Chana Gazit, BA '82 & David Steward, MA '79

The road to filmmaking

Emmy-winning filmmaker Chana Gazit, BA 1982, knew that she had found her calling when she walked into her first film class as a college senior. “I majored in English and theatre, not knowing what was pulling me,” she says. “The minute I began taking a filmmaking class I understood that the English and theatre were just leading me on the road to filmmaking.”

What Gazit did not realize immediately is that she had also found her future business partner and husband, David Steward, MA 1979, in that career-defining course. A group of five media studies students, including Gazit and Steward, met on the first day of class and remain closely connected. After graduating and later marrying, Gazit and Steward worked independently in documentary filmmaking for many years; she was a producer, writer and director, and he worked primarily as an editor and producer.

An auspicious partnership

In 1989 the UB grads received grant money to collaborate on a film. The resulting documentary, Honorable Nations, focuses on the town of Salamanca, NY, whose lease with the Seneca Nation of Indians was set to expire in 1991. Gazit and Steward, with their 18-month-old daughter in tow, relocated from New York City to the small town 65 miles south of Buffalo for three months to chronicle the story. Gazit calls such experiences one of the privileges of a career in documentary film. “People allow you to enter into their lives in a way that would be much harder to do as a regular person,” she says. “They share some of their deepest experiences and stories with you. It is just an amazing thing.”

From the outset, their partnership was an auspicious one. Honorable Nations was awarded an Emmy, and the success of that first venture led them to form Gazit/Steward Productions 10 years ago. Since then the duo has collaborated on more than half a dozen Emmy-award winning programs and series, and their films have been honored with, among others, DuPont-Columbia Journalism Awards, Peabody Awards, Writer’s Guild Awards and by the Sundance Film Festival. In September 2004, their film The Pill, which traces the development of the birth control pill, was awarded an Emmy. Gazit and Steward’s most recent projects include a program for the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America, and a film on women and immigration for the series Destination America.

Both filmmakers find the profession extremely rewarding. Through their films they become, in Gazit’s words “mini-experts” on a variety subjects and can pursue and tell real life stories. While Steward admits, “Every film becomes your favorite while you are working on it,” he says that two of his more memorable independent projects were piecing together the “wonderful archival footage” for Surviving the Dustbowl and working with legendary producer Bob Drew on Being with JFK. Of their passion for documentary Gazit says, “What draws many of us into documentaries is the chance to be engaged with the social issues of the day. The other big pull for us is that there are extraordinary stories to be told. There is a wealth of human drama and poignancy in the stories of real people.”

Sense of drama

Gazit and Steward trace this love of documentary to their days at UB. After that first life-altering film class, Gazit took as many others as she could in her final year. She also credits theatre Professor Saul Elkin. “I began to understand the nature of drama and narrative through his classes,” she says. “That became a really important thing for me as I continued with filmmaking. Even though I am a documentary filmmaker, I think that the sense of drama and narrative is as important in documentary as it is in a fiction film.” The Brooklyn native found that the intermingling of the filmmaking, English, and poetic student communities made UB “an extraordinarily stimulating and intellectual and theoretical environment. It gave me an intellectual framework and curiosity that would last always. We were kind of all on a journey together.”

For Steward it was “the summer in darkness” he spent in screening rooms that drew him to filmmaking. His first summer at UB he took a documentary course that featured some of the great names in the field, such as Donald Allen Pennybaker and James Blue. “I was awed by their work and what documentary was when it was handled with great care,” he says. “It was incredibly valuable for me to work with these world class documentary makers and get a sense of what can be done with cinema in the documentary form.”

Sense of community

It’s no surprise that when they aren’t making movies, Gazit and Steward like to see them – although interestingly enough fiction films are usually their first choice. Based in Manhattan, the couple and their teenaged daughter also have a cottage retreat in the Catskills, where Steward enjoys hiking and Gazit pursues her newfound love of gardening. Both like to travel, whether to Mexico, Europe or to visit Steward’s family in Western New York. Says Gazit, “I am extraordinarily attached to Buffalo.” Those four years [at UB] were one of the most wonderful four years of my life. I have never felt up to that point or ever since as much of a sense of community as I felt during my time there. Every time we are up there, I just love driving around and going to the old places. It really it fills me with a lot of warmth and a lot of fond memories.”

Written by Jessica Dudek, BA '94
May 2005

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