Filmmaker Susan Polis Schutz has lived a multi-faceted life. Her background includes social work, teaching, poetry, writing, and even founding one of the first e-greeting card sites on the internet — but it's documentary filmmaking, which she came to in her sixties, where she found her true passion. Schutz is the type of person who is endlessly curious and doesn't shy away from a challenge, and the concern for fellow humans learned throughout her varied career pervades her work. Her latest film, Love Wins Over Hate, explores the lives of people who have broken their bonds with white supremacy and gone on to find lives of empathy and advocacy. We spoke with Schutz to learn more about making the film, and how the themes it addresses — prejudice, hatred, redemption — are more timely now than ever.
While white supremacy might be a topic that seems to run counter to Schutz' inclusive outlook on life, the documentary quickly banishes that assumption. In fact, Schutz says, the thing that helped lead all of the people she interviewed out of the hatred espoused by the white supremacy groups they belonged to was the love in their lives: for their fellow man, for their families, and, most importantly, for their children.
Throughout the filmmaking process, Schutz says, her own thoughts on prejudice and racism continued to develop and change. While she first set out to find out why people are biased, she soon learned that bias often depends on your own perspective. And, as she says in the below video, we all carry our own prejudices.
While Schutz finished Love Wins Over Hate in early 2020 — editing long distance and working for up to 20 hours a day — the film and its themes of divisiveness, redemption, and empathy remain at the fore. A national reckoning with deeply-rooted racism, the coronavirus pandemic, economic downturn, and climate crisis have come together at a time when our people and politics are more divided than ever before. But Schutz says that her film can be watched anywhere at anytime. Prejudice and hatred isn't just a "now" problem, and it isn't just a U.S. problem, and it isn't just "somebody else's" problem. It's a global issue that we all have to work together to solve — and it's love that will show us the way forward.
