Advertisement

Movies & TV News & Features

Interview: Dana Nachman

BATKID BEGINS directed by Dana Nachman. A Warner Bros. release. 87 minutes. Opens Friday (July 10). For venues and times, see listing. 


Most people remember the day of the Batkid, when five-year-old leukemia survivor Miles Scott ran around San Francisco in a pint-sized Batman costume, thwarting the plans of the Riddler and the Penguin with the help of the Make-a-Wish Foundation. 

Tens of thousands of people came out to cheer him on. Hundreds of millions more followed his exploits on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And documentary filmmaker Dana Nachman missed the whole thing.

“This is my most embarrassing question,” she says. “I was editing another project. I wasn’t even on social media. I didn’t even look at the news that day, I guess. I think my seven-year-old told me it happened.”

A journalist friend put her in touch with the foundation, and a year and a half later the result is Batkid Begins. 

“They said they’d had a bunch of people come to them [wanting] to do a documentary, but they were so inundated during the wish that they couldn’t deal with it. That was the luckiest of timing for me, around early December [2013], right after the wish, and I’ve been working on it since then.”

Nachman’s documentary focuses on the nuts-and-bolts of putting the day together, which essentially involved turning San Francisco into a theme park for one small child. 

“There’s a core of six or seven people who made this happen,” she says. “It went out there in concentric circles of joyness and love, and I think each person wanted to one-up the other one’s kindness.”

Batkid Begins expands our perspective beyond Miles and lets us understand that something larger was happening. 

“The goal was to make Miles have a good day,” Nachman explains, “but aside from what Make-A-Wish was doing, there was this whole other thing happening, separate from the actual planning. All these other people [were] coming down for inspiration and community feeling, and that was happening on a totally different plane from what Miles was experiencing.” 

While the project could easily have turned into a feature-length commercial for Make-a-Wish, Nachman tried hard to keep the material objective.

“My work tends to be connected to non-profits,” she says. “There’s great people in the world, working on a lot of great causes, so I always have that in the back of my mind.

“But in the end, they made this amazing thing happen. So you can’t not mention it, you know?”

See our review of Batkid Begins here.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted