vHopeful Conversations Podcast

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I speak with producer Ivan Orlic about Mistura, his first Spanish-language feature and first film set entirely in his home country of Peru. Together they explore how the 1960s‑set story of Norma, a high‑society woman cast out after her husband leaves her, becomes both an intimate melodrama of personal reinvention and a larger reflection on gender, class, race, and Peru’s extraordinary culinary and cultural diversity. Ivan shares how he and writer‑director Ricardo de Montreuil built a richly detailed period world—using archival headlines, partnerships with El Comercio and PROMPERÚ, virtual production technology, and a food stylist—to ground Norma’s journey in a rapidly changing Lima, and discusses the film’s all‑star cast led by Bárbara Mori and Afro‑Peruvian musician‑actor Pudi Bayumbrosio. They also talk about Mistura’s remarkable box‑office run in Peru, its sold‑out festival screenings and U.S. theatrical release, the deeper thread of democracy and “being seen” that connects his work from Pelé: Birth of a Legend and La Cocina to Invisible Nation, and why he hopes this cinematic love letter will inspire audiences everywhere to open their hearts—and maybe seek out the nearest Peruvian restaurant—after the credits roll.Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, & Apple, or Spotify Vanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined today by my friend and producer Ivan Orlic. He is a Peruvian–Croatian film producer based in Los Angeles and founder of Seine Pictures. His recent productions include La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and starring Rooney Mara, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival; Invisible Nation, which Ivan produced alongside Ted Hope and which became one of Taiwan’s most popular, highest‑grossing documentaries of all time and comes out on PBS this May 1 (today!); and Eating Our Way to Extinction, narrated by Academy Award–winner Kate Winslet, which won the Environmental Media Award for Best Documentary. Ivan’s earlier credits include Pelé: Birth of a Legend, produced with Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment. Today, we’re here to talk about his film that is out in theaters right now, which we want everyone to go see. We love it: Mistura. It’s Ivan’s first feature set entirely in Peru, and the first he shepherded as sole producer, which became the highest‑grossing local drama of 2025 in Peru. Ivan, thank you for joining.Ivan Orlic: I’m so excited to be here, and thank you for having me. It’s so nice to talk to a friend as well as a collaborator. You know how much I admire you and your work and how much I have enjoyed our collaboration on Invisible Nation, which, for everyone out there, continues to be touring universities all over North America, and that’s super exciting. It’s launching, as you said, in May on PBS, which we’re also really excited about. It’s such an important story, and I’m so proud to be a small part of it.Vanessa: Ivan, thank you. That’s so moving. I feel the same, and you’re so kind and so amazing to work with. It’s such a pleasure to be able to talk about this fiction film from Peru! And it’s a country Ted and I need to visit with you.Ivan: Yes, that’s pending on our list. On our to‑do list. Vanessa: Yes. So, it’s your first film set in Peru and your first Spanish‑language fiction feature. Can you describe the film in your own words, and then also maybe share what it meant to you personally to finally make a film about home?Ivan: Yeah, so I am from Lima, Peru, and that is where the film is set. But it is set in the 1960s, when I wasn’t yet around. It’s still really, really special after about fifteen years of producing films shot in different countries and set in different countries, to finally go and tell a story that comes from where I come from and that represents so many people—all of us Peruvians. Peru is a very diverse country and has a very storied history, and a very diverse cuisine that reflects the diversity of our people. It was very special for me. I was looking for a few years for the right story that would bring me back home and also help me tell a story from Peru to the world.About ten years ago, I met the writer‑director Ricardo de Montreuil. We actually met at Imagine Entertainment, where I was working with them on a great film called Pelé: Birth of a Legend that I really love as well, and Ricardo was working on his film Lowriders, which has Demián Bichir and Eva Longoria and is set in the lowrider culture of East L.A.—it’s a really cool film as well. Ricardo is one of the more prominent filmmakers from Peru.Mistura is a story that, firstly, is very enjoyable and crowd‑pleasing. The story is about a woman who is from the high, high society of 1960s Lima, Peru, and she gets ostracized from society in the aftermath of her husband leaving her, at a time when women were judged for their husbands leaving them as though it was their fault. It’s like, your husband cheated on you and left you, so you must have done something wrong. It’s so ridiculous, but it was so commonplace. Setting it in the sixties allows the story to unfold at a time when the opportunities given to, and almost allowed to, women were so limited that the story of our protagonist, Norma Piat, is an original story but almost an amalgamation of a whole community of women at the time who, because of these societal restrictions, had to depend on a man in their lives—first a father, then a husband. And in many instances, that man left the picture for reason A, B, or C, and they had to figure out their own way.This is the story of one such woman who does so by embracing her own skill and passion for food and building a team that, intentionally in the film, is very representative of Peruvian diversity. That also allows the opportunity for this story to be the story of a community coming together. I’m not saying this kind of discrimination is gone, but setting it in a period when it was more noticeable and more marked in society, I think, allows the character arc to be a bit stronger. She has more to overcome. She is judged more harshly by the society around her and ultimately finds her own way—that true friendship is not defined by who we are in society, but who we are as people, and that what we have in common ultimately is so much more important than what differentiates us.Vanessa: Yes. Okay, that was brilliantly put. You made me think of two things that are interesting ways to attract audiences to this particular story, because it is timely, and I think there’s something in the zeitgeist right now. There’s a memoir by Belle Burden called Strangers that is completely exploding culturally, a New York Times bestseller.It’s about her husband leaving her all of a sudden and her grappling with putting their life back together. As with your protagonist in Mistura, she’s a high‑society, upper‑class woman who would normally never speak about this, and speaks about how her mother and her grandmother endured tons of infidelity from their husbands or partners and never spoken about it. And so for Belle Burden, it’s incredibly important in her processing—and in helping her children process the changes—that she speak about it.So I feel like Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers and Ivan Orlic’s movie Mistura go together: if you love this book, you will love this movie. Also, you mentioned Eva Longoria, and I rarely indulge in watching travel food shows, but on the way to Taiwan last June, when we came out in theaters there with Invisible Nation, I was working on the flight and I watched Eva Longoria’s food tour of Mexico, and it’s so good. First of all, Eva is so cool—she’s so politically right‑on and brave and speaks up. But she really gets into the culture and history of the country and her heritage and the food. And so if you love Eva Longoria’s food tour of Mexico, you will love Mistura. Those audiences also fit very well together. Ivan: You mentioned “Ivan Orlic’s Mistura,” but it’s really everyone’s. Firstly, the writer‑director’s, but everyone who made the film. It was really done with what in Peru we would call “the jersey”—everyone wearing the jersey of the national team—with a lot of heart and passion. It really belongs to everyone who made it, but it’s also our love letter to our own country, as well as, hopefully, something that will resonate around the world. I truly believe not only that Peru has a lot of special things to offer and that Peruvian food, in my humble opinion—or maybe not so humble in this case—is the best in the world, but also that the detail‑oriented work that was done in the making of this film makes it very specific. And in doing so, whenever we are telling a story as specifically as we can, it opens the potential for it to resonate as universally as possible.Vanessa: Yeah, exactly. That’s so true. And it’s very true with this film, which is why I could also see my mother’s story in it a little bit. Opening a restaurant has certain characteristics that are very unique. So fans of The Bear television series may also be drawn to it. That’s also very zeitgeisty—the restaurant drama set in Chicago. Such a great show.Your cast—I understand there’s some history between some of the actors, as well as some big‑screen debuts, and your cast is almost entirely Peruvian?Ivan: Yes, and I almost can’t believe that I would go on this long without mentioning Bárbara Mori, who plays the lead character, Norma Piat, in the film. She’s just incredible in it. She has now won many awards for Best Actress and been nominated in several instances. Just last week she won Best Actress at the most important award show celebrating entertainment in Peru, where our co‑protagonist, Pudi Bayumbrosio, was also nominated for Best Actor, and of course our film was nominated for Best Film.But Bárbara is incredible. She was born in Uruguay and moved early on to Mexico, where she resides now, so her natural accent is very much Mexican. But not only did she do an incredible job portraying this character and living the role, she did so through the lens of an accent that was very precisely worked on with an accent coach. It’s not just a Peruvian accent—it’s a high‑society Lima accent from the 1960s.Vanessa: Wow.Ivan: The co‑protagonist is César Bayumbrosio, who loves to go by his nickname, Pudi. He’s one of the most wonderful people I’ve encountered, and he is also the best percussionist I’ve ever seen in my life. He is the percussionist for Peru Jazz, the most important jazz band in our country, and his entire family, for generations, have been the most emblematic of Afro‑Peruvian music. So his inclusion in the film is not only about him personally and his charisma and great performance, but also brings a lot of meaning and richness to the film itself because of who he is and where he comes from. This is his lead‑role debut, and whenever we mention that in front of an audience that has already seen the film, there are first gasps, followed by applause, and it’s very well deserved. Just a great performance.Starting with him, the entirety of the rest of our cast is Peruvian, and also features Christian Meier, who serves as an executive producer and plays the husband who leaves her. Audiences tend not to love his character, but it is really well done—so well done that it only takes a second for the audience to understand he’s the antagonist when you see him, even though in real life he is one of the nicest, most charming people you’ve ever met and has been known in Peru as “the most handsome man in Peru.”Vanessa: Wow. Excellent, excellent.Ivan: Yes, there is history, and they have worked together four times now. They usually play husband and wife, and their first collaboration happens to have been on a film called My Brother’s Wife—or La mujer de mi hermano—which was the feature debut of our director, Ricardo de Montreuil, about twenty years before this. So this was a great reunion of three artists who were already very high‑profile and very talented at the time and have since only become more so, and I think you can see the results on screen.Vanessa: Yes, yes, yes. Your film tracks Norma’s transformation—you’ve just been talking about Norma—as she builds alliances with people from different communities whom she was raised to disregard. It’s very daring of her to open a restaurant, especially in the way that she opens the restaurant. I wonder how you thought about balancing the intimate melodrama of the story with this broader social commentary.Ivan: Yeah, so again, it’s an original story, so it was already in Ricardo’s screenplay. This was important to all of us: even though it’s an intimate drama—it’s a very intimate story, and you can see it and feel it both in the plot and in how it’s executed—we didn’t want to lose the fact that most of the story is taking place inside her bubble. Even though she has real problems and a lot to overcome, it’s still a story taking place inside a high‑society bubble. To some extent, some of her problems are what we would often say are “first‑world problems,” you know. We didn’t want to lose the fact that this bubble exists within a bigger context of a country that was still developing, at a time when Peru was experiencing increasingly widening inequality—something that is happening again today.I think it was important to us not to lose that, so one of the ways in which we keep that alive and the story grounded and rooted in that reality is by showing a couple of real clips from archival footage of the time on the characters’ TVs. These go towards showing that there was dissatisfaction from the wider population and some political turmoil, as well as through newspaper headlines. We worked with the paper of record in Peru—like The New York Times would be in the U.S.—the Peruvian equivalent, which is called El Comercio, and they were a partner in the film, providing us not just with real headlines of the time, from which we selected some that highlight both that Peru was a destination—again, something that has come back—as well as that there was turmoil and not all was well outside of this high‑society bubble.But these newspaper headlines are not just real—they’re printed on a printer from the ’60s that the newspaper still had, and they generously made that available for us. During pre‑production we also created a big PDF we called the “1965 Bible” that informed every head of department in the film, to try to pay as much attention as possible to the details. Once we had it, we went back to the screenplay with Ricardo and did some adjustments to dialogue to make sure that we were using expressions and words that were used at the time and we weren’t being anachronistic, you know.I think there is some mirror between the ’60s and the 2020s in Peru, where again the country had a bit of a spotlight. One of the newspaper headlines, for example, tells of how Mr. Rockefeller is not coming to Peru for the first time but is returning to Peru, and it became a destination in the way that it has again—now more because of the archaeology and also culinary tourism, which is becoming a real driver for tourism. We worked with a Peruvian government agency called PROMPERÚ that is always promoting everything to do with Peru around the world. They were instrumental in the logistics and even helped us with visas for people to come in during the production.We work with them because this film, as much as it’s a personal story—and I think people will find it engaging and moving and inspiring on a personal level—is also, on a country level, a movie that really invites you not just to visit Peru but to try our food. In live screenings, appropriately, we give people a warning before they watch it that this film may—and will—make you hungry.Vanessa: Yeah, very much. Ivan, you have me curious: in terms of the different classes in Peru, is it waves of immigration from Europe? Because I feel Norma’s character—her father is an ambassador, it’s France—Ivan: Norma, the character played by Bárbara, is the daughter of the former ambassador from France to Peru, so the character moved to Peru as a young girl. She and her son in the film speak Spanish and French, but because they grew up in Peru, their French is accented almost as badly as my English is accented. But yes, classism is definitely a problem in Peru and has been for a long time. Much like other forms of discrimination in most countries around the world, it’s something that has improved over the last several decades, but where we still have room to grow.I think—like in the U.S., the phrase “we are always working to create a more perfect union”—that sentiment is present all over the world, no? Our societies are overall in a better place than in most of our past, even if in our recent times there is, to my taste, too much polarization. That was one of the inspirations for this story. In fact, it is one of the director’s theses for the film: that all of us being different, but being together, makes us much stronger and better, in the same way that any one dish would not be as good if you removed any one ingredient, even though each ingredient is very different