Columbia College Today

Writer/director Rick Minnich ’90 (center), sound recordist Raimund von Scheibner (left) and directory of photography Axel Schneppat (right) filmed Homemade Hillbilly Jam in Missouri in 2005.

Photo: Mark Bilyeu

“When I was 12, I won a Super 8 movie camera as a bonus for being a good paperboy, and began filming my baby brother, Ben. That’s how everything got started,” says documentary filmmaker Rick Minnich ’90, whose recent project, Homemade Hillbilly Jam (2005, www.atriskfilms.com), made its world premiere in Toronto last April. It has been screened throughout the United Kingdom and the United States and was part of Lincoln Center’s Independent Nights.

Though he pursued a B.A. in English literature and considered a career in journalism, New York City changed his plans. “I was pretty overwhelmed by New York at first. Everything was wonderful and new,” says Minnich, who spent most of his childhood in suburban Los Angeles. Then he discovered New York City’s art house cinemas.

“I started to get the feeling during my first year at the College, while immersing myself in Jean Renoir films at the old Regency Theater near Columbus Circle, that I wanted to pursue filmmaking,” he recounts. “I was exposed to these filmmakers [including] Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Ross McElwee and Johan van der Keuken at Columbia either in film classes, at screenings at Casa Italiana, through Zooprax [the former Barnard film society], the Columbia Film School or during my many forays into NYC’s art houses.”

Minnich and some friends gave the Ferris Booth filmmaking club a go, albeit unsuccessfully. “We got some funds to buy equipment, which quickly vanished,” says Minnich, who served as Zooprax’s president during his junior year. From the summer of his sophomore year until graduation, Minnich worked part-time as an intern for film distributor Kino International under Don Krim ’67. The job gave Minnich insight into film distribution as well as exposure to filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch ’75, Aki Kaurismäki and the late Michael Powell.

Responding to a Spectator ad a month before graduation, Minnich applied for an internship with Latvian Television in Riga. Spending three months of “a bizarre experience” during the Baltic States’ efforts to dissolve from the Soviet Union, he became camera assistant for a news program and shot film shorts with Latvian students. After Riga, Minnich migrated to Berlin, then returned to California to pursue graduate studies at CalArts. But he missed Germany, so he applied for a graduate fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service. Minnich received funding to continue graduate studies at the Film & Television Academy Konrad Wolf in the former East Germany, graduated from its directing program in 2001, and has been living in Berlin.

Recently, Minnich brought his documentary work back to the United States. “I found myself attracted to subjects American filmmakers hadn’t discovered, or for which they simply hadn’t found the funding,” Minnich says. “I began searching for some kind of American essence, what it really means to be an American today.”

Minnich decided to look in the Ozarks, where he filmed Homemade Hillbilly Jam and his award-winning thesis documentary, Heaven on Earth (2001). Having spent his early childhood in Kansas, Minnich rediscovered the Midwest. He describes the feeling of working in the States as “straddling the fence between being an American vs. a Europen filmmaker.” Homemade Hillbilly Jam explores the musical lives of modern-day hillbillies residing in Southwestern Missouri.

Minnich has seven documentaries and experimental films to his credit, six of which received awards from festivals in Europe and the United States. His subjects have ranged from the fate of Lenin statues after the collapse of the Soviet Union (The Book of Lenins 1993–96) to his 10-year high school reunion in Los Angeles (Good Guys & Bad Guys (1997) and the Las Vegas of the Bible Belt, Branson, Mo. (Heaven on Earth). “I’ve had the good fortune of being able to make films about things that really interest me,” Minnich says.

Through a commission from German television station ZDF, Minnich is working on a feature-length documentary about his father’s amnesia following a car accident shortly after Minnich’s College graduation. This fall, Minnich will spend a month at the Villa Aurora, a German-run artists’ retreat in the Pacific Palisades, to work on Lenin in Hollywood, the story of Lenin’s trip to Los Angeles in 1915 in an attempt to gain support for the Russian Revolution. Minnich hopes to eventually return his attention to Germany and create a screenplay based on an old idea for his “great Berlin film.”

While he continues filmmaking on both continents, Minnich adds, “If I get ‘discovered’ along the way, I certainly wouldn’t protest!”

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A Filmmaker of Two Continents