Rising Above

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When Mary Recine ’92 was a student at Barnard, she floated through various disciplines, feeling unsure of what she wanted to do with the wide-ranging knowledge she was gaining.

“I went to Barnard not really knowing exactly what I would study. I always dabbled in photography and storytelling,” she says. “I wanted to tackle the world’s big questions.” She chose to major in philosophy but also delved deep enough into history to acquire a job in that department. She was working there one day when two filmmakers came in seeking a professor to showcase in their work. A faculty member who knew about Recine’s interests introduced her to them. “They asked me, could I carry heavy camera equipment? And I said sure,” she says. And that is how her broad interests set the course for her subsequent career as a film producer — one that includes working with notables ranging from Joan Didion to Spike Lee.

“I’ve always been drawn to stories about people and their identities and stories about artists,” she says. Since graduating, Recine, a lifelong New Yorker, has produced documentaries, films, and events exploring the inner lives of artists and writers. She has won three Peabody Awards and earned multiple Emmy nominations, and her work has premiered at prestigious film festivals like Sundance and Tribeca.

Her most recent documentary, Lift, follows three young New Yorkers with unstable housing — some living in shelters, others with Section 8 rental subsidies — for a decade through their participation in New York Theatre Ballet’s scholarship program.

“I’m interested in entering worlds with films and having an entree that you would not have if it wasn’t for your own commitment to looking and listening,” says Recine. The length of the commitment to Lift was unanticipated at the outset, but “the gift of time allowed us to film collaboratively. That helped us scrupulously avoid stereotypes and emphasize their nuanced aspirations.”

Viewers watch the children — Victor, Yolanssie, and Sharia — grow, dance, and grapple with the difficult hand life has dealt them. The film simultaneously lays bare both the daily hardships of untenable commutes and unreliable work schedules and also the beauty of ballet’s elegant, methodological discipline, in which the children blossom. (Victor is now a dancer at New York City Ballet.)

“I hope this film invites a conversation about arts and poverty and inequity but also the promise of these children,” Recine says.

The film centers the children but views them through the eyes of their mentor, former program participant and professional dancer Stephen Melendez, who is now the artistic director of New York Theatre Ballet. The camera follows as he returns to the shelter where he spent part of his childhood to introduce ballet to the children now living there. He finds the door to his former home and promptly passes out.

“He had a very intense, dramatic reaction,” Recine says. “We didn’t really know what was happening, but we knew that was where the journey would begin.” Melendez wrestles with his past while remaining a steady, supportive mentor to the young dancers. The film ends with a performance of his choreography, a work that incorporates the lived experiences of the children and their parents.

“[Steven] was retelling himself his own story through the process of choreographing a dance about what it’s like to grow up in poverty,” Recine says.

This deep engagement with the narratives of her projects makes Recine more than just a standard “find funding” sort of producer; she works in creative partnership, an approach that influences her eclectic — but always fascinating — oeuvre.

“I make films about people or places or topics that I respond to in some real way,” she says. “I don’t fit in a box, and I think the films I make don’t either.”