- Hey, humans.
How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human Podcast.
This is episode 407, and my guest is Dr.
Annika Hili. Mo Annika is an award-winning Swedish
filmmaker, and we discuss her upcoming documentary,
the Last Witch about Elizabeth Johnson, Jr.
A 22-year-old who was the last person wrongfully convicted
of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.
And the film is about the efforts to exonerate her
by a Massachusetts teacher,
her students, and a state senator.
I've seen the trailer. I cannot wait
for this movie to come out.
My friend Lauren said, oh, I've started working
with this really amazing woman
and she's doing this documentary,
and it's about this wrongfully accused witch from 16
hundreds and, and she never was exonerated.
And, and you've gotta see it.
So I checked out the trailer
and oh my gosh, this looks like the coolest documentary.
So I'm super excited for you to hear this episode,
general stuff.
I'm on Patreon at Susan Ruth.
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Thank you for that. All right. Thank you for listening.
Be well. Be kind and be love.
Here we go. Hi.
- Hello. How are you? - I'm well. How are
- You? I'm good, thank you.
- Welcome to Hey, human.
- Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
And huge shout out to Lauren Holiday. She's amazing.
She started working with us as an intern,
and she's so fantastic that she is
becoming our new assistant. Yay. Yay.
- That's awesome. Yay for Laura. She's really great. Yeah.
- Yeah, she's fantastic and great people are good people
to hold onto, so we're definitely holding onto her.
As far as the documentary that she's helping out with,
it's an incredible story.
I think it's one of those stories.
It's once in a lifetime in some ways,
even though we may have more than one,
once in a lifetime projects coming our way.
But this, this is definitely one of them.
I can't wait to show this documentary to the world.
- I think it's gonna win a lot of awards
and a lot of accolades.
And the people are really, uh, it feels
to me like one, and, and we'll get into it.
I wanna start talking about you first,
but it feels to me that the last, which is gonna be one
of those movies where everyone's talking about it
and saying, have you seen that movie?
Have you seen that movie? Oh, you've gotta see that movie.
So I think you've got yourself a real winner there.
- That's the intent. That's what we hope for.
We want to have those conversations,
and we'd love to get those awards, obviously, too.
Ones, it's out there.
I think even more importantly, starting those conversations
and getting people talking to each other again.
Have you ever noticed how little
people are talking to each other?
Yes. Really talking .
- Yes. I actually do notice that. Yes, indeed.
Let's get into you. Talk about where you're from,
where'd you grow up, what shaped you as a, as a human,
- I have a little bit of an eclectic background compared
to some, but not all people.
I was born in Sweden.
I am a Swedish citizen,
and I am a permanent resident here in the United States
these days, but I grew up in Sweden
and also lived in a couple
of other countries when I was growing up, so
that makes me a little bit different compared to many
who live in one space all the time.
And so I lived in, uh,
very briefly in Switzerland when I was very, very young,
so I barely remember that.
But I also lived in The Bahamas.
I lived in the United Kingdom.
I went to school in England,
and I lived in Los Angeles for a bit when I was growing up
before returning to Sweden,
and then eventually came back to the US
and got more educated and got more educated
and got more educated,
and ended up landing in Los Angeles
where I now live in Santa Monica.
- What made you and your family move around so much?
What was the impetus for that?
- In our case, it was business.
And so as the family moved, we all moved.
But it is an experience that really shaped me in many ways,
both going to local schools in different countries,
and I think especially going to school in England,
it was a boarding school where there were people from all
around the world, and it taught me a lot about humanity,
which I think is very pertinent
or germane to this conversation, who we are
around the world, and the challenges that people face
around the world, and how,
and who we become as human beings as a result,
how cultural differences shape us,
and how major political events shape us.
So I learned that at a fairly early age,
and that's also really impacted me as a human being
and how I relate to other people.
So that would be a good one.
- I imagine I, I myself also traveled quite a lot
as a small child, different schools and all of that.
And I know for me,
I imagine this has definitely shaped you into
what would become your career, uh, when a child is in
that sort of environment
and experience, they have to assimilate so quickly
and navigate so quickly
and read people so well for their own wellbeing, safety,
just to assimilate.
I'm sure that that created a lens in your brain, uh,
a filmmaking lens, if you will,
because you had to understand everything going
around at once.
- Absolutely. And I, your point is, I mean, it's so true
that when you move around a lot as a child, you have
to pick up really quickly, and you get used to that.
I think often people will look at it
and they'll go, oh my gosh, how did you manage?
Well, you manage by learning some tools along the way
that I feel have served me my entire life.
