Hospital staff members in the pandemic documentary, “The Storm & the Boats.”
(UPDATE: Due to the storm that is forecast for New Jersey on Feb. 8, the screening will be online only.)
“The uncertainty was the thing that, I think, got to all of us,” says Liora Seltzer, the mother of two young children, in the pandemic documentary “The Storm & the Boats.” “Because you can deal with something when you know what you’re dealing with. But when you don’t, you just need to change the mentality to just survive the day, and go day by day, and do your best.
“We may be in the same storm, but we don’t all have the same boat.”
The 53-minute documentary — which will be shown at The New Jersey Film Festival in New Brunswick on Feb. 8 and be available online, that day — is, basically, an oral history of the first year of the pandemic, with photos and videos from that time added. It is hard to imagine anyone who lived through those agonizing months not being able to relate to these stories, and being moved by them.
The film was written, produced and directed by Jody Small of Fair Lawn, who was the Founding Director of Film and Video at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and also has worked for The Vietnam Era Education Center in Holmdel, The Holocaust Museum Houston and elsewhere. She set up a home studio and, as soon as the first COVID vaccines became available, started shooting interviews with a diverse group of New Jerseyans — a police sergeant, a restaurant owner, an emergency room doctor, a history teacher, a retired rabbi and so on. They all talked about their personal experiences with life in the shadow of COVID: both the small frustrations and, in some cases, the life-altering tragedies.
(Small received grant support from the Rutgers University Oral History Archive and The New Jersey Historical Commission, and the full collection of her interviews can be accessed at The Rutgers University Oral History Archives.)
BRIAN L. STROM
Brian L. Strom, Chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and the Executive Vice President for Health Affairs at Rutgers University, discusses some of the steps that were taken to manage the crisis. But for the most part, Small focuses on everyday stories of people who came down with COVID, or had relatives who did, or were just dealing with the day-to-day realities of wearing masks, staying in isolation, communicating with others via Zoom and FaceTime, scrubbing groceries after they brought they home, and so on.
Subjects such as pandemic-related mental illness, the impact of the murder of George Floyd (in May 2020) and the increase of food insecurity in New Jersey during the pandemic, are discussed in different portions of the film.
A section is also devoted to “silver linings” of the pandemic.
“Being outdoors all the time,” says Seltzer.
The “complete stop” that most people experienced in those early months, says Tami Kabiawu, a high-achieving high school student and athlete. It gave him a chance to take a step back and “realize what I’m doing it for, in the first place,” he says.
“There were people that were there for me, in ways that I could never imagine being there for me,” says Gail Rottenstreich, whose Newark-based manufacturing company, ZaGO, made parts for ventilators that were essential in COVID recovery.
Genny Allard — who tells one of the film’s most harrowing stories, about her 25-year-old son’s nearly fatal bout with COVID — sums up the importance of this project this way: “My great-grandmother died in the Spanish flu. But it would be nice to have had more details. As time goes, and people’s memories fade, I think it’s important to document this.”
The New Jersey Film Festival will screen “The Storm & the Boats” at Voorhees Hall at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m., along with two short films, “Embryo” and “Crowboy”; visit newjerseyfilmfestivalspring2025.eventive.org/welcome. The film will also be available online that day. Visit watch.eventive.org/newjerseyfilmfestivalspring2025.
For more about the film, visit thestormandtheboats.com.
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