“I am interested in how we perform our identity, how we heal and connect with one another and the construction of self,” says producer and now director Emma D. Miller about the kinds of documentary projects she’s drawn to. With Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller having just premiered in Venice and her own directorial debut in the latter stages of production, Miller says she embraces films “where there’s some sort of journey happening, a process of inquiry and discovery. Ultimately, I want to find a way to understand who we are and how we relate to one another a little better.”

Miller credits her success so far to her “multi-hyphenated-ness,” connecting her work as a producer and director to the skills learned across multiple early jobs and internships. She graduated from Duke University, where she studied anthropology; interned at NPR and POV; worked in audio documentary production; wrote arts journalism; and finally landed as a programmer at Full Frame, the documentary festival she calls “her film school. To be watching hundreds of films, talking about the craft, personally advocating for films and then to learn the players, producers and sales agents was a foundational experience.”

After Full Frame, Miller worked at Concordia as a development executive on such acclaimed documentaries as Time, Procession and Boys State. She left the company after a year and a half and began producing, starting with Iliana Sosa’s SXSW-debuting documentary What We Leave Behind (2022). Although she previously had producing roles on other docs, including associate producer on Jennifer Brea’s Unrest and Thomas Lennon’s Oscar-nominated short, Knife Skills, producing Sosa’s film, alongside the director, was “a shift in identity I needed to make.” Without a weekly paycheck, there was risk—“It was like, ‘I am an independent producer. This is not someone else’s project, and there is not an organization or bunch of producers above me’”—but also the thrill of the “deep collaboration and ability to really shape a film with a director.”

Miller’s parallel career as a director began casually when two friends told her about hiring an acupuncturist for their dog who trained at the Ojai School of Canine Massage. She immediately imagined the charming animal visuals such a topic could provide but wondered about the human subjects. “I went in a bit skeptical over what I was going to find at a place where people train to become dog masseuses,” she says, “but found there was real meaning to the work.” While Miller was making The School of Canine Massage, which premiered this year at SXSW, her amateur ventriloquist father had begun posting intimate conversations with his various dummies. Every week, there’d be a different dummy, a different confession or revelation, and, Miller says, “It was making me very uncomfortable and also sad. I’m like, ‘Why aren’t we having these sorts of conversations you’re posting online with these dummies?’” She voiced this feeling to her DP, Ora DeKornfeld, who asked, “Why are you having such a strong reaction to your dad’s ventriloquism? Maybe there’s something there to look at.”

“I have such an aversion to making a ‘personal film’,” continues Miller, but “I knew there was something there and that [making a film] would dig up something about our relationship to interrogate.” About that relationship, Miller explains, “My parents had an acrimonious divorce when I was a teenager, after my mom found out that my dad had been having a protracted affair. There was a lot of emotional turmoil at home, and my dad just kind of bowed out and left me in the fallout. I had to do a lot of work as ‘the parentified child’—having to be the emotional support. I felt like we were never able to get past all this, even once I was an adult.”

Her debut documentary feature, Father Figures, stages a series of encounters with Miller’s father and his various dummies—at his house, in hotels, at a ventriloquist convention and, for one cathartic scene, a theater in Los Angeles. Miller and her dad both unpack the past and, often speaking through the dummies, find a new, more productive mode of communication in the present. “Both my dad and I have this performance background,” Miller explains. “We have an ease in front of the camera, and I think this is the right way for us to be connecting—we need this as a frame to figure things out in our relationship.”

At the moment, Miller is making the festival rounds with Mistress Dispeller, which, in verité scenes, follows a Chinese couple whose wife has hired the titular relationship counselor—a woman who restores marriages by breaking up husbands’ affairs. Later this fall, she will go back to Father Figures with a shoot in which the various dummies form a kind of Greek chorus, filling in backstory and commenting on the verité material. And while the film’s not done yet, Miller says, already “there has been this real shift in our relationship over the course of working on this project together. I’m 34, and it’s kind of amazing that at this stage of life, you can be like, ‘Let’s make things different.’”—Scott Macaulay