So I don't look at this as a bad thing.
Being able to assess situations quickly, being able to
connect with people quickly
and figure out what makes them tick quickly, you know, it's,
to me, it's a skill that I've carried
with me my entire life,
and it's been a way to really learn about diversity
and how people think differently, how people think the same.
And to be able to pick up on that very quickly in a way
that I think it really helps me, it serves me.
And so that serves my career now.
It's always served me in a good way.
- Did you have an idea
of being a filmmaker when you were young?
Did you have a creative family?
Were they supportive of those aspirations?
- Being a filmmaker came to me later,
but I was always very creative
and I was supported in my creativity.
For the mo, for the most part, I'd say it's, um,
it's something that I started at a very, very early age.
I was telling stories,
creating stories when I was very young,
and there are family stories
of me performing when I was very little and charging for it.
So , apparently I would sing songs
and then I'd go, okay, and now I want to get paid for it.
It's like, give me a coin.
So , I don't know where that came from.
- That is hilarious to me. ,
- And I was very young,
so this is when I was not much more than a toddler.
So storytelling has always, always been a part of me.
I had my own magazine for a long time between the ages
of eight and 12, I think, you know,
and then I was, I started training as a singer,
as a class classical singer, starting around the age of 12.
So stories have always been a part of me.
And as far as films in the movies go, some
of my earliest impressions of films, they range from,
uh, Charlie Chaplin movies,
because I would sneak away,
there was this small theater in the town where I was born,
where, where I lived when I was very young.
And I'd sneak into that theater.
I, it's, I must have been seven at the time, which is crazy.
But I snuck into that theater afternoon matinees,
and watched Charlie Chaplin movies.
So that came, that became a strong
influence for me in many ways.
And then the other ones that really stood out
for me are the Pippi Longstocking movies
that I think I started watching
in the cinema when I was about four
or five or something like that.
So movies have always been a part of me,
even though I didn't start working as a filmmaker
until much later in life.
But they've always followed me and inspired me.
- Is this what you went to college for then?
Or when you say later in life, what does that mean exactly?
- Well, I went to, uh, college for Communication,
and, uh, so I, I went to school
to study communication first, mass media and communication,
and then international communication,
and then organizational communication, which is my PhD.
And there's a thread here when people ask me
what communication is about,
it's ultimately about storytelling.
So it's about the stories that we tell
and we share each with each other
and what we find, where we find commonality
and difference in those, how we interpret it and so on.
But I didn't study movies specifically.
That being said, when I was working
as an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount, especially,
I was studying films.
I was studying what I consider to be
or calm teen queen movies.
So where you have a story about a teenage girl who
becomes herself, it's a coming of age story,
and usually she finds some kind of career during this,
and she takes over and in one capacity
or another, rules the world.
So if you look back in time,
it would be things like Princess Diaries,
which people still watch, right?
And would be the Hunger Games and those types of stories.
So I got to know those really well
and got a little frustrated with them.
And this is what pushed me over into filmmaking more, is
because I found that it was too,
too often it was happenstance that girls were thrown into it
as opposed to being the drivers of their own journeys
too often, especially in the comedies, that it was easy
to get the career that it's like you get discovered you have
to go through a journey, but you are discovered.
So that was another thing that it wasn't
that you worked hard for a long period of time.
There was usually something else that you had to work on,
but you, innate talent just showed up
and all of a sudden you could do things.
So that would be a second thing.
And then the third thing that drove me crazy was that
the mothers were dead, or they were really flighty,
and they often had, if they were around,
they would have a career that was artistic,
but without having to run a business, which
as an artist, you have to do both.
You have to be very entrepreneurial.
So I got a little frustrated with many of those messages,
and I'm, I'm not pointing to those two films specifically,
but sort of more on a generalized level.
And, um, started to write my own scripts
and was encouraged to write my own scripts.
And then from there, I dove deeper
and deeper into filmmaking as an art
and a form of storytelling,
and as a way of encouraging conversations
and, uh, having the opportunity to, in some ways,
I won't say that necessarily, change the world,
but encouraging people to really think
and change the world as a result.
- What drew you to the subject matter of the Last Witch?
How did you step into that story?
- That story came to me as a surprise, as stories often do.
And the origin starts with Sundance in 2020,
which was pre pandemic and a major super spreader event
because there were people from around the world who came,
and we all stood very close to one another.
And when you get people from around the world
and you're close, you're gonna catch something,
whether it's a cold or something else.
But it turned out that it was the pandemic.
But while I was there at Sundance,
I was in a restroom late at night after an event,
and the faucets were malfunctioning.
