Interview | Brindusa Nastasa talks about Springroll Media and her US Exchange experience with DCN
It was love at first sight. “I’ m Bidu. I’ m documentarian. Please, sleep during our huge flight, as you will have a serious jet lag. Oh, you cannot sleep? Ok, let me suggest what movies you can watch”.
We shared seats as we crossed the Atlantic, not knowing what lay ahead for us in our exchange. It was the start of so much sharing as we explored the US together. Now I can proudly tell you that she’s one of my best friends as close as a sister.
By Marianna Tanagia
She’s talented, restless, curious to explore the world, with a unique charisma to communicate effortlessly and make friends in just a few minutes. This is Brindusa, and this is her Springroll story:
Tell me the untold story of Springroll Media: How did you decide to create a female collective of media professionals?
A German, a Chinese and a Romanian walk into a take-away and order a springroll with extra chili sauce. It is in Denmark, they can afford only one — they share it happily and talk big business. Two years later Spring roll Media is born. Dip it, bite it, like it!
I met my colleagues in Aarhus, Denmark studying the MA Erasmus Mundus Journalism, Media and Globalization which turned out to become one big family I am happy to be part of. Me, Annabella Stieren and Jialu Zhang besides becoming close friends, we are very different and we have different skills that complement each other. Our first project together was for CCTV while we were still students and we learned a lot about each other, but we had a lot of fun. That’s so important. The following year they went to Amsterdam, I went to London to finish my MA at City University. Towards the end of the program we found ourselves Skyping a lot looking for a way to work together again. Brexit happened and that made my decision easier, so I moved to the Netherlands with them and Springroll Media started.
A female collective of media professionals because … oh so many reasons.
I have been working as a freelance filmmaker and camerawoman for 9 years in many countries and I have noticed how sometimes I get to a location and I am not what people expect — this tiny woman with a small camera and tripod who starts telling them what to do. I loved breaking those preconceptions about how a camera person should look like. It has worked to our advantage when filming in countries like China or India because everyone thought that we were harmless tourists.
The Springroll Media core is all women and we collaborate with other female professionals from different fields all over the world. Our work focuses on sensitive issues and we found that being women gives us the advantage to get access to characters and very personal stories. Most of our characters are women and we try to get female experts for our stories, even though it’s on themes not necessarily related to women like Islamophobia, extremism or the crisis in Venezuela. We aim to give a voice to female characters, whilst addressing bigger issues in their society.
During our master's program we also often encountered research about reporting and gender which shows a lack of representation of female voices in the media and points directly to the lack of female journalists covering certain subjects.
What is Springroll Media’s vision about multimedia storytelling?
Our focus on multimedia storytelling came from combining all our skills: my background is documentary, Jialu is TV and Annabella is writing. We aim to give a voice to women in order to empower them whilst addressing issues in the wider context nationally or globally. But we want to talk about difficult, challenging even tragic topics in a positive way, by showing examples of regular people who, despite everything keep moving forward. If they can do it, so can our audience. We want our audience to learn and be inspired by these stories.
Please, introduce us the other wonderful women of Springroll Media and tell us what you admire in them!
I am very grateful to Jialu for teaching me so much about China and her culture. In 2016, I moved in with Jialu’s family in Chengdu for 2 months while filming our project Mao’s Ice Cream which was very challenging but also a huge growth experience. She is extremely driven and hard-working, probably one of the few people I know who can achieve anything she puts in her mind. She has taken a break from media now and will have a baby this year, but I hope we will work together again soon.
Annabella is not only my colleague but also one of my best friends and because of her, I am both a better filmmaker and a better person. That kind of says it all. Her empathy and positivity makes her a great storyteller and journalist. We have been through a lot together covering issues that affected us, but this has brought us closer and made us grow.
Tell me one moment that you as a team felt very proud of your work.
I and Annabella traveled to refugee camps across Europe to collect bedtime stories in 2016. This became the multimedia project ’Good night stories!’ which was published by Der Spiegel and was nominated for Best Web-Video ReporterPreis in Germany and received 2nd Prize Best Multimedia at the Migration Media Awards. All these awards cannot compare to the pride we felt when we met some of our characters 3 years after the reporting trip.
In 2015, we met a Syrian family who was living in a refugee camp in the harbor of Athens. We spent a few days with them and had to leave them in this desperate situation to go back home and write the story. It was a very painful experience and we felt extremely helpless. Last year, we were finally able to visit them and their family in their new home in Germany. They got lucky and reunited with one of their sons. They lived together with an elder German bachelor who told us that his depression has improved since the family moved into his house. He felt a sense of community for the first time. He was teaching the children German and helped the father to find a job. It was as if we found a little heaven where integration worked and a story with a happy ending. We feel proud to continuously try to tell stories with a human angle like the Good night stories and try to make an effort to prove that humanity sometimes wins.
