‘A Town Called Victoria’ Director Li Lu on Community-Centered Filmmaking Practices
by The Gotham Staff on November 21, 2023 in Alumni on Screen
The Gotham recently had the chance to talk to director Li Lu about the community-centered filmmaking practices employed on her new docuseries A Town Called Victoria. We’re pleased to share a few edited excerpts from a much longer conversation, facilitated by filmmaker and Islamic Scholarship Fund staffer Aizzah Fatima. A Town Called Victoria premiered November 13, 2023 on PBS Independent Lens.
Aizzah Fatima: I just want to tell you personally—as a Muslim American who also grew up in the South, in Mississippi, it was so heartwarming for me to watch this story. I thought you did such a great job of depicting the community as a whole, and I just want to congratulate you on a job well done.
Li Lu: Thank you so much. And it’s not only me, but a whole village of other filmmakers, as you see in the credits of this film, that really poured their heart and soul and artistry into telling this story. So thank you.
Aizzah: Absolutely. So tell me a little bit about the process of the seven-year journey [to make the series]. I want to know—was there a time when you felt like “I can’t do this anymore. It’s been too long and that’s it.” And if there was, what did you do to sustain yourself?
Li: I mean, the whole thing was such a journey. This happened, of course, January 27th and 28th of 2017. And, you know, I first learned of it because so many people from my hometown were posting about this, calling me, sharing the story. It just felt like it was happening in our hometown. It was like our story, our tragedy as well. We were on the ground pretty quickly afterwards just to get started, to break the story, to meet everybody. And it became this multi-year saga because we were just so invested in what happened to the community. [There were] so many people, including the news media. This was a huge story that went viral because of the timeline with the travel ban and all of that.
But after all those cameras went away, I think ours was the one that lingered. Because I personally just felt like I had to ask the question of, “What’s going to happen from here? How will they rebuild this mosque? What will happen [with] the trial as well? This hate crime trial?” So we kept filming, and we got really invested as people—as human beings—to what happens to them in their lives. We probably ended photography in 2020, maybe the last scene we shot was 2021.
And throughout that process what sustained us is small grants and acts of kindness. The first organization that gave us anything to really kick start this whole process was the Islamic Scholarship Fund. So we were just so thankful for that incredible support, also the advising that the organization has given us for all that time. But collecting small organizations and labs, like The Gotham, we were in the episodic lab there as well, to get to a point where public media entities stepped in for post. And we subsequently spent about two to three years cutting everything together before seeing the final product airing this week.
Aizzah: When you first started off, was this a feature? Or were you like, this is going to be a multipart series. How how did that [happen]?
Li: When we found the story initially it was going to be a 10 minute short film.
Aizzah: Wow.
Li: I know, it just kept growing, growing and growing. Because it was originally going to be just about the incident and amazing response of the town the next day. So many people showed up to support this community and they held a peace rally the next day, a prayer rally. But then again, as I said, these questions really were nagging my psyche. Like, how long is this solidarity going to last? Being from the region, it’s—I’m not naive, you know, to where I grew up, in South Texas. So then it was like, OK, well, let’s just see what happens with the rebuild. But then just incredible things started to fall together, connections from people, from story, and also we realized that our responsibility for this series was to have a complete portrait of this town, so we needed to include as many people as possible if we were to take that call seriously. So pretty early on I knew it wasn’t going to be a feature. I didn’t see the structure of it as a feature. Because we have so many different storylines and people and aspects. And [so] began our path of making an independent series, which is an oxymoron in a way.
Aizzah: Right. Unheard of. No one does that right? Just so we’re clear. Nobody ever wants to do that. Why would you do that?
Li: Yeah, from just from a distribution standpoint, what are your options? To a funding standpoint, how are you going to sustain being able to fund and fundraise for a whole series? But story really led the way, and story led us down the path of having a series project instead.
Aizzah: What was your relationship with this community before this incident, and how did this incident kind of transform that relationship?
Li: I really leaned on, and I also shared, the reasons that my family went to Texas. So much of our immigrant stories are so parallel with why we came to this region of the world, you know, from our home countries and home cultures in a way. And I think a lot of that made them feel like they knew who I was and what my intentions were, and also what I was curious about. There were so many times when I wasn’t filming, I was at their dinner table or I’d invited them out to something, or I would just go visit at the mosque. Every Friday they had this incredible potluck where anyone’s welcome and just having that time, that personal investment, was such a huge part of what you see on screen, which is them trusting that I was going to be a good steward of the stories and the information that they were telling me. And I love this town. I deeply care about it. I care about its future. I care about, you know, this as a record, a living record of what happened to this community and taking that responsibility very, very seriously. Because so often as doc makers, we are creating visual histories as to what happened in a particular incident.
