Q&A: Where does the Peace Corps fit in a changing world?

“A Towering Task” airs on Rocky Mountain PBS Thursday, Feb. 27 at 7 p.m. Ahead of the showing on Rocky Mountain PBS, Denver filmmakers Alana DeJoseph and Shana Kelly sat down for an interview following a screening event at the Buell Public Media Center. 

Alana DeJoseph: In terms of how everything changed was pretty dramatic, really, because the idea to start the film was back in 2013. Shana and I were moms of kids at Teller Elementary School, and we were on the playground discussing the film and the possibility of having a documentary about the Peace Corps. First question was, is there such a thing? How is it possible that this agency was founded in ‘61 and there is no comprehensive documentary about the agency? It just didn't exist.

So the motivation behind it was more that America was forgetting that there was a Peace Corps. I'll go to college campuses. And my first question to class is, ‘so who here has heard of the Peace Corps?’ You'll see a few hands go up, and then I say, ‘who knows what the Peace Corps does?’ And all hands go down because nobody really understands it anymore. 

But during the time that we were producing this, this nationalism was taking hold, and we were working towards isolationism and people were kind of losing touch of why we need to connect with the rest of the world. Sooner or later, if there is a war across the world, we're going to find the people, refugees at our borders, and it behooves us to work with the rest of the world.

Shana Kelly: We started working on this movie when it was President Obama [in office] at some point, things started to shift dramatically. And I remember the morning [in 2017] I heard Trump say what he says in that soundbite that we used in the film about there's no global currency, there's no global this, there's no global that. So then I realized, ‘Oh, God, we have to include this person. We have to talk about how the world has changed, but, and address why it is important.

RMPBS: As a filmmaker, I'm sure you debated or even anguished over some parts of whether to include this or to include that. What are some key points that you had to work through?

SK: There were a lot. We did have probably a six to eight hour version of this. There's a lot of history to cover and a lot of questioning, which part of the history is actually part of our story? Do we include 9/11, do we include these things? We did update it after COVID. We had that section on Ebola and then COVID happened and we were like, ‘Oh, okay, great. This is an even bigger version of the story we were trying to tell with Ebola.’ So we did actually update it to include that scene. It seemed like it was needed.

RMPBS: Were there any interesting facts or things that you just didn't have the time to put into this documentary? 

AD: I think one of my biggest regrets remains the story of Carolyn Payton. Carolyn Payton was the first female and first African American director of the Peace Corps. She was director of the Peace Corps only for about a year, and it was in that time when you had all those different directors, but Peace Corps was subsumed under ACTION (a government agency that existed from 1971-1976 that combined all federal volunteer agencies). The director of ACTION at the time wanted to redirect the Peace Corps towards only working on basic needs, and he wanted to throw out the whole education part of the Peace Corps. The education sector has always been the biggest sector of the Peace Corps, and she refused. And she got fired over that.

There's so much of the story of the strong African American woman leading a government agency, fighting the good fight and losing out. That to me is going to be a documentary in itself, if somebody wants to fund that. 

SK: There were so many stories that were fascinating that we ran across as we were working on this. In terms of stuff that we ended up cutting, I don't regret a lot of it, but I do feel pretty good about what we ended up keeping in the documentary. 

Alana must have done 300 interviews with different volunteers, and so every single interview has these incredible stories and, you know, to the point of, one of our interviewees, it felt like this movie was really the sum of its parts. You get the sense of these volunteers and what they were actually bringing to these different countries.

AD: I think what I'm trying to wrap my mind around is we are facing this heightened level of anxiety and fear in our country, and a lot of it is around basic survival. It's around where do we go next when our education is suffering, when our food prices are going through the roof, when housing is a problem? And there's an urgency to that. And it's easy to scare us with those very survival things. How do we put that urgency into long-term thinking? Because we can't just think about the eggs, we also have to think about, where is this country going to be in 10 years from now? In 20 years? 

How do we imbue the building part with the same urgency as the destruction part? And I'm not sure I've put my finger on it, but to me, the Peace Corps is such a great example. Most volunteers won't see the fruits of their labor in two years that they are there, but it's the volunteers that come in 30 years later to that country that will have the kid that grew up that tells them, ‘Oh yeah, I was taught by a Peace Corps volunteer, and this is what I learned. And ever since I have a different perspective on America.’ And so, if we can tell the Peace Corps story with some urgency, then I have faith we can tell the story of world peace with some urgency as well. 

