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Award-winning filmmaker Lauren Greenfield is pulling something like quadruple duty at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece.
Not only is she serving on the International Competition jury – alongside Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridis and four-time Oscar-nominated producer Signe Byrge Sørensen – but she’s being honored by the festival with a retrospective of her work. On Thursday, she gave a master class at TiDF, “Social Studies: The Artist’s Journey” — the title referencing her most recent documentary, the widely praised docuseries Social Studies about the impact of social media on American kids.
Greenfield says of the career tribute, “It’s really exciting. It’s a huge honor… I’m really thrilled to get to be here.”
We sat down for coffee at one of the festival’s port side venues shortly after Greenfield wrapped a conversation with Greek high school students who had just watched a screening of episode 5 of Social Studies. Several of the kids told Greenfield they appreciated that the documentary did not talk down to them, but offered an authentic picture of the pressures kids feel from incessant engagement with social media.
One of the high schoolers commented, “I just want to say that it was one of the first films I think most of us have seen that was really based on the teenager’s perspective on the whole topic.” Another said, “It was really fun seeing students in the United States that we don’t have much in common with in our everyday lives, but we all shared the same thoughts on social media.” Noted another, “I believe it’s scary because we know how bad it is [social media], but we cannot change it and be like, ‘Okay, we’re leaving this behind.’”
Greenfield participated in a Q&A Thursday following a screening of her 2006 documentary Thin, which examines body image and eating disorders among young women. Also screening at Thessaloniki is Generation Wealth, Greenfield’s 2018 film that offers “an extraordinary visual history of our growing obsession with wealth.” The Queen of Versailles, released in 2012, documents the wealth-obsessed couple of Jackie and David Siegel, who attempted to build an 85,000 square foot mega-mansion in Florida before the 2008 mortgage meltdown complicated their plans (the film has been adapted into a musical that will premiere on Broadway in October, starring Kristen Chenoweth as Jackie and F. Murray Abraham as David).
Greenfield’s work, be it Thin, Generation Wealth, The Queen of Versailles, or her 1997 book of photography Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, retains a startling currency despite the passage of time.
“It’s crazy, the relevance,” Greenfield says. “Queen of Versailles — there are a lot of similarities between Trump and David Siegel.”
No Greenfield film is more timely than her 2018 documentary The Kingmaker, which also screened at Thessaloniki. It documents former Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos and her attempt to re-establish the Marcos political dynasty. Imelda’s hopes were pinned in part on her son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who entered into a secret political alliance with Rodrigo Duterte, the strongman-style Philippines president who ruled form 2016-2022. In 2022, Bongbong succeeded Duterte as the country’s elected leader.
“It was unbelievable that he actually became the president and then even more out of a Shakespearean play that he became president by forming an alliance with Duterte, which we broke in the film. We broke that connection that they were working together, but it was just kind of nascent in the film,” Greenfield observes. “They actually allied, and then Bongbong had the brilliant idea of bringing in Sara Duterte [Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter] as his vice president, and together they wrapped up the whole country, the north and the south. And I guess that was a marriage of convenience.”
Earlier this week, Duterte was arrested in Manila and promptly flown to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face charges of alleged crimes against humanity in connection with an anti-drug campaign he launched as mayor of Davao and then continued as president, which saw thousands of alleged drug dealers slaughtered in the streets.
“Mr. Duterte was arrested in compliance with our commitments to Interpol,” Marcos explained in an address to his people. “Interpol asked for help, and we obliged because we have commitments to the Interpol which we have to fulfill. If we don’t do that, they will no longer help us with other cases involving Filippino fugitives abroad.”
Greenfield observes, “I think when Duterte passed the baton to Bongbong and Sara [Duterte], probably the understanding was they were not going to turn him over to the ICC and that he was going to be exonerated for his crimes. But it’s kind of amazing that it’s happening now.”
The Kingmaker shows how Imelda Marcos was able to overcome exile and disgrace after the ouster of her husband, dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and eventually resuscitate her image and her children’s political viability. Observes Greenfield, “The kind of whitewashing of history that The Kingmaker documents was fully realized with Bongbong first becoming president and then getting an invitation to the U.S. and [Vice President] Kamala Harris went to meet with him.”
Greenfield says there’s a connection to be made between the Marcos documentary and Social Studies, her FX docuseries.
“Social media is not just a big part of Social Studies, but also a big part of The Kingmaker, because that was part of how [the Marcos’s] kind of whitewashed history is by putting a new history or a revisionist history out in the world through different media,” she notes, “teaching it in schools, but also [via] social media in a place where a lot of the populace, especially the very poor, get their news from Facebook… That’s where a lot of the poor are getting their media.”
She expands on that point by noting, “I think we saw with Elon Musk and Twitter, buying the narrative is hugely powerful. And we know from the Nazis and also from modern day Russia — and past Russia — the power of propaganda. And when you have social media, you have the power of propaganda.”
TiDF’s career retrospective for Greenfield was originally supposed to happen in 2020. Then the Covid pandemic erupted.
“It feels like the right timing because I feel like a lot of the work has new relevance in our current political climate,” Greenfield tells Deadline. “So, maybe it was fate that it didn’t happen during Covid and it happened now, plus I’ve done Social Studies since then. So it’s a new project to share that in a way is very international.”