Aizzah: What [were] those interactions like initially, and did that evolve over time?
Li: We were invited to the mosque the first day that we were in Victoria and immediately, you know, they’re in their temporary building and they’re asking what we needed. And so that warmth and that sense of just, family, was so immediate from the very beginning. And we definitely wanted to show them that we weren’t like the others. Other people had dropped in, and what I saw with all of those other entities was that they were really there for a transaction. And I knew that this was not going to be the way that I wanted our project to be, or me to be. It was so much more than a transaction. It was, you know, our collective future at stake, with what the story was and the fallout from the fire. So there’s so many things that we did just interpersonally that I felt like really grew the conversation and also grew the relationship. The best thing right now is, we’ve been traveling, doing panels around the country. And [film subject] Lanell said something the other day—we’re like a family up here. It’s going to be something that sort of bonded us, each other, for life, and I’m really grateful for that.
Aizzah: What has the participation been from the people who are depicted in the film? How have they been part of this larger rollout that’s happening right now?
Li: [Film subjects] Omar and Lanell, Abe and Heidi and sometimes Dr. Hashmi and some others, including the imam, they’ve been with us on panels. They’ve been with us even for a few workshops that we’ve done. All of this stuff now that we’re doing, we’re trying to create restorative space for folks right now. There’s a lot of things in the story that can only be told through this story because it was about the way they felt internally, the internal things that they had been dealing with since the hate crime happened. So it’s been really healing, actually.
Aizzah: What are some of the impact events that you guys are doing that involve these communities?
Li: The screening that we had in Los Angeles here, we were always really cognizant about how we can lift up the community in terms of creativity and also healing practices, mental health practices. For many of our events, we’ve included mental health specialists from the Muslim community to really guide and help center audiences during the screening and after the screening, before, during and after, I would say, and also to put some guardrails for folks if watching these images is too much. Because these are harsh images of hate crime and trauma. So being really, really, really cognizant of people’s mental health and their well-being and giving them physical tips or personnel onsite to help them if they need that assistance. That’s one thing.
Another thing is, we want to share this space with other artists. So in LA, for example, we had a spoken word artist perform a few poems that she had written and that was a beautiful thing to ground folks into a space before watching a film. And other workshops, we’re not screening at the film at all. We’re just meeting each other, talking about the themes within it. We have a great one coming up in Austin this Saturday where we’re going to have this incredible writer, Sara Bawany, read something from her latest book and also lead a journaling exercise for folks. And another artist, Rakhee Jain Desai, she’ll be leading a watercolor collage-making restorative art practice. And we have another woman, Rabia Meghani, who is going to be doing, you know, mental health and breathing and physical integration work. And I think just the act of being together right now, especially from folks in the Muslim community can do a lot in terms of how they feel. Having communal spirit, and making feel people feel a little bit less alone right now. We never thought we’d be releasing this series in these kinds of times, but if we can make these spaces feel restorative and feel communal and can build solidarity, I think we would be doing a good thing.
Aizzah: You know, it’s interesting. I saw this first a few weeks ago and then I was watching some of it again. And there’s a moment when the person in charge of the investigation says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now calling this a hate crime.” Man, it hit me so differently, watching it more recently, than it did the first time around. With what’s going on in the world, has it impacted what’s happening at these community gatherings for you guys in any significant way?
Li: I don’t think it’s proper for us or the series to comment on world politics, especially for governments and organizations that have nothing to do with the people within the film. But I think it’s completely our responsibility to meet the community where they’re at right now and to acknowledge that this is such a difficult time for folks who are experiencing an ocean of pain and suffering for the loss of innocent lives. So I think we’re so cognizant of how people are feeling, the level of burnout that people are also feeling, the level of helplessness and an inability to see how they might be able to change what’s going on. If anything, just giving people a place to gather, giving people a place to process together, and if they go home [feeling] a little bit more solidarity than they did before, then that is our goal. That is our dream at this moment.
Aizzah: What is some advice you have for documentary film makers who are telling stories about trauma?
Li: It became very apparent that the participants need access to mental health. We were able to set them up with an incredible set of counselors from this organization called The Impact Counselors out of Allen, TX. It’s a Muslim woman-owned practice. And we were offering counseling services completely for free for anyone in the congregation that wants to speak to a therapist.
