Few administrators have had larger success exposing the tough realities of American life than Debra Granik. But after a drug abuse-themed first characteristic, “Down to the Bone,” the Jennifer Lawrence-led poverty saga “Winter’s Bone” and a documentary (“Stray Dog”) and drama (“Leave No Trace”) about haunted navy vets, her new multipart doc, “Conbody VS Everybody” may be her most upbeat tackle a troublesome matter up to now.
The Jan. 23 Sundance premiere follows former drug kingpin Coss Marte as he launches a health enterprise with different ex-cons, primarily based on exercises developed behind bars. While the six-part sequence has some bleak moments, its hopefulness appears to have rubbed off on Granik. “This film buoyed me a bit during the pandemic and helped me get through it,” she says, “because of the fighting spirit that the team had.”
Her shoot for “Conbody,” two episodes of which bow in Park City, lasted eight years. “I learned that reaching the five-year benchmark of staying out of prison was considered extremely positive statistically: the likelihood of returning becomes very small, so that seemed like a good framework,” Granik says. “What I didn’t realize was that all of the other trainers would join him, and that Coss was going to build them into a family, which changed the probability of his success because it increased their vulnerability as a unit. The stakes multiplied.” She says the ensuing doc is like watching mountaineers “climb Mount Everest: you want to see them all get to the peak.”
The mission emerged from Granik’s analysis for a story movie a few drug dealing ex-con from a author on HBO’s “The Wire,” primarily based on a personality from the present. “Some people who had had prison experience were extremely helpful in bringing me to [other ex-cons] willing to speak about the most dangerous part of their first few months of freedom: the fact that you have zero money in your pocket. I didn’t know [how to show the role] society has to receive returning citizens, or how to conjure the nuance of these real people’s experiences. Coss had a vision that part of what was going to make their lives better were middle- and upper-class people meeting and working with them through professional services such as fitness, a turning point that the United States had not previously seen. All the levels of complexity were much better served by a documentary.”
Granik introduced “Conbody” to the late doc legend Diane Weyermann, chief content material officer at Participant, proper earlier than she handed away in October 2021. “She believed there could be more of a novelistic approach, a story told in chapters,” Granik recollects, “where people are interested in the same way they’re interested in getting to the end of a novel.” Participant, which is repping the doc’s gross sales with Cinetic, produced the mission alongside Granik and Anne Rosellini’s Still Rolling Prods., Louverture Films and Meerkat Media Collective.
What’s up subsequent for the Massachusetts-born, New York City-based filmmaker? A story movie that’s “a beautiful love letter to New Jersey, about everything that’s ever been in a Bruce Springsteen song.” Could the indie queen of harrowing tales lastly be turning over a brand new leaf? Well, not fairly: it’s an adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 nonfiction e book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” about struggles confronted by the working poor.
But Granik doesn’t see the thru-line of her work as grim. “Someone mentioned to me the opposite day — and I liked his abstract — that ‘it always seems like your big question is, “How are you doing?” to a stranger about their life. ‘How are you coping? Are you OK over there?’”