Make it a Better World

“Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.

Take up the battle.

Take it up.

It’s yours.

This is your life.  This is your world.

I’ll be leaving it long before you under the ordinary set of circumstances. You make your own choices. You can decide life isn’t worth living, and that would be the worst thing you can do. How do you know, so far?

Try it. See.

So pick it up. Pick up the battle, and make it a better world.

Just where you are.

Yes, and it can be better, and it must be better, but it is up to us.”

–Thank you, Dr Angelou.

“Maya Angelou” Oprah Presents Master Class. OWN, 2011.

2022 Year in Review: Documentary

2022 was a year of extremes and intensity: Russia’s war with the Ukraine; the US Supreme Court overturned abortion rights; Covid continues to disrupt; worldwide inflation and extreme weather events. Beyond the boundaries of our planet, the Webb telescope sent back awe-inspiring images of our galaxy, and the moon is experiencing a bit of a come back. No surprise that the films that document our lives also share these qualities.

Below are the documentaries that moved me this year:

Award Season: Emmy Nomination!

KOK and Jeff Goldblum, Birmingham, AL. Photo by Seppi Aghajani

We made this show during the height of the pandemic.  It was hard – our production schedule was in a constant state of flux.  And it was beautiful – each day was different and I made some friends for life. So it’s especially rewarding when the Television Academy recognizes the effort.  I’m thrilled that Season 2 of “The World According to Jeff Goldblum” is nominated for an Emmy for best hosted nonfiction series.  Congratulations to the entire staff and crew from Nutopia in London, New York and Los Angeles.  You can watch it now on Disney+.

Recently, I talked with Katie Chambers at New York Women in Film and Television about the experience.  You can read it HERE and excerpted below.

 

Thank You, Mr. Poitier

“I was born to 2 tomato farmers” were the first words of a tale that would captivate me for the next 6 hours and change the course of my life when Sidney Poitier sat down to tell his life story.

In 2011 we produced Oprah’s Master Class, the flagship documentary series, which launched the network OWN.  It was an autobiographical series in which people who Oprah considered “masters of their lives” recalled critical turning points in their lives and relayed their life lessons.  This was an important show for Oprah, and she pulled out all the stops to book her favorite people for this inaugural season.  Among the most important were Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier, whom she considered family.

The World According to Jeff Goldblum

Drum roll please…

At long last, I’m thrilled to announce my latest directing project, The World According to Jeff Goldblum for Disney+.  Filmed over the course of six months at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, this was a feat of research, coordination, safety, creativity, compassion and a healthy dose of silliness.  You know you’ve made good career choices when Day 1 of filming is Jeff Goldblum in a pile of puppies.

Jeff Goldblum is back — and he’s as curious as ever.  Through the prism of Jeff’s always inquisitive and highly entertaining mind, nothing is as it seems in this new series. Each episode is centered around something we all love — dogs, dance, magic and motorcycles — as Jeff pulls the thread on these deceptively familiar objects and unravels a wonderful world of astonishing connections, fascinating science and history, amazing people, and a whole lot of surprising big ideas and insights.

The challenge: how do you make a show during a pandemic as interesting and exciting as the first season which was filmed when there were no limitations?  Answer: you plan everything very carefully to be safe but you also have to leave room for spontaneity and magic. Creatively, this host-driven show was a director’s dream because every day we filmed something completely different.  I mean, we’ve got trapeze artists, magicians, robots, witches, a sea lion named Diego, and a BIG DANCE NUMBER this season!

Pet Portraits on iPhone

Learn how to take expressive pet portraits on iPhone with photographer Sophie Gamand and Jahmyra from Today at Apple.  

They say never work with animals or kids…but this adorable video was well worth the effort.  After only a few weeks on YouTube, it has already gotten over 4.2 million views, making it the cutest instructional video on the planet.

This summer I directed remote shoots simultaneously in three different time zones and two different cities, Miami and Denver, from my laptop in Bodega Bay, CA and later in Gloucester, MA.  Special thanks to Sophie, Jahmyra, the teams in Denver and Miami and the folks at Apple and Radical Media. It was a blast.

Pet Portraits on iPhone
Client: Apple
Radical Media
Kathryn O’Kane, Director

Apple, dogs, iphone, kittens, pet portraits, puppies, Sophie Gamand

The Corona Diaries, Part 3: Back to Business

Hollywood Hills from The Line Hotel, Los Angeles, November 2020. Photo: Busy K

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the nature of production during the COVID crisis.

When it became clear that our show Parenting Without Borders wasn’t coming back anytime soon, I relocated to northern California to stay with family while the worst of the virus raged in my beloved New York City.  Many of my friends and colleagues were discovering that they had COVID or were recovering from it. The executive director of New York Women in Film and Television was living in the epicenter in Queens surrounded by the steady scream of ambulance sirens, which we could hear during on-line board meetings. Another friend had a mobile morgue unit parked on her block in Brooklyn. And then in April 2020, two people I know died within a week of each other – one in NYC and one in Milan.  The scope of this virus is devastating.  And those deaths have influenced everything I’ve done since.