And as per usual, I crack a joke and I go, oh, it's magic.
They're coming back on, just as a woman steps out
of a stall going, oh,
and I'm related to one of the witch hunters
from the Salem Witch Trials.
So we end up having a conversation that led
to my doing a lot of research around the trials, thinking
that this could be a great narrative project,
taking a different look at them.
And what's amazing is that there is
so much information available,
including the original court transcripts.
So I was looking through all of this
and following a trail that took me to an article
about a middle school teacher
and her students who were working to exonerate somebody
who was still convicted
of witchcraft from the Salem Witch Trials.
And there was only one person left that was still convicted.
So I thought to myself,
because she was still convicted, so Massachusetts
in 20 20 20 20 21 still had someone from the Salem Witch
trials that was convicted of witchcraft.
And so I thought this is unusual.
Now, parenthetical, there are lots of people
around the world who are still convicted of witchcraft,
sends the era of the witch hunts, the what we look at
as the era of the witch hunts,
and which sent back to the 4 14, 15 hundreds through
17, 18 hundreds and into today.
I'll put that in there as well.
But this court case just seemed to be so unusual
because we hear so much about the Salem Witch trials.
And so I thought to myself,
because it had, she hadn't been cleared yet,
this really might be a documentary as opposed
to a narrative film.
So where does the story wanna take you?
So I called the teacher up
and I talked to the, uh, so her name is Carrie LaPierre,
and I talked with the then state Senator Diana Dilio,
who was spearheading the project
through the Massachusetts legislature.
And I said, are you interested?
And they both kind of looked at me
and they're like, uh, what, you know,
and documentary?
Sure. And I thought to myself
that somebody else must have picked up on this
because it's such an unusual story.
It's one of a kind, but nobody else had.
And so that's really the origin, starting
with those conversations, and then filming the students
and the teacher, and, and it's just taken off from there,
but it's following a moment, following instinct,
and then taking action.
And that's really the origin of it.
- And just to give a little more information on the last
Witch, the, this, this teacher of these kids
and said to the kids, Hey,
do you wanna start researching that?
And they went to the cemetery, is that correct?
- It, it's actually, it's even bigger than that.
So the story itself, just to encapsulate it,
it's a story about a middle school teacher
and her civic student who worked to exonerate
that means clear the name you are no longer guilty of,
but clear the name of Elizabeth Johnson Jr.
Who was convicted of witchcraft in 1693.
She was sentenced to hang, she was day of ex execution
the day before she was sentenced, supposed to be hanging.
So just the day before she was supposed to die,
she got a stay of execution and,
but lived the rest of her life as a convicted witch and,
and within that criminal witchcraft.
And I promised all my witch friends then
to call it criminal witchcraft.
So this case had been ongoing for many, many years.
And then what happened in 2018 is
that the Massachusetts legislature got really frustrated
because people in general and kids that were growing up
and leaving school couldn't tell the difference
between fake news and real news.
And they decided that there is a need for civics education
so that people know how the government works,
that this is a real deficit in society,
that people don't know how things work
and how to participate actively as a citizen.
So they unilaterally
and across the board voted
to implement a civics requirement in the public school
system, so that now all students in the eighth grade have
to take a civics class with an applied project.
So this class came about just as the pandemic took forth.
And so the project came out of that,
that they needed a project that was going to be applied,
an applied project.
So the hands on the kids really got to learn
how government works,
and they needed a project that was going
to be manageable just as the pandemic hit,
because they, they were split.
So 50 50 kids were working at home or kids coming to school.
So that's really how the project came about.
And the rest is history in some ways.
But we went to visit them in, let's see, in May
of 2022.
And that's where we filmed them
as they were working in the classroom.
They had a visit from Senator, then again, Senator Dilio,
she's now the state auditor.
So that's why I'm saying then Senator Dilio, uh,
and the kids had an opportunity to visit the cemetery,
the local cemetery.
The, uh, let's see,
it's the old burial ground in North Andover, Massachusetts,
where people from the era are buried.
But what the kids discovered there,
and this is really important, is
that Elizabeth was not buried there.
And the reason why a also discovered and were shocked at is
because she was convicted as a witch,
and witches could not be buried on hallowed ground.
So for the kids to realize that she was not buried
with her family was
profound, and it changed them.
So we followed that transformation
with the kids when we went there
and have continued to follow them since.
- What an incredible story. I'm just so taken by it. Now.
You mentioned that you have witches,
current witches who are friends.
How are they, how do they feel about this project and,
and even the history of it?
