We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laura Ganotis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Laura thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

As a creative, life can often lack some basic stability and balance. In an attempt to make it all work, I’ve often found myself in really difficult, stressful, exhausting and draining situations. It’s in those moments that I ask myself if I should be doing something else and whether it’s all worth it.
The last time I thought about that was in my last shoot in New Zealand. We were shooting in the South Island, in a small former hydro-town with few resources and far from everything. At the foot of the Southern Alps, everywhere you turn, it’s breathtaking. I was incredibly grateful for being there, doing what I think is the best job in the world – making films. The crew was so wonderful and the film was really meaningful to me. And yet, the journey to get there was not an easy feat. The Director and I started working together on this film in December 2022. We spent endless hours trying to figure out the financing of the film – received a grant, lost a grant, eventually raised the necessary funds. At the same time, we were scouting for months trying to figure out the best location to shoot this in. Nothing seemed like the perfect fit. Until tiny Twizel that is. Remote and breathtaking, Twizel was always near impossible within our budget.
A week or so before flying out to the South Island to begin filming, we were still struggling to confirm crew and one evening, it hit me – I was picturing our film without sound, without light, with all the problems we might have and I felt physically sick from those thoughts. That’s when I started dreaming about a different job but every time this happens, I have to take a moment to be honest with myself and realize that all the other jobs I dream of undertaking are equally “out there”. I think I might make a good war reporter, an activist or an underwater documentarian. I’m trying to find small jobs within my field that give me some of this stability but I also keep reminding myself that the lifestyle is in part what I love about the work.

Laura, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a Greek-Italian film producer based in Brooklyn, New York where I graduated with an MFA in creative producing at Columbia University, with Honors. I grew up between cultures and countries and focused on producing work that has a nomadic and fluid identity. I consider myself nomadic – not in the 21st century digital way but rather in a primal seasonal migrating way, what flocks of birds do. I recently received the 2024 Katharina Otto-Bernstein Mentorship and Development Prize for the short film “Wheels” which is written and directed by my long-time collaborator, Arthur Gay. I was also really honored and grateful to receive the Michael Hausman / Buffalo Mike Filmhaus Foundation Award 2024. I currently collaborate with the Athens-based production company Homemade Films, founded by Maria Drandaki, which produces arthouse independent films.
The narrative films I take on as a producer always have elements of a vérité style and revolve around true-to-life characters. Some themes that I naturally gravitate towards include belonging, displacement and ecosystems of various shapes. I organically turned to international filmmaking, seeking out stories to bring to international audiences, in order to inspire empathy and understanding for people from all walks of life. As the child of diaspora myself, I believe displacement has a powerful message that can encourage tolerance. I believe film is to the past century what theater was to Ancient Greece – a way of investigating the world we live in and what it means to be human.
I come from a background in live arts and always had audience engagement at the forefront of my practice. After seeing the lack of diversity that live arts often brought as an audience, I was craving a medium that would be more accessible to more people. As a kid, I had a camcorder that I’d take everywhere. I then took on photography and just realized how much I loved spending time looking through a lens and how different the world was through a viewfinder. In my search for a more democratic medium, I remembered my love for film and it led me to producing independent art house films.
Part of what I love about filmmaking is the places it takes me. Whether it’s a neighborhood I’ve never seen in New York or the other side of the world in New Zealand, I find it so special to immerse myself in the local community, the daily life and the things you’d never stumble upon as a short-term visitor. Unfortunately, film inherently has an exploitative nature. I really care about setting the right tone and sense of respect for the place we film in and its local population, acknowledging that as filmmakers we are often all visitors. So many places have been burned by film productions and I hope to wrap every production leaving the people involved feeling like it was magical. Because it is magical. And we need to work harder to preserve that.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

For as long as I can remember, I needed my work to feel meaningful. I’m constantly seeking stories that are powerful and have potential for social impact. I want to work with diverse voices and get their stories heard by diverse audiences. I want to keep pushing the boundaries of good cinema and keep getting it made, despite its somewhat questionable viability. I really believe cinema can make a difference in worldview, encouraging empathy and an inquiry into other vantage points. I think it’s important to keep making films and immersing ourselves in alternate worlds. It’s both nourishment and growth, while I’m not above films being entertainment too.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is the chance to work with other creatives. It’s such an incredible privilege and opportunity to work with other people – whether likeminded or not – who ultimately contribute to an idea and help materialize it. It’s a magical process to bring an idea to life, into flesh, objects and storyline to then capture it and put it back on a screen. Every collaborator on a project makes the story richer. Every film is the product of a huge incredible team who thinks about every possible detail and it would never be manageable by one person alone. I feel very lucky to share the success and credit on any film with a dedicated team of wonderful creatives.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraganotis/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laura.ganotis/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-ganotis-067bb765/

Image Credits

Gill Weavers
Cyrus Duff
Murdo Barker-Mill