The Feedback: Jessica Chaney and Amanda Willoughby Reframe Mental Health Challenges in ‘I Am’

In Jessica Chaney’s I Am, five Black women directly address the audience to discuss their personal struggles with mental health—a therapist and a holistic life coach are both also on hand to help contextualize their stories, to demonstrate that no one need truly be alone in their personal journeys in anxiety, depression, and more. The film seeks to break down barriers in communication around how Black women specifically suffer these issues in this country.

In collaboration with the 2022 Indie Memphis Film Festival, IDA presented a work-in-progress DocuClub screening of I Am. To help Chaney and producer and editor Amanda Willoughby incorporate the audience’s feedback, IDA also paired them with editor Sarah Garrahan, who then spent several months advising on the film. A completed version premiered at last year’s Indie Memphis. On October 25, the film will debut on WKNO, the Memphis PBS member station. Documentary caught up with Chaney and Willoughby over Zoom to discuss how the project had finally come to fruition in this time. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

DOCUMENTARY: You identified this gap in the discourse around mental health. At what point did you decide you might as well be the ones to make this movie about the subject?

JESSICA CHANEY: It came from me going therapy for the first time. I went into the office (this was pre-COVID), and the therapist simply asked how I was doing. And I basically just broke down, and was diagnosed from there. Talking with Amanda and other people in our community laid bare how there are unfortunately still a lot of misunderstandings and stigma around mental health, especially for African-American women. The way these things impact our lives and how we navigate around them are also different, because of societal and systemic issues we face. We’re gradually seeing more openness in conversations around mental health, especially in the Black community, but it’s still very much like, “Don’t tell your business.” It’s still seen as a weakness in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. So I think this conversation is important. 

We talked about how we could bring this conversation to the forefront. And what we wanted most wasn’t to just talk about how we’re coping, how we’re just getting by, but being able to say that we can thrive, we can have the lives we want. I think our participants show this off really well. They’ve gone through so much, but they’ve done the work, and they’re better at showing up both for themselves and their communities. They’re really thriving and joyful. 

D: How long did production ultimately last?

JC: We first received the grant for the project in 2021. Originally it was a short, but we received so much support and found so many wonderful stories and opportunities. I was apprehensive about it, but Amanda was like, “No, this is a feature. Let’s go for it.”

AMANDA WILLOUGHBY: We wound up sitting with each woman for about an hour and getting so many great stories. I was looking at it all when editing, and I thought there was more than could fit in a short. Thinking both as producer and editor, I was like, “I got it. We don’t have to pay anyone to do it, so let’s make it a feature.”

D: What was the process for finding each of these women like?

AW: We were talking about wanting to have women from different walks and stages of life. One of them, Angel, is my sister, so I knew about her struggles with the healthcare world and her fertility. Alisha has been a friend since we were 14 years old. I’ve known her since high school, and I knew she’d gone through something significant in her military experience. I met Chloe on a film set where she was a PA, and a few months later I invited her to participate in a women’s arts festival, where I told her about our grand and the project. I was thinking maybe inviting her to be a PA or something, but she said, “Wait, if you all need somebody else to interview, I have a story to tell.”

JC: We knew Grae through industry connections, working locally with them. And when we were talking to Miss Jackie, the holistic coach, about whether she knew any other people, she recommended Angela to us, because she had been working with her for a while. And so that’s how the cast was rounded out. 

We also wanted to have a healthcare professional who could give credited and accurate information about these subjects. Initially we spoke with a woman Amanda went to school with, and she recommended her mentor. That’s how we got to know Dr. DeBerry, who eventually joined the film.

As we’ve moved toward completing the film and putting it out there, the really great thing is how many people have said they felt seen, that they felt validated, that they finally felt heard. They felt they weren’t alone in their struggles. It’s beautiful that people can resonate with the five who told us their stories.

D: What kind of changes did you make based on the feedback from the DocuClub screening?

AW: That screening was invaluable, a godsend. We had all the meat we needed to put on the bones, but they helped us craft it in such a way that we hadn’t looked at it before. And we had such a great group of people from the community that came to watch, women who told us, “These are my stories. I know myself and every single one of these women.” Craig Brewer, a good friend of ours, was there, and he helped me zone in on some things for the edit, how I could bring the story to life, how to get to the important things more quickly. 

Many in that audience said they wanted to see more of all the women. The version we screened was 55 minutes long. So we added more to the stories. We went back to our participants and asked them for materials—personal archival footage, cellphone footage, etc. We asked if we could shoot B-roll with them in certain areas, often places they talked about in their interviews. They were all super amazing, very game. Angela got permission from her school to film in her classroom, things like that. We kept the overall structure; we just added a lot more to it. IDA and Sarah also helped us rearrange certain details to help it flow better.

D: How did you connect with Sarah Garrahan through IDA? What was it like working with her?

JC: IDA gave us a list of people who had worked on films with highly sensitive subjects. Sarah appealed to us because she had worked on Silent Beauty, which is about a young lady [director Jasmín Mara López] who recounts her stories around abuse as a child. We felt she’d understand how to approach our participants and what they were telling us. At our very first meeting, she already had the whole film broken down, section by section, and she really went through it with us.

AW: Sarah, we love her. She gave us more help than she was required to. She’s been a good friend ever since. She really honed in with the most attentive eye, which I appreciate as an editor because sometimes others see things I don’t. She brought her different perspective to help me shape the film in a way that could be easily digested by all audiences. 

D: The completed film played at Indie Memphis last year, and now it’s about to air on public television. Are there any further release plans?

JC: We’ve gotten into some great festivals—Indie Memphis, Hayti Heritage, the International Black Film Festival. We started a conversation in January with our local PBS station, WKNO; the team there has worked with Indie Memphis and others in showcasing local art. The broadcast will coincide with a community screening. And we have an amazing opportunity with Alliance Healthcare, a provider here in Memphis. We’ve partnered with them for a screening that will kick off their 50th anniversary celebrations. The work is expanding in some beautiful ways.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.