SK: How important this person-to-person interaction is, just how valuable the volunteer who goes and has that connection to somebody that comes back and talks about that country. That just started to really mean a lot to me as I worked on this, and I started to understand that it doesn't happen instantly. It happens down the road. It has this ripple effect, which is something we talked about with imagery. It's this tiny stone being thrown into a pond, and the ripples get bigger as they spread out. Every single volunteer has that effect on the country they go to, and then when they come back and talk about the country and people that they learned to love, and that they understand on this fundamental level that the rest of us couldn’t without living there. 

AD: I have such a crush on that man. When you do documentaries, you spend a lot of time fundraising. And when you fundraise, it can always feel a little awkward. Sometimes you find yourself in the room with people that are very powerful and use that influence in not the most pleasant ways. And as a female, you feel that especially. So I was a little concerned…here was another elderly, powerful white man that we were going to be in a room with.

My cousin and executive producer, Theresa Gallant, and I got to be at that interview together. We're both politics geeks, and, so we were just tickled about the idea of being in a room with Jimmy Carter. Theresa suggested that we take a picture and asked President Carter whether that was okay, and he was just so jovial about it. He said ‘of course,’ and he planted himself between us and put his arms around our waists. And I can tell you, I've had arms around my waist in other situations where I felt not comfortable, I wanted to take him home with me. He was so thoughtful and so kind and so generous with his time. There's not a bad word I can say about that man. 

SK: Taylor Hackford was one of the interviewees in the movie. He's a Peace Corps volunteer who became a Hollywood director and so happens to be married to Helen Mirren. So as we’re writing and doing interviews, we kept thinking — who is going to be the narrator? So, we got in touch with Taylor Hackford and he said, I wonder if Annette Bening might do?

Apparently, Taylor Hackford and Helen Mirren are great friends with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. Basically, I hadn't really thought of her, but as soon as he said her name, [we said] ‘Oh, please, yes, that would be amazing.’ So, at some point we sent her the script and she said, you know, I'm inclined to do this. And it was like one of the most generous things I've ever seen. She had been in New York doing a show on Broadway until the day before she recorded with us. She missed her family. She had just come back, and she was so generous and so down to earth and actually did the work for free.

AD: Well, that's one of the beautiful stories of the Peace Corps. It's a place of connection. I always compare it a little bit to ‘Where's Waldo?’ There’s always a Peace Corps volunteer working somewhere. Like the Iran hostage crisis, there were three RPCVs (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) there. And we found the same thing in the wealthy communities, there were always some Peace Corps volunteers.

This film was funded by over a thousand individual donations, anything from $2 to $50,000 and everything in between. So it feels like a really democratic process and we’re really proud that we got all these people into supporting this film. 

We're actually working together on some other films, and we're looking at funding where we can get three corporate entities to fund the entire film. But it's a very different feeling. It was a very unique story; I don't know of a lot of documentaries that were funded by over a thousand donors.

SK: We felt it was really important to approach this with a warts-and-all mentality. This wasn't funded by the Peace Corps and this wasn't funded by the National Peace Corps Association. We wanted to create a fair view of the roller coaster ride that it has been, and we wanted it to be nonpartisan as much as possible. We made a lot of efforts to see the good in different administrations and how that affected the Peace Corps.

AD: Well, one of the criticisms that is levied against the Peace Corps is that it is elitist. That it is white saviorism, and it's this naive, do-gooder notion of we're seeing all these young, untrained people around the world to stumble around the world and make themselves feel good about themselves. And there is some truth to that. 

There's a percentage of people that will find themselves overseas with not the technical experience needed, not the language experience needed, but what I always think of what is the incredible strength of the Peace Corps is that you're going to be sitting there for two years. So even if you start a two year career with the Peace Corps as ‘All right, I'm here to develop the heck out of this village. By the time I leave, they're all going to have running water and electricity or whatever.’ That's not going to last very long. 

As Peter Hessler said, humility is one of the biggest lessons of the Peace Corps. And you get humbled in the Peace Corps, and you learn very quickly that you don't know anything. And it is over the course of those two years you realize maybe there's some things that you do have to exchange.

So yeah, I think it's very important to criticize the Peace Corps. It's very important to keep pushing it to be at its best, but also realize that it is those volunteers that have spent two years out in the field and then come back and become foreign service officers or work in the State Department or work at USAID because they have a better understanding the rest of the world and what is needed.