from the others.Vanessa: Yeah. I imagine, knowing what a good son you are, that this movie very much pleased your parents, and that maybe capturing 1960s Peru—every aspect, food, class, race—in the storytelling was pleasing to them, that you could bring it to life, that you could show how the differences have contributed to the Peru we have today.Ivan: Well, as far as I know, yes. They love this film. And I think all of their friends—well, I think they love hearing how much their friends love the film. We had an amazing experience in the theatrical release in Peru. We were able to release the film in 109 out of 111 total cinema venues in the country, so it was a wide release, like a blockbuster, which doesn’t normally happen for a drama. Because the word of mouth was so strong, we were able to stay in theaters for nine weeks, even though the normal amount of time for that market is three to four weeks, even if you’re doing well.I’m really proud of that. It was incredibly rewarding that audiences in Peru would have ovations after commercial screenings—something I’ve seen mostly at festivals, but not very frequently at commercial engagements. I would go and stand outside some of the cinemas toward the end of the film, because at first I wasn’t ready to just believe the distributor telling me this was happening all over the city, all over the country. So I went to several cinemas to check it out, and there it was: people clapping at the end of a movie. It’s been really rewarding.We actually opened in the U.S. on April 24th, so last week, and I was able to go to a handful of engagements here to do Q&As after commercial screenings. In speaking to the audiences, we’re also hearing the applause before we walk in, which was super nice, and I really hope that it continues to resonate like this.Vanessa: Yeah, me too. It’s crazy, Ivan. You had two films in theaters last year in two different countries—Taiwan and Peru — you had these two movies become big phenomenons in two countries at the same time. It’s very unique.Ivan: (I edited out the effusive praise Ivan heaped on me and our team and the team he worked with on Mistura before saying…) The correct answer is “thank you.” I’ll take the compliment.Vanessa: Take the compliment. Yes, you have to take it. Mistura only took about six months from first draft to assembling partners and starting pre‑production, and that is also remarkably fast. I wonder, from your producing standpoint, what made that speed possible?Ivan: Yes. I had the idea that I needed—I think that’s the right word—to make a Peruvian film as part of my career, and hopefully it will be more than one. I had this idea for years, and I was actually working on my own version for like three years before Ricardo sent me the script for Mistura. When I first read it, I felt like, “This is accomplishing everything I was trying to accomplish with the script I was developing—except in this one, it’s working.” So I didn’t hesitate and jumped in right away.Because Ricardo had previously worked with Christian Meier and Bárbara Mori, their coming into the project really early was facilitated by that pre‑existing relationship between them. Once those elements were together—and the film actually had some financing come in early as well, which ended up falling apart; that was one of the big challenges of this production, putting it back together during pre‑production—we were able to do that.The other reason it came together so fast is that I worked with a local producer named Enid Campos, who prefers to be known by her really cute nickname: Pinky. She is one of the most talented producers I’ve worked with and, in Peru, renowned for her work, especially in art‑house film. She has a long history of working with all the more established heads of department in Peru, so she helped me. We interviewed all the top choices and ended up building the team very fast.I will also say there was an outside date for the shoot because Bárbara Mori is also one of the protagonists in an Apple TV+ show called Women in Blue—or in Spanish Las Azules—which tells the story of the first women police officers in Mexico City. It’s another period piece, but a limited series, and they were shooting right after us. So we had an outside date by which we had to wrap her, and as the protagonist that means we had to wrap the film by then, not just her. So in one way it had to come together so fast, but in another it was almost natural for it to do so because everyone who came into contact with it jumped in without hesitation, and because Pinky really was instrumental in finding the right fit for each department head very quickly.Vanessa: Do you want to speak a little more about if there were any challenges because you were working so quickly, in terms of creating that 1960s period look and feel for Peru?Ivan: Yes. So after working with that team of historians and having the 1965 Bible, during pre‑production there was a lot of attention paid by, especially, Mario Frias, our art director; Leslie Hinojosa, our wardrobe designer; and Laura Quijandría, our hair and makeup designer; and of course our DP and director of photography, Nicolás Wong, who’s amazing. We’re lucky that his work has received some well‑deserved recognition.We are also the first film made in Peru to work with virtual production technology. I think most of your audience will know what it is, but in case some don’t: it’s the modern version of green‑screen technology that was first popularized by The Mandalorian, whereby instead of using a static green screen during the shoot, we used giant LED screens to encompass the set in which we were shooting. The LED screens were projecting images we created before shooting, instead of adding them in post‑production. The advantage, of course, is that the actors don’t have to imagine their environment—they get to see it and live in it during the shoot— and the director can watch every take as it will appear in the film instead of having it full of green to be filled out later.The company that helped us model, design, and create a 3D photorealistic model of all the streets in Lima that the cars in the story drive through is called La Escena Virtual. This was the first time they were working on a feature and the first feature in Peru to ever use this technology. I think it worked really well—we haven’t had anyone question it; it looks great.Also in terms of the food itself, we are the first Peruvian film to work with a professional food stylist. Paola Musso is someone who was trained in Europe and has worked in film before, but she also does a lot of commercials and is at the top of her field. This was her first feature in Peru, and of course she’s Peruvian. She not only made the food look really nice—I think it looks beautiful and delicious—but also adjusted the dishes to how they were more commonly presented in restaurants and even at home, how people would have recognized them most in that period.Vanessa: So no more talk from film producers anywhere about “period is too challenging, period is too difficult.” It feels like with new technology, there’s really opportunity to make interesting period films.Ivan: I mean, it certainly adds a layer, right? It requires more attention to detail, a bit more work, more budget. But it’s within reach, especially when you have the opportunity to work with talented and committed artists like we were lucky to have.Vanessa: Mistura had its international film‑festival premiere at Mill Valley, and you’re excited it’s in theaters now here in the U.S., and it sounds like you just had an extraordinary response in Peru. And everyone needs a warning that they’re going to come away hungry. Ivan: Yes. We’ve been lucky—there hasn’t been an exception in any festival screening so far that it’s not sold out. That’s always rewarding, to see that people are interested in the work we’re doing. I’ve had the good fortune of being present myself at over a dozen of these festivals that were kind enough to invite us, meeting audiences at sometimes one, sometimes multiple screenings per festival, doing Q&As, and listening to their reactions. More or less half of the questions we get are long‑winded compliments that are incredibly appreciated and usually have to do with how people perceive that we executed the period really nicely, that the cinematography looks beautiful, the acting, and how much they felt inspired by the film.Vanessa: That’s so beautiful. What does success look like for you with Mistura, beyond the celebration, box office, awards, all of that? Maybe you’ve spoken to it just now, or is it about how this representation of Peru might influence Peruvian stories globally?Ivan: On one level, I’m in this field, in this world of film, because I really believe that stories have the power to transform people. We empathize with a protagonist who is necessarily different from ourselves, unless it happens to be a biopic on us. In doing so, I think we expand our empathetic imagination—our ability to relate to and empathize with different people—and that in itself makes every story have inherent value, in addition to the artistic work itself. So I hope that Mistura will travel.Yes, we are soon to announce distribution in more countries, which is very exciting, including theatrical releases in more countries, which is not a given, especially for a film from a country that is a relatively smaller market. But we are very proud to be able to accomplish this, and that wherever this film travels, it opens hearts and minds. For me, that’s really important—and I think it naturally will flow because of what the story is.On another level, I hope we are breaking the stereotype of what a Peruvian would look like. I think to challenge that stereotype, as well as to invite, through the film, more people to visit Peru and try our food wherever they live, is important. I think it’s a fortunate time for those interested in trying Peruvian food around the world, because there has been such a boom since the early 2000s. When I first moved to the United States in 2001, I couldn’t find a Peruvian restaurant in most cities. Now I can’t find a city that doesn’t have multiple.And that’s a very welcome change for me because not only do I think Peruvian food is amazing, but I also miss it. It’s one of the ways I get to continue to feel connected to my home country—eating our food wherever I go, whether it’s here in Miami or in New York or in L.A., and also in smaller cities.Vanessa: Side question—because I’m realizing as I’m speaking with you that I’ve had this thread going through the podcast series. So many Brazilian stories and Brazilian filmmakers—from the amazing documentarian Petra Costa (Apocalypse in the Tropics), to Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent), Gabriel Mascaro (The Blue Trail), Fisher Stevens, Chelsea Greene, who made the documentary We Are Guardians…Ivan: That was your most recent episode—Vanessa: That was the most recent, yes. I wonder, what is the relationship between Peru and Brazil, politically and culturally?Ivan: I think it’s a great relationship. Of course, in Brazil Portuguese is spoken, and in Peru Spanish. We share the Amazon rainforest, and it both connects us and sits between us—it makes the cities on both coastlines relatively far away geographically. But I think that connection is really important between us. Also, both happen to be the countries in Latin America that have the most immigration from Asia, historically, and so we share that connection as well. My favorite food, for example, is Nikkei food—Japanese‑Peruvian fusion. The chef in Mistura comes from these backgrounds, I think on purpose.I also, as you know, worked in Brazil and was able to have the honor of telling the story of one of their most beloved sons of the country, the King of Soccer, O Rei Pelé, whom I also had the privilege of being friends with until his passing in December 2022.Vanessa: All these Brazilian filmmakers and all of Brazil can also support Mistura. That’s where I’m going.Ivan: I think yes. I think identity is really important, and at the same time it should be something that connects us, not something that divides us. This is not a film just for Peruvians. This is not even a film just for Spanish speakers or just for Latin Americans. Vanessa: We’re now adding Asians into the mix as well—people from Taiwan.Ivan: We’re all connected. Exactly. And anyone who loves and supports independent film. I really appreciate supporting all independent film, wherever it comes from. I really appreciate theater chains and all they do for cinema, but independent theaters in particular, I think, are such champions—they matter.Here in Miami, for example, the Coral Gables Art Cinema has been a real champion of our film, Mistura. In New York, it’s Cinema Village that’s championing us, and we’re about to work with Laemmle in California, who are one of the most iconic, legendary supporters of independent film through the years.Vanessa: Okay, great—so my stepmom in Miami: go to the Coral Gables theater. My mom in New York: go to Cinema Village. And all our friends and family here in Los Angeles, California, please go to the Laemmle theaters. When you were speaking of champions of independent film, you were making me think about Ted, of course. The way Ted always describes your involvement with the Taiwan documentary is that, like us, you’re a champion of democracy—that you care about democracy, that that’s the thread connecting us.In a way, you can read this film, Mistura, as a story in which that kind of personal liberation is connected to a larger politics—where an ideal version of democracy supports everyone in their individuality and their differences to feel part of a larger whole, to feel free, to have rights, autonomy, respect, integrity, all of that. Across your filmography—from Pelé to Eating Our Way to Extinction, La Cocina, now Mistura—what do you see as the connective threads in the stories you back?Ivan: Yeah. I really am passionate about democracy, and I am proud to be a part of Invisible Nation. I’m a big believer that all peoples have a right to self‑determine their own destiny, and democracy is the tool through which we can do that. When we’re unhappy with a situation, we get to choose to change it. I’ve become very familiar with the U.S. political system and modern history, because in a system like the U.S., neither party is effectively and significantly improving the lives of the majority of the people who are not doing well already. This is true in all sorts of countries, including Peru, and it creates a sense of dissatisfaction that I think inspires people to vote for more and more extreme options.Vanessa: Your opening thought about self‑determination—that’s really the key. That’s really in Mistura; that’s what takes the personal to the political.Ivan: Yeah. It’s universally resonant. Also, the story of Mistura takes place only a handful of years before Peru lost its democracy—we became a military dictatorship for a few years. My family left during those years and returned when democracy returned. That’s why in countries like Peru, where this has taken place or similar things have taken place, I think we’re much more aware of how fragile democracy can be. It’s that U.S. phrase—and forgive me for not being a better U.S. historian—but “It’s your republic, if you can keep it.” That is so true. It really depends on all of us to fight for it, to keep it, and to continue to strive for it to become a more and more perfect version of itself, whether it’s a union like here or a different system.I think the through‑line, especially of the last few years for me, is also a lot about being seen and how beautiful that is. I’m more of an art‑house and independent film lover than a big‑blockbuster lover, but I had a chance to briefly speak to James Cameron once about the Avatar movies, and one of the things I really love about them is the “I see you” phrasing. That is, to me, the through‑line of my work over the last few years.In Invisible Nation, overtly in the title, it’s: can we finally see a whole people that aren’t being fully seen? La Cocina is based on the play from the 1950s in the U.K. by Arnold Wesker, but heavily adapted for this film to take place in Manhattan—in a world where we’re telling the story of one day in the lives of people who work at a restaurant. Vanessa: It’s an excellent restaurant film. It’s an excellent film, La Cocina. This is with Rooney Mara—brilliant, brilliant. Ivan: And in North America it’s currently available on the platform MUBI—check it out. Please, do check it out. La Cocina is one day in the life of these people who work at a restaurant, and they represent one of the segments of people in society that during the pandemic we learned to call “essential workers.” They’re the people who make society run. They are also people that we don’t really see that often—we kind of look past them and see them as part of the service being provided to us instead of as a person who has a job and a life. So I think Invisible Nation is “let’s see these people who aren’t being seen”; La Cocina is “let’s see this community that isn’t really being seen”; and Mistura is the personal, individual‑level