ABOUT


EMILY MACKENZIE is a New Orleans based director, producer, and editor working primarily in documentary film. She is the co-director and producer of CARPET COWBOYS, a feature documentary about American Identity and Carpet Manufacturing.   She is a graduate of Bard College (2008) and the New School’s Documentary Media Studies program (2010) . MacKenzie has produced and directed for Vice, MTV, Fuse, Animal Planet, WEtv and co-wrote and co-edited Nina Davenport’s feature length HBO Documentary FIRST COMES LOVE (2014). MacKenzie’s short documentary SCAR STORY (2016) was featured on Atlantic.com and was viewed over 80 thousand times. An excerpt from her project TAPESTRIES, a feminist audio series depicting queer breast cancer narratives, was features on NPR in 2020.

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 To me, documentary filmmaking is not a subsidiary of journalism; it is storytelling, and all storytelling is subjective. A film emerges from the pull between the craft of non-fiction storytelling and the maker’s own internal discourses – it is spun out of that tension. I work carefully to avoid imposing a heavy handed critical thesis onto the story and instead aim to create opportunities for queries and curiosity.

Stories have a way of getting into our psyches, of revisiting us hours after we saw or heard them and forcing us to consider what they were about. In storytelling, an audience is invited in to feel and experience the worlds of the principal characters. It is experiential and empathetic. Our job as storytellers is to build worlds out of the material we capture in the field. We aim to prioritize moments and emotions that will allow our audience to thoughtfully experience the world of our subjects and perhaps intuitively understand them more fundamentally. It is an exercise in intuition and emotion – arriving at meaning and ‘truths’ through phenomenological experience.

  • Emily MacKenzie.