Keene, New Hampshire directors Bryant Naro and Meagan Frappiea return to the Made Here series with their new film Sara’s Circus. The film follows 20-year circus veteran and single mother Sara Greene as she attempts to create the first woman-founded tented circus. Can she convince the local New Hampshire fire chief it's safe, dodge the weather, build interest with the summer tourists, and create a successful show?
Filmmakers Bryant Naro and Meagan Frappiea answered questions about the film via email with Vermont Public's Eric Ford. This interview has been lightly copy edited.
Eric Ford: How did you first meet Sara and decide to make a film about her?
Meagan Frappiea: A friend of a friend had a daughter who needed an advisor for her high school capstone project; she was doing a film. It was a really tiny class, maybe seven kids, but even so, their senior presentations took place over the course of two evenings. It was just luck that she presented the same night as Kierstin. Kierstin's senior project was aerials arts, and Sara was her advisor. For Kierstin's presentation, everyone filed out to the playground and watched her perform on a red sling on this portable rig — all of us in our coats in the April chill and Kierstin in a black leotard. It was such a striking image, and we'd never seen any circus arts up close like that before. Bryant filmed it, just because we were there and it was neat, and that footage is in the film.
After the presentation, Sara spoke to the audience and said she was putting up a tent and doing her own circus that summer. Anyone who's been around Sara knows she's incredibly charismatic, and we were just taken with the whole idea of the thing. We had wanted our next doc to be centered on a woman in male-dominated industry, and I had wanted to follow someone through an event, so this felt like an amazing fit. We contacted her afterward and she agreed to let us film her. She was a great subject — she never asked to see a frame of footage, never asked how the film was going or what we were doing with it, never made suggestions. She was making her art and trusted us to make ours.
Eric Ford: Realizing you both have day jobs and a young child, how did you go about making a feature length documentary?
Bryant Naro: Production was done before our child was born, so we were able to sneak in days between gigs/projects. For example, when we finished filming the tent going up, we packed in to our car and drove directly to NYC for a shoot the following morning. We had no funding, so almost every shoot day we drove all the way out to Laconia from Keene, and then back again (we sprang for a hotel one night, which was the night they were rained out during the pre-show).
We became parents just as we started post-production, which meant a lot of working during naps, or after our then newborn had gone to sleep. We would plug away with the editing in bursts between our commercial projects for many years. We just kept at it, bit by bit. Some people are shocked at the time that passed, as it took us about seven years to finally finish the film. But when you add up the available time to actually work on it, it probably equates to about a year of full-time work.
Eric Ford: What were some of the biggest challenges making the film?
Bryant Naro: Carving out time in our schedule to work on the film was always the biggest hurdle, and then once we did make time, it was the crafting of as concise and coherent of a story as possible that became the biggest challenge. In the scheme of things, the 35 production days were the easiest part. There's no open-ended nature to production — you film what you film, and hope you did it well enough to tell a story. Post-production is where you hit a space of endless possibilities, and where most documentary filmmakers lose steam, rightfully so, because there are an infinite amount of ways to tell any given story.
We started with a three-and-a-half hour edit, and underwent a couple of screenings with our filmmaker friends/colleagues to get their feedback. Condensing Sara's history, focusing on the 'show don't tell' aspect (everything featured in the first act) really was the most difficult thing to do. Sara has a dense and wonderful history, but it's difficult to explain succinctly. We took an entire year off from the project (after COVID-19 struck), which really gave us a fresh perspective when we finally came back to the project. We were finally able to make act one click, and everything else fell in to place, as acts two and three are more straightforward with the events that happened.
Eric Ford: What was your favorite part of making Sara's Circus?
Bryant Naro: I thrive in a verite documentary production setting. I love catching a moment that is so real and representative of a person's character or emotion. I'm a camera person through and through, and I love to tell a story via visuals. I love the happy accidents or kismet that can happen when you keep a camera mounted on your shoulder, recording all day. There were so many during the filming of Sara's Circus, too many to pick out, and some that unfortunately didn't make the cut. Capturing scenes that held so much weight and showcased so many layers of character development were my favorite parts — it felt like preserving a feeling and moment in time.
Meagan Frappiea: Receiving tracks from our composer and experiencing the sound mix were both highs. The film had been entirely our creative energies for years so seeing what other people could contribute (and also no longer having a role other than co-director) was exciting. But my favorite part of documentary in general is meeting people you wouldn’t otherwise meet and being places you wouldn’t otherwise be. Sara has been a transformative person in our lives and we’ve been touched by a lot of the other cast, too. I’m grateful for the whole experience.
Eric Ford: What are you working on next?
Bryant Naro: Short films. As many as we can make, on whatever topics interest us. Features are exhausting, mentally, physically, financially. We have a lot of practice to get back to, and the quicker turn around of a short lets us experiment with different techniques. We have a couple short docs that we filmed years ago that we plan on finishing. One is almost 99% done, and is about self-expression through hair styling. The other one could lead to a longer form piece, but only if we have the funding — we think there's a story of American culture that can be told through home movies and video. Not just a linear historical milestones type of narrative, but one about class barriers presented through technology, reflected in our home movies. We would showcase culturally what we found important enough to document, who was privileged enough to do so, and what it says about who we were, and what we've become.
The Made Here season finale Sara's Circus premieres on Vermont Public's main TV channel 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 21 and is available now on demand.