I, I think that, that the title Witch is an easy moniker
to throw on any strong woman who speaks her mind
or knows how to heal herself without
whatever the modern medicine of the day is.
- It's, that's a really good question.
And, and we do bring up the question. So what is a witch?
And, uh, how are we using the moniker witch today?
So I'm very careful about
using it when people self-identify as witches, as opposed
to using it as a label to, um, to somebody
that I don't know how they see themselves.
It's very contestable.
And it's interesting to talk to the people,
various people in this documentary about what is the meaning
of the witch, because we talk with historians, we talk
with politicians, we talk with, um, obviously the kids
and teachers and parents, and a lot of people.
And we also talk to modern day witches
who self-identify as such.
And in general, this project has been very well received.
They themselves do not consider themselves to be in any way,
shape, or form criminal.
They consider themselves as healers in many ways,
and both for themselves, for other people in society.
And like you mentioned, healing in ways
that modern medicine may
or may not be able to help out with,
but also to recognize when modern medicine is the way to go.
And of course, in the 16 hundreds,
we did not have modern medicine.
So, and a lot of diagnosis did not exist then.
- But those women and men who identified in that way,
or had that name thrust upon them,
were probably well versed in herbs
and certain home remedies
and things like that, that when you could cure something
without throwing a on it, that was suspicious .
Not to mention the carrot on the nose.
I mean, that's a dead giveaway. ,
- Right?
The carrot on the nose and the stories
that come from that era.
Many things that we still do today.
So I have to keep that in there as well.
The way that people looked at what, which was
or was not back then is different from how we look at
what a witch is or is not.
Today. Witches have existed,
and the idea of a witch have existed since, I don't know,
since time began in one way or another.
I think it's that ancient, back in that day,
people were looking at witches as somebody
that had sold their soul to the devil, pretty much.
And those, so those are the ones that are being accused
of witchcraft.
They are the ones that are being accused of using their soul
or their ghost to attack other people in
cohort with the devil.
So they've given the devil permission to use your soul
to hurt and maim other people, even to kill other people.
So this back in the day, was a criminal offense.
It was the worst of the worst that you could
possibly imagine.
And today, you might compare it to a terrorist more or less.
So you can imagine people back then thinking about,
I'm walking down the street and there's
a terrorist right next to me.
I don't know who's a terrorist.
It could be my neighbor, could be anybody.
But that was the feeling
that you didn't know when you were gonna be attacked
by somebody else's specter or ghost.
They didn't have the same kind of medicine that we do today.
Their ministers would be, a reverence would be
as much somebody that would be a healer
and a physical healer as somebody that
weekday would consider to be a doctor.
You would have people that were tailors
that would be considered to be healers
because they could stitch people up.
They knew how to stitch things, you know, things like that,
that we don't even stop to think about today.
They also had a lot of folk magic back then,
but nobody would talk about it as full magic, folk magic.
And then you have the interestes between these two,
which there is a blurring
of lines when you start to look at it.
What I always think about when I look back at
what they were doing and using as folk magic back then,
we're doing and using a lot of that today,
and many of the people that were accused, convicted,
and even hanged were, we're using some of the same
tools that people use today.
For example, astrology, right?
Back in the day, they used the almanac,
and the almanac was based on astrology.
So they predicted the weather for an entire year ahead
based on the constellations in the heavens.
People use astrology today.
So those kinds of things, fortune tellers people back then,
one of the men who hanged Samuel Wardwell was known
as a local fortune teller, and who often was, right.
So he, his predictions would come true today, a lot
of people go to psychics.
It's a booming, burgeoning industry.
Many people have crystals at home as talismans
of various things, good things, ways to find strength,
whatever it is that we experience with items like that,
they would've used some something similar back then.
Perhaps if we are looking at the magic part of it,
we're using the same magic as we did then.
So where do we draw some of these lines? We
- Manifest, we built vision boards.
The modern medicine of today is a derivative
of much plant medicine that's been processed
and deconstructed and then reconstructed for profit.
We're told dandelions are a weed,
when in fact they have great healing property.
Was she one of the young women who had ergot poisoning?
Is that, was that, was she in that group?
- Well, ergo poisoning is actually, that's a myth.
- Oh, - It is. That's been, that's been disproven. Yeah.
It was not ergot poisoning.
There are still questions about what happened and why,
but that particular one is really off the table.
It's, it's more about mass hysteria, the situation
that they were in.
They were in the middle of a perfect storm.
And so to say that it's just a one thing.
I think personally, having studied this quite a bit now,
I wouldn't point a finger at the one thing.
