Feeling like a failure isn’t the same as failing, filmmaker tells journalism grads

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

[Music fades out]

Geeta Anand: Our keynote speaker is one such person. She’s a model for all of us. In more ways than I can say without taking up too much time, she’s an award winner, documentary filmmaker. She’s the president and CEO of ITVS, which supports independent filmmakers and which coproduces independent films for PBS, including the acclaimed series Independent Lens.

She’s an alum. Indeed, an alum who just won one of campus’s most prestigious alumni awards. She was already a mother when she was a student here, and among the many things she’s remembered for is bringing her 2-year-old son, Diego, to class and to editing sessions. She’s also a former instructor in the documentary program here at the school, a beloved instructor. She’s a mentor and a role model and a bridge builder. She’s a friend and inspiration to me and to so many others. Let’s welcome, Carrie Lozano.

Carrie Lozano: I am going to try not to be emotional as I listen to this incredible graduating class and think about how much time I’ve spent in this courtyard over the last 20 years. It’s just an incredible thing and I’m just so happy for you that you’re part of our community and I feel so lucky to be here. So thank you. I want to say to the parents, to the family, Dean Anand, to the faculty, to the staff, just it’s such an honor to be here today. So I sat here on this very weekend, in this very courtyard 19 years ago, that was my J-School commencement. And I remember so well the days and the weeks and the hours leading up to this moment, and you all also saw their incredible work.

But just a couple of weeks before I was going to show my thesis film, my hard drive that had all of my media and my entire finished film … Thank you. They know. It crashed and it died, and it didn’t have a backup because we were the first class to experiment with laptop editing. And the drives back then were like this big, and they were $1,000. And anyways, it was really, really tragic and catastrophic and a major f-up. So things didn’t go exactly as planned. And I remember that I had to painstakingly call my colleagues and call the former Chris Keen and say, “Can you help me?” We couldn’t rebuild it. So I had to sit and redigitize tapes and literally rebuild my film to make it to this day.

So I sat here totally depleted. I didn’t have a hangover, but I hadn’t slept in a number of days. And I remember really wondering if all of the sacrifices, the time, the stress, if it was going to pay off. And I’m here to tell you that it did. I have never, ever once, not once regretted the incredible education, the relationships, this courtyard, this institution. It has been such an amazing and pivotal part of my life, but that does make me a little queasy to think about it.

Another thing that makes me queasy is Geeta said my oldest son, who’s now 22, he’s up in Seattle at his own university right now. I was a parent and I can remember leaving class and running across campus to pick him up at preschool or driving over there. And I would arrive just in the nick of time to pick him up and I’d be full of sweat and running and going to get him, and he’d be riding a tricycle outside all carelessly. And I just would collapse. And sometimes in the morning when I would drop him off before coming in here for the day, it was so hard, I would just sit in my car and cry.

And by the way, if you’re a parent, there’s many of those days where you drop off your kid. I’m sure many of you remember sitting in your car and just crying. But all of that, all of the hard drive debacle and all the festivities and all the adrenaline that happened, it was such a relief to slow down after graduation. So I hope that you can do that, even for a beat.

Diego would soon turn 3, and that Herculean juggle was just so exhausting. I missed most of those legendary karaoke parties and all the amazing Pulitzer Prize winning speakers. I couldn’t travel abroad to go do a story or take an amazing internship in New York City like all of my colleagues did. I couldn’t even dabble. I had to just focus on documentary. I couldn’t take radio and I couldn’t take photography with Ken Light. I really just had to stay on track.

And I often felt and wondered, “Am I missing out?” I submitted my J-School application when Diego was 6 months old, and it was right before the feature film that I had produced and worked five years on, a true labor of love, premiered at Sundance. I didn’t know that while I was at J-School, that the film would hit the zeitgeist of the moment. It would lead to an Academy Award nomination. And it was so weird and so exciting, but so much work on top of J-School, raising my baby, and also caring for my little sister at the time. So on every front I felt buried. I felt like I did not know what I was doing. And you guys might be like, “Why are you telling me this? I just went through J-School.” I just had my own tragedies and triumphs and struggles and juggles.

But what I want to say about that is what that teaches you, the curve balls, the running around, the deadlines, the fun, the joy, trying to squeeze it all in, that’s the job. It hasn’t stopped since.

It’s been anything but easy and nothing has been perfect. Nothing has been perfect, but it has been so unimaginably fun and meaningful along the way. In what other profession could you interview a general at the Pentagon or immerse yourself in the creative process of a jazz musician for years? Or meet a female astronaut who spent six months living on this space station when her son was 10 years old. I just met her about a month ago. I want to get her name Katie Coleman, and thinking about her, I was just so amazed by this woman. So trying to convey to you all, to the families, to the friends, that sense of wonder, that feeling of how can I possibly be doing this with this person in this place, this thing right now right here? It just feels really hard to describe what that’s like.

And I don’t really have words if I look at the last 20 years and the 27 years of my professional career to really describe the people I’ve met, the places I’ve been, the friends I’ve made, or the institutions that I have served. And I do consider myself a civil servant. I just feel so lucky and privileged to do this work.