version of this, where there’s a woman who on one level is being seen by everyone, but being seen for her position in society—for who her husband is—not for who she is.It’s really the story of how someone—in this case her driver, who is Afro‑Peruvian, again played by Pudi Bayumbrosio, who I love—finally, finally, someone is seeing her for who she is. Beneath all that, she loses her status, she loses her money, and suddenly all that can be seen is who she really is. Because that is seen, and they start to see each other, they can build this team and transcend the restrictions and limited beliefs, the discrimination of the moment of the ’60s—which in Peru is more comparable to the ’50s in the U.S. socially.Vanessa: Okay, I have a new and very challenging last question for you, Ivan, because I feel we need to tell people where they can have dinner and see your movie. I feel they should have dinner, if they can, at a Peruvian restaurant, ideally one that has the Japanese‑Peruvian fusion. Luckily there are lots of options. And what’s the name of your favorite dish that’s Japanese‑Peruvian fusion?Ivan: Yes. So my favorite dish is probably ceviche, and the Japanese‑Peruvian fusion version is called tiradito. The film actually tells the real, sort‑of‑fictionalized story of how tiradito comes to be. That reminds me: the chef in our film, who is a chef in real life, grew up with his father having a restaurant in Peru, which was the first restaurant that chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa was head chef at. Nobu came from Japan to Peru, picked up a lot of Peruvian ideas and traditions, and then opened his own restaurant, which has become an empire—Nobu across the world—which has a lot of influence from the Peruvian menu. So that is always going to be an option.But there’s a group that have been doing the good work—they’re called the Peruvian Restaurant Guide: peruvianrestaurantguide.com. You can go there and find the Peruvian restaurants nearest to you, wherever that is.People will be able to see and hear our conversation starting May 1st, right? Starting May 1st we will be at the CMX Dolphin, at the AMC Aventura, and at the Regal Sawgrass in the Miami area. In New York, we will remain at Cinema Village as well.Vanessa: You’re being held over.Ivan: Yes, we’re being held over, which is always an exciting thing to learn. I’m particularly excited that starting May 7th we are returning to where this relationship with the audience started. As you mentioned, our world premiere was at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and starting May 7th we are playing at the San Rafael Film Center.Vanessa: Ooh, I love that theater.Ivan: I’m really excited. I love that theater, and it’s so special to go back to where our first public screening was held. It’s special to be here in Miami; I think the community here is so rich with immigration, and the Peruvian food in Miami is amazing. In New York, similarly, there’s so much immigration. There are many Peruvian restaurants in New York as well.On May 8th we’re opening in Los Angeles, as well as San Diego and Sarasota. Los Angeles will be extra special for me because it’s the city that has become my home over the last fifteen years. We will definitely be at the Laemmle Monica and the Laemmle Glendale, and I believe the Regal South Gate as well for our first week.I know that everyone in this audience knows this, but I’ll still say it: the opening week and opening weekend in each market that a film opens, especially an independent film, is critical—most important. Vanessa: Get to the theater when it opens, please. Ivan: The more we do, not only the more opportunity this film will have to reach more people, but the better independent film does in general in theaters, the more those theaters will remain interested, open, and excited to continue to support independent film.So this is my plea to please come support us, as well as follow us on social media. We are @MisturaFilm—M‑I‑S‑T‑U‑R‑A, Mistura Film—where we continue to announce releases in each city. We hope to be in more cities in North America over the coming weeks. I know that starting May 28th, for those of you in Puerto Rico, we are definitely opening on several screens. In July we will be in theaters in the U.K.Vanessa: Ooh, fantastic—in July. And Puerto Rico. I love Puerto Rico. This has been a wonderful conversation, and it’s been so great to see you!Ivan: Thank you so much, Vanessa. Thank you for having me. Always great to see you. Thank you, thank you. I hope everyone enjoys the film.Vanessa: Me too. I know they will.IVAN ORLIC producerIvan Orlic is a Peruvian-Croatian film producer based in Los Angeles and founder of Seine Pictures. His recent productions include La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and starring Rooney Mara, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival and went on to win five Ariel Awards; Invisible Nation, directed by Vanessa Hope and produced alongside Ted Hope, which received multiple awards including at the Cinema for Peace Awards in 2024 and became one of Taiwan’s highest-grossing documentaries of all time; and Eating Our Way to Extinction, narrated by Academy award winner Kate Winslet, which won the Environmental Media Awards for Best Documentary. His earlier credits include Murder of a Cat, produced alongside Sam Raimi, and Pelé: Birth of a Legend, produced alongside Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment.Most recently, Orlic produced Mistura — his first feature set entirely in Peru and the first he shepherded as sole producer. Following a successful theatrical release in Peru, where it remained in cinemas for nine weeks to become the highest grossing local drama of 2025, the film opened in U.S. theaters last week from April 24th 2026, through Outsider Pictures, a distribution company specializing in bringing Spanish language and foreign films into the North American market.He is also a guest lecturer at University of California, Los Angeles, a speaker at international industry forums, and a graduate of The Second City conservatory program.MISTURA SCREENS BY DATENOW PLAYINGMIAMI1. CMX Brickell -- likely to hold over2. Coral Gables Art Cinemas3. CMX Dolphin -- likely to hold over4. AMC Aventura -- likely to hold over5. AMC Tamiami6. AMC Hialeah7. AMC Sunset Place 8. Regal Southland Mall9. Regal Kendall VillageFT. LAUDERDALE10. Regal Sawgrass -- likely to hold overNEW YORK11. Cinema Village -- confirmed to hold overDALLAS12. America Cinemas (Ft Worth)PORTLAND13. Battle Ground Cinemas 814. Sandy Cinema 9ORLANDO15. Regal Waterford Lakes16. Regal PointeOPENING MAY 1BUFFALO1. North Park TheatrePALM SPRINGS2. Desert Film SocietyMIAMI3. TBC: Silverspot BrickellOPENING MAY 7SAN RAFAEL1. San Rafael Film Center (San Rafael)OPENING MAY 8LOS ANGELES1. Laemmle Monica (Santa Monica)2. Laemmle Glendale (Glendale)3. Regal Southgate (Norwalk)SAN DIEGO4. Digital GymSARASOTA5. Burns CourtOPENING MAY 22LOS ANGELES1. Maya Chino Hills (Chino)2. Maya Fresno (Fresno)3. Maya Bakersfield (Bakersfield)OPENING MAY 28SAN JUAN1. Fine Arts Popular Center2. Fine Arts Café3. Montehiedra4. San Patricio Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this special vHopeful Conversations episode, Vanessa Hope spotlights Fall of Freedom, a nationwide wave of creative resistance to rising authoritarianism that began last fall and now returns with more than twenty May Day film screenings across multiple states. She highlights powerful new work from award‑winning filmmakers, including Steal This Story, Please! about fearless journalist Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin; Homegrown, directed by Michael Premo with writing consulting by two‑time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Lynn Nottage, examining the rise of right‑wing extremism in America; Soul Patrol, J.M. Harper’s Sundance‑winning drama about an elite unit of African American special‑ops soldiers in Vietnam; and Chelsea Winstanley’s feature debut TOITŪ: Visual Sovereignty, following Māori curator Nigel Borell as his groundbreaking exhibition becomes a battleground over Indigenous self‑determination. She also shares news of Invisible Nation, her documentary on Taiwan’s struggle for democracy, premiering on PBS this May Day, along with programs like Fall of Freedom: Labor of Love and Damned in the U.S.A.: A Fight for First Amendment Rights with legendary lawyer Martin Garbus—inviting listeners to join a communal declaration that truth matters, art matters, and courage is contagious at falloffreedom.com. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this Earth Day edition of vHopeful Conversations, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with producer Fisher Stevens and co-director Chelsea Greene to discuss We Are Guardians, their urgent and deeply human documentary about Indigenous forest defenders on the frontlines of the Amazon. Chelsea traces the film’s origins to the 2019 Amazon fires and her decision to drop everything to document communities risking their lives to confront illegal loggers, while Fisher reflects on joining the project, helping shape its verité approach, and supporting a multi-year impact campaign grounded in accountability to those same communities. Together they explore how the film braids intimate character stories with Brazilian electoral politics, the economic drivers of deforestation, and the outsized influence of agribusiness giants like Cargill and JBS, all while arguing that “action is the antidote to despair” and inviting listeners to see themselves as guardians too. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with multi‑hyphenate indie director Pete Ohs to unpack his Warsaw‑set “volcanic experiment” Erupcja, a Charli xcx–starring anti‑romantic comedy in which a stranded vacation and a rekindled relationship with a Polish florist explode Bethany’s sense of who she is and who she wants to love. Ohs traces his journey from an exhausting seven‑year, $200,000 “traditional” first feature to a radically lean, joy‑forward process—tiny crews, half‑outlines, writing scenes over breakfast, shooting in story order, and treating each film like a table made of bubbles that can’t bear the weight of industry expectations. Together they dig into how low‑budget tools, liberating constraints, and a “movies as vacation” mindset let him collaborate with performers like Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Will Madden, and Jeremy O. Harris while encouraging filmmakers everywhere to ditch perfectionism, question what they’re told they “need,” and just go make movies with their friends.Transcript lightly edited. podcast available on Dream of a Better World, and Apple or wherever you listenVanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined by Pete Ohs, who is an American multi‑hyphenate filmmaker in the truest sense: a writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor. He’s known for his inventive, low‑budget, genre‑bending features that have become fixtures on the U.S. indie festival circuit, including the hybrid documentary I Send You This Place, the desert sci‑fi fable Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, the horror satire Jethica, his recent workplace comedy‑drama Love and Work, and the new film, which I’ve just learned how to pronounce with a Polish accent, Erupcja, which we were mispronouncing “Erupcia” in case that’s what people read when they see it. It’s playing at New Directors/New Films, (ND/NF) in New York City, April 11th and 12th. Then coming out in theaters starting April 17th. Thank you so much for being here, Pete.Pete Ohs: Happy to be here.Vanessa: Ted and I, who you just met, and it was so fun to talk to you before this interview—we’re both filmmakers, and we often talk filmmaking at breakfast. Well, pretty much all day long into the night, as well as questions of how to have a creative life in this chaotic and ever‑changing world. So we look for new models for work and life and study and examine prior movements. And your way of working is particularly exciting to us.If you could take us through your path to this new film, Erupcja—no, no, that wasn’t the right pronunciation; how do I say it again?Pete: Erupcja.Vanessa: Erupcja. All the films that came before, and how this became your method, which feels like a really amazing articulation of long‑live cinema (!) in the purest form. You’ve said that your way of working now is partly a rejection of, or reaction to, this not‑fun first feature film experience, which had a bigger budget. How did you arrive at this new moment?Pete: Yeah, so I’m a kid from Ohio. I didn’t have parents in the creative fields. I have creative parents, but not in the creative fields. And I really was just a kid with a video camera, borrowing his parents’ video camera or friends’ parents’ video camera, making videos with friends as a hobby.This was in the 90s. This was before there was YouTube. If there was YouTube, probably we would have been uploading them, but at the time, all we were doing was making the videos and then going down to the basement to watch them together again. This was like my favorite thing to do, favorite hobby.But I didn’t go to film school. I was never really aspiring to be a director, actually. I wasn’t some little Spielberg kid. I was just making videos with my friends. And I ended up going to a liberal arts college, studying computer science, still doing videos as a work‑study job and as my hobby, but still not fully recognizing that that could be a career path.My senior year, that clicked, thanks to a mentor—one of our advisors in the video program pointed out that, oh, I could have a job as an editor, as a videographer at a production company. So that’s what I then did. I did not use my computer science degree. I went straight into a small television production company in Cincinnati, Ohio.I was doing that for a few years, making music videos, and eventually just naturally worked my way up, within myself, to the point where, oh, I want to try to make a feature film now. It just felt like a gradual progression, but I was still very much outside the system, didn’t know what I was doing.I sort of manifested this feature hybrid documentary that got into one cool film festival, Full Frame. Each little increment was just enough to keep me going, along with the fact that this is what I was enjoying doing.The next progression, just based on what I was observing from the world, was to write a narrative feature script and try to get that made. And as I’m trying to get it made, I’m also learning what that even means—to “get it made.”We miraculously get cool cast attached. We don’t really even know what that means, to be attached. Each thing we thought, “Oh, I guess we make a movie now,” and then months later, the movie has not happened yet. And then you get producers, and you’re like, “Okay, so now we make the movie,” and then all that stuff, until like a year and a half later you’re finally shooting the movie.Again, this is new to me. I know this is not new to other people who have done that, but this is my first time doing it. And then you shoot that movie. It’s almost a $200,000 budget. That’s a lot of money to me. I keep being told that’s not a lot of money for a movie. We make this feature film with a 20‑ish person crew, a 20‑ish day shoot—big and small, you know, it’s in that in‑between zone.I’m really proud of that movie. It stars a pre‑Ozark Julia Garner. All these magical things were there. And I was certainly dreaming in my mind, or imagining in my mind, that I was going to live the dream. I was going to premiere at Sundance, my life was going to change, the golden gates to heaven were going to open and I was going to get to walk through, and happily ever after.And then you don’t get into Sundance, and you don’t get into those big festivals. That film ended up premiering at the Los Angeles Film Festival—which no longer exists but was a good film festival—but still isn’t… not exactly Sundance. Great festival, great programmers, connected to film, and all these really good things, but you’re having to recalibrate the dream.You have that and you’re like, “Okay, so I didn’t get launched from that project. What does that mean now? What does that mean about what I’ve done?” And for me, that film, that first feature, took like seven years from just having the idea to then making it. And then it didn’t really instantly, light‑switch change my life. And it made me question: okay, seven years—that was a long time for what came of it, which was not a lot of joy, really.Vanessa: Yeah.Pete: For seven years. Certainly some bits and pieces, but I was like, I don’t know if that was an adequate return on investment of my time in my life.Vanessa: It’s so much waiting. I mean, so much of it when you speak of attachments with cast, or waiting on producers, or waiting on your financing, and you’ve already got the script and the idea and you’re ready to go seven years ago. It’s a frustrating process.Pete: It can be. It can be really frustrating. As I would vent, complain, share about this experience to other people—other filmmakers—the thing I would hear, or I remember hearing, although this was years ago now, was that