Mm, it's, it was at a time when
Massachusetts had been a colony for some time.
We're talking about third generation people at this point in
some cases, and community of about somewhere between three
and 5,000 people.
People were traveling back
and forth between the us what is now the United States.
So it should be the Massachusetts colony
and England, not everybody,
but there were people who could travel.
It would take a couple of months,
but there was an exchange of information.
It was also a time when the charter for the state,
the colony had been revoked.
So there were no laws.
It was a time when there were a lot of wars going on
around them, both with Native Americans
and by then most of the native, the wars who the Native
Americans had filtered out in the area,
but they were still going on, not too far away.
And with that, a lot of people that were there at the time
had PTSD from wars, from attacks.
It was a time when people were still,
families were still getting used to a different climate.
So at the time, they had very, very cold winters
and hot summers, so the temperatures would fluctuate.
So let's keep that in mind.
So all of those things,
and it's still a community at this time, the Puritans were
starting to have to revisit their way of thinking.
The idea that they came to this area to live a pure life
and to live consistently, just by the word of the Bible,
when there were also other communities coming in the,
there were quite a few Quakers, for example, in the area.
So that was happening.
There was a question of economics, certainly
that's a big one, that there were factions in the
communities that were starting to figure out who's in charge
and who's in control, who's in power.
There are definitely questions about women and women's role
because it was a very patriarchal society at the time.
And so there is no surprise that was .
Yeah, well, exactly was it was. Well, you know, there.
But there are places in this world
that are a little bit more matriarchal
and we, we can find balance.
That would be a good thing. Yeah.
You know, all of these things coming together really just
made for, it's a perfect storm.
Yeah. So, yeah.
And teenagers, am I right, ,
oh my gosh, these teenagers.
That's actually one of the fun things
that I've kept reading about,
and I've put into this as well.
Teenagers, there was an ordinance in town that was passed,
I think the year before to say that the kids had to come
to church because they were, and they had to be quiet
because they were getting too rowdy.
And I'm looking at some of these stories going,
somebody borrowed dad's mom
and dad's horse to ride next door to somebody
where they were drinking apple cider
because that was, the water wasn't that great.
So they all made apple cider.
So they'd had a little bit too much apple cider.
They ride mom and dad's horse back through the forest
and something happens, they fall off the horse
and voila, stories happen.
You know? So there are definitely teenage stories
that are part of this as well.
- It's just funny to think of 16 hundreds, CERs ,
- Right? You crash,
- You crash.
Mom's horse man, .
- That's the image I have to get
that image every now and then.
When I read some of these stories, it's,
I kids were kids then, just as kids are kids now.
Even though their culture was a bit different.
And you've got hormones popping and all sorts of things.
So, you know, oh yeah,
- It would be interesting to look at the correlation between
how teenagers were behaving in that time,
and then the witch accusations,
and then the Poltergeist activity around
more modern day teenagers
and that intense, energetic, uh, field, I guess, for lack
of a better word, that even science says, yeah,
teenagers make so much kinetic energy
that it bursts out into a room
and knocks over a lamp, which is to me,
so mind blowing, but fascinating
- For sure.
You know, there's so much that we can look at and,
and I really learn from this.
It strikes me that we haven't learned it, that we've kind
of pushed this aside as a fairy tale in many ways.
And I think we have a lot to learn.
I mean, the teenage thing that you're talking about, I think
that's incredibly fascinating
because so many teenagers,
adolescents were involved in the trials, whether as accusers
or as victims or whatever.
It was, adding gossip to that, think back
to the teenage years and
how fragile we all were at that age.
And you can't take that out of this story entirely.
It's not just about teenagers,
but they definitely play a big part.
- How many died in the Salem Witch trials?
- How many people were executed?
Let's see, I believe it was 21.
And don't quote me on it
because I don't have my, those notes right in front of me.
Uh, one, most of them were hanged.
Uh, one man was pressed to death, and,
but these are the ones that are executed
as a result, direct result.
But then there were five
or six people at least that would know of
who died in the jails.
They had to build the jails
because there were no jails at the time.
And those were pretty much just thrown together.
So a lot of people
who lived in poorly constructed buildings very
tightly put together.
They were wearing, many of them were wearing chains, uh,
iron chains to keep their spectras from flying
away and hurting people.
And, uh, they would be a rat infested.
There would be disease.
You would get the kind of food, the kind
of keep that you could afford.
So you can imagine the conditions that were there.
So we do know that several people died as a result
of that incarceration.
The, uh, execution method that was most commonly used.
