A Quick Chat With Rossella Laeng

Award-winning documentary filmmaker & archival producer

You’ve done a bit of everything: directing, editing, archive research. When someone asks what you do, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Do you feel more like a documentary filmmaker, or more like an archive producer? Or do you think that labels like these don’t really reflect what your work is about?

I have done a bit of everything, and that’s because most of my work has been independent, i.e. low / no budget. So I’ve had to improvise and adapt out of necessity, which is hard, but also a great way to learn and stay nimble.
I generally say I am a documentary filmmaker / documentarian, as a way to make the title all encompassing. Filmmaking can mean many different things, and over time my focus / what my work is about has shifted.
First and foremost I think of myself as a director: I love to discover great stories, and figure out the puzzle pieces of how to compellingly tell them through the medium of documentary.
Then professionally / for money I apply different film-related skills to various types of projects (film, commercial, corporate, etc).
Archival Producing is a more recent development. In 2022 I was hired as an archival research assistant for an American documentary, and my role on that project grew, as did my interest in and knowledge of archival producing.


You studied film in New York and got a journalism certificate from NYU. But you’ve also lived and worked in places as different as India, Texas and Australia.
What do you think you learned through formal training, and what did you only discover by being out in the world, working on real projects?
Is there something essential in your way of working today that comes more from life experience than from school?

As someone who was raised by parents from different nationalities, traveling and living around the world; my status quo is feeling like I simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere. I believe this is why I’ve always felt like I see the world around me like a movie, as if I was watching life unfold the way a spectator watches a film. For a long time being the “perpetual outsider” felt like a curse, but in filmmaking it’s perhaps my superpower / greatest asset. My perspective is unusual, and I gained it through the great privilege of experiencing the world from many different angles.
I discovered filmmaking a bit later in life, while I was living in New York; which was lucky because I was able to cut my teeth on different kinds of sets. I had the clichè experience of starting out bringing coffees, taking notes, wrapping cables, driving film gear around the city… I learned a lot about filmmaking, especially the technical parts, on the job. Eventually I decided to go back to school to formalize my knowledge of the craft, and the educational context was useful. It gave me time and support to work on projects, and access to internships and networking opportunities. But I do believe going to film school would have been a very different experience, had I not been older, wiser, and worldly.

I think it primarily comes down to taste, I just like things that are niche and quirky. But I also like to see / study the world from unusual perspectives, find patterns and similarities in unexpected places. I’m very curious by nature, so my first reaction to things I don’t know is to try and understand them. Then once I’ve normalized it for myself, it’s a fun challenge to translate my vision into a film. One of the best compliments I’ve received regarding Taxiderman is that I was able to take something that can seem so appalling to some, and find the poetry and beauty in it. You don’t have to appreciate taxidermy to understand that some people find it beautiful, and in this specific context even therapeutic. The fact that after watching my film someone is able to say: “it’s not for me, but I understand and respect those who choose to taxidermy their deceased pet” feels like success to me. It means I was able to build a bridge between opposing views, which seems like something the world is lacking at the moment. So I guess what makes a character / story worth following for me is the depth of what they can convey, and the universal truths contained within their story, no matter how bizarre.

Somewhere along the way, your path also crossed with archival research.
Was it something you actively looked for, or did it find you while working on a project?
What do you enjoy most about the process of digging into forgotten footage and uncovering fragments of past lives?

I spent months traveling around Italy searching for material, sometimes in obvious places (state archives, museums, etc) but also via word of mouth. I found myself in private homes, digging through shoeboxes and holding photo negatives up to the window. Because I’m Italian / bilingual, I leveraged my local network in Venice and was able to find buried material that would have otherwise been unfindable. So I learned pretty quickly that Archival Research can sometimes resemble detective work, which I very much enjoyed (I’m a very social person, I could talk to rocks; so an excuse to knock on a stranger’s door and go digging through their stuff is always fine by me!).
Because I had no formal training in archival research and management, I built my own system to organize the material, as well as a workflow to share it with my team in the United States. During a previous life working in tech I had become pretty familiar with Airtable, which we used to organize archival material so that it was easily searchable, as well as manage other aspects of production. By the time we got to the final cut stage, our Airtable system had become quite sophisticated: we had built in formulas to calculate how much each piece of archival would cost (video, for example, is usually sold by the second). So we would import cuts of the film as metadata / timecode, and calculate how much each cut would cost us in archival rights alone. I have no idea if this is what other productions do, but it worked quite well for us.
So I learned about archival production hands on, from simply finding it all the way to contracting rights, and I dove in the deep end: as this film is about art, each item had to be scanned for multiple rights (who took the photo / video, who appears in it, who currently owns the artwork, etc).
I fell in love with this aspect of filmmaking for several reasons. It’s thrilling to give new life to old material, it’s like taking part in a form of historical preservation; there is something ancestral and deeply human about it.
I also love matching existing material to contemporary storytelling, it’s like a kind of puzzle that feels extremely satisfying to my brain. Perhaps because I’ve always had a very visual memory: I can’t remember a date or name to save my life, but I’ll never forget an image. Once I’ve seen it, I know it exists. So although I’ve learned to use tools to help me, once I’m working on a project I become a living database for it.

