Every story has its twists and turns — ditto for the lives of those who craft them.
For the Academy Award- and Emmy-winning documentarian Daniel Junge, those twists and turns took him from Cheyenne to Denver to Los Angeles and now to Boulder, earning him an Oscar and an Emmy for the 2012 short documentary “Saving Face,” and spanning from streaming’s golden era of the 2010s to “the malaise,” as he calls it, of the 2020s. Yet Junge persists. And on Nov. 7, Denver Film Festival attendees will get a chance to see his latest feature, “I Was Born This Way,” the story of singer and archbishop Carl Bean.
Bean’s story is also one of twists and turns. Born in the 1940s in Baltimore, Maryland, Bean sang on the 1977 single, “I Was Born This Way,” which became a club hit for Motown Records and a gay liberation anthem for disco dancers. Thirty-plus years later, Lady Gaga paid tribute to it with her own song, “Born This Way.”
To call Bean’s “I Was Born This Way” a revolutionary record is an understatement. But the hit faded into the woodwork when disco died, as did Bean’s recording career. Then came Bean’s second act: founder and archbishop of the Unity Fellowship Church in L.A. That’s where Junge found his story.
“I like to use [“I Was Born This Way”] as an example for students,” Junge tells me over cups of black coffee and slices of Pink Lady apples at his kitchen table in Boulder. “A lot of people think documentary filmmakers have this burning story that’s in their heart.”
Occasionally, he admits, there are those, but “I don’t think I’ve had one.” Instead, “films come out of an opportunity,” and Bean’s story came to Junge while he was researching a TV series on social action and the intersection of protest music.
“One of the episodes was going to be ‘Sex,’” he continues. “For me, that meant Lady Gaga’s queer anthem, ‘Born This Way.’ That was the LGBTQ+ anthem of my generation.”
In researching the origin of Gaga’s song, Junge discovered Bean’s story, and it “stuck in my craw.”
But when funding for the series fizzled, the project was put on ice. Junge didn’t stop. He tracked Bean to his church — not more than two miles from Junge’s L.A. home — and within a couple of months was filming interviews, “out of pocket, by hook or by crook.”
“They become passion projects,” the 56-year-old filmmaker explains. “[‘I Was Born This Way’] was built, piece-by-piece, over six-and-a-half years.”
Collaboration is key
As he has on previous docs, Junge shares directorial credit. It’s part of his process.
“I’m a straight, white, cis-guy, and it’s always important, when I’m making a film outside of my community, to collaborate with that community,” he says. “So every key position [on ‘I Was Born This Way’] are people of color and/or LGBTQ-identifying.”
Junge recruited “documentary royalty” Sam Pollard — director of “Two Trains Runnin’,” which played the Boulder International Film Festival in 2018, MLK/FBI and Bill Russell: Legend, to name three — as co-director and Wellington Love as producer. (Love, along with Junge, film participant Beatitude Bishop Zach Jones and executive producer Cori Robinson will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A moderated by Lisa Kennedy following DFF’s Nov. 7 screening.)
World-class cinema from the foot of the Flatirons
To date, Junge has directed more than a dozen features and shorts — and worked on as many TV shows — across varying styles and subjects. Those numbers expand if you start counting his credits as producer, including the recently completed “Sallie’s Ashes,” a short doc about Alabama grandmothers fighting to remove toxic coal ash from Mobile Bay. A friend of Junge’s described it as “Erin Brokovich meets The Golden Girls,” he recounts with a chuckle.
Junge has high hopes that “Sallie’s Ashes” will compete for next year’s Oscar. That’ll be quite a coup for Boulder, particularly for the filmmakers working here.
“We don’t think of [Boulder] as a [filmmaking] hub, but it is — especially in documentary,” he says. “Some of that is by virtue of the fact that we have Louie Psihoyos living here. We got Paula [DuPré Pesmen], Jeff [Orlowski-Yang], me, Davis Coombe [who edited ‘I Was Born This Way’]. … I can’t say there’s something in the water here, there just happens to be a collection of individuals who have decided to live here that are making world-class stuff.”
And that goes for “I Was Born This Way,” a movie that started six-and-a-half years ago when Junge was working on a completely different project.
“Even though I started this film in L.A., all post-production was here,” Junge says. “The editors are here: Davis and Tessa [Malsam], the post house [Milkhaus], and the digital animator… It’s a Colorado product.”
“I Was Born This Way” will play at the Denver Film Festival at 7 p.m. on Nov. 7 at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Tickets include a pre-film reception beginning at 5:30 p.m. in the Freyer Newman Center atrium and a post-film Q&A with director Daniel Junge, film participant Beatitude Bishop Zach Jones, producer Wellington Love and executive producer Cori Robinson, moderated by journalist Lisa Kennedy. Tickets here.
