try."

Today's guest documents the work of spiritual guides, also known as hospital chaplains, as they help patients navigate this country and the next.

He's Luke Lorentzen this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright rousing music) (bright rousing music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also at Salves Pell Center.

- Our guest this week is Luke Lorentzen, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose most recent film is "A Still Small Voice."

He's joining us today from Maine.

Luke, thank you so much for being with us.

- Yeah, thank you so much for having me here.

- So I mentioned to you before we got started that your film was incredibly powerful and it affected me in a profound way.

For those who haven't seen it yet, though, would you give us a quick overview?

- Yes.

The film "A Still Small Voice" is about a chaplain at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, one of the largest health systems in the city through the pandemic as she's learning to offer care to patients.

And we are with her for the course of a year long residency as she comes to terms with how to do this unbelievably difficult job.

- So "The New York Times" called this one of the best films of 2023.

It was shortlisted for an Oscar in the Documentary Film category.

It really is a tremendous film.

What was the inspiration?

What led you to tell this story?

- The seed was planted by my sister, who has done a lot of work as a chaplain.

She was working in a big hospital in Washington, DC as the pandemic started and we were just sort of talking about what that was like and specifically, what it was like to learn how to do this work.

And it was a moment where I as a filmmaker was looking for my next project, and there wasn't a whole lot going on in the world outside of the pandemic and I decided to lean into it and to look for a meaningful story that was at the heart of what it felt like to be going through this moment.

And so I reached out to maybe as many as a hundred hospitals all around the country.

First just trying to learn more about the work, but the next step, finding a place that would be open to having me there for a pretty long period of time and I eventually met Amy Strano, who's the director of the program at Mount Sinai, and they invited me to come for a week and that grew into really, a multi-year collaboration.

- So Luke, what motivates chaplains like your sister and Mati, who is the protagonist of "A Still Small Voice"?

- I think the motivations can be really diverse.

I think people come to the work with lots of different reasons for doing it and different life experiences that bring them there.

I can tell you what motivated me as somebody interested in the work was just the power of human connection.

The feelings and the experiences that become possible when leaning into life's challenges, walking into the room and connecting with a total stranger but with open enough of a heart that really, just a, yeah, I'm trying to think of the right word.

It's not special, it's not magical, but it's some combination of this energy that comes from people really trying to understand one another.

- So we should note that in addition to Mati, there are several other chaplains in training in the film.

What do they bring to their patients?

And in your film during the pandemic, these are very sick people.

Many people are dying or will soon die.

What do they bring to these people?

- Attention.

They are witnesses.

They are open, caring people who show up and say, "You matter and I'm here to acknowledge what you're going through."

And it's such a simple task on the surface and such a straightforward thing to do is to show up but you see in the film that doing that time and time again in these situations takes a really big toll.

But again, chaplains have lots of different ways of thinking about and approaching their work.

What resonated with me most about what I experienced was this sort of art of presence, art of making people feel seen and understood.

- And as we see in the movie, patients appreciate that on a very deep and profound level.

It's just extraordinary.

How do chaplains deal with the inherent stress of that job?

This is not reporting to an office and working in a cubicle, this is a very different type of work and very important type of work, but quite different than "the ordinary job."

How do they deal with what they come back with when they go to bed at night or when they get up in the morning or when their thoughts are straying or their thoughts are stuck at the hospital?

- I think, again, the sort of learning how to do the job is so much learning how to have more capacity for other people's feelings and the weight of holding all of these conversations.

David, who's the supervisor of the program, would often talk about the residency as sort of exercise.

And it's sort of the moment that you aren't feeling sore, you're not sort of pushing hard enough and you need to sort of find that spot where you're expanding your capacity as widely as possible to create space.

And I think what the film is showing is that it's incredibly difficult and it's not in many ways a sustainable job.

I think a lot of the chaplains that I met through the project were struggling in really big ways.

And it's a profession that is all about making people feel seen, but it's also very unseen itself and a lot of people don't even know that chaplains exist in the healthcare system in the way that they do or sort of understand the role that they play.

So a big goal for the film was to sort of pull back the curtain and show people the real wonder of this line of work.

- Yeah, I think one of the things as an adult that I've come to terms with is that more often than not, I don't know the weight that other people are carrying.

And as I was watching this film, it sort of opened my eyes to the weight, the psychic weight, the emotional weight, the spiritual weight that chaplains carry on a daily basis.