the reason it wasn’t as enjoyable is because you only had $200,000 and you needed $2 million.And I, as this kid from Ohio, I’m like, I don’t even know really how we got $200,000. I don’t have another person waiting to give me that money. How am I going to get $2 million? Still, this is what people are sort of telling me to do. So then I write another script, I make another pitch deck, I start sending emails, I try to get meetings with production companies and producers.I’m having those meetings and they’re sort of into the script, but sort of not. And I’m leaving those meetings thinking, “They didn’t like it.” And then I’m like, “But they weren’t even cool. Why do I care what these people are saying?” But I have to care because I need this thing from them. And it just wasn’t fun.I felt myself going down the same path I had already gone down, that I know I didn’t really enjoy. And so I stopped. I remember I was walking on Sunset Boulevard back from a coffee shop—another day of “working,” where you’re sending emails and revising things, lookbooks or whatever—and I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I actually doing this?For me, the reason I was doing it was because I loved making videos with my friends when I was 15. And I thought, why can’t I do that now, even though I’m a 30‑something professional filmmaker? Can we make a film like I would have when I was 15? And I recognized that nobody—only I—would stop myself from doing that.So that’s where this new process came from, this new way of making movies, which is: make every decision the way you would have made it if you were 15. And so all this stuff is like: would I have a budget if I was 15? No. Would I have producers? No. Would I have permits? No. Would I have a script? No. I would have a camera and some friends and we would just go have fun. We’d make stuff up, we’d try to make each other laugh, and we would do it until it was time to eat pizza.Vanessa: Amazing.Pete: So that was the experiment I wanted to try. As I was even moving towards that film, which is this movie called Youngstown, it was just made by me. The main shoot was just me and two actors, two friends—everything as small as it could be, all trying to just be for fun.And even as I was moving towards going to shoot it, like a month out, I still felt bad. I still felt like, “This is stupid. This is a waste of my time. This is going to be terrible.” And that’s where this metaphor came from that I have been saying a lot, which is “a table of bubbles.”It was like: this film, this experience is a table made of bubbles. It cannot support anything. Do not put anything on it. Do not put a plate on it; it will just fall through. That’s not what it’s for. So don’t put your hopes, your dreams, your budgets, your expectations on this thing—just appreciate it for the magical object that it is.That is all centered around the belief and experience that pressure does not help creativity. It doesn’t help enjoyment. So essentially, let go. It becomes almost very Buddhist in a way. These things are a table of bubbles. Keep that in your mind as you’re moving through every aspect of making the movie. Try to remember that this is supposed to be for fun. This is just supposed to be enjoyed. If it’s too hard—not that I don’t like working hard—but if it feels like you’re having to force it, it’s not worth it. Protect the bubbles, you know?Vanessa: I love it. And you’ve repeated this method a few times now, to where we’re talking about this amazing new film we just watched.Pete: Yeah.Vanessa: Right?Pete: Right. Well, so after that first movie—even as we were leaving the Airbnb where we stayed—before I’d even edited the footage together, I was like, that was too much fun to not do every year. Even if it didn’t result in a movie, I don’t care. Just that two‑week vacation of play with these friends is such a rewarding, fulfilling experience. I’m going to do this again no matter what.Next year was 2020, so the pandemic got in the way. But then 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, I’ve just done another one and another one. I like to challenge myself. I like to try new things. I like to make sure there’s some sort of progression, whether internally or externally, in my life and my projects. And so they each have nicely progressed in some way.Such that now, I have made a movie the exact same way as I made that first movie, but it just happens to star Charli xcx, it happens to have been filmed in Poland, and it happens to be having its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center.Vanessa: That’s so great! That’s so exciting! So let’s talk about this film with Charli xcx that’s premiering at New Directors/New Films at MoMA. It’s been called—you’ve called it—like a “volcanic experiment in Warsaw.” You made it with a tiny crew over two weeks. And it’s like an anti‑romantic comedy, would you say? It also feels like a story about artists and risk and blowing up your life. Where was the spark of that story for you?Pete: The way all these movies get made is that it does start with a location. If you’ve made things, made films, you can skip ahead of so many logistical problems just by starting with locations that you actually have access to and that ideally you are also inspired by.I was just living in Warsaw at the time. I had been living there for almost a year and wanted to make a movie in this place that I lived. Vanessa: “Why Poland?” I know you lived there for a year, but I don’t know why you chose it. I went for the first time with my doc to the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival in Warsaw and loved it! They truly understand emerging from an authoritarian past and embracing democracy.Pete: The fact that I was living there at the time is the most crucial.I got connected to Poland through American Film Festival in Wroclaw. They have a great lab-like program called “US in Progress” for American indies with films in post to connect with international sales agents and Polish post-houses. In 2021, I was at the festival screening Youngstown and also with Jethica in the US in Progress program. That year I had my own “Before Sunrise” type adventure where I met a woman, extended my trip, took a train to Warsaw, fell in love and started a relationship that would eventually lead me to moving to Warsaw.I also saw this cool opportunity to make a foreign film. I always like to do some sort of genre experiment, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can make a movie that gets to have subtitles. That’s exciting and fun.”So much of the way that I make these things is about using a resource—using your resources, putting yourself in a sandbox and only playing with the sand that is in that box. Warsaw is that. And then my collaborators have become that as well.So Jeremy O. Harris—I had just made a feature with him the previous year. Will Madden is an actor who had been in two of my films before. I always like to bring back people who already know the process because it is quite new and different, and that can be disorienting for people.Then Lena Góra was this cool actress I had met who is from Poland, but also has this really nice Poland–America existence, where a big chunk of her formative years were in the United States. She had made a movie in English in America so she and I had met when it screened at a film festival in Poland. It’s all these nice serendipitous things around.And then, like three months before—I had already decided I was going to make a movie in August in Warsaw, not knowing what it was going to be—and then I met Charli just randomly at a bar in New York when I was hanging out with Jeremy. I described this process that I just described to you, and that was really exciting to her.We didn’t really know it—I didn’t know it—not only that Brat was about to happen, because it was pre‑Brat, but also that she was interested in acting and wanting to expand this area of her creative career, her expression in the world of film. So it was just a project that aligned so nicely for all of us.That’s a thing I really like: when you’re not forcing things, you’re just open to the offerings of the universe, and you’re ready for them, and you move towards them with intention as they present themselves. That can create a really exciting, thrilling, and kind of natural, organic way to create and to experience.It lets you not feel precious about things, because it’s not that you spent years on this script. It’s not that you spent all this money and time. These are resources that make it harder to let go of something when it’s not working. So by keeping things light, it allows you to be literally nimble and also creatively nimble. And that is the strength of making these movies in a small way.You can’t make every movie this way—every movie requires its own approach, essentially. If a movie is going to have a bunch of dangerous stunts and explosions, then you’d better make sure that’s safe. But if your big risk is creative, then the safety is a different kind of safety. It needs to be that there’s not a lot at stake. That’s how you can then allow yourself and your collaborators to feel empowered to take those risks, to make those leaps—by literally telling them, “It’s okay if we don’t make a movie.”So little is being spent. If we just have a really meaningful two‑week adventure together, then that’s fine. That’s our baseline. If a movie is on top of that, the movie is actually the icing.Vanessa: Wow, that is incredible. That’s such a smart, fun way to look at it. Such a brilliant way to look at the creative process and what you can do. I also heard that in that infamous bar meeting, Jeremy O. Harris was talking you up. So you had worked together, he loved your work, and he talked you up to Charli xcx. So cool.You were saying you don’t go in with a fully preconceived or written script, and you’re building it with your collaborators. How did that look on this new film?Pete: It looked, as you describe, the same as on all the other movies. With each film—and it’s funny—as the films have kind of gotten bigger, with more eyes on them, I’ve also sort of challenged myself to have less and less preparation.You would think, “Okay, you should be more prepared,” but with each film I’m kind of like, “How little can I get away with?” That’s also one of the theories I like to test. So in the first movie, there was a full outline. Then the next one it’s like, there’s an outline and a half. At this point, it’s like: at least half of an outline—but that’s all the outline.It’s as simple as: “They arrive at the Airbnb.” That’s one scene. And then: “She goes on a walk.” Scene two. It’s that basic. And there are lots of reasons—there are lots of reasons for basically everything I do. I try to have everything be wearing multiple hats—not just me, but my collaborators and the decisions being made.Vanessa: Just in that simple description of the first two scenes, I already know, having seen your incredible film, how much is actually going on in those scenes. Whether you’re talking about Charli and her boyfriend—it’s Will Madden, did you say is his name?Pete: Yeah.Vanessa: And their interaction, which—the way it played for me, and how I read them as a couple—absolutely played out. It was hinted perfectly. If you had written it in the script, you couldn’t have written it better for the way the story unfolds and their relationship plays out. Because it felt just a little cringe, like there was more love coming from him than her, and she needed to get away and take that walk.She knew more about Warsaw, and then we later understand she chose it. And that walk is very meaningful, and you shoot it in really interesting ways. So I wonder, again, in your process—as you’ve said, you’re wearing so many hats, you’re really the only person shooting it, and you’re thinking about it from all of these different angles at once.Pete: I mean, I’m shooting it. I’m eventually the editor. I’ve shot lots of things—not just my own things—but when I first moved to L.A., one of my ways of paying rent was doing behind‑the‑scenes videos of music videos and commercials. And I just got more and more efficient at the shots I would get, knowing what angles are good, what communicates what.And I am always in dialogue with myself as the editor, where I try, as the cameraman, not to shoot shots that my editor doesn’t want. It makes my life easier when I’m eventually editing the film. So that rinse‑and‑repeat makes me more and more efficient at these things.Vanessa: Yeah.Pete: Yeah, it’s practice—it’s practice and love. And then knowing the different aspects of the art form, basically. By doing it a bunch, by practicing, you learn the tricks. You learn what works, you learn what doesn’t, just by doing it a bunch of times.The journey from the Airbnb to the flower shop, I just did that in real life one day and just paid attention to what things I responded to. Then when we were there, we just did it again. But now we have Charli. Now I have Charli with me. I’m like, “Stand here, walk past this, see this cool blue glass thing—there’s a thing we can do with that.”Vanessa: So you walk through as an actor, too. You’re in their shoes all the time too.Pete: Right. I’m trying to have everything be kind of method. That’s also one of the cool things that comes from shooting the story in order: you really get to just experience the story in real time and the movie in real time. So you physically can respond to the kinds of shots we’ve been doing.“We’ve been doing a lot of close‑ups, we want to feel something else. It’s been too many close‑ups for too long. We haven’t done this kind of move in a while, we haven’t done that kind of move in a while.” You just know that naturally. You don’t actually have to plan for it; you just have to stay present and you will continuously feel it.The reason I don’t write scripts is not that I’m anti‑script; it’s that I’m trying to be really, really efficient. Who needs the script? You write a script—who actually needs the script? My collaborators don’t; they are down to not have it. I don’t need it. We don’t need to present it to financiers—who, often, that’s who you really need to provide it to, because they’re like, “What am I putting this money towards?” We don’t have those. And so, let’s not do it.That can be scary, and it can be like, “What happens if you don’t?” And it’s like, let’s find out. The stakes are low enough that it’s okay. There’s also a very long creative process to filmmaking that is not just the shoot. The storytelling continues in the edit and in the sound design. There are a million tricks that can keep happening. It’s not like “fixing it in post,” it’s just “keep making the movie in post.”Many of the things that don’t make sense on the day, or that you didn’t properly connect, you will have ways later to connect them. It’ll make it seem like you knew what you were doing the whole time. But you don’t need to. And the idea that other people do, on these big movies that have scripts, is a lie. They don’t either. And if they go through the process as if they do, I think that’s what results in the movies that I don’t even like—because they stop engaging through every step of the process and bringing more and more ideas.Vanessa: Yeah. Your metaphor was so evocative—I kind of want to go back to the table made of bubbles. And I don’t mean to overload it, but I wonder whether you think about the different bubbles also including the contributions of your collaborators. Because I’m curious: how do they have these negotiations or conversations with you each day about what their character is going to do and say, and where they’re going to walk, and how?Give me an example of one of your collaborators contributing to all of that—your actors.Pete: It all is happening simultaneously. Even the outline—that outline came to exist via conversations with them. The idea for the whole movie came from conversations with them. It’s all happening together so that they are on board; they are already having input for everything. They are naming their characters. They are coming to understand who their character is at the same time I am—ultimately at the same time the audience is, too.Vanessa: You realize, by the way, every single actor in Los Angeles and New York—wherever they are, actually—is listening to you say this, and they’re like, “How can I meet Pete Ohs? How can I become one of his collaborators? How can I make a movie with him?”Pete: I know.Vanessa: It’s the best way.Pete: So the literal way it looks is: we shoot three scenes a day. We know what the first half of the movie is roughly going to be. It always changes by day three in meaningful but medium‑sized ways—often not huge ways where the whole movie has changed; you can’t go that far. But there will be changes.The things we’re engaging with are just dialogue, which you do the night before or the morning of. I do a first draft of it—I’m just typing that into the Notes app on my phone. You can text that to the group text, and then everyone has that note on their phone. It’s collaborative, so as I update it, it updates. If they want to add to it, they can too.So it just becomes this breakfast‑meeting writers’ room, where