On A Global Scale: A Lesson In Storytelling

By
Felix Van Kann
October 30, 2020
Christina Lazaridif

On A Global Scale is a bi-weekly series about international co-productions by Columbia filmmakers.

Welcome to another edition of On A Global Scale. This bi-weekly series celebrates the international spirit of the Columbia University film program and the incredible global collaborations coming out of it.

The first film Assistant Professor and alumna Christina Lazaridi ’98 set in Greece, Rosa of Smyrna, came out in 2017. When I asked her why she chose to write about her home country for the first time after almost 20-years as a writer, she chuckled. “I didn’t write the script recently; it was actually one of my first paying jobs. It just took a long time to be made,” she said. “Stories have their own lives. The culture has to be ready for them. So often when there’s a delay, it’s because a culture isn’t ready for it. The script was a multi-generational Romeo and Juliet story between Greece and Turkey, and when we first worked on it, no one knew why people would care about topics like migration and refugees. It wasn’t there. But as time passed, suddenly these issues became public discourse and were more relevant in the culture. Times are changing and the film had its impact. It took a while, but it came out at the right moment."

The changing times—it’s a recurring theme for Lazaridi who came to Columbia as a graduate student and has been teaching at the institution since 2008. “Growing up in Europe in the 70’s in a political family, it surprised me that politics wasn’t a bigger part of the discourse in the program in the 90’s. It was a lot more about entertainment for the sake of entertainment then.” Being interested in politics, human nature and how these components influence people’s decision-making, the topics Lazaridi has always been drawn to, seem to be more present in current times. “I feel like the cultural questions have caught up with my interests. In a way, I feel like I have more in common with students now than I had with my peers back then in terms of how I think about stories.”

Last year, she joined the screenwriting faculty as a full-time member after having received many professional awards including an Academy Award nomination and having helmed the screenwriting curriculum at Princeton University’s Creative Writing program for ten years. Given these credentials, it’s safe to assume Lazaridi effectively married a successful writing career while also following her passion for academics. “My mum was in theatre, my father in politics, so I ended up in film which I see as a mix of the two fields. And they were both academics, so I had in the back of my mind that there is a teaching path and it doesn’t have to be separate.”

Lazaridi also sought out teaching for the simple reason that it allowed her to be choosy with what kinds of stories she was writing and what collaborations she wanted to engage in. She wanted to keep control, so she needed a way to evolve her craft while also being able to pay the bills but avoid taking on projects she didn’t want to. To her fascination, the two career tracks kept engaging with and informing each other. “Through teaching I got involved with stories and worlds I wouldn’t have come up with. I would actively be asked to facilitate story solutions, no matter the content. By articulating and analyzing new concepts and ideas I was constantly learning for my own writing – which keeps it fun. And humbling. It connects you with people because you get to know how they look at the world. So, finding what powerful stories are to different people opens your mind.”

As a co-founder of the Cine Qua Non Lab in Mexico and the director of the Mediterranean Film Institute, Lazaridi has worked with countless international writers and has found that certain elements of storytelling always repeat themselves. This doesn’t mean the stories themselves repeat, Lazaridi emphasized, but the way people understand and get excited about them has a certain rhythm and way of showing up no matter who is in the room. Consequently, in her quest to understand how storytelling unites people, Lazaridi has also turned to science. She initiated a research project with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute to investigate the representation of storytelling principles in the human brain. “For me, the core fascination is: Is there a way the human brain is wired that allows for stories to be as effective as they are. And is there a way an artist can make use of these findings and accelerate the process for their craft?”

Lazaridi found that a teacher’s main task in supporting students is listening. Really listening. “You listen to the specific information, but also about what excites the author, what feels real to them and train yourself to follow that. You try not to pull the narrative into your version of the story. Showing and illustrating technique while still allowing the creator to truly go for the vision they have in mind.”

Columbia builds a great community for this kind of approach because of the richness of its international set-up, a circumstance that already existed during Lazaridi’s own time as a student. “It’s fascinating to see what happens when you put a room together of people with the same passion for storytelling and yet their initial training, influences and aesthetics are completely different. Then something magical happens and stories can be found that we didn’t know we had in us.”  

But isn’t this easier said than done? How does one create a setting of harmonic collaboration with a constant culture-clash? To Lazaridi, the answer is simple. “For both my labs and at Columbia, we’re curating people first and stories second. The creator and the work are connected. I think a space of empathy and caring for supporting each other is important, more so than a specific project.” What happens next is like alchemy to Lazaridi, a balance needs to be struck. “You put together human beings who have a common goal. In order to achieve the common goal, they come from different perspectives. There has to be some sort of glue, some common thirst and then you serve that through different venues.”

These rules apply even, if not especially, in times like these, when most classes are taking place online without the important personal exchange. In a strange way, Lazaridi points out, this commonality is potentially stronger than it has been in a long time because at this very moment, we are all affected by the pandemic. “This virus connects us. No other group has ever gone through this. We will always remember the people we shared this experience with. The stories born out of this generation will be unlike anything we’ve seen and would not have been born otherwise. It’ll take some time for them to come out, but this is undoubtedly forming the voice of a generation,” Lazaridi said. “It’s an uncomfortable space because it’s unprecedented, but at the same time it is exactly this glue I’ve been talking about. There’s a lot of ripple effects and not all of them are horrible. There’s amazing art that’s formed through crisis and after. The culture rebounds and finds a way to regenerate. Which doesn’t mean one welcomes these spaces, but there’s always an after.”

Lazaridi’s view is an oddly comforting way of looking at the uncertainty of our current situation. But times are continually changing and stories are waiting to be told.

Read more from the 'On A Global Scale' series