Let’s move to a topic I personally care a lot about. Artificial intelligence. I truly believe we are at the beginning of a major revolution. AI will probably bring many benefits, but also huge challenges, especially in the creative industries.
What’s your take on AI-generated video? These tools are improving incredibly fast. Videos that looked clunky just a few months ago are now starting to feel more and more realistic.
How do you think AI, and video generation in particular, might affect the documentary field and the way we tell stories?

I think we’re all struggling to predict and prepare for how AI will affect any field, including documentary film.
I have colleagues who have already started to produce AI generated shorts, and although I’m supportive, I’m mostly observing from the sidelines / pretty uninterested myself (I still find the results too “uncanny valley”).
My stance on AI is ambivalent: I can see the advantages for filmmakers such as myself, as suddenly many aspects of production which were time consuming and expensive are accessible to us (I recently worked on a project where we used AI to animate photographs, and the results were impressive). Similarly to how social media expanded and fundamentally changed the media landscape, AI will likely shift the existing world order for many industries, including film; and change is often hard and uncomfortable while it’s happening. But since the AI train has already left the station and there is no stopping it, I am mainly focused / concerned with the new ethical dilemmas brought on by AI in documentary films. The APA (Archival Producers Alliance) published guidelines for best practices, which I think should be mandatory reading for anybody in this field. Our profession carried a lot of ethical risks before the advent of this potentially very harmful technology, so it’s as important as ever for us to act with integrity. Not to paint with broad strokes, but I optimistically have faith in the documentary field. I know many incredible, talented filmmakers whom I trust to safeguard the sanctity of what we do, and use these new tools for good. Like anything else, AI is what we make of it.

I share your perspective on artificial intelligence. There’s a quote that I think fits this moment perfectly: “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”
Thank you so much for this conversation, Rossella. It’s been thoughtful, honest, and full of those subtle layers that often go unnoticed.
To everyone reading: take a moment to explore her work at rossellalaeng.com — it’s truly worth it.
And before we let you go… what are you working on right now? Is there a new project on the horizon you’d like to share?

Since 2023 my creative partner Marco Riva and I have been developing a documentary about Pietro Vassena: an inventor from our hometown, Lecco; who in 1948 broke the world diving record inside the C3, a midget bathyscaphe of his own artisanal construction.
The first step we took was to reach out to the family (Vassena’s grandchildren) and ask if they had an archive of visual material, in order to assess whether or not we had enough to build a film with. To our great advantage, we discovered a treasure trove of never before seen photographs, documents, news articles, technical drawings… I took it upon myself to organize the material (using the skills I’d developed with Taking Venice) and now we’re piecing together a historical documentary that showcases this amazing archive, and enhances it in new ways. For a recent exhibit organized by the city of Lecco for Vassena, we experimented with AI animation, yielding results that are quite impressive. But I have to be honest, it was Marco’s idea and execution to animate existing photographs with AI. At first I was a bit skeptical, even somewhat opposed to the idea. Not morally, but I think I’m still adjusting to the concept as well as the aesthetic. Since I’m so familiar with the photographic material, I couldn’t help but see the artifice; I’d notice faces morphing and strange things happening. I had to take a step back and apply some objectivity, and it wasn’t until I saw the results through the fresh eyes of our audience that I was ultimately convinced. Many exhibit-goers were surprised to learn that what they were seeing wasn’t video, but one black and white photograph animated using AI.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about how these new technologies, as scary as they rightly can be, might reshape documentary storytelling. During the time I spent doing research for Taking Venice, I ran across several heartbreaking examples of material lost in the vaults, potentially never to be seen again. I think Italy in particular has a problem with preserving and showcasing its national treasures (of which we are lucky to have many), and it’s understandable: organizing, archiving, storing… These are laborious and costly tasks. I imagine soon the very tedious work I’ve been doing (scanning, cataloging) will be done much more efficiently by a machine, and that’s not such a bad thing, as it frees up time and resources to turn that material into a film, or an exhibit. Presumably one day not too far from today, I’ll be able to generate an entire documentary from a couple of scanned images. Of course this will open the floodgates to a lot of garbage content (and harmful content, if strict safety measures aren’t put in place and enforced), but I’m trying to focus on the positive outcomes, like expanded access to knowledge and information which would otherwise likely perish.

Thanks again, Rossella. I’ll be following your next steps closely, and who knows, maybe we’ll cross paths again in the archives!