we’re both eating breakfast, we’re writing the script, we’re also rehearsing it because this is them going through the lines as well, having their input. Such that by the time we finish breakfast, we have our shooting script, and they already have an intimate understanding of the motivations for why their characters would say these things.Often we’re also writing—and this is the best thing that can happen—you’re writing and conceiving of those scenes basically in the locations where you’re going to shoot. So there’s already an understanding of roughly what the blocking is going to be. We’re already starting so much further down the line of creative decisions that need to get figured out. That just makes the shooting that much more fluid and that much more natural.Vanessa: And I noticed in the credits of your film, all of these actors—don’t they also have producing credits? They are your producers, they’re producing with you, or they have more than one credit, I would say, almost all of them.Pete: I mean, they all have more than one credit. They’re also writers. Jeremy’s a producer as well; he produced the previous movie as well. And then Charli’s a producer as well. A big part of Charli being a producer is: she’s a massive star. So she has that kind of value to bring to it.The thing I also think about, as far as the table of bubbles and what we’re doing, is trying to be aware of what I’m asking from different people. That’s also the reason why the shoots are only two weeks long—because it’s enough time to make a short‑but‑feature film, and a short enough time that basically anyone could fit it into their life.Even if they are an international pop star, they can slot in two weeks. If they are a caterer in L.A., they also can get time off and not lose their job for two weeks. That again makes it not putting too much pressure on their real lives. Not too much is at stake just to go have this experiment, to go and play, and to go do something that might not result in anything, but also might result in something really cool and life‑changing.Vanessa: I actually—this just popped into my head—but now that you’ve had this successful rhythm of one of these movies a year, are you being approached by investors who are like, “Oh, let me get involved with your process”? And are you rejecting financial offers? Will you? How do you handle that?Pete: We have rejected some financial offers, because part of it is: more money, more problems. Help doesn’t always help. Don’t be greedy. Try to be lean.Vanessa: So how are you making a living? This isn’t how you’re making a living?Pete: No, not at all. I’m a freelance editor. I live very frugally. I don’t take vacations. The filmmaking is the vacation. And then if you do a good job of it, you get to go to film festivals, and that becomes a vacation too.Vanessa: Totally how we look at it, too. That’s our life too. Okay, so where can we add to all that you’re sharing? Honestly, it is so inspiring hearing you speak and knowing that you’re having so much joy in the process, and you’re so creative and so collaborative and so productive. And by taking the weight and the pressure off, you enable better work.If you were going to advise young filmmakers—or any filmmakers of any age, really—who are watching this and stuck, and feeling like they want to make movies in that “regular” way too, what would you advise them?Pete: It’s not the first time I’ve had this question. I think often we all are asking each other these types of questions—just like, what advice, what are you learning, what useful thing have you brought back to the village for us to make our lives better?One of the things that I’ve thought about a lot, as I’ve gone down this one‑man‑band approach, is the awareness that this is what all this tech has been for. That’s why we can edit on a laptop. That’s why these cameras shoot like they do. The camera I’m shooting on is from 2012. Cameras have been good enough for a long time.The accessibility of that means something different: it means that movies shouldn’t be made the way they were before. It maybe means that filmmaking can be more like a hobby, in a way that can be good—in a way that I think more people should make movies.We don’t all need to see everyone’s movies. Everyone doesn’t need to see my movie. But the good that can come for humanity from more people getting together without ego, but with creativity and empathy, to explore stories and learn things and maybe stumble across something that should be shared with more people—but maybe it should just be shared amongst your household, your small group.So many good things come from it that I often just want to be encouraging: go make a movie that you don’t even need to post. Just go have fun doing it. Don’t think it’s going to pay your bills or change your life, but you still will be happy that you did it.And don’t do it thinking, “I should max out my credit card.” We don’t live in that world anymore. That’s what’s cool about the technology. You can make a good‑looking movie—not through AI, but through actually engaging with the real world and with real people—and make something that feels fun and cool and is a cool experience for you.And then for the people who are imagining and dreaming about it being a career, a life pursuit in that way, and are at those earlier stages—or at any stage, really—where they’re once again feeling these blocks or challenges or the uphill battle. It’s not that the uphill battle is going to go away. It’s always climbing a mountain to make a movie. People climb mountains for fun. People go climb Mount Everest for no reason except just to enjoy doing it.But the thing I like about how I make movies, and with so little, is that it sort of proves all these things that you don’t actually need. I don’t need a script. I don’t need a sound guy with a boom pole. I don’t need a first AD. I don’t need a schedule. I don’t need to storyboard. I don’t need hair and makeup. I don’t need an art department.It doesn’t mean that we don’t value those people when they’re needed. But you don’t need them just to make a movie. So as you’re conceiving your film, and if you’re feeling frustrated that you can’t just go make something, I want you to question all the stuff that you’re told you need just to make it—because you very much might not.Try doing it without it, and then finding out that you actually do need it. That’s why it’s like, keep the stakes low so it’s okay that you fail. But if you test this theory—“What if I don’t? What happens if I don’t have that stuff?”—and it still works, then you’re a superhero. Because you can do this thing without all this. You can jump out of a plane without a parachute. How freeing is that? How liberating?Vanessa: Those are brilliant last words for this. And we did hit the 32‑minute mark, except I feel like I just want to hear what you shot on, what you edit with, and how you do your score. Because if you don’t have money but you’ve got this excellent sound design and score, how did you pull that off?Pete: I very much believe everyone is creative, and if you simplify things, you can become like a razor—you can become like a slicing razor. It doesn’t need to be a big thing ever.So I’m shooting—I’m using basically nothing. I’m shooting on a hacked Canon 5D Mark III. This is just the camera I’ve owned since 2012. It shoots 1080 only. The hack allows it to shoot RAW, which means more color depth for the color grade. But it’s not necessary. Love and Work we shot on the same camera and we didn’t use the hack; it was just normal 5D. Again, that’s good enough. And “good enough” is still good.For sound, they’re just wearing Sennheiser G3 lavs running into a Zoom H4n that I’ve owned since 2012—just the original one, the crappy one we all bought for like $350 in 2011. I just monitor it with earbuds. You don’t have to ride levels; you just have to make sure it’s not peaking.I’m editing in Premiere Pro on a MacBook Pro. The way I do music is—when I started my career, my journey, I was doing a lot of music stuff. I loved music. Music was my identity: going to shows. I had a band in high school, I had a band in college, I had a music blog in the early aughts.Vanessa: You’re totally confirming my theory that good directors have good musical taste and are musical. I think they’re very connected, the two art forms.Pete: And so I have all these friends, these musician friends that I have collaborated with, made music videos with. It’s really fun to get to do that step of the process with them. But the first feature we made, we just did the score ourselves—me and my co‑director Andrea Sisson. She is very creative; she’s not necessarily a trained musician. I’m also not a trained musician. But if you just simplify: a score can just be the sound of, like, you know…(Taps a mug) If you actually committed to that, and you did your whole score as tapping on a coffee mug—that actually would be completely sick.As opposed to, it doesn’t need to be orchestral. It doesn’t need to be any of those things. Nothing needs to be anything. You just need to be creative, engage, think about what it means. What does it mean for the score to be tapping on a coffee mug? Hopefully, there’s some connection to the movie. Hopefully it’s about an office worker who’s addicted to caffeine or whatever. And then it’s like, okay, that’s an amazing idea. But also it could be something equally simple.So yes, music and sound are one of the tools in your toolkit to tell a story, but it doesn’t need to be John Williams. Often when it’s trying to be, it sucks. When you’re trying to do something you’re not, it feels bad. You don’t really reach that. But if you just not even tried it and had gone your own direction, it becomes something way more interesting and exciting—to me, anyway, and I think to a lot of other people as well.Vanessa: Yeah, I love this. Incredible. And let’s remind people: they can see your new film—Erupcja—in theaters starting this Friday, April 17. How else—how can people follow you, find you, see your movies?Pete: So it’s screening at New Directors/New Films April 11th and 12th in New York. It’s also going to start coming out in theaters the following week. It’ll be in L.A. and New York that weekend, and will be in Chicago on April 24th. That’s certainly the biggest release rollout of any of my films so far, which is very exciting.I was just looking at the website where it starts to list the theaters it’s going to. It’s coming to Columbus, Ohio. It’s coming to Oklahoma City and Tulsa and Minneapolis and all these places. Somehow it got into a bunch of AMC theaters, which is cool.So I was just considering it’s like, yes, it has Charli in it, but it’s also a movie shot on a hacked 5D Mark III. Something about that is really funny to me, but also cool and exciting.Vanessa: Excellent and cool and exciting. Thank you so much. And we all can’t wait for this movie to come out and share it with everyone. Thanks for talking.PETE OHS | DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER Hailed by Indiewire as “a rising filmmaker well worth the attention,” Pete works as a director, producer, writer, editor and cinematographer. He has produced and directed five feature films in the past five years. In 2025, he was at Sundance with OBEX, a fantasy adventure feature he produced, cowrote and shot. This was followed by THE TRUE BEAUTY OF BEING BITTEN BY A TICK, a genre-bending horror satire he directed, co-wrote and shot premiering at SXSW.A Film By Pete OhsStarring Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Will Madden and Jeremy O. HarrisOpens in New York and Los Angeles on April 17th Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Mascaro to dive into the dystopian yet deeply life-affirming world of The Blue Trail, his genre-blending new film about 77-year-old Tereza, an elderly heroine who refuses to quietly disappear from a society that literally ships its seniors away in “wrinkle wagons.” Mascaro traces how the film grew from the late-life creativity of his own grandmother into a playful, visionary journey through the Amazon, where blue-snail visions, road-movie textures, and speculative politics collide to imagine aging as an awakening rather than an ending. Along the way, he and Vanessa explore how Brazilian cinema is reimagining the future, why centering older women on screen is a radical narrative choice, and how atmosphere, sound, and performance (including Denise Weinberg and Rodrigo Santoro) become tools for empathy, resistance, and dreaming new futures together. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

Fiercely independent journalist Amy Goodman has spent three decades holding the powerful to account, from war zones to the Democracy Now! newsroom, and in Steal This Story, Please! Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal turn their lens on her radical experiment in truly independent media. We talk about how their new film captures journalism’s power and peril in an era of media consolidation and authoritarian politics, what it means to make art as a form of resistance, and why Amy’s Jewish family newspaper, 9/11 reporting, and “trickle-up journalism” philosophy still model a different way of doing news. Along the way, Tia and Carl reflect on their own path from Bowling for Columbine and Trouble the Water to The Janes and now Steal This Story, Please!, and how they’re teaming with the Fall of Freedom campaign and independent outlets nationwide to defend the First Amendment and keep critical reporting alive. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this intimate vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with actor, painter, and now bestselling memoirist Ione Skye about her book Say Everything, tracing how a life lived “inside a story” has shifted into real‑time presence and self‑forgiveness. They explore Ione’s evolving relationship with her first husband Adam Horovitz and how recurring dreams of him changed as she wrote, the lifelong imprint of her absent father Donovan and the bittersweet reconciliation that recast them as “two wounded poets,” and why so many of her great loves have been musicians. Ione reflects on early fame in River’s Edge, Say Anything, and Gas Food Lodging, why her career didn’t follow the expected Winona‑style trajectory, and how she now sees herself as much a writer and director as an actor. The conversation also dives into rock‑and‑roll patriarchy, her honest reckoning with “serial cheating,” and the pressures our culture places on marriage versus the sustaining power of creative community, from her mother’s legendary Wilton Place to the Weirder Together universe she now builds with Ben Lee. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with writer‑director Bart Layton about his new L.A. noir thriller Crime 101, exploring how a Don Winslow short story became a “ripping yarn” about status, corruption, and the haves and have‑nots in contemporary Los Angeles. They dig into Layton’s documentary‑driven research process, the visual language inspired by 1970s cinema and Gordon Parks, and how he crafted complex characters for Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Halle Berry that both honor and subvert classic noir archetypes. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation for International Women’s Day, Vanessa Hope speaks with authors Anna Malaika Tubbs (The Three Mothers, Erased) and Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her, The Resilience Myth, All We Want Is Everything) about why authoritarians fear and target women and democracy, and how American patriarchy is rooted in the country’s founding. They trace how Black women and mothers have long been cast as “foils” to the system even as they drive the deepest democratic change, unpack the intimate link between unequal family dynamics and strongman politics, and connect petromasculinity, militarism, and today’s wars for resources to the policing of women’s bodies and reproduction. The conversation also explores the radicalizing role of technology for young men versus the leadership of young women across social movements, considers what it means to dismantle male supremacy in practice, and ends with a hopeful vision: recognizing that we are already part of a multi‑generational struggle to build real democracy, learning from global feminist gains, and imagining institutions and constitutions that finally vest power in all the people. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with director Craig Renaud and producer–photojournalist Juan Arredondo about their Oscar‑nominated short Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, exploring how Craig’s journey to bring his brother’s body home from Ukraine becomes the present‑tense spine for a film that interweaves two decades of verité reporting from Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Honduras, and beyond. They discuss the promise Craig and Brent made to keep filming even if one of them was killed, the emotional and ethical difficulty of turning the camera onto their own family story, and the painstaking editorial work of digging through vast archives and Brent’s journals to find moments that reveal his compassion and method. Juan reflects on bringing a frontline photojournalist’s eye to the film, their shared commitment to showing the humanity and relationships behind “clinical” news images, and how partnerships with the Committee to Protect Journalists and the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation shaped the film as a tribute to all war reporters while also supporting the next generation with safety and training resources. Together they talk about why the story belongs in a short, how sound and silence convey the true weight of war, how the Brent Renaud Foundation aims to mentor young filmmakers, and how powerful audience reactions—from veterans to families of killed journalists—have transformed their own grief and underscored the urgency of journalism at a time when truth is under attack. