When film producer Lisa Frank graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1997, she knew that she wanted a career in the arts. As a student, she had taken advantage of the many performance opportunities, which prepared her well to major in theater at Northwestern University; she also knew that storytelling was an important component of everything that she had always chosen to do. After a series of freelance gigs, a fortuitous opening to work with a film producer – combined with Frank’s fluency in French – led to her first film project, and, in her words, “I was hooked.” Frank’s most recent projects are “The American Nurse” and “Defining Hope,” the latter of which was honored as the 2017 Heartland Film Festival Best Premiere.

I’ve always been interested in telling stories, and there has been a storytelling component to almost everything I’ve chosen to do. I actually made my first documentary during my senior year at Bryn Mawr with my friend Katie Hammond. We were in Mr. Shoemaker’s film class and we had an assignment – I don’t think the assignment was to make a film, but somehow that’s what we did. We borrowed a friend’s home video camera, the kind with the giant VHS tapes. The story was about two students and their journeys home from school. One student drove five minutes down Charles Street to her home in Guilford and the other student spent an hour and a half riding two buses and a light rail train to South Baltimore. I remember staying up all night to “edit” the footage, interweaving the two stories. Katie and I didn’t know anything about filmmaking, but the stories spoke for themselves.

At Northwestern University I was a theater major and French minor. When I graduated, I moved to Paris for a couple of years to continue studying theater, acting, writing, miming, improvising and producing. I was also doing some translation work. After that I moved to New York and started freelancing, doing everything from translating French screenplays to working as a teaching artist with The Story Pirates, a children’s theater company. I think I had 18 jobs in two years! Somehow the intersection of French and theater led me to a job producing a documentary about the 2007 French presidential elections. The executive producer was American and didn’t speak French, and he needed help finding subjects to be interviewed for the film. So, I would wake up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to cold call French politicians and ask if they’d like to be interviewed for our project. I spoke to French leaders including Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Francois Bayrou, all while sitting under my loft bed in my pajamas. I loved it. When the opportunity presented itself, I quit my day job and moved back to France to work on distribution for the film. That was it – I was hooked.

For the last decade, I’ve been the producing partner to a wonderful photographer and director named Carolyn Jones. About five years ago, we started a project called “The American Nurse,” which turned into a photography book, a website and a documentary film. We started the project by researching some of the biggest issues affecting our health and healthcare in the U.S. – aging, poverty, war, incarceration – then set out to find nurses working with patient populations most directly affected by those issues. We spent time on a Labor & Delivery unit at Johns Hopkins; with a nun running a Wisconsin nursing home using baby goats and sheep as animal therapy; and at the biggest maximum security prison in the country, where inmates are trained to care for their fellow inmates when they’re dying.

Whether we were speaking to hospice nurses, nurses in an ICU, nurses in the military or in the emergency department of a major hospital, there was one recurring theme: that we’re not dying well in this country. And that even if we can’t change the whole dysfunctional healthcare system, we can at least make small changes and take small actions to regain some control over our end-of-life experience. So, we set out to make a film that would tell the story of patients facing impossibly complex decisions about their care, interwoven with guidance from their nurses.

One of the most consistently surprising things to me has been that people usually want to have their story told. Sometimes I think, wow, there is no way this person is going to agree to letting us film these incredibly intimate aspects of their life. But more often than not, once they know the goals of the project, they come onboard. In “Defining Hope,” one of our subjects agreed to let us film her undergoing brain surgery. And the surgeon agreed. And the hospital agreed. They felt that there was something to be gained by sharing this story with the world and that it might help another patient and family facing a similar scenario.

Without question, my favorite part of my work is interacting with the subjects. I get to talk to people all over the world, from all walks of life. I get a little window into their world and it’s my job to dig in and figure out how best to tell their story. I also get to travel, which I love. Carolyn and I have had amazing experiences all over the world together, from a 13-hour boat ride up the Amazon in Brazil, to a birthday celebration in Malawi; visiting a train station health clinic helping homeless children in Delhi and driving up a creek in the Appalachian mountains that was flooded by top-of-the-mountain coal mining. Sometimes I also have to make spreadsheets and balance budgets. But every job has to have at least some tedium, or else how would we ever appreciate the good stuff?