In May I got a call about a commercial project for a big tech company.  They were planning a shoot with crazy numbers: 10 directors and 300 crew members to make 200+ short films in 4 weeks.  I was both apprehensive and excited to get back to work.  Because this was a client that would follow strict safety protocol, I felt comfortable committing.

March 2021 at The United Nations

On March 24, 2021, New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) presented the panel discussion “Representation Matters: Ensuring Inclusive Leadership in Politics and the Media.”  Originally planned to be hosted at the United Nations in March 2020 as part of the Commission on the Status Women Forum, the event was postponed and viewed online this year. 

Thanks to the vision of NYWIFT’s executive director Cynthia Lopez, and NDI’s senior associate & director for Gender, Women and Democracy Sondra Pepera, we  organized this incredible panel to discuss the importance of representation and strategies for equity at the intersection of politics and media.

One of the highlights for me was getting to hear from H.E. Hanna Tetteh, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative to the African Union and Head of the United Nations Office to the African Union who left us with some closing thoughts: 

“Media needs to help the public believe that women are where they belong. Lupita Nyong’o said, “No matter where you are, your dreams are valid.” 

Own your ambition.  Men have been doing that for centuries.”

This partnership holds special significance for me because my first job out of college was with NDI, where I helped organize workshops for women in politics in Argentina and Jordan all the way back in the 90s. 

Being virtual made it a truly a global presentation – from 4 different time zones.  Our participants were in Los Angeles, New York City, Stockholm and Addis Ababa and our audience tuned in around the world.  You can read more and watch the recording of the event at the link below.

Clockwise from top left: Journalist and Moderator Natasha Del Toro, Birgitta Ohlsson (Director of Political Parties at the National Democratic Institute and former Swedish MP), H.E Hanna Tetteh (UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative to the African Union and Head of the United Nations Office to the African Union), Tanya Saracho (playwright and television writer), and Sheila Nevins (Executive Producer at MTV Networks).

Up and at ’em at 6am when the panel spans 4 time zones: California, New York, Sweden and Ethiopia!

The Corona Diaries, Part 2: Decolonizing My Mind

Ballerinas Kennedy George and Ava Holloway at the base of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, VA. June 5, 2020. Julia Rendleman/Reuters

What a year we’ve had.  And what a time we have in front of us.  Covid-19 is a seismic event that revealed cracks in the foundation of American society: from massive income and wealth gap, to the failings of a healthcare system that is tied to employment.  Equally significant is the momentum of the social justice movement Black Lives Matter that sparked nationwide protests against hundreds of years of racial inequity, brutality and injustice.

When our world opens up again, we should ask ourselves: what kind of society do we want to live in?  And how do we give meaning to the crisis that we’ve survived and are still enduring?

I recently read an opinion piece by columnist Leonard Pitts Jr who spent last year reading works by women.  He noted that “my bias deprived me of whole vistas of discovery.”

“This past year, has served as a reminder to never be too smug about one’s own enlightenment. Because enlightenment is not a place one reaches but a process always ongoing. And it requires not just a willingness to acknowledge that one harbors biases but also a recognition that they will not go away on their own. One has to make them go away. And then one has to get up the next day and do it again.” Leonard Pitts Jr 

In an effort to confront my own bias, over the past few years I’ve made a conscious effort to read more authors from backgrounds that are different from mine, with an emphasis on black authors. And in doing so I rediscovered some old favorites and was shaken to the core by new authors and stories.

Here are some recent reads that really affected me:

The Corona Diaries, Part 1: The Shut Down

Northern California Coast, 2020. Photo: Busy K

Checking in, everyone.  How are we doing? I hope you all are safe and healthy. Isolation takes its toll, and I hope you are being kind to yourselves.

When everything shut down in March, I was working on a travel series for Disney+ called Parenting Without Borders.  As the showrunner and director, I had assembled the most incredible team, and together we had developed a great series that the EPs and the network loved.  I had wonderful partners at Disney who wholeheartedly supported our creative ideas.  I also had the tremendous support and institutional knowledge of Boardwalk Pictures, which does such incredible international production with Chef’s Table and Street Food.  This was going to be a beautiful, poignant series about how culture influences parenting around the world.

I think back to those days in February and March when we were conducting daily risk assessments. Because of a lack of coherent information about coronavirus from the Feds and CDC, we had to glean the risks from our own resources, the news and from our international contacts on the ground. The world started to shrink before our eyes as countries around the globe turned into hotspots, and suddenly, the coronavirus was here in the United States.

Death Row Stories

Corey Williams is the kind of person who makes you want to root for him. Sincere, honest and open, he’s a hard worker and a man of few words.  And 20 years ago he was sent to death row after a house party ended in the murder of a pizza delivery man.  Corey was a mere child of 16, a victim of poverty and intellectually disabled.  He was living in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, notorious for its tough-on-crime approach to justice where African American teens were labeled “super predators.”  In short, Corey never had a chance.  And yet, details of the case didn’t add up.