Sarah Greenleaf: filmmaker

PROVIDENCE – You don’t have to go far to find a local artist in this city. At Jewish Rhode Island, we only have to go across the office, where we find Sarah Greenleaf, a Jewish Alliance staffer who is also a filmmaker.

Greenleaf’s short, “I’d Like to Thank My Husband,” screened July 16 at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre as part of a New England short film retrospective by the Boston-Berlin Grrl Haus Cinema. Greenleaf made the film with archival footage, doing voiceovers herself.

The inspiration for the film came in 2016, when Greenleaf read an article about how much wives contributed to their husbands’ work. “One of his examples was of an academic, and his wife had done all the research,” Greenleaf said. “But for an academic, the research is the work.” The film pokes fun at the discrepancy, which the crowd at the Brattle enjoyed.

Greenleaf enjoyed seeing the audience respond to her work. “You get to hear all the people in the theater laughing,” she said, arguing that, at least for many films, public viewing – rather than watching streaming on TV or, worse, your phone – is a necessity.

Of the festival itself, she said, “I was just very heartened that people are still making short films just for the joy of making something.” She added that she thinks not enough people are making shorts, and the people who do make them are most often creating a teaser in hopes of getting a feature film deal.

“I just want you to do something different,” Greenleaf said. “I want to be interested. I want to look into somebody's life in a way that is authentic or strange in some way. I just want to see stuff I haven't seen before.”

Aside from making films, Greenleaf has taught film to high school students at “a fancy private school.”

On learning how to make film, the perennial question is: should you go to film school? Greenleaf did at Temple University, but she says, “You do not need to go to film school. I went to film school, and I had a fun time, but I don't think it's necessary to make films.” She added that, in film school, students spend a great deal of time trying to perfect their projects, “but the way that you really get better at anything is not to labor over a single thing, but to make a ton of stuff.”

Greenleaf is more interested in the practicality of filmmaking than the theory. “If you want to shoot on film, you might want to go to film school,” she said. There is only a finite quantity of film, so shooting on that medium requires getting everything just right in a few takes. Digital video, she says, allows an unlimited number of re-takes and thus more room for experimentation.

Still, she says, “If you're watching something shot on film, I do think you can tell.”

Sarah Greenleaf’s work can be found at her website: sarahgreenleaf.com.