vHopeful Conversations Podcast

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I sit down with legendary San Francisco–based documentary duo Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to talk about their new film, PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN. They trace the project’s unlikely origin—from a Linda Ronstadt–invited cabaret night at Bimbo’s to deciding to build their own documentary loosely around Peter Asher’s memoir show. The conversation explores ho...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with filmmaker Valerie Veatch about her Sundance 2026 documentary Ghost in the Machine. We dive into the dirty wiring behind today’s AI boom—its roots in eugenics and race science, its extraction‑driven infrastructures, and the white male techno‑fantasies shaping it. Veatch unpacks how a “secret” artist program around OpenAI’s Sora jolted her from curiosity t...

This vHopeful Conversation features director–producer Rowan Haber and Emmy‑winning producer Caryn Capotosto discussing their documentary We Are Pat, which revisits SNL’s 1990s “It’s Pat” sketches through a contemporary trans and non‑binary lens. We talk about why this is the right cultural moment to unearth Pat again, how Ro’s realization that “the punchline wasn’t about me, it was me” became the...

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, filmmaker Katie Camosy joins me to talk about her new Greenpeace‑backed documentary GASLIT, which follows Jane Fonda, Connie Britton, and Maggie Rogers through Texas and the Gulf South as they bear witness to LNG export terminals, petrochemical corridors, and the communities living in their shadow. Katie traces how a shocking first encounter with the Permian...

This vHopeful Conversation features creator, producer, and host Janet Hsieh whose journey runs from MIT pre‑med and the long‑running Discovery travel series Fun Taiwan to funding and creating her new YouTube travel show GET AWAY with Janet Hsieh. We talk through the “drought” Janet faced moving back to the U.S., how a chance reunion with high‑school friend and Emmy‑winning producer Joe Litzinger l...

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope speaks with Emmy‑nominated documentarian Ivy Meeropol about her new film Ask E. Jean, a portrait of advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll that goes far beyond the courtroom headlines to explore her Miss Cheerleader USA past, gonzo magazine career, TV show, and late‑in‑life decision to publicly confront Donald Trump. They discuss the chall...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Brazilian filmmaker Marianna Brennand about MANAS, her powerful narrative feature debut rooted in a decade of documentary research into sexual abuse and exploitation of women and girls in the Amazon rainforest. Brennand discusses why the story had to become fiction rather than documentary, how she transformed real testimonies into a protectiv...

Actor, musician, and storyteller Gina Gershon joins Vanessa Hope for a Mother’s Day vHopeful conversation about her fearless new memoir, AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs , tracing how she became an “alphapussy” in life and art. They dig into Gina’s path from Valley tomboy to Naked Angels co-founder, her iconic work in films like The Player, Bound, and Showgirls, a...

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I speak with producer Ivan Orlic about Mistura, his first Spanish-language feature and first film set entirely in his home country of Peru. Together they explore how the 1960s‑set story of Norma, a high‑society woman cast out after her husband leaves her, becomes both an intimate melodrama of personal reinvention and a larger reflection on gender, class, rac...

In this special vHopeful Conversations episode, Vanessa Hope spotlights Fall of Freedom, a nationwide wave of creative resistance to rising authoritarianism that began last fall and now returns with more than twenty May Day film screenings across multiple states. She highlights powerful new work from award‑winning filmmakers, including Steal This Story, Please! about fearless journalist Amy Goodma...

In this Earth Day edition of vHopeful Conversations, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with producer Fisher Stevens and co-director Chelsea Greene to discuss We Are Guardians , their urgent and deeply human documentary about Indigenous forest defenders on the frontlines of the Amazon. Chelsea traces the film’s origins to the 2019 Amazon fires and her decision to drop everything to document communit...

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with multi‑hyphenate indie director Pete Ohs to unpack his Warsaw‑set “volcanic experiment” Erupcja, a Charli xcx–starring anti‑romantic comedy in which a stranded vacation and a rekindled relationship with a Polish florist explode Bethany’s sense of who she is and who she wants to love. Ohs traces his journey from an exhausting seven...