Tell me some untold things about some of your favorite projects (one photographic, one documentary and one interactive multimedia project if you can)
We have so many crazy stories about our work we can entertain dinner parties for the rest of the year. So it is hard to choose just 3.
Last year I worked on a photography project entitled Blue Banks. Female Identities in Rural Romania. This is very dear to my heart because I am from a small village in Romania and this project gave me the opportunity to give a voice to women who are stereotyped and completely underrepresented in the media. Together with film director Andreea Bortun, we collected their stories and presented them in a multimedia exhibition. This is when I received the best ever feedback — people crying at the exhibition.
I and Annabella were researching for a documentary in Romania in the last 2 years about the belief in the supernatural — the stories and characters we met in this project surpasses the limits of reason. We found ourselves listening to stories about energy-sucking ‘strigoi’ (poltergeists meets vampire), witch spells, clairvoyant priests, palm and card readers, and a yoga cult guru. Unfortunately, the project fell through because of lack of funds, but we had so much fun.
We moved to Chengdu, China in 2016 for a couple of months to produce the multimedia story Mao’s Ice Cream which also became a multimedia exhibition. This is the story of 5 female friends who take a photo every 10 years since 1976 — the year the Cultural Revolution ended. We followed them preparing to take the 5th photo. One day we found ourselves in this fancy K-TV (karaoke) room full of elderly Chinese people singing Vengaboys — Boom Boom Boom to them, they don’t understand a word of it, but we are all dancing and singing from the top of our lungs. Memorable day.
You as a director have a distinctive style. What inspires you?
I think I am still learning what my style as a director is. My own personal projects focus on my close friends and close family and deal with slightly different topics — loneliness, relationships, ageing, death. In those projects, there is a clearer recurring visual style whereas with Springroll Media we produced for different media outlets so the visual style has to change and adapt accordingly.
Unlike other film directors, I don’t get inspired by cinema or other media products, but by the complexity of people around me which I get to experience first-hand. Also, by things I care about and affect me — like the refugee crisis, gender inequality, injustices, and human rights violations. These things make me angry and that leads to ideas.
The new challenge for all digital creators is to engage the audience. Please, share your thoughts on that.
Images are powerful and this is why we focus on multimedia storytelling and documentaries, but because we are producing for different outlets, engaging with the audience is not something we can directly control. Now, organizations have their own engagement teams whose role is just that. I have always hoped our work has an impact and can lead to positive change, not just engagement through views, likes, and shares.
Tell me your craziest dream for the Springroll Media future.
I would love Springroll Media to grow into an organization that continues to tell and collect stories that matter for both media and corporate organizations. A step further would be to apply our skills and knowledge in producing media campaigns where we can clearly measure and evaluate the social impact of our work. We already have a huge and amazing network of female journalists, filmmakers, communicators and social makers all over the world. We would like to develop in order to be able to connect them with potential partners interested in the stories they can only tell.
Could you give an advice to a new journalist who tries to succeed in multimedia journalism?
What we learned is that although we specialized in multimedia storytelling and that’s what we want to do, not every story is best told through multimedia. First, find your story and see what is the best way or medium to tell it — it can be words, or photo, or video, or sound, or all, or none.
As a video-journalist, I see more and more demand for short social media videos. This is a genre in itself — relies mostly on video, stills, and words. The story is essential, whereas the quality of footage not so much. This is an advantage for good storytellers because they don’t need great filmmaking skills. There is a high demand for catchy stories with powerful, quirky, unusual characters for the potential of going viral. I produced a few of these videos and two have gone viral, but it’s not the kind of content we want to focus on, because there is no potential to tell a story in depth.
And last, tell us about your exchange experience in the US.
I participated in the DCN US Exchange in April 2019, and it was a great opportunity to satisfy my curiosity about the US (having never been there), learn a lot and grow my network. It was intense and time flew very fast. My favorite part was attending the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) in Austin, Texas where we got to talk to a lot of journalists from US and Latin America. I met there a Venezuelan female journalist with whom I am collaborating right now on a project. My fellowship took place at Indy Star in Indianapolis, Indiana. I must be honest I knew nothing about Indianapolis before, so it was quite surreal to be for a week in the heart of America. They were welcoming with us and we got to shadow a variety of reporters on the field — during sports press conferences, teachers rally, million-dollar auction, photojournalism competition and even filming a documentary on racial inequality. Being able to meet and connect with the other participants was great.
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