“Complicity Comes in Many Forms”: Jay Rosenblatt on His Sundance Short About Bullying, When We Were Bullies

Jay Rosenblatt’s latest inventive short When We Were Bullies, world premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, originated with a stranger than fiction coincidence surrounding a guy named Richard and the making of Rosenblatt’s 1994 short The Smell of Burning Ants — which itself had been influenced by another Richard, who is likewise the spark for this film. Fifty years ago the director and the former Richard, fifth-grade classmates, had been on the bullying side of a bizarre incident involving the latter Richard — a moment in time subsequently frozen in both their minds in similar, yet distinctly different, ways. So to get at the heart of what truly happened at a Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn public school a half century ago, Rosenblatt travels back down memory lane, contacting classmates whose recollections of the collective attack range from the totally blank to the weirdly specific. (One former student even surprisingly recalls the teacher as being a bit of a bully. So of course Rosenblatt also reconnects with that now nonagenarian teacher.) As the meta, or perhaps circular, quest ensues revelations begin to build as do the questions. All of this culminates in Rosenblatt’s disturbing recognition that culpability lies equally with leaders and collaborators, a dangerous lesson we’ve all been painfully learning over the past four years, right through to this very day. Just prior to the film’s Sundance debut Filmmaker reached out to the acclaimed San Francisco-based filmmaker, who’s directed over 30 films in 40 years, to find out all about both When We Were Bullies and “the bully in all of us.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.