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with director Ryan White and producer Jessica Hargrave about their Oscar‑nominated documentary Come See Me in the Light, which follows poet Andrea Gibson and partner Megan Falley as they navigate a terminal cancer diagnosis, queer love, and creative collaboration. They trace the film’s origin to Tig Notaro’s unlikely pitch for a “funny” poetry‑and‑cancer documentary, describe arriving at Andrea’s Colorado home with no prior meeting, and unpack the deep ethical considerations of filming through such an intimate end‑of‑life period. Ryan and Jessica explain how they turned the house—and occasional hospital visits—into a visually rich, mostly verité cinematic space, why they built the emotional arc around Andrea’s live performance and extensive poetry archive rather than interviews, and how editor Bernice Chavez and their team used specific poems to carry biography, humor, and grief in surprising ways. They also reflect on Andrea and Megan’s own ability to alchemize devastating news into philosophical insight and jokes, how that rhythm shaped the film’s balance of heartbreak and levity, and how making this independently—before Apple acquired it out of Sundance—felt like a “life‑changing” experience that transformed their understanding of intimacy, grief, and what it means to live fully in the face of loss. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with director Joshua Seftel about his Oscar‑nominated short All the Empty Rooms, which follows CBS reporter Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they visit the preserved bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. Joshua describes how a single image—a toothpaste tube with its cap left off—convinced him this could be a powerful film about absence and presence, and why he chose to avoid showing violence, naming shooters, or even using the word “gun,” instead focusing entirely on rooms, objects, and the families’ memories. He explains the intimate, low‑impact way they filmed, the photo books they created as gifts for each family, the minimalist score that “holds” viewers without telling them how to feel, and the emotional impact of the project—from helping grieving parents like the Muhlbergers finally move house to changing the minds of gun‑rights supporters and even a Sandy Hook denier who saw the film. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Brazilian writer‑director Kleber Mendonça Filho about his Oscar‑nominated film The Secret Agent, exploring how an intimate character study becomes a layered portrait of Brazil under military dictatorship and its haunting echoes in the Bolsonaro era. Kleber discusses drawing on his archival work in Pictures of Ghosts, the iconic Veraneio police car and other precise period details, and the tense, Western‑inflected opening sequence that reveals Wagner Moura’s quietly heroic protagonist through his reaction to absurd violence and petty corruption. They delve into the collaboration with DP Evgenia Alexandrova and the city of Recife as a living character, the film’s dense, radio‑worthy soundscape and bold music choices, and how the 1979 amnesty law—and a state‑imposed culture of forgetting—shaped the film’s structure, its tragic final movements, and its urgent resonance for countries everywhere now trending authoritarian. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Oscar-nominated co-directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman about The Alabama Solution, exploring how an initial visit to film a prison revival in Alabama evolved into a six-year collaboration with incarcerated organizers exposing a deadly, intentionally opaque prison system. They discuss the ethical stakes of working inside an authoritarian structure, the decision to center incarcerated men as co-authors using contraband cell phone footage, and the craft choices that give the film a propulsive, thriller-like shape without reducing a humanitarian crisis to true-crime entertainment. The pair reflect on building deep trust with subjects like Sandy Ray, navigating the risks their whistleblowing participants face, and the creative friction that shaped the edit, while also describing the film’s growing impact in Alabama and beyond as a tool for public awareness, legal advocacy, and collective action against mass incarceration. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this Hopeful Conversation, filmmaker and host Vanessa Hope speaks with Oscar-nominated directing duo Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni about their acclaimed documentary Cutting Through Rocks, which follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to a rural village council in northwestern Iran, and the ways her leadership reshapes her community’s ideas about gender, power, and possibility. Together they unpack their long-term vérité process over seven years of filming, the trust-building that allowed such intimate access, and the evolving themes of visibility, child marriage, and education that emerged as they followed Sara’s bond with her father, her motorcycle, and the young girls who see her as a role model. They also discuss how their own love story unfolded during production, how state pressure and gender-policing shaped both their subject’s life and their ability to work, and why Cutting Through Rocks resonates with audiences worldwide at a moment of backlash against women’s rights, even as the film struggles to find sustainable distribution in the current cinema ecosystem. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation, Ukrainian director, novelist, and war correspondent Mstyslav Chernov reflects on 2000 Meters to Andriivka as a deeply personal follow‑up to 20 Days in Mariupol, shifting from documenting unbearable loss to showing how ordinary people who’ve lost everything fight back for their homes, memories, and agency. He describes choosing Andriivka—a village and forest that mirror his own childhood landscapes—as a symbolic microcosm of the war, and explains how the film’s helmet‑cam immersion matters less for its combat than for the fragile, intimate moments with soldiers joking about cigarettes, family, and broken toilets under artillery fire. Mstyslav talks about walking the thin line between honoring courage and sacrifice and insisting that war is a nightmare that should not exist, arguing that truly anti‑war cinema makes viewers feel individual lives rather than abstractions like borders or casualty numbers. He and Vanessa speak about the surreal whiplash between awards‑season red carpets and front‑line trenches, the erosion of faith in international justice, and his belief that while films alone cannot stop a war, they can secure a form of historical justice by preserving how events really unfolded. He closes by stressing that every citizen eventually faces a choice about their country’s future, and by reaffirming his commitment to keep telling war stories—through documentaries, scripted films, and literature—as an act of resistance against propaganda, forgetfulness, and what he calls a world “on fire.” Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

This Hopeful conversation centers on Mr. Nobody Against Putin as both an undercover whistleblower document and an unexpectedly funny, emotionally intimate portrait of Russian primary school teacher–turned–co-director Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, tracing how his state-mandated patriotic videos inside a small-town school become a secret act of resistance and, eventually, an Oscar-, BAFTA-, and PGA–nominated film; the directors dig into the ethical and security risks Pasha faced filming in Putin’s Russia, the long-distance trust and encrypted collaboration they shared, the specifically school-based mechanics of indoctrination and institutional capture, the Russian cultural norm of “inner emigration” that shaped Pasha’s voice, and the film’s unexpectedly humorous, universal resonance for audiences confronting rising authoritarianism in places from Hungary to the United States. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation, filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir delves into her documentary The Perfect Neighbor, an unflinching exploration of gun violence, racialized fear, and the complex fabric of community. She reflects on her personal connection to the story and the ethical and emotional challenges of working with police body camera footage. Gandbhir describes how the film seeks to invert the usual narrative by centering the voices of neighbors and those most affected by the tragedy. She underscores the role of “grief work” in her creative process and critiques Stand Your Ground laws, inviting viewers to question how fear and accountability shape their own communities. The conversation also highlights her broader body of work, including the Oscar-nominated The Devil is Busy, and the mission of her production company, Message Pictures, to tell stories that spark justice and empathy. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

Director Kaouther Ben Hania in less than one minute speaks to why she made her now Oscar and BAFTA nominated international feature film, THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation, Vanessa Hope interviews Petra Costa, director of 'Apocalypse in the Tropics,' the feature documentary which was Oscar-shortlisted and has now been BAFTA nominated and the Oscar nominated 'The Edge of Democracy.' They discuss the themes of democracy, theocracy, and the intertwining of personal narratives with political realities in Brazil. Petra shares her journey in filmmaking, the challenges of accessing political figures, and the importance of visual storytelling in capturing the essence of her subjects. The conversation highlights the global implications of Brazil's political landscape and the hope for democracy amid rising authoritarianism. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation with Vanessa Hope, Mascha Schilinski discusses her Oscar-shortlisted film, 'Sound of Falling,' exploring themes of memory, trauma, and the unique visual language of the film. She shares insights into the casting process, particularly working with young actors, and the significance of the film's title. Masha also reflects on the collaborative process with her cinematographer and the challenges faced during production, emphasizing the importance of capturing the essence of memory and emotion through film. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation, Vanessa Hope and Brandon Kramer explore how Holding Liat follows Brandon Kramer’s own relatives after Israeli-American teacher Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband are kidnapped on October 7, tracing the family’s frantic advocacy in Washington, D.C., and their emotional fractures over politics, grief, and the weaponization of victimhood narratives. Brandon discusses the ethical and emotional challenges of filming close family in real time during an ongoing crisis, balancing his role as a supportive relative with his responsibilities as a documentarian, and using a single family as a lens to reveal the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict’s complexity. Brandon describes how the film resists reductive binaries, includes perspectives like Yehuda’s peace activism and his brother Joel’s critical historical framing, and ultimately centers Liat’s own post-captivity call for coexistence and empathy toward Palestinians, which shapes the film’s ending. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation, director Kaouther Ben Hania discusses her film 'The Voice of Hind Rajab,' which centers on the urgent and emotional story of a young girl trapped under fire in Gaza. The film explores themes of ethical filmmaking, the role of women in conflict, and the power of cinema as a tool for change. Ben Hania reflects on her creative process, the importance of real recordings, and the need for accountability in the face of violence. The discussion highlights the emotional weight of storytelling and the responsibility of filmmakers to honor the voices of those affected by conflict. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation with Vanessa Hope, Sasha Molochnikov discusses his Oscar‑shortlisted short film 'Extremist,' which dramatizes the real‑life case of Russian artist and political prisoner Sasha Skochilenko, jailed for replacing supermarket price tags with anti‑war messages about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He reflects on shooting in exile in Riga for safety, portraying the absurd brutality of “extremism” and “fake news” laws, and exploring everyday complicity through the neighbor who reports the protagonist. Sasha also talks about working closely with his lead actor on the risky courtroom speech, the love story between the two women as a vivid counterpoint to state oppression, and how omnipresent propaganda shapes characters’ lives. Finally, he touches on the film’s surreal ending, the support of executive producer Ben Stiller, and his plans for an expanded feature weaving together multiple stories of Russian political prisoners and dissent. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

Our next panel is this Sunday, February 1st:Watch The Film: Jan 28th - Feb 1stRSVP: https://watch.eventive.org/togetherfilmsus/play/68ed0fc3eb1ac02b56e6f2fdGlobal governance is at a crossroads. This conversation will imagine what a more representative international order could look like — one that includes Taiwan and other marginalized countries. Experts will debate pathways for reform.This is the fourth installment in our six-part Protecting Democracy series with Together Films, featuring Invisible Nation, available for several days each month alongside special vHopeful Conversations—now on Hope for Film and Substack TV. We hope you enjoy, and thank you for watching, reading, and sharing.In this January conversation, I speak with journalist–author Chris Horton and scholar–activist Wen Liu about Taiwan as a frontline case study in global information warfare and democratic resilience. They discuss how China’s unprecedented propaganda campaign seeks to convince the world that Taiwan is not a country, shapes international media language, and fuels both external dehumanization and internal defeatism. They explore Taiwan’s complex identity beyond simplistic “chip superpower” or “weak victim” narratives, tracing its hard‑won democratization, the U.S.’s contradictory role, and the ways Chinese disinformation exploits Cold War habits on both the right and the left. Together, they argue that defending truth, democracy, and Taiwan’s sovereignty requires everyday global solidarity, critical unlearning, and an ongoing willingness to confront propaganda rather than cede the field to it.transcript lightly edited for clarity and brevityVanessa Hope: Hello, I’m Vanessa Hope, director of Invisible Nation, and I’m very excited to be joined tonight by two incredibly bright authors and journalists who appear in the film. I was fortunate to meet and interview them in Taiwan, where they’re joining us from. Together we’re going to discuss promoting facts and truths, which could not be more important in this age of information warfare that threatens democracy worldwide.First, Chris Horton is a longtime foreign correspondent who has reported from China and Taiwan for decades for just about every leading news publication you can think of. Most recently, he’s the author of the brand‑new must‑read (or listen‑to) book Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival. Hi, Chris, thanks for being here.Chris Horton: Hi, Vanessa, thanks for having us.Vanessa: While we’re on your book, it comes out in the United States on February 10th, but I’ve already listened to the entire audiobook—which is awesome. The audiobook is available, and the book is already out in some countries. Can you say where it’s available now?Chris: It’s available worldwide outside of the U.S. It’ll be released in the U.S. on February 10th, but the audio, Kindle, and ebook versions are already on Amazon and other platforms.Vanessa: And Wen Liu is a prolific Taiwanese scholar, writer, and activist who most recently authored the must‑read Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility Between Assimilation and Oppression. She is also the chairperson of Kuma Academy on Civil Defense Education. Wen, thank you so much for joining us.Wen