Personally for me, I started therapy because of this project, and I see that as a great thing, because I never took that investment for myself. And it wasn’t until I started therapy almost, you know, three years ago, especially in the edit, where I realized that I myself was also living in a hate crime for all this time, watching the footage day-to-day and in taking the way people felt. Especially the people that I care about. It was a huge step in my journey to how to take care of myself as best I could, how to also have a lot of grace and patience for myself because I didn’t — I didn’t know it was going to take three years to edit this thing.
I think that aspect of trauma and how deeply embedded it is and how intertwined it is for everything, it’s a part of our identity. Being an immigrant, there’s so many things that are traumatic that exist within our very bones and so much of those things are tied to what you see in this film. So that space to analyze and to have a moment to breathe was very, very much needed. For any film makers out there—I look back and I do wish I could have taken care of myself better. So don’t forget about your mental health with the process of serving others. Because there’s that saying, if you don’t take care of yourself then you can’t take care of anybody else.
Aizzah: I will say—coming from a South Asian Muslim background, and being a child of immigrants, and I also moved here when I was born in Saudi Arabia, we moved to Mississippi when I was younger, living through all these different kinds of communities—there are definitely pockets within the American Muslim community, they don’t believe in supporting mental health. Historically, they have not. So it’s like such a struggle sometimes. Have you all encountered any of that?
Li: It’s a great question. I think that’s also why we really sought out professionals within the community to showcase.
Aizzah: Very smart. Yeah.
Li: There are cultural boundaries and like, there’s just some edges to all of this because mental health and even breathing exercises and meditation—you don’t want to present it in a way that feels foreign and against the culture, right? So it’s really important that we found people who knew how to exist in that space. How to guide folks in that space, to say “You can enjoy and employ these practices to take care of yourself. It’s not going to be a detriment to your faith or your practice.” And for our some of our screenings we did guided meditations and breathing exercises and grounding techniques. And for many of those folks, it was the first time trying those things, and I remember my first time of trying those things. I think that was just really important, and then having a therapist that understands the immigrant struggle, understands the clash of cultures within all of us and how to sort all those things out.
And I just have to say how important it was, also, for the younger people at this mosque. This was the formative moment of their young adulthoods or childhoods, and they really needed someone to help process all of that because it can come out in mental and physical form, the suffering, if it’s just something that isn’t fully processed and dealt with. But reaching within the community to see what beautiful wisdom has already been unearthed, helped alleviate a gap in understanding.
Aizzah: What do you hope that people who are watching the series, what do you hope that they take away from watching this story?
Li: I really hope, especially right now, that people can think about their own community, their own hometown, when they see the story of Victoria. It’s very easy to put up the story of Victoria and think, you know, we’re critiquing, perhaps, what people do there. But I really hope people get a sense to say, “What about my community? How well do I know my neighbors?” Have I visited my local mosque or synagogue just to say that “I live here, here’s a little bit about me, I care about you, and you can call upon me if you need.” That’s the biggest thing I learned for myself, too. Because I realized—my block, my neighbors, my City Council person, these are the things that actually affect my day-to-day, you know? And to take care of myself is to take care of all of us as well. So if anything, I think we’ve made this series to feel rhetorical in a way, for people to really think, “How well do I know my neighbors? How well do I know where I’m from? And what can I do to make my daily life and the people within it feel uplifted?”
Aizzah Fatima worked in tech before turning in her Google perks to work in entertainment. She is an award-winning filmmaker, actor, comedian, and an educator. She teaches workshops on leadership, women’s empowerment, and storytelling at universities in the US, Europe, and Asia. She is the Programs and Artist Development Manager at ISF where she manages writers labs, fellowships, and networking opportunities for both documentary and narrative filmmakers. Her first romantic comedy feature film, Americanish, which she co-wrote, produced, and starred in won 25 festival awards before landing worldwide distribution with Sony International. Her directorial debut TV pilot Muslim Girls DTF: Discuss Their Faith with comedians Zainab Johnson, Negin Farsad, and Atheer Yacoub premiered on FUSE+. As an actor she is recurring on Law & Order as Dr. Annemarie Mercer and has appeared on New Amsterdam (NBC), Blue Bloods (CBS), High Maintenance (HBO), The Code (CBS), and The Good Wife (CBS). She tours her stand up and one woman comedy show Dirty Paki Lingerie internationally, and has performed in the UK, Italy, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, the New York Comedy Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe to rave reviews. She has an MFA from Emerson College in Writing for Film & TV.
Li Lu was born in Suzhou, China, and raised in Sugar Land, TX. Her award-winning projects have been supported by Sundance, Firelight Media, Ford Foundation, Austin Film Society, Gotham, and others. Her narrative feature, television, and documentary work can be streamed on Hulu, Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix. A lover of all storytelling, Li strives to create bold and fearless projects spanning genre and form.