Aspiring filmmakers and journalists and students and some of these very students here often ask, how did you do it? How did you go up and around and have a career and raise a family and what’s the key? That is a tough question, and I am very, very careful with my answer because everybody has their unique passions and paths and curiosities and talents and in this field, and in this day, there is not one way forward.

But from where I sit, J-School graduates are uniquely positioned to succeed by their own definition. Thank you, Jeremiah. By their own definition at this career, given your incredible range of skills and the instruction that you received here. And I could name off all the accomplishments of our fellow alumni who do transformative, rigorous culture-shifting work and who innovate new practices and ways of storytelling.

In truth, I do have a secret to my success and I will share it, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve taken a lot of risks. That means I’ve stumbled a lot. I have worked really, really hard and I’ve developed a lot of different skills and muscles and calluses and bruises that allow me to continue to the next thing.

So with each step of my career, I’ve been hired to do something I have never done before. This is absolutely true. I’ve been an editor of a trade magazine. This list is so long, I have to read it because I forget the weird things that I have done. I produced and directed and edited documentaries. I was a senior producer delivering a weekly international show, an executive producer working on major series. I’ve been a philanthropic funder, an organizational leader. I was a lecturer here. I’ve worked on my own projects. I’ve straddled the arts with investigative reporting.

And instead of telling myself that none of it made sense, which I sometimes did, secretly saying, why can’t you focus? Why can’t you focus? And obsessing over all the ways in which I might crash and burn? I took it all on energized by the invitation to try something new. I get really excited by the challenge of something new. And sometimes I have crashed and burned as royally as my sad little hard drive. But I’ve learned profound lessons from each crisis, starting with the thesis film that almost never was.

So in the process of salvaging the film, the film that disappeared is not exactly the film that came to be, and that’s because I could see things more clearly and I could let some things go. Some of you have seen the film, it’s called Reporter Zero. It didn’t get into Sundance, and I was super crushed because my other film had. But it did get into the Berlin Film Festival. And at the time, I didn’t know anything about the Berlinale. I didn’t know if it was a big deal or a little deal. I just knew it got in and I went and it was there that I sold it to a cable channel for $20,000, which is more actually than films get in this market with much bigger audiences. It won the Student Academy Award and other awards and it screened for years and actually still does all over the world.

So that near miss turned into a success. But it hasn’t always been the case.

I’ve had a lot of tough moments in my career, sometimes feeling like I was not going to recover. So I have put energy into my process for dealing with staggering mistakes and things that don’t work out. And this is also a true story. My son, who’s here, could tell you.

So first, I own my mistakes. We all make mistakes and it’s OK to own them and take responsibility. And it’s so liberating actually to just take responsibility for them. And then I do this. I allow myself, depending on the gravity of the situation, time to sulk or to cry, to be depressed, to be upset, to be angry, feel all the feelings, but I am finite about it. Some things require a few hours. Some things might require a few days, some things might require therapy. Whatever it is, I figure it out.

And then I just try to figure out, what did I learn? How can I make it worth it? That was damn so painful. How can I make this mean something to me? How can I do better next time? Or at least not repeat it minimally? So this is not like earth-shattering advice. I’m sure there’s lots of self-help books about this, but it is a process just like editing, just like writing, just like photography. It’s a process. And for me it works. It’s super helpful to know that the feeling of failure is not the same thing as failing. It’s part of being human. It’s part of growing. It’s necessary. It’s messy. It’s life.

So my mom, who’s sitting right in the front row, sitting in the sun so she could be in the front row, she had me when she was 19 years old. She didn’t have enough support, sometimes food or security. For a number of years, I didn’t realize this until later, but we didn’t have a permanent home. But she had love and wisdom. That’s how I didn’t understand that we didn’t have a permanent home.

When I grew up and I was on my own and things would go awry, let’s just say I’d call her and I’d be full of angst, so upset. And she would say, “It’s all what you make of it.” So I often repeat that phrase to myself: It’s all what you make of it. And to my kids, one of whom is here in the very back, there you go, raise your hand, 16, I hope someday that that phrase will click for them like it did for me. And I’m saying that to you, it’s all what you make of it. Graduates, it’s all what you make of it.

After one really horrific period where my husband spent nearly a year unable to walk, and the kids were relatively young. He had been in a horrific bike accident, two major surgeries, could not walk, could not work. He was just on the mend when news broke out that there would be no indictment for the officer involved killing of Michael Brown. It was Thanksgiving 2014.

And I spent the holiday constantly checking in with my team who was on the ground in Ferguson, putting themselves in harm’s way as they covered the uprising amidst showers of tear gas and rubber bullets. Sound familiar? One of the reporters was also a Berkeley J-School alum. We had done so many stories that year all over the world, but that one stood out. We turned it around within weeks and we knew it was an inflection point that something historic, something profound, had just unfolded.

A few months later, I was on a trip to meet a new boss and I flew to DC from Atlanta, where we just had an amazing screening with a documentary film about the history of the war on drugs. Now, mind you, the flight from Atlanta to DC is two hours. But in that two hours my life changed.

