A life in stories

Film-maker Holly Morris makes a living out of telling powerful stories. Her latest, Exposure, follows 11 ordinary women to the North Pole, and has brought her to NZ

- ELISABETH EASTHER

Author, journalist and documentary-maker Holly Morris's most recent film, Exposure, follows 11 women from the Arab world and the West as they ski to the North Pole in a powerful story of resilience and global citizenry. The American is touring the film here this month in association with the recent Doc Edge film festival.

You fill your life with adventure, telling stories from Cuba, Chernobyl and Iran. What were your early influences?

My parents were both sportscasters. Mum was also very active politically and Dad had been an NFL footballer player, so I grew up with an appreciation of the outdoors and an awareness of the power of media. We lived on a quasi-farm outside Chicago, in Illinois, so it was a sort of suburban, regular, middle-class American childhood where we also rode horses and ran around barefoot.

Were there hints back then that you'd grow up to become a globe-trotting film-maker?

The most notable thing we did was when I was in third grade. It was 1972 and my parents pulled me and my three siblings out of school for a year. I was about seven, and my older brother was 17. We toured east and western Europe and the then Soviet Union in an old Ford Econoline van we called the Blue Beast. I didn't think it was a big deal at the time, but I see it now as a ballsy move. Our parents weren't hippies, either, but that presumably set certain things in motion. It definitely taught me to look at the world fearlessly, which is not a given in an American childhood.

How direct was your path to making films?