Artist Dylan Strzynski started interviewing art fair artists in 2013. It was easy to find subjects, because he and his life partner, Helen Gotlib, travel the circuit themselves, selling their work at fairs all over the country. But The Life We Make is just now getting its first Ann Arbor showing, in the Michigan Theater’s screening room on February 11.
What took so long? “I did a Kickstarter, got a better camera, and then did a lot of work on it in 2014 and into 2015,” Strzynski says. In 2016, independent filmmaker Padrick Ritch came on as codirector. But “there was a lot to sort through.”
He estimates that less than 1 percent of what he shot ended up in the finished film. “To sift through that and assemble it into something an audience can follow—just that alone is a huge, huge process.” They also got “a lesson in storage redundancy” when a hard drive failed and they “had to pay for a forensic hard-drive restoration.”
The Life We Make had an invitation-only showing on YouTube in May 2020, and people “really seemed to appreciate it,” he says. It’s since been shown at numerous film festivals. “But it’s never screened here, locally, and this is where we live.”
The intended audience? “People who like documentary films,” he says. “I didn’t make it about art-fair artists for art-fair artists.”
He sees their lives as the “purest expression of the American spirit … making something yourself and going out on the road to sell it.” As one of the artists in the film puts it, “Everything’s on your shoulders, but you are in the driver’s seat.”
“My big criticism about an awful lot of documentaries that have been made in more recent years is that they are so driven by an agenda, by an argument that they’re trying to make,” says Strzynski. His film’s message, “is going to be up to the viewer. That’s important. I think that’s how documentaries are supposed to work.
“At the beginning I was on some sort of crusade,” he admits. He’d thought it might legitimize working artists in the eyes of a bigger art world or academics or whatever. But now, “I don’t care about that at all. It’s really about the people and the relationships.”