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Mascaro to dive into the dystopian yet deeply life-affirming world of The Blue Trail, his genre-blending new film about 77-year-old Tereza, an elderly heroine who refuses to quietly disappear from a society that literally ships its seniors away in “wrinkle wagons.” Mascaro traces how the film gre...

Fiercely independent journalist Amy Goodman has spent three decades holding the powerful to account, from war zones to the Democracy Now! newsroom, and in Steal This Story, Please! Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal turn their lens on her radical experiment in truly independent media. We talk about how their new film captures journalism’s power and peril in an era of media consoli...

In this intimate vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with actor, painter, and now bestselling memoirist Ione Skye about her book Say Everything, tracing how a life lived “inside a story” has shifted into real‑time presence and self‑forgiveness. They explore Ione’s evolving relationship with her first husband Adam Horovitz and how recurring dreams of him changed as she wrote, the lifelong imp...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with writer‑director Bart Layton about his new L.A. noir thriller Crime 101 , exploring how a Don Winslow short story became a “ripping yarn” about status, corruption, and the haves and have‑nots in contemporary Los Angeles. They dig into Layton’s documentary‑driven research process, the visual language inspired by 1970s cinema and Gordon Parks, an...

In this vHopeful Conversation for International Women’s Day, Vanessa Hope speaks with authors Anna Malaika Tubbs ( The Three Mothers , Erased ) and Soraya Chemaly ( Rage Becomes Her , The Resilience Myth , All We Want Is Everything ) about why authoritarians fear and target women and democracy, and how American patriarchy is rooted in the country’s founding. They trace how Black women and mothers...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with director Craig Renaud and producer–photojournalist Juan Arredondo about their Oscar‑nominated short Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud , exploring how Craig’s journey to bring his brother’s body home from Ukraine becomes the present‑tense spine for a film that interweaves two decades of verité reporting from Iraq, Ha...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with director Ryan White and producer Jessica Hargrave about their Oscar‑nominated documentary Come See Me in the Light , which follows poet Andrea Gibson and partner Megan Falley as they navigate a terminal cancer diagnosis, queer love, and creative collaboration. They trace the film’s origin to Tig Notaro’s unlikely pitch for a “funny” poetry‑an...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with director Joshua Seftel about his Oscar‑nominated short All the Empty Rooms , which follows CBS reporter Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they visit the preserved bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. Joshua describes how a single image—a toothpaste tube with its cap left off—convinced him this could be a powerful film abou...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Brazilian writer‑director Kleber Mendonça Filho about his Oscar‑nominated film The Secret Agent , exploring how an intimate character study becomes a layered portrait of Brazil under military dictatorship and its haunting echoes in the Bolsonaro era. Kleber discusses drawing on his archival work in Pictures of Ghosts , the iconic Veraneio pol...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Oscar-nominated co-directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman about The Alabama Solution , exploring how an initial visit to film a prison revival in Alabama evolved into a six-year collaboration with incarcerated organizers exposing a deadly, intentionally opaque prison system. They discuss the ethical stakes of working inside an authori...

In this Hopeful Conversation, filmmaker and host Vanessa Hope speaks with Oscar-nominated directing duo Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni about their acclaimed documentary Cutting Through Rocks , which follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to a rural village council in northwestern Iran, and the ways her leadership reshapes her community’s ideas about gender, power, and possibility. Toget...

In this conversation, Ukrainian director, novelist, and war correspondent Mstyslav Chernov reflects on 2000 Meters to Andriivka as a deeply personal follow‑up to 20 Days in Mariupol, shifting from documenting unbearable loss to showing how ordinary people who’ve lost everything fight back for their homes, memories, and agency. He describes choosing Andriivka—a village and forest that mirror his ow...

This Hopeful conversation centers on Mr. Nobody Against Putin as both an undercover whistleblower document and an unexpectedly funny, emotionally intimate portrait of Russian primary school teacher–turned–co-director Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, tracing how his state-mandated patriotic videos inside a small-town school become a secret act of resistance and, eventually, an Oscar-, BAFTA-, and PGA–nomina...