When I landed, I turned on my phone and there was a panic message from my husband telling me that his mother was in the ICU. I headed back to California as soon as I could. And when I got to the hospital, the last question my mother-in-law asked me was if her grandson had won his basketball game. She also declared, “I’m not going to make it out alive.” She died the next morning.

Her name was Susie. She was a force of nature on every level, as mother-in-laws can be. She was a Type 1 diabetic. And at the time, she was one of the longest living insulin-dependent individuals in the country, if not the world. She had a prosthetic leg. She survived breast cancer. She’d survived heart surgery. She seemed invincible, and she had a zest for adventure and pleasure, like no one I have ever known. Her death shattered my world.

When I had left town, I think just three days before, she had seemed perfectly fine. I had just gotten a big promotion, making more money than I could imagine. But two weeks later, I quit my job and instead I spent a glorious year in one of the highlights of my life, gardening, hanging out with my kids, juggling a bunch of contracts, some that I cared about, some that I didn’t, just to pay the bills. I was overcome with grief. And I did not know what I would do next. This was 10 years ago, but it turned out to be an unexpectedly creative time.

I resumed editing a feature film that I’d shelved for two years and one afternoon as I was cutting a scene, I love editing. I’m a failed editor. That is true. My son, Hugo, who is here, he was 8, and he comes in and he says, “Mom, how long have you been working on this film?” And I said, “Five years.” “Five years,” he exclaimed. “Is that why you don’t want me to be a journalist?” At 8, he knew it wasn’t rational.

And I’m here to inform you all that journalism is not rational. You know that. It’s like religion. You have to believe in it. You have to have faith in it to do it well. But it is essential, though maybe not for all the reasons that we’ve been taught. Yes, we create a record. We hold power to account. We unravel complex systems and circumstances and phenomenon, and we are inextricable from democracy. That is all true. I believe all of it.

But here’s what I feel is its crucial function and what I think about pretty much 24/7 these days, which is that the act of helping others see the world as it is, make solutions to our most intractable problems possible. It’s not always obvious given what we cover, but journalism is an act of hope. So we hold significant responsibility to the public, to the sources, to our colleagues. We have so much noise and disinformation as we have heard about. We have so much trust to rebuild. And no matter the obstacles and challenges we face, we just cannot give up. It is all what we make of it.

So today, I’m president and CEO of ITVS. We’re the major coproducer of independent film for public media across all the strands. And again, I’m trying something new. After I took the job, I learned that only 5% of women comprise, or 5% of CEOs around the world, are women. That is a mind-boggling statistic. Five percent of CEOs around the world are women. I am one of them, weird. And that could stop you in your tracks a tiny bit. And sometimes I do think about the responsibility. But the opportunity to amplify diverse stories and storytellers to make public space for creative expression, to contribute to a more robust picture of the American experience and the vast array of people and communities who don’t have a platform and whose narratives are under told, this is the capstone of my career. And I’m stretching — I’m stretching in this role.

But all those previous experiences, that whole long list that seems super random or sometimes felt like mega bumps or U-turns or something in the road, starting with the thesis film and that whole horrible debacle, all of it, made it possible for me to embrace this opportunity at this critical moment when the stakes are as high as they come.

So my path makes sense now. But raising a family while pursuing this work required a lot of compromise, conflict, tension, support, especially for my kids and my incredible partner and best friend, Don Loeb, who’s in the back, who also has spent a heck of a lot of time in this courtyard, we have all sacrificed, you guys have sacrificed so much. But the student coverage of the campus uprisings across the country, recognized recently by the Pulitzer Board, it’s a reminder that we need people who are up for the sacrifice. We need people who are up for the sacrifice, and we need you to support them in the sacrifice. And you’re going to be so mad at them sometimes, but it’s worth it. It is worth it. We need them.

This school and the University of California have meant the world to me. I was an affirmative action undergrad before email and laptops were ubiquitous. And my first films were on film, this funny little analog, tactile thing called film. And when I graduated from the J-School, there was no iPhone, no streaming, no AI. Blogs were the big innovation of the day. They changed everything, but there were similarities. The U.S. had just invaded Iraq and the Patriot Act and concerns about privacy and government surveillance loom large. It was a fraught times, and I’ve seen a lot of dark times since, and we all have. And yet I have rarely felt hopeless. I have always felt that as a journalist, there was something I could contribute.

During COVID, when this school turned into a newsroom overnight, we were designated essential workers. And even though I wear an executive hat now, I will always identify as a journalist — it is my badge of honor. And I have the benefit of seeing the fruits of so much intentional labor by so many of the people sitting here as evidenced by makeup of this incredible graduating class. The year I graduated, women made up 49%. Of graduates this year, 69% of you are women, and 6% are non-binary and we did not capture that information in my day.

So I know that there’s a long tough road ahead, and I know there’s so much work to do, and I know it’s scary and a truly, truly heartbreaking time in the world. But I am so optimistic because there are brilliant, creative, committed people like all of you who are pushing boundaries, asking hard questions, changing the way we do and think about our work. And I know that you are going to do it so much better, with so much heart and accomplish so much more than I ever could have dreamed for myself. I know that. So all you need to do is take a lot of risks. Thank you and congratulations class of 2024.

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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