People think of this as burning, which is at the stake,
and have this image of that being a relatively
quick death, or they ha they get the sense that
people would be hanged
and we get this image of the news dropping and you're gone.
That's not the case.
In this case, this was what's known as a short drop,
which meant that you dropped just a little bit
and you would hang there until you suffocated and died.
- They call it the devil's dance.
'cause your legs kick around and
- Yeah.
- And for,
and for a long period of time, I mean, it could take an hour
and even longer for somebody to die.
So it was painful, a slow,
painful death while people were watching you.
So you can just imagine. It's absolutely horrific.
And that's something that I don't think
we recognize enough when we honor these people.
It's just pain, the torture they had to go through.
- This is the problem with religious fervor.
Every time I see any explosion of that,
I get incredibly nervous.
One minute it's a witch, the next minute it's a trans person
or a civil rights leader,
or a, you know, you just go down the line.
Those who have been murdered in the name
of a religious fever.
- Mm-Hmm. . - Yeah,
- Absolutely.
And I, you're so right.
Be, and it's not just about one kind of religion
or one denomination.
You see that in every religion, every denomination. It's
- Humankind.
They just use religion as their back.
They hide behind the religion.
But it's really about what's in people's hearts. I think.
- Exactly what people are afraid of. Yeah.
What they're afraid of for themselves
and, uh, what they're not willing to face about themselves.
- I agree with that. Yeah, absolutely.
What is the plan with the film?
- It's very exciting. We are going to be filming again.
We're not done filming. So let me underscore that.
We've filmed three times so far.
We've filmed the time that I mentioned back in 2022.
Then we went back again in 2023 to revisit with some
of the students and the Carrie, the teacher,
and with some of the, uh, the other people
that we've already interviewed, historians
and politicians, we interviewed, um, now state auditor,
Diana Dilio again, to get her perspective a year later.
Elizabeth was exonerated in July of 2022.
So now we're 2023. So how is this impacting society?
Is there really the big question?
And, um, we got some early answers to that.
It's impacting us women's rights.
It's impacting civic participation.
It's impacting on how we view mental health.
It's, it's actually, it's a fairly long list of questions
and issues that we can point to diversity,
how we're treating each other,
how we're bullying each other.
All of those questions are coming up in this.
Then we filmed again during Halloween in Salem,
because that is a big holiday tradition there.
Now. Salem has come 180 , 180 degrees
and now celebrates people who identify as witches.
People who feel a bit different can find a
home in that community.
We're going back again in August to film more.
Uh, we're going to be filming at the Peabody Essex Museum
and is the intent where they have a huge exhibit
that's opening up on July the sixth about the Salem Witch
trials and a few more things.
So meanwhile, uh, we've,
or I, as the writer director,
have been working on taking all these pieces
to create a story so that we have a journey
to take people on, not just about the court case,
but what does this mean
and what does it mean in terms of claiming your voice?
And one of the ways that we're going to be showing that is
when we have the film just a little bit further along,
we're going to be filming a reenactment
of Elizabeth's original court hearing so that we get
to hear her voice and we get to hear her words.
And she gets to claim her own voice
and help us to listen to what she has to say, what she had
to say then, and what she has to say now.
Because she, like all of us, does need
and deserve to be heard.
And it's not until we speak up
and we listen to those voices
that we can really learn from them
and make a difference in our own lives.
So that's what's next for making this film become a reality.
And then from there, we'll get to distribution so
that everybody gets to see it cannot wait.
That's the, that's the big part.
And of course we're fundraising,
so fundraising like crazy to get this done.
So I have to mention that as well.
That's the other big part,
because it's not just about making a film, a film like this
and to do it well does cost a lot of money to make,
I want this to be the kind of film,
like you said at the beginning,
that people would wanna talk about and wanna come
and see and go, have you seen it?
Have you seen it? Have you seen it? I gotta see it.
You know? And in order to do that, we have to do a good job,
which does require a lot of funds.
So a big part
of my work right now is raising a lot of money
to bring people into this community that's making the film.
'cause it's a community film.
- And they can do that through the website.
- They can do that through the website.
So they can go to our website, sign up for our newsletter,
which we give updates on a regular basis.
And it's gonna be exciting 'cause we're gonna be filming.
So there'll be a lot of, a lot of updates.
And that will also take you to
where you can contribute funds.
I always say it's like whether you have $5
or $500,000 to contribute to this,
you are part of our community. Yeah,
- Absolutely.
- So it's really, really important.
Now, those people that do have a little bit more
to contribute should reach out to me via the website
and let me know, because we'll have a conversation.