And so I'm fascinated to hear you talk about the sustainability of this work because in some very candid moments you capture the struggle that many of these chaplains are facing as they deal with the weight that they are carrying.

I'm curious how you get permission to, for example, sit in on one of the chaplain's therapy sessions.

How you get permission to see these people at their most vulnerable and do they get any say in what you're actually able to present on screen?

- The process of being invited into the room was a long, slow patient journey of, you know, more than anything, offering the film, really sort of switching my approach, not asking people if I could film them, but offering the film as something that was possible if documenting this moment in their life was something that could be meaningful to them.

And continuously being surprised by the number of people who took that offering and invited me to be there.

One of the things that we did, Mati and I, was everyone who was filmed had the right to revoke that material later, to see the film before others, and to request changes.

It was too intimate, the stakes were too high to hold on to this sort of traditional director has final cut approach and I slowly learned that doors would open for me if I invited people in with a real openness to whatever they wanted to share.

- So it's a more collaborative approach.

- Yeah, more collaborative and I think safer.

Makes people feel more in control of how they appear.

It was something that Mati and I worked on a lot together.

She was the chaplain and really the one who had a certain responsibility towards these patients and for her to feel comfortable and for the patients to feel comfortable, we needed to sort of come up with an approach that felt more open-ended and collaborative than past films I've made.

- So I think now is a good opportunity to show a clip from the film.

You're talking about Mati and our audience will see her in this clip.

(distant conversations) - I recall you saying, "I cannot believe what my body can endure and I just needed to share that with somebody, to let them know."

And what I felt in that moment through the tears was awe.

It was this quiet strength.

- I checked in for one thing, I got four other things happened since I've been here.

- [Mati] I got pancreatic cancer, COVID, then liver failure, aneurysm, bacteria in the stomach?

Did I get that somewhat right?

- Yeah.

- [Mati] Girl, your body, it's been through a lot.

- Yeah.

- A powerful clip.

All of the scenes in "A Still Small Voice" are like that, just incredibly powerful.

I have a question about the mechanics of it.

You never see, of course, the crew or the cameras or you or anyone.

And you shoot in many parts of the hospital, not all over.

How did that work?

How were you able to get the cinema verite touch, this very authentic touch without I don't know, "There's the camera.

Oops."

- I shoot as a one person crew which was a big part of this project, but many of my films, the doors that open by just being there as a person and trying to really minimize the technical components without giving up a real cinematic feel.

That's really at the core of my work is making the film about relationships, about being with people, but having the sort of technical knowledge to make it feel like a big crew was putting thought into each shot and how the film sounds and how it aesthetically feels.

But yeah, it was just me and I shot about 150 days over the course of a year and a lot of that time was massaging the approach and really figuring out how to be present with patients in a way that wasn't extractive, but was adding to this feeling of being witnessed.

And when that was working, when my presence was not necessarily additive, but was creating something together with Mati, there was an intimacy and a feeling of being invited that made the film sort of take off.

Any moment where I wasn't fully invited or there was a feeling of being voyeuristic, I needed to stop filming because it wasn't working for the patient, for Mati, or for the film.

It needed to feel really cohesive.

- Luke, when did you know that Mati would be the protagonist?

- I always really connected with her and from the very beginning found an energy and just a power to her that stuck out.

But it took months of talking and getting to know each other before she was even interested in being filmed at all.

And then through the residency I continued filming with all four of the residents and watched each of them grow and sort of complete this huge chapter of their lives.

And it wasn't until really partway through the edit where I started to see that Mati's story had a weight to it that I wanted to focus on more specifically.

And that was a huge sort of turning point and a surprise, really, for me as a director who had an interest in all of these people, but then a film that wanted to get even more specific and personal.

So there were a few key collaborators that helped me navigate that and make that decision to focus on Mati and then a lot of conversations with her about how that felt and what it would mean for her to be such a part of the movie.

- So surprise in the sense that you had not initially intended to be focused on an individual chaplain as opposed to the experience of that cohort, or, I'm just trying to understand what the surprise was.

- I was imagining the film as including all four of the residents.

And as I get more experience as a filmmaker, it's often a process of casting a wide net and being open to what happens and what unfolds over the course of the time that we filmed together and keeping a really open mind as to how it can unfold.

And this project sort of really taught me that you can only plan so much and just continuing to show up and continuing to evaluate what it is that you're able to be present for and how that feels to an audience is something that will sort of not be determined for you, but is not something you always have.

I think if you have too much control over it, you're maybe blind to the exciting, spontaneous stuff that happens.

