Whose Stories Get Told?
From the winter 2024 issue of Concord Academy Magazine
Story by Heidi Koelz | Opening illustration by Valerie Chiang
CA alums share how they create entertainment
There’s no shortage of movies and shows out today from filmmakers who trace their careers back to Concord Academy. We caught up with three storytellers working in film and television to ask about their recent projects and why diverse representation matters in their work.
Caroline Suh ’89 makes documentary films and series about people we don’t often hear from onscreen. Ami Boghani ’99 focuses on developing authentic, multifaceted characters. Eugene Sun Park ’96 produces narrative films that celebrate women, people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ communities. All three underscore the importance of a variety of perspectives, backgrounds, and life experiences—both onscreen and among the creative professionals who shape what we watch.
“The projects I develop come out of wanting to understand something for myself,” says Caroline Suh ’89, a New York-based director and producer of documentary films and TV series. “I’m not a journalist. I’m aware that everything I do is slanted by my own experience, and my point of view is limited.” Seeking to understand different perspectives has been the driving force behind her work.
Suh considers herself an “old-school documentary fan,” recalling the cinéma vérité classics she first saw in Chris Rowe’s class as a CA student. “To this day, one of my favorite things is to go watch a movie at an art-house theater in the middle of the day when everyone else is working,” she says.
Rowe’s students also made experimental films on Super 8 cameras. “I didn’t realize then that that’s what I wanted to do, but it was one of my fondest memories from high school,” Suh says. “CA gave me such a great foundation for figuring out what appealed to me and for finding my voice.”
She attended Columbia University, where she continued to take film courses, and worked as a copy editor for Harper’s Bazaar before earning a master’s degree in urban planning from Columbia’s School for Urban Planning and Preservation. Then she began interning at a PBS station in New York. “I started at the bottom, taking out the garbage, and I worked my way up,” she says.
The first film Suh directed, Frontrunners, about a student government election at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, came out in 2008. “It was my first time being able to do something the way I wanted, and I thought the people in it were incredible,” she says.
Afterward, she began producing films. “I always wanted to direct, but the industry was not necessarily set up for me to do that, or maybe I wasn’t aggressive enough,” she says. But she seized her chances and carved out a career.
Suh directed and produced the 2016 docuseries The 4%: Film’s Gender Problem, which grapples with sexism in the industry. “Working on that project, I learned about implicit bias and realized how much I’ve internalized, how it colors how I think of myself and my limitations,” she says. While making 4%, Suh says, she realized that because everyone has blind spots, “you really want a lot of different people working on films.”
She credits filmmaker Alex Gibney with giving her the chance to direct and produce some prominent documentary series for Netflix, including Cooked (2016) with journalist Michael Pollan and Salt Fat Acid Heat (2018) with Samin Nosrat, who had become renowned for her cookbook of the same name. When Suh first met Nosrat, the Iranian American chef hadn’t appeared on television before. “We approached it like an art project, which is how I like to try to approach everything I do,” Suh says.
Her throughline has been “featuring people you don’t normally hear from or see in a certain way,” she says. In Nosrat, Suh recognized an adventurous person—a capable chef who was comfortable outdoors, who could butcher meat and build fires. “Since Julia Child, a lot of the female chefs you’d see on TV would be on this kitchen set and wearing a lot of makeup,” Suh says. “We wanted to capture her naturalism.” She filmed Nosrat in Italy, Japan, and Mexico, as well as in the chef’s home kitchen in California, alongside her Iranian mother.
After those food-focused series, Suh was ready for a change. “I don’t like to do anything twice,” she says. “I never want to know exactly what a documentary’s going to be like. I try to incorporate something new with every project.”
Directing the 2020 documentary Blackpink: Light Up the Sky, she took a deep dive into K-pop. Blackpink, a South Korean girl group that skyrocketed to fame, wasn’t well known when she began the film. “While I was researching, I noticed they would all be interviewed together, so none of them got to speak in depth,” Suh says. “They were portrayed as kind of giggly, sweet dolls, and I wanted to let them talk at length and humanize them.”
She had a similar motivation while directing Working: What We Do All Day. The four-part 2023 Netflix series examines what labor is like today for people from different socioeconomic strata in America. Former President Barack Obama narrates and interviews the subjects, who hold jobs ranging from service roles to executive positions. Suh spent around four years working with him, from the project’s early development through its completion. “It was a life-changing experience,” she says. “I learned more about the world and people than I ever had before.”
Suh’s Blackpink: Light Up the Sky presents the K-pop singers with complexity.
“People have so much to say if you just ask them.”
—Caroline Suh ’89