We have a way for things, um, larger contributions
to be tax deductible that we work through fiscal sponsorship
where it's a way for people that do have a little bit more
to, to contribute
and participate to also potentially re receive a tax
deduction for their, their contribution.
So definitely wanna put that out there too.
- What is the website? - The website is the last witch
film.com all in one.
And I think you're gonna include that in your links as well.
So it'll be easy for people to find. Yeah.
And from there, sign up and um, and follow us
and all social media as well.
'cause that's, we love that we reach a lot of people
who have great conversations about all these topics
and just loving seeing our community
grow and being a part of it.
- Absolutely. Does Elizabeth have any descendants?
And uh, I'm also curious, has she come to visit you at all?
- That's a really good question. Both are good questions.
So first of all, Elizabeth does not have any descendants.
Elizabeth was not married, no children.
And because she was not married, she didn't have a husband
to speak for her at the time.
And one really important reason
for why she got lost in the shuffle in many ways.
She did not have any children.
She had no descendants to speak on her behalf,
- Any siblings.
- She did have siblings. Her brother spoke on her
behalf a couple of times.
But over time people forgot about her. She disappeared.
And that's something that it's very close to my heart
as a single woman as well.
How easily will I be forgotten?
That's, that resonates with me.
She was also probably,
we know she was a little bit different.
She's described as being ish exactly what that means.
I'm cautious about diagnosing retroactively.
There are people who will suggest
that she may have been slow to develop in some way,
but exactly what it is, we don't know.
We do know from, I can read the court transcripts
and I see that she speaks, she's very bubbly
and she gets attention and she takes that and runs with it.
But again, exactly what it means.
I can't, we can't diagnose,
just know that she was different.
So that's, that's a really big aspect to this.
And so you had a second part of this question as well. I'm
- Curious if she's visited you.
- This has been a fascinating journey for me as well.
She's not come to visit me.
She has visited one of the students
and have visited with that student's ongoing.
They had a very close relationship,
which we're talking about in the film.
She chose one of the students to speak on her behalf
during this process, which is very interesting.
I also think that Elizabeth in her own way
has been speaking to other people.
And in a sense, she's speaking to all of us
because she won't let go.
She's finally getting her voice
and she is insisting that we tell the story.
She's, she insisted that she be free
from this burden of the conviction.
She's also insisting that we remember her.
So there's a reason
for why there's an exhibit on her behalf in this large
exhibit that's coming to Salem, Massachusetts
at the Peabody Essex Museum.
There's a reason why she wants to have a memorial somewhere
so that we will remember her and her journey.
And I think there's a reason why I am do making this story.
And she's probably a part of creating that as well.
So I feel like she's just not gonna give up
until she gets her story told in that sense.
But I haven't seen her physically,
so I haven't, haven't had that.
- Oh, it's such an interesting aspect
that she has chosen a child to, to tell her
that, to talk to.
I love that. Oh, I'm so excited to watch this movie.
I cannot stand it. Please keep me updated along the way.
Of course. Let's talk about Sheltering Love,
which is an Alzheimer's dementia film.
Mm-Hmm. Documentary.
And then Eddie's turn is something that is coming up.
- Yes, both of those. And they're wonderful projects.
Let's start with the documentary, which is Sheltering Love.
And that's an ongoing project.
It's been in the works for a number of years now.
It's a story about a daughter who finished
graduate school just
as her mother developed signs of Alzheimer's.
Signs that were strong enough.
I didn't start to develop them,
but had signs of Alzheimer's that said she needed help.
So Dawn, who is the protagonist in this
story, it's her story.
She moved back home to New Jersey from Los Angeles
where she just graduated from the American Film Institute
and was poised for a career in Hollywood.
Had she stayed here, she realized
that her mother need needed help.
And so she moved back home to New Jersey
where she's been taking care of her mother since
for over 10 years now, well over a decade,
and has found a way
to keep making movies from where she's at.
But her mother has been progressively getting worse.
And so at this point, her mother is non-responsive.
Dawn is still taking care of her mother
and has been documented the journey all this wild.
So the story is in many ways about what that means
as a daughter taking care of your mother and how that shape
and changes the relationship.
It's also a story about self-discovery In many ways,
Dawn, through this journey has discovered more about her
mother's history, for example,
and thinking about how that applies to herself.
She's discovered more about her mother's history
and origin as a Norwegian coming to the United States.
And so in the process, Dawn has been learning Norwegian
and going back to find her own roots in Norway in a way
that she may or may not have done had it not been
for this journey.
And of course her mother's name is love.
I can't forget that. So,
and that's why it's sort of a double entendre.