- So death of course is a central theme of the film.

And Mati in one scene says, "You could look at religion as like a psychological crutch because it's way easier than reality.

But then at the same time, I can't throw all that out because there's too much here that's nourishing."

What was she saying there and did she come down on one side or the other of that?

- Mati in the film both relies on a deep faith and tradition while also questioning every sort of part of it.

She is a person who can hold hands with a patient and pray and feel a palpable change in the temperature of the room and the feelings that the person is experiencing and the sort of, to use her word, the nourishment that can come from real belief and real hope.

And that is often for some people coming from religious beliefs, from sacred texts, from traditions, but Mati, and not to speak for her, has real parts of religion that are difficult or that she questions.

And that to me was fascinating for her to be, again, learning what parts of her family's tradition, of her belief system she relied on and which parts she wanted to continue questioning.

- Did filming this prompt you to have the same questions or internal discussion?

It must have.

- Yeah, I think I had an innate interest in this work in that it in many ways is parallel to my work as a filmmaker and as somebody who's spent a large chunk of my life witnessing other people.

And I think this project has deepened my belief in what that means, what it can be to pay attention really closely to somebody and the very profound journey that can come from showing up in that way.

I'm not a very religious person, but I think I believe deeply in the power of connecting with people and what can happen when having a really open, curious approach towards the community and individuals around me.

- One of the qualities of Mati that leapt out at me was her empathy, her ability to understand and process.

And there are a couple moments where she actually gets firm with the people she's ministering to, explain to them that they're not responsible for whatever illness or tragedy has befallen their loved ones.

I found in that, again, coming back to that sense of burden, in how do individuals carry that, not just their own, but the stuff that they're taking on for others.

Did she ever sort of reflect on that consciously with you?

- I think you can see in sections in the film, the sort of fine line between caring and caring too much and learning how to be, you know, David talks about boundaries in the film, how to know when to open your heart wide and when to close down and be able to clock out.

And that's just such a hard thing to do.

And I really always admired how much Mati was able to care and I think that makes the job worth it, is when you really care and being able to not always care so that you can take care of yourself is a needle that she and many chaplains were needing to thread every day.

- So let's have you talk about a couple of your other films.

The 2015 documentary "New York Cuts."

Tell us about that.

- Yeah, "New York Cuts" was my undergraduate thesis and it- - At Stanford, right?

- Yep, at Stanford University.

I shot it in New York City after visiting five or 600 barbershops and hair salons.

- [G. Wayne] You do your homework, don't you?

- All around, I picked six that represented or embodied vastly different cultural enclaves.

I think there's a range of haircuts from like $4 to about $1,500.

- [G. Wayne] Oh wow.

- [Luke] And just the things that people talk about and share about their lives while they're getting groomed.

- And then in 2019 you did "Midnight Family" and that was shot in Mexico.

Boy, you get all over, don't you?

But tell us about that film.

- "Midnight Family" is the story of the Ochoa family who run a for-profit ambulance in Mexico City.

It's a place where the government has fewer than 45, or at the time, they had fewer than 45 public ambulances for a city of 9 million people.

- [G. Wayne] Oh my God.

- [Luke] And these mom and pop businesses fill in the gap and try to make a living doing that and it's a really cutthroat, ethical Wild West.

And we watched this family trying to on one hand, put food on the table and on the other hand, save people's lives.

And it's a really fascinating look at sort of unbridled healthcare.

- So there is a subtext in "A Still Small Voice" about the quality of healthcare in the United States.

Mount Sinai Hospital is one of the great hospitals in the United States, and the level of care there is perhaps exponentially better than it is at some smaller hospitals in smaller communities across the country.

Did you get a sense though, of those burdens?

We got about a minute left here.

And how that weighs, particularly on a chaplaincy in a hospital that's maybe not as well resourced as something like Mount Sinai?

- You know, working in healthcare in the US is often being a part of a huge machine where your agency is very limited and I think you find doctors, nurses, chaplains being asked to do impossible tasks and feeling overwhelmed or burnout because of their role in a system that really doesn't take full care of the people that are working in the system or being treated by the system.

Even at a place like Mount Sinai, there are big flaws in how it works.

- Well, Luke, the film again is "A Still Small Voice" and it is incredibly powerful.

Where can people see it if they wanna catch it now?

- It is streaming on a platform called Mubi.

It's M-U-B-I.

You can watch it there.

- They can check it out there.

Luke Lorentzen, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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