Journalists take to the road with PBS
Recent graduate Leila Lemghalef, Michael Lasry and Alex Redgrave (l to r) with a sculpture of Kinky (nicknamed because of his curly hair) Friedman, who’s running as an independent for governor in Texas, right before we interviewed him in Austin. His advice to our generation: “Hold tight, spur hard, and let her buck.”
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For three Concordia journalism students, the road to self-discovery began in Los Angeles and ended five weeks later in Montreal.
Students Alex Redgrave and Michael Lasry and recent graduate Leila Lemghalef decided to take the road less travelled by navigating a 37-foot-long RV through the American Midwest and deep South for a PBS documentary. Their mandate was to interview as many inspirational people on camera as possible in little more than a month.
“I didn’t know what I could do with a journalism and liberal arts degree,” Lasry said. “In order to find out, we went out and asked people with whom we had common interests, or people who are interesting and inspirational to us, and asked them what they did with their lives.”
The RV and the two-man camera crew were provided by Road Trip Nation, a project initiated by several American students weighing their post-college career options. This year, two U.S. teams and one Canadian team were chosen to document their journeys. Two hours of each team’s footage will air on a PBS mini-series next year.
Redgrave was working as a waitress when she found out about Road Trip Nation, and called on Lasry and Lemghalef to assemble a last-minute application for which they interviewed Pop Montreal festival co-founder Dan Seligman.
“It was a really good feeling to interview someone, the three of us, and to find more about the person, not about an issue, which is what we usually do in journalism,” Lasry said.
The team flew out to Los Angeles in late June and encountered the giant green RV with a broken shower they would call home for the next five weeks. The experience of being reduced to relative vagrancy was a humbling one.
“In California, there was no problem [with having no shower] because we had the ocean. But the rest of it was finding empty hotel lots, jumping in their pools and then being able to sleep without getting caught,” Redgrave laughed.
But spending the summer in a sweltering, smelly RV was a welcome change of pace for these journalism students. The trip underlined the importance of not jumping into careers they may not be all that enthusiastic about as a way of satisfying the post-university questions that plague most graduates.
“[Film director] Richard Linklater said to us, ‘You should do something that you’d rather do than go on vacation with your friends’,” Lemghalef said. And with 500 hours of footage and thousands of miles of American highway under their belts, Redgrave, Lemghalef and Lasry now have a story to tell that goes beyond a line on their resumés.
“Everybody really has something to tell, you just have to sit down and actually listen,” Lasry said.