It's sheltering the love between a mother and a daughter.
And it's sheltering love the woman who now needs support
as she's transitioning with a very difficult,
debilitating disease.
- And that is an ongoing project
that's not out yet either. Yeah,
- It's not out there out yet either.
There's still more filming to be done for that as well.
So it'll probably be another couple of years
before it's actually ready to be seen also.
But it is, it's another incredible story, very personal.
It's, we're treating it with care
because it's a tender, tender story, obviously,
but one that so many people can relate to.
- What, what about Eddie's turn?
- So before, before we get into Eddie's turn,
I just wanna say that's www do, that's everything, right?
So sheltering love film.com.
- Sheltering love film.com.
And you're the executive producer on it?
- I'm the, I'm a producer on it. Okay,
- Got it.
- Yes. And then we have Eddie's Turn,
which is my narrative short film.
That's my other project.
It's my passion project in many ways.
And it's a story about a former ICU nurse. She's burnt out.
She has PTSD from her work, uh, at the hospital.
And she now comes to visit her uncle's ranch
where she finds a friend in a former race horse
that's recently off the track and just lingering about
and also needs a new path in life.
So through trials
and tribulations, the two of them come together
to form a partnership, healing
and partnership as potentially becoming equine therapists
working together where there is a trained,
clinically trained therapist who works with the assistance
of a horse to help human beings heal in different ways.
So very much about healing.
- I've read a little bit about equine therapy
and I think it does wonders for people.
Horses are incredibly intuitive creatures.
They're beautiful animals for sure.
- The transformation that happens in work with horses is
it's second to none.
If you've observed it, if you've seen it,
if you've experienced it, it's something that I want
to bring to light with this story.
And that's why, another reason why it's so important to me,
I started working on it during the pandemic when I went back
to horseback riding after many, many years out
of the saddle on a regular basis
and met a horse called Eddie,
who is the inspiration for this story.
It's not my story, but it is an inspiration for the story.
And through that I learned more about equine therapy.
And I wanna just preface it the,
because there are so many different
ways that we can look at this.
So equine therapy is therapy by a trained professional,
licensed trained professional, working with the help of
a horse as an assistant assistant, as opposed
to more generalized healing with horses,
which can take place in many different ways.
Everything from leadership coaching
to a wellness seminar, all of those things.
So there's a spectrum,
but in going on this journey, I've had the privilege
of visiting so many different places that are working with
equine therapy specifically.
And seeing, for example, just give you one example,
and there was a young man at one facility
who was autistic when he came to the facility.
Originally he was non-verbal.
Now at this point, we saw him take care of a horse,
brush a horse, and train to be a trainer of other people
who were like him so
that they could learn how to brush horses.
So a young autistic man that went from
not only being nonverbal,
but now being a trainer, teaching other people how
to take care of horses, he had sponsored his own horse
that he had done the math for,
which horse he was going to sponsor.
And the list just goes on and on and on.
So to see this ability of the horses to heal,
and that's just one example.
We've seen so many of them.
So the idea of Eddie's turn is to work with nonprofits
that are working with equine therapy or wellness, uh,
and to work with groups that are working with horses
that are coming from the track that need new jobs
because they come off the track having been elite athletes.
They've got, had one job, they're ready
for the next one, like many of us.
And, uh, working with those groups as well
to bring awareness and support for their activities
and, um, help, maybe help one
or two more people gain access
to this wonderful opportunity.
- I love it. And what's Eddie's turn's website?
- Eddie's turn movie.com
- And I'll put all the links on. Hey, human podcast.
- For sure. Hey, thank you .
- Yeah, I I, you're a delight.
I'm so excited for you
and for your, the work you're putting out into the world
that's I think is quite healing and beautiful
and educational and all the things that we need desperately.
And who knows, maybe some people will see the last witch
and think we need to put civics back in our schools.
I remember civics class.
I did not know they had taken it out,
but it's not a surprise to me.
- Well, that's the hope too,
that we can open up people's eyes to the importance
of knowing how to participate, knowing how
to discern information
and having conversations for, for me,
that's a big message for the last witch in all of these.
It's a message of healing
and care that's underlying all of them
and the possibility that we actually do have as humans
to take care of each other just a little bit more.
But that con it starts with conversation. For sure.
- Absolutely. I wish you all the success and I'm so excited.
I cannot wait to see the movie,
- , thank you so much.
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me.
This has been a delightful conversation.
I we're so enjoyed it.
- Oh, it's my pleasure.
And thank you for listening everybody. Bye.
Great review and subscribe to, Hey, human podcast on iTunes,
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