling and gratifying. We started shooting The Light In Her Eyes, about the leader of a women’s Qur’an school in Damascus, Syria,in June 2008. Flash forward to June 2011, and we’re still searching through our forest of footage to find the structure and story that we’re sure is there. And then suddenly in August—it creeps up on us and takes us by surprise—we have a solid rough cut! It feels both miraculous and expected. Now it’s the Friday before IFP’s film week and Laura and I are sitting in LAX, at different gates, waiting on delayed and possibly cancelled flights. Aaaahhh, but this is just a small bump in the road—nothing compared to all of our equipment laid out at the boarder crossings between Lebanon and Syria and convincing the Syrian security guards in Arabic (no less) that we were there to shoot a wedding! LAX to JFK is a cake walk. On Monday and Tuesday we’ve got a slew of meetings lined up and a solid cut to show. We know that the independent film world is brutally competitive, so we’re being realistic about goals. We want to make contact with as many programmers and broadcasters as possible and show them the story we’ve told about a the very private world of conservative Muslim women in Damascus, Syria. But, first, we gotta get to NYC!
