“Because the world is too troubled for any of us to rest, “ says Julie Carmen recently who has now directed her third short film, ‘The Unnecessary Salvation of Mary McDaniel’, written by Herman Johansen with music composed by Maria Newman and Scott Hosfeld.

The Unnecessary Salvation of Mary McDaniel, in 22 minutes deals with women who are in prison for murder. Their ideas of salvation are very strong and very deep. The roots of their acts, you can imagine, are not shallow.

Julie Carmen: “We did not submit to many festivals because we felt the story was meant to be a springboard for dialogue and an opportunity to listen to the unheard so we shared it publicly but I was especially jazzed that it screened in Turkey at the Anatolia Film Festival since Istanbul is where #ChallengeAccepted started due to the high number of femicides there.

Our film is about four women in prison for retaliating against their abusers. Interestingly, when we went to Anatolia for our honeymoon, I was told that Anatolia’s name itself means, “place of women”.

Sydney: I think Julie’s giving voice to the women in such circumstances in the film highlights that bearing witness to one another’s traumas has its own curative effects.

Watch the short here and then come back here for our far ranging conversation about Julie’s purpose in making the film as well as her life as an actress and licensed psychotherapist. We talk as friends about everything from our feelings, the intersection of immersive empathy in psychoanalysis and in acting… and why acting is her mainstay.

Julie: I never felt intimidated by the profession, walloped, yes, but challenged in a profoundly centering way. My neurosis is that I am addicted to riding a carousel 🎠 and reaching for a ring but barely missing it round after round that makes grabbing it all the sweeter.

Psychoanalysis saved me. Without it I might have continued wandering among the selves in the scripts that came fast and fantastically at a developmental age.

Sydney: Julie’s memories are so vivid — how acting work finds her and “drops from the sky”, how working with John Cassavetes trained her to be an experiential actor vs. a presentational one. She played the female lead in two European films for the new wave Berlin cooperative Filmverlag der Autoren, Der Mann auf der Mauer (Man on the Wall) and Comeback. As the only American working with German crews it taught her that the essence of German filmmaking contrasts greatly from Hollywood mindsets. So many other subjects are covered which, if you care to, you can follow on the video conversation here.

Sydney: Where do we begin? How did you begin to become a storyteller through acting and directing the three shorts you have made?

Julie: Gosh, maybe it all began when, listening to my mom reading us fairy tales and telling us our great great grandfather Jonas Hoffa was the house doctor of the Brothers Grimm. Maybe that was the moment when I believed storytelling is an essential part of being human.

Sydney: You have quite a few fascinating ancestors. Aren’t you currently producing a documentary about your great grandfather, Afro Cuban child piano prodigy, José Manuel “Lico” Jiménez Berroa? I read that he was born in Trinidad de Cuba in 1851 and died in Hamburg in 1917, co-director of the Hamburg Conservatory of Music and Professor of Composition.

Julie: Yes, that’s my passion project. But working on a documentary with layers of relevance is consuming. It’s so important for me to complete this film that I felt the urgency to totally retire after 20 years from my private practice as a psychotherapist and from my teaching and clinic. As I got older, I couldn’t keep three careers in the air. I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. All of a sudden life feels short.

Sydney: Tell me about Lico. It’s a documentary? How far along are you?

Julie: We already filmed in France, Spain, Cuba, the USA and currently are filming in Hamburg, Leipzig, Bayreuth and Nuremberg. The documentary is called “Lico Jiménez the Ebony Liszt”. But the hardest part is raising money for an independent documentary. The 23 living descendants want to protect the authenticity of the narrative. Therefore, I’ve been “hat in hand” collecting donations through a fiscal sponsor.

Sydney: In Europe we don’t use fiscal sponsors in the same way as in the USA. Tell me about that.

Julie: When philanthropists, friends and family who believe in your film want to donate, a reputable 501 ©3 fiscal sponsor provides a letter the donor can use to reduce their federal taxes. The sponsor takes a small percentage and the rest of the donation can be used to pay camera crew, editors, etc.

Sydney: You created an IMPACT CAMPAIGN. What is that about?

Julie: Since we are relaunching the extraordinary music of Lico Jiménez, nicknamed, “The Father of Cuban Lieder”, we are selling the recently rescued and republished symphony, piano concertos and songs in classroom packs. People and orchestras who buy classroom packs not only receive the music and biography, they help underwrite the costs of making the documentary. Our director, Isidro Betancourt Benítez, re-mastered all the music. The heart and soul of our impact campaign are “Afro Cuban German Lieder Incubators and Salons” that we are launching wherever musicians master and perform Lico’s compositions.

Julie Carmen & Sam Neill in In The Mouth of Madness 1994

Sydney: On IMDb it says you have co-starred in films for John Cassavetes, Michael Mann, Robert Redford, John Carpenter, Nicolas Roeg, William A. Graham, Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, Franc Reyes, Tommy Lee Wallace, Carl Schultz, Dan Petrie, Jr., Michael Olmos, Tom Dolby, Tom Williams, Reinhard Hauff, Christel Buschmann, Alfonso Ungria and on television for Karen Arthur, Betty Thomas, David Milch, Paris Barclay, Debbie Allen, Deborah Kampmeier and Quentin Tarantino. Any stories you want to share?

Julie: Actually, I’d prefer people see the films themselves. I’ve always hoped there would be retrospectives for Cassavetes’ Gloria or Tommy Lee Wallace’s cult classic Fright Night Part Two or “Films about Walls”, where Reinhard Hauff’s Man on the Wall could finally find a wider audience or a retrospective about Latino Noir where Marcus De Leon’s Kiss Me a Killer would screen. They were all cutting edge films that contributed significantly to their genres. I always prefer people see the films rather than talk about them.