Joslyn Barnes ’81 wrote her first film at age 20 and is now co-founder and chief operating officer of a production company, but she hasn’t always been a filmmaker — at least not professionally. She took a leave of absence at a critical point in her screenwriting career to pursue work that has little of the sheen associated with the silver screen: international development at the United Nations.
It would seem a sufficiently radical shift to pull her away from film for good. But it turned out to be an enhancement to her career, paving the way for her eventual return to the medium and underscoring a defining element — a commitment to social justice — that has come to characterize her filmmaking.
Her work is all the richer for the departure.
Joslyn spent some time after graduating from Cornell University, where she had studied after Chapin, successfully writing movie scripts in Los Angeles. Soon after, however, she made the leap to the UN. “It was a natural extension of my studies at university and activist work,” Joslyn recalled. “I had already participated in work connected with the anti-apartheid movement, the peace movement and indigenous peoples’ rights.”
As a UN information and program officer, Joslyn traveled throughout Asia and Africa and worked with civil society organizations, NGOs and activists on development issues. She also encountered, though she may not have known it at the time, ideas for films.
“Sometime during my sixth year at the UN, I was sitting in an endless, frustrating donor meeting,” Joslyn said. “A colleague from Cameroon turned to me and said, ‘I read this great book that I think would make a great movie. It’s about a group of beggars who go on strike and stop accepting alms.’ Four years later, I was making that movie, Bàttu, in Senegal, with a filmmaker from Mali. It’s about the African debt crisis. Go figure.”
The experience set Joslyn’s re-entry into the film world into motion. She continued to work part-time at the UN while making the transition, which reached a turning point in 2005, when she and actor Danny Glover founded a production company called Louverture Films, aiming to develop and produce movies with historical relevance and social purpose.
“At Louverture, the question we begin with when considering a film is: Is it a necessary film?” Joslyn said. For this company, “necessary” often means documenting a struggle for social justice or equality. Among its eight films are Africa Unite, about Bob Marley’s vision for a cohesive Africa; Bamako, about Africans who confront international monetary funds that exist to eradicate poverty; the Academy Award-nominated Trouble the Water, about a couple from the lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and the forthcoming The Time that Remains, a chronicle of the Palestinian struggle. Two more films are in production, and four are in earlier stages, including Toussaint, which examines the Haitian Revolution and its charismatic leader, Toussaint Louverture, from whom the company takes its name.
In her work at Louverture, Joslyn often juggles what comes naturally to her — being a screenwriter — with roles that she has to learn as she goes, such as being a producer. “Shifting to producing has been a huge learning curve,” she said. Joslyn also recently tried out directing, making a short film, Prana, which is part of a series of internationally distributed films to promote environmental awareness. It will premiere at Cannes next year.
Despite the challenges of writing, producing, directing and running a business, what keeps Joslyn going is her love of cinema and the belief that art can tackle meaningful subject matter and positively change people’s lives.
“I think that the imagination is among the most powerful gifts we can exercise, and that artistic expression, in any form, has a unique power to enhance awareness and, by extension, to cultivate compassion and empathy among people,” she said.
As her career attests, she has never let that connection to others end up on the cutting room floor.