Emotional Explorers

Husband-and-wife filmmakers Hank Rogerson ’89 and Jilann Spitzmiller ’89 are known for taking viewers inside worlds they’d probably rather ignore: a nursing home, a medium-security prison, an Indian reservation. “In these places people are segregated, roped off, and we don’t want to look at what’s going on in there,” says Spitzmiller. “Our work is about looking in places that have some darkness on the outside, but finding what’s good and true and light inside.”

Before they started winning film awards, Rogerson and Spitzmiller were seniors at Dartmouth running around campus with a VHS camera to create a video yearbook. “My favorite sequence was when Hank spent a whole day at career advisory services during the winter, when everyone was starting to interview with companies that came to campus. They all have their suits on and they’re completely uncomfortable,” Spitzmiller says. “There I was just shoving my camera into people’s faces as they were trying to get ready to interview with Leo Burnett!” Rogerson says. The film was shown at their 25th reunion.

Next year the couple’s latest documentary, Still Dreaming, airs on PBS. It’s atender, often hilarious story about elderly, longretired Broadway actors, musicians and dancers putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream as they battle Alzheimer’s, hearing loss and the emotional ravages of age, all in an effort to do what they love: perform.

The Santa Fe, New Mexico-based couple seems to run toward crisis and redemption. Shakespeare Behind Bars (2005) is about a prison theater troupe seeking atonement from heinous crimes. Homeland (2000) follows four Latoka Indian families struggling with poverty and poor health on an Indian reservation. “We are emotional explorers,” says Spitzmiller. “We have to be brave to go into aplace a lot of people don’t want to go. It’s about deepening the idea about what we feel, see, hear and know from others around us.”

“We make a bridge for people to these worlds that are ‘other,’ ” Rogerson says. “We show up as a witness.”

Abigail Drachman-Jones ’03