Liu: Good to see you, Vanessa.Vanessa: It’s great to see you. I feel like you’re traveling all the time—book tour, lectures, what have you been doing?Wen: Yes, I’ve been to the U.S. a couple of times for the book and for civil defense–related work.Vanessa: Kuma Academy appears in Invisible Nation—we filmed there. Do you want to explain what Kuma Academy is?Wen: Sure. We are a grassroots‑funded civil defense education school. We provide workshops to teach regular civilians in Taiwan what information warfare is, how to counter China’s narratives, and how to better understand international relations. We also teach civilians basic medical first response and how to react to different crisis situations, particularly war.Vanessa: I don’t want to make you sound too young, but you have a wonderful comment in Invisible Nation: President Tsai Ing‑wen was the first president you voted for. So all you’ve known is this incredible first female president. Is that right?Wen: Yes.Vanessa: Lucky you. We’re never getting a female president in the United States—at least not in my lifetime, I don’t think.We’re living through an awful era of information warfare. It shapes elections and wars and public perception—from Taiwan to Venezuela to the United States. Truth feels increasingly fragile, especially when a president names his social media app “Truth Social” and it’s full of lies.Why is Taiwan such a critical case study for understanding how truth is contested globally? This is for both of you; either one can start.Wen: I think Taiwan is a really important case because we’ve experienced some of the heaviest information attacks from China. It’s not only information warfare—it’s combined with actual military aggression.During the most recent military drill by China at the end of 2025, our government found almost 20,000 pieces of disinformation tied to that exercise. So it’s both a psychological attack and a misrepresentation of China’s military capacity and Taiwan’s capacity. China has been trying to instill defeatism or fatalism among the Taiwanese population—the idea that our government is weak, our military is weak, so our only option is to surrender.That’s a very dangerous narrative that we try to counter. Internationally, it’s also important to challenge simplistic views. People often say, “We need to care about Taiwan because it has chips,” or “We need to care about Taiwan because it’s weak and a victim of China.” Both are too simple.Taiwan is neither super strong nor super weak. It’s neither colonizer nor simply colonized. We should think about Taiwan in a complex way. For example, Taiwan is now the seventh‑largest exporter to the U.S. We have a big economy, even though people think of us as a small island. We do produce the world’s most advanced chips. But we’ve also experienced severe military aggression. All of those facts coexist.So producing a complex, humanizing narrative about Taiwan is really important right now.Vanessa: Thank you. Through your guidance and Chris’s guidance while making Invisible Nation, I tried very hard to avoid those binaries and reductive narratives: that you should only care about Taiwan because of semiconductors, or only because it’s militarily weak. I wanted to say, “Hello, can we please care about human beings and have global solidarity?”Chris, in addition to your amazing book—which I’ve just finished and love, it’s a must‑read—you also just published a piece in The Observer tackling Taiwan and Venezuela. How do you look at Taiwan’s information environment?Chris: I think Wen did a great job summarizing the domestic side of information warfare. There’s also the external, global‑facing side, and there’s overlap. China is running one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in human history: convincing the world that a country is not a country.You have to hand it to them; they’ve done a pretty good job. A lot of people think: “Taiwan? It’s part of China, right? And they want to leave?” Or, “It’s like Hong Kong, right?” It’s just not. There are no PLA boots on the ground here. The People’s Republic of China has never controlled Taiwan for a single second.One thing often overlooked is how much of the Chinese narrative has been absorbed and internalized by international media. When I moved here from Hong Kong in 2015, the first article I wrote for a major American publication went through their style process. An editor told me, “Our style is a little weird when it comes to Taiwan. We can’t say ‘Taiwanese people.’”I had naively written “Taiwanese people.” I asked, “Well, what do we call them if not that?” The answer was: “The people of Taiwan” or “the people on Taiwan.” Otherwise we’d be “suggesting it’s a country.” I eventually got that publication to change its style, and now everyone says “Taiwanese people”; it’s fine. But that was only ten years ago.It reflects a lingering Cold War mentality—a hangover from calling Taiwan “Free China.” Information warfare has always been vital to war: the Marco Polo Bridge incident before Japan’s invasion of China; the Gulf of Tonkin incident before the Vietnam War; Colin Powell at the UN claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Historically, people have felt the need to jump through those hoops.What’s interesting with Venezuela is that there hasn’t even been much of an information‑warfare campaign; it’s just, “We’re going to do this.” China isn’t taking that approach with Taiwan. They want their public on board—and many Chinese people I’ve met think Taiwan should remain independent—but they also need the foreign audience to believe two things: first, that nothing can stop China; and second, “Why should we stop them? Aren’t people in Taiwan just Chinese?”The external campaign dehumanizes Taiwan by framing it as “the Taiwan issue” or “the Taiwan question.” It’s designed to make the world treat this not as an attack on 23.5 million people, but as some abstract internal question. That’s part of why this is such an important case study.Vanessa: After a decade reporting from Taiwan and witnessing cycles of military pressure, disinformation, and diplomatic isolation, what distinguishes China’s information warfare against Taiwan from more familiar forms of propaganda? You’ve addressed much of that.Chris: I would add that with international media: newsrooms really need to rethink their Taiwan style—the way they talk about Taiwan. Saying “mainland China” in a Hong Kong context is fine; Hong Kong is an island and part of the PRC, so the rest is literally the mainland. But Taiwan is not part of the PRC.When we say “Taiwan and mainland China,” it feeds the narrative that Taiwan completes China—that there’s “mainland China” and the missing piece is Taiwan. We need to think about the words we use. When we call Taiwan “the island” instead of “the country,” we diminish its sovereignty and democracy.Most American media have no problem calling North Korea or Iran “countries,” even though they’re adversarial to our government. Yet Taiwan, a friend and democracy, is denied the label. That should change.Vanessa: That was a critical, essential point in your book, related to the title Ghost Nation: China uses information warfare to isolate and marginalize Taiwan and prevent people from calling it a country—dehumanizing them by not naming them as they are, but that is entirely furthered by liberal democracies and countries worldwide who should stand together and speak truth but instead, parrot that propaganda.Since our audience may not know Taiwan’s history, I’ll just say: when the U.S. used to call Taiwan “Free China” under Chiang Kai‑shek’s Republic of China government, it was a military dictatorship. It wasn’t free, and it wasn’t China. Taiwan only became democratic through democratization driven by Taiwanese people—after the U.S. left. It wasn’t thanks to U.S. “democracy promotion.” Taiwan became a democracy on its own.Chris: The U.S.–Taiwan relationship is complicated. In 1947, the U.S. basically supported and gave political cover to Chiang Kai‑shek’s Kuomintang (KMT), which had been in Taiwan for only two years after Japan’s surrender. We supplied arms and political backing while they slaughtered a generation of potential Taiwanese leaders.But now, we’re also the only country openly supporting Taiwan so it can defend itself. So we’ve been a bad friend and a good friend at different times. There’s a lot more that other democracies, in the West and in Asia, could do to preserve stability in the Taiwan Strait and defend a fellow democracy at a time when democracies everywhere are under threat.Vanessa: That’s a great segue to a question for Wen about the grassroots civil‑defense work you’re doing, aimed at whole‑of‑society resilience. How does disinformation affect people emotionally and psychologically, not just politically?Wen: To echo Chris, one of the biggest disinformation narratives internationally is China’s “peaceful rise.” That term comes directly from the CCP. Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen tremendous economic and military growth and a bigger global footprint for China. The party keeps saying this is not about changing the international order—that China will remain a partner to liberal democracies and just wants trade.But in reality, it’s not just economic. China has dramatically expanded its military, with much of the budget aimed at Taiwan and other neighboring countries. It wants to be a regional hegemony in the Asia‑Pacific.The idea of a “peaceful rise” has influenced generations of Taiwanese to think of China as a negotiable partner. My generation grew up in the 1990s, seeing the world as globalized, peaceful, with multipolar cultural exchange. That shifted dramatically after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. He cracked down internally, then embraced “wolf warrior” diplomacy externally. Human‑rights abuses in China got much worse, then we saw the crackdown in Hong Kong—democracy protesters jailed or exiled.So China’s rise has fundamentally changed cross‑strait relations and its posture towards the world. Taiwanese people feel that pressure first.Research in Taiwan shows that about 60% of Taiwanese are consistently willing to defend Taiwan if China attacks militarily. That number has been quite stable. But there’s also a consistent 20–30% who are more likely to favor surrender under military pressure.That undecided 20–30% is influenced by multiple factors: whether international allies are willing to help, whether the U.S. is willing to assist, whether other democracies stand with us. That support significantly boosts morale.But within that group, psychological defeatism plays a big role. Kuma Academy’s work explains modern warfare: it’s not only about counting tanks and ships. It’s also about what we call “whole‑of‑society resilience”—how resilient our critical infrastructure is (energy, food, medical supplies) and how resilient our cultural identity is.In my research, I’ve found that information warfare isn’t just about individual true or false stories; it’s about the narrative built over time. If information keeps reinforcing the ideas that Taiwanese are not a people, Taiwan is not a country, and China is undefeatable, then you can’t counter decades of propaganda with a few fact‑checks.Finally, there’s the Cold War dynamic. I spent about 20 years in U.S. academia. In progressive circles there, there’s a tendency to side with the Chinese narrative: Taiwan is seen as a sub‑colony of U.S. empire, so people feel they shouldn’t support it. They argue that human rights and democracy in Taiwan are just Western myths.So they delegitimize Taiwanese histories of democratization and identity formation, while romanticizing China as a socialist alternative to U.S. hegemony. That Cold War mentality and fantasy about Maoism are still very prevalent in some progressive spaces.Vanessa: Absolutely. And just to underscore: when the U.S. called Taiwan “Free China,” it wasn’t free. It only became free after the U.S. left and Taiwanese people themselves pushed democratization.Right now in the U.S., there’s a lot of disillusionment and danger of losing any sense of hope or resilience. We could not need Taiwan’s example more: we have a lot of democracy work to do here. But the progressive left often sees the U.S. as the big villain—worse than China—and sometimes doesn’t even recognize China’s authoritarianism, treating it as just an economic force. That makes them fail to see Taiwan and hear Taiwanese voices.Chris: Taiwan is “inconvenient.” It clashes with a lot of preconceived notions, especially on the left. Taiwan is actually pretty conservative in some ways, but in an Asian context it’s one of the most progressive countries around. It was first in Asia to legalize same‑sex marriage in 2019, and the first to elect a woman leader who isn’t connected to power by blood or marriage.It still has the death penalty and harsh drug laws—there’s room for improvement—but overall it’s as progressive as Asia gets. It should be a darling of progressives elsewhere. But because of China’s narrative about the “century of humiliation,” Taiwan is framed not as a progressive success, but as an unresolved shameful fragment of Chinese history, unredeemed territory. That’s how many on the left see it, often unconsciously—and it’s just not accurate.Vanessa: Yes! And now a question or sequence of questions that come up constantly in casual conversation, especially after Venezuela and the visible closeness between Putin and Xi: “China is going to invade Taiwan, right? It’s going to happen soon, right? And there’s nothing anyone can do about it, right?”How do you answer that when people throw it at you? Maybe your answers can help others.Chris: The effectiveness of Chinese disinformation is impressive. People take it as gospel that Xi Jinping can just take Taiwan whenever he wants. But why hasn’t he? Why is he still building up the PLA Navy? Why all the drills?What was the last successful major military operation the PLA carried out? Tiananmen Square—an operation in their own capital in 1989. Before that, China invaded Vietnam in the late 1970s, got their nose bloodied, and retreated.They bang drums and thump their chests about being ready to take Taiwan. But if they actually did it, it would be bigger than the Normandy landings in World War II. Taiwan is not small; it’s a large, mountainous island of 23.5 million people, most of whom would be furious at an invasion. To take it, you’d need the largest amphibious invasion in human history.The idea that China can just flip a switch and do this is a fantasy. But for many people it’s psychologically easier to believe “there’s nothing we can do.” That defeatism is exactly what Chinese propaganda seeks to create.Wen: I agree. It’s also basically impossible to “kidnap” Taiwan’s president as a shortcut. Our military capacity is quite strong, and we’re a democracy. If you remove the president, you still have the vice president, the premier, other executive leaders. It’s not a way to defeat Taiwan’s democracy.Vanessa: Is there any kind of deal you can imagine Xi Jinping might accept that would get him to back off Taiwan? Obviously, the facts, truths, and will of the Taiwanese people don’t seem to move him. Is there any pressure or arrangement that might persuade him he can have all the trade he wants, maybe some international prestige for doing the right thing, and no need to aim missiles at Taiwan?Wen: I think the real pressure on Xi would come from inside China. International partners can help by making clear that attacking Taiwan is not the best option. If he attacks and Taiwan defends itself, we would likely declare independence immediately. In that scenario, seven decades of disinformation about Taiwan could collapse, and Taiwan would be formally free—that’s a huge cost for him.Xi’s main concern is regime legitimacy. He’s already on his third term, heading toward a fourth, and he needs some kind of historical legacy to silence opposition inside the party and society. It’s similar to Putin: he can’t just stop the war in Ukraine because he needs to sustain the narrative that the West is Russia’s enemy and democracy doesn’t work for Russians.Chris: Xi and the CCP’s legitimacy rests on two main things since Tiananmen: economic growth and “national rejuvenation”—becoming a respected, even feared power. When Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi recently said that a conflict in Taiwan would likely require mobilization of Japan’s military, China freaked out, though she was stating the obvious. Taiwan is as close to Japan as it is to China or the Philippines.The party also recently rolled out a new narrative that the CCP—not the KMT and the U.S.—played a decisive role in defeating Japan in World War II. That’s simply not true. The ROC and U.S. armies did the bulk of the fighting.When people start learning facts like that, they can’t unlearn them. Constructing a fake reality is a lot of work; a single unstoppable fact can crack it. The CCP knows that, which is why they react so ferociously to any hint of Taiwanese sovereignty anywhere in the world, no matter how small.Vanessa: Both of you remind me of what Xi did with foreign correspondents. There used to be many Beijing‑based reporters for major outlets. In one of his crackdowns, he essentially forced a lot of them out. Many relocated to Taiwan, which is number one in press freedom in Asia. That echoes what Putin did before invading Ukraine—kick out independent journalists so there’s no more truth.Chris, can you remind us what was going on when Xi reduced foreign media presence?Chris: He didn’t kick everyone out completely—that’s the clever part. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and others were allowed to keep maybe one reporter each in Beijing, where they previously had several. So China can say, “We didn’t expel everyone, look, they’re still here,” while drastically shrinking coverage.This really escalated at the beginning of COVID, when China was on the defensive. It started when the Wall Street Journal opinion section ran a column calling China the “sick man of Asia,” a phrase with ugly historical connotations. I can understand why people found it offensive. But there’s a firewall between opinion and reporting. Punishing news reporters for an op‑ed they had nothing to do with was the mechanism.Vanessa: There’s that Chinese saying: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.”Wen: Sha ji jing hou. (杀鸡儆猴 (simplified) / 殺雞儆猴 (traditional))Vanessa: Exactly.Wen, earlier you mentioned internal pressure on Xi coming from the Chinese people. Could you say more about that and what international actors could do pre‑war, instead of only reacting afterward?Wen: Talking to diasporic Chinese intellectuals, many feel that sanctions on Chinese elites before a war—like what wasn’t done in Russia—could be much more effective than sanctions imposed afterward. These elites form a tight circle that could, in theory, influence Xi’s decisions.If war does break out, the most important internal pressure would come from the Chinese people themselves. We already saw spontaneous protests during COVID—the “white paper” protest movement against harsh lockdowns. Movements like that will keep emerging and can help delegitimize Xi’s rule.International allies should do everything possible before Xi decides to use force—make it clear that an attack on Taiwan would carry enormous political and economic costs, and that there are alternatives to war.Vanessa: You’re making me think about the power of facts and truth to override the system you’re born into. I spoke with the stand‑up comedian Vickie Wang 王宇平, (who just published this helpful, timely piece: Keeping Up with Taiwan — English-Language Sources and Legit Experts to Follow to Learn about Taiwan) who’s Taiwanese, and she had a cross‑strait act with a Chinese comedian, Jamie Wong. Jamie jokes about how people outside China assume Chinese‑born people have been brainwashed and “won’t understand democracy,” which is wrong.One of the beautiful things about factual information and journalism is that people everywhere have a desire to speak freely and live truthfully. That’s not confined to any country.Chris, you also point out in your book, that in a system like China’s, people self‑censor and avoid answering polls which can’t be anything but tools of the state, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think freely. And honestly, there are degrees of self‑censorship and soft authoritarianism in every democracy, including the U.S. right now.Chris: There are all kinds of Chinese views on Taiwan. I’ve met people who say, “We should go to war, it’s ours, it was taken by Japan and the West.” Others say, “Taiwanese are basically Chinese, but we shouldn’t go to war.” Others come here as tourists, cycle around the south, eat street food in Tainan, get lost and helped by locals, and leave thinking: China’s big enough, Taiwan’s doing fine, it should be left alone.I have Chinese friends who used to say, “It should be ours,” and later, after visiting Taiwan, told me, “This should not be ours; it’s good the way it is.”We all grow up in information environments and have to unlearn things. As an American, I had to unlearn a lot of things I absorbed about my own country and about Taiwan—from the Communist Party, from the KMT, from the State Department.The key is to keep an open mind to the possibility that you’ve been duped or misled on something. You may disagree with someone on almost everything, but maybe there’s one issue where you see they have a point. That can be a bridge.In Taiwan, there are people who deeply believe in the Republic of China and want nothing to do with the PRC, even if they’re not very “Taiwanese” in identity terms. There are others who are strongly Taiwanese. The question is: how do you connect with people who don’t see things exactly the way you do? How do you make that a bond rather than a divide?Vanessa: That’s so important. I also like your point about unlearning and humility: recognizing where you’re coming from, what you’ve been taught, and staying open to other people’s experiences—especially across languages and borders. You both bridge cultures beautifully—in your writing, in your activism.Maybe we can do a bit of “lightning round” questions for another 10 minutes?Chris: I’m fine. Let’s do it.Wen: Sure.Vanessa: Wen, Taiwan is often cited as a global leader in countering disinformation. What roles do humor, civic tech, and education play?Wen: A lot of the education we do doesn’t come from the state, but from civil society, precisely because Taiwan went through 37 years of martial law under KMT rule—the longest martial law period in the world (until Syria earned that dubious title). That kind of top‑down patriotic education no longer works for Taiwanese people, especially younger generations.From civil society, we’re creating hands‑on curricula and activities that build mutual trust and self‑efficacy. People learn they can help themselves and each other in crises, instead of passively waiting for the state.As Chris said, Taiwan is a contested democracy; people differ on the ROC flag, for instance. Grassroots education helps us create our own sense of belonging. Kuma Academy’s symbol is an indigenous Formosan black bear. It represents belonging to the land and the diverse ethnicities of Taiwan, rather than a top‑down nationalism.Vanessa: In Minneapolis recently, a woman was shot in the face by an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent. So I think Americans now have to think about civil defense in a whole new way. We could learn a lot from Kuma Academy: local civic education, citizen journalism, activism, community. We need all of that here.Chris: Community—caring about your neighbors and them caring about you—is the bedrock of any society. China and Russia understand that. Dividing a society and pitting neighbors against each other is a major goal of disinformation.In my ten years in Taiwan, I’ve watched society become more fractured. You still have the blue–green divide (KMT vs DPP), but now there’s the TPP claiming they’re neither. They say they’re not Taiwanese‑identifying or Chinese‑identifying—so what are they? In practice, TPP legislators mostly vote in lockstep with the KMT: blocking the defense budget, cutting diplomatic and international‑outreach budgets, and so on.They don’t say, “We’re doing this to help China.” They call it waste, or accuse the DPP of acting like dictators, which is rich coming from a place where the KMT party’s military dictatorship actually existed. It’s similar to MAGA in the U.S., where people can’t talk politics with family anymore.When people stop talking about politics, things really start to fall apart. Instead of dialogue, you build flat, two‑dimensional caricatures of others in your head.Vanessa: Here’s a good follow‑up for both of you: what proactive approaches to fighting disinformation could genuinely change public behavior or media literacy? If there’s anything you’d add—especially thinking about America, where media literacy is collapsing.Chris: It’s a very hard question. We’re entering an era where truly fake news—AI‑generated video and audio—is a real problem. AI can create extremely convincing content, especially for children and older people who may not distinguish real from fake. That will only get more realistic.We’re heading into uncharted territory. I wish I had a great answer for how to combat that, but I honestly don’t yet.Wen: I don’t have a perfect answer either. But in my education, we were trained in critique and suspicion—critical theory encourages that. Yet in this era, constant suspicion can lead to political apathy. That’s what disinformation wants: for us to feel nothing is true anymore, that human rights are fake, that democracy doesn’t work better than authoritarianism.That’s dangerous, not just for regular people but also for well‑educated progressives. I’m learning too. I still think there are values we need to preserve. Democracy has many flaws, but I believe it’s still better than authoritarianism.So we need core values we’re willing to fight for—and we need to teach people that some things are worth defending, even in a landscape filled with lies.Chris: Memory matters as well. Younger Taiwanese voters have grown up in a peaceful, democratic, free Taiwan, unlike their parents and grandparents. That can dull a sense of how fragile democracy is.In the U.S., I’d argue we only became a full democracy when Black Americans gained the right to vote; we’re a young democracy and we’re still in growing pains. There were times, like the 1970s, when the U.S. was becoming more multicultural and open; the conservative turn of the 1980s and the MAGA movement now are very much about putting that genie back in the bottle.In Taiwan, there are forces who would love to roll back Taiwanese‑focused education, same‑sex marriage, indigenous and Hakka broadcasting—all the things that underscore Taiwan’s diverse, multicultural reality. They prefer a narrative that “we’re all basically Chinese.”The information battle never ends. Since the end of the Cold War, many assumed the work was done. It isn’t. As soon as you let your guard down, there will be someone pushing lies and division, often backed by hostile foreign powers. While you’re alive, the fight never ends.Vanessa: That’s a powerful closing remark. I’d add that everyone who cares about Taiwan should read both of your books. And it’s an everyday practice: if we care about strengthening democracy and keeping facts and truth alive, we have to work at it daily.Chris: Exactly. The people pushing disinformation show up every day. If we decide not to push back, we’re just ceding ground to them—and we can’t afford to do that.Vanessa: My contribution was making Invisible Nation, which I’m still promoting, and it’ll be on PBS in May. Wen, I’d love for you to close us out.Wen: I think both of your works are really important, especially for American audiences who don’t know much about Taiwan. For progressives in the U.S., there’s a strong guilt about U.S. interventions abroad—and rightly so, in many cases. But Taiwan is different.Taiwan is an independent, sovereign nation with its own democracy. We’re not asking the U.S. to install a puppet government or make us a sub‑colony. We’re asking for genuine solidarity, understanding, and truth.In this crazy age of disinformation, if you don’t know where to look for truth, look at how ordinary people in a place are reacting: look at Venezuela, look at Taiwanese people and how they think about their future. That’s where we should stand.Vanessa: That’s a beautiful place to end. Thank you both so much for your time.Wen Liu is a Taiwanese scholar, writer, and activist based in Taipei. She is an Associate Research Professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, and is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Trained in critical social psychology (Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center, 2017), her work develops a critical psychological and affective analysis of transpacific geopolitics, examining queer mobilization, sovereignty, security, and militarism in Sinophone and diasporic Asian communities. Her first book, Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression (University of Illinois Press, 2024; winner of the 2018 National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize), investigates diasporic Asian American subjectivities and affective geopolitical alignments amid U.S.–China inter‑imperial rivalry through ethnography, narrative, archival, and discourse analysis. She has explored how affects such as paranoia, melancholia, and shame shape Sinophone Asian identities (including Taiwanese Americans, Hongkongers, and diasporic Asian Americans) beyond simple East/West or democracy/authoritarian binaries, and she co‑edited Reorienting Hong Kong’s Struggle: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Currently, she is conducting fieldwork on grassroots civil‑defense mobilization in Taiwan and how civil society responds to escalating war threats from China, and she serves on the Presidential Office’s Whole‑of‑Society Defense Resilience Committee.Chris Horton is a Taipei‑based journalist and author who has reported on cross‑strait relations, domestic politics, the economy, and culture in Taiwan for the past decade. Over his career he has written for outlets including The New York Times, Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, Nikkei Asia, and others, bringing long‑form, on‑the‑ground coverage of Taiwan’s democracy and its contested international status. He has lived in Taiwan since 2015, after spending roughly 15 years working in China and Hong Kong, experience that informs his comparative perspective on information warfare, propaganda, and East Asian geopolitics. His new book, Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival (Macmillan), to be published in the U.S. on February 10, traces Taiwan’s modern history, Beijing’s efforts to erase its sovereignty, and the island’s fight to preserve its democracy and global voice.Vanessa Hope is an award‑winning producer and director. Invisible Nation was Taiwan’s number 1 documentary on release in 2025 and became their 3rd highest grossing, most popular documentary ever. Her work often centers on China, U.S.–China relations, and social justice. She has produced multiple acclaimed films in China, including Wang Quanan’s The Story of Ermei, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Chantal Akerman’s Tombee de Nuit sur Shanghai, part of the Cannes‑selected omnibus The State of the World. She has also directed and produced several documentary shorts, such as China in Three Words, an official selection of DOC NYC, and made her feature‑directing debut with All Eyes and Ears, an exploration of the complex links between the U.S. and China that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her additional producing credits include Sundance selections Zeina Durra’s The Imperialists Are Still Alive! and Sarah and Emily Kunstler’s Academy Award–shortlisted William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, as well as their award‑winning SXSW documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America; she also served as executive producer of Paula James‑Martinez’s Born Free. With her husband, producer Ted Hope, she runs Double Hope Films. Before her film career, Vanessa worked on foreign‑policy issues at the Council on Foreign Relations with Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies Elizabeth Economy. She received her B.A. in Anthropology and East Asian Studies from the University of Chicago and completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at Columbia University before transitioning into film. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you to all the movie theaters in the Bay Area and San Francisco screening our film INVISIBLE NATION starting THIS Thursday, July 31st through August 4th! Ted and I are attending as many as we can as if we're an indie rock band with a new album in release! Please join us and help us spread the word to your friends and family!Our film is not only continuing its momentum, traveling around the world nonstop to film festivals, community and university screenings, but, even in this normally "dead" moment in summer, demand is picking up! With two hundred upcoming engagements in process, INVISIBLE NATION, is building a wave of support that feels totally in tune and in sync with the grassroots groundswell for democracy lifting the presidential campaign of America's first female, Black, South Asian Vice President, Kamala Harris, to win in November. (I wrote about that here last Tuesday).The link to use for all tickets is our website:https://www.invisiblenation.net/watchIf you'd like to request a screening, let us know here:https://www.invisiblenation.net/communityscreeningsIf you're wondering what it means from Taiwan's perspective to compete in the Olympic Games of Paris 2024 right now under the misnomer "Chinese Taipei," then come see INVISIBLE NATION!THANK YOU from the whole team as always for your support! We deeply appreciate it as we are a truly low budget, independent, grassroots powered documentary film giving this run, (and now also Kamala's campaign to hold onto our democracy), everything we've got! Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe