An Interview with Ellen Frankenstein, Director of ‘Cruise Boom’

Ellen Frankenstein, Director of ‘Cruise Boom’. (Photo Courtesy of Artchange Inc.)

​Ellen Frankenstein is an accomplished documentarian whose current project is going to stir up some conversation. For Cruise Boom asks from tough questions about the arrival of cruise-based tourism in small towns, and we here at NTG had the honor of sitting down with Ellen to discuss her poignant new film.
 
John Betancourt: I’d like to start by getting to know what motivated you to tell this story?
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Well, I can say that many ways, I didn't want to make this film, but I came up to this community, Sitka, Alaska, this beautiful community surrounded by mountains and ocean and eagles and whales and all that, to make a film, and I ended up staying. And what happened -- that was like years and years ago, came up as a documentary filmmaker. Well, this is a town where we kept voting down public cruise ship docks, and anyway, someone built a private one, and suddenly the community was facing this incredible change. And some people that I worked with or knew said, “You're a documentary filmmaker, you should document the community on the cusp of change.” So, I made this film.
 
John Betancourt: That leads me right into my next question, which is a two-part question, what were the challenges of putting this film together and the challenges of doing so when you had some reluctance to do so.
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Well, there's so many challenges. Um, one challenge is, I've made a lot of films. I've made films about grief and healing and food and teenagers, whenever you get into resources, and capitalism, it's a really tricky topic. So that's one thing that it's really hard to make films about the economy, about things that have -- and it's a polarizing topic. It's not a healing topic. The film is a lot of questions. It's also… this is a topic that's on many people in the community's minds, like all the time, because we're faced with more tourists some days than actually live in town. A lot of people are creating new businesses because of the cruise boom. But for the other people who live here on the day-to-day basis. It's it really impacts our lives. So, it's kind of almost feels like, who am I to take on such a topic that is so part of so many people's lives?
 
John Betancourt: Now you also beautifully explore the “Us vs. Corporation” mentality that’s out there right now, and I’m curious why you think now really is the perfect time to have that discussion, while showcasing an issue that few of us know about.
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Well, for one thing, this type of issue is not just about cruise ships. We know it's a time where corporations and privatization, it's everywhere. I mean, whether it's prisons, it's schools, what other places are we seeing? They’re just trying to privatize everything. So, it's just there's so much tension. And it's also this time of climate change. So, it feels like we should be thinking about how we do things. But with that, there seems to be this hunger to just go ahead and use and do and not think about impact. So, I don't know. I mean this, it happened that this boom happened in the town I was living in. So, I made this film with my co-creator Atman Mehta. But I don't feel like I answered that question, so why do you think it's relevant? Why does it resonate with you?
 
John Betancourt: For me, it’s just a hotbed topic. Because we are seeing more and more that corporations are just being awful to people. I live in Denver, and out here, Kroger, our big grocery supplier admitted to fluffing up prices and it has people rightfully mad. Because they don’t feel like their best interests were in play, and it has raised the temperature here. So, perhaps to redirect a bit, let’s shift to what the temperature is like in Sitka, when it comes to this.
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Well, it's interesting, because the grocery store thing is, is huge, and it impacts everyone everywhere. I think one of the issues here that's interesting, as a filmmaker, trying to keep my eye on this whole thing about privatization, globalization, corptocracy, I guess, is that the right way to say it on a local level, sometimes people get kind of bogged down with this. The streets are crowded, the trails are crowded. It's hard to get groceries, and there's diesel fuel fumes in the air. So, and what about the quality of our town? So sometimes the quality of our life, I feel like it's a tension. I felt like, “Hey, we got to step back and look at this as this issue of -- this is not in the film. We have some small fishermen. We have a -- we're the home of a mom-and-pop fishery. And the tension, one of the tensions in the film is that Chris, who decides to buy this boatyard, boat haul out, has both the boat haul out that fishermen use, where you get your good cooking line salmon from these fishermen. And he gradually turns it totally into a cruise ship dock. It was a financial choice. He thought it would be better for not only himself, but for the whole community. But that put the mom and pop, small people more on edge. So, it's that, if there is that tension, and I don't know, I think we're seething as a country and as a world, because things are not trickling down. And we get all over the world, there's, I mean, there's housing and access to food issues, you know, what's our minimum wage right now in the US?
 
John Betancourt: A joke. It’s nice and stagnant. So then, to continue that discussion, and that line of thinking as a follow up now to post filming, has the town seen the boom that it wanted, or is it still at that point of kind of like, well, we did this and it's nice, but it's not the benefit that we wanted?
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Ooh, that’s complicated. I think people, there's been a local group called Sitka Soul, and they've been working on putting in these petitions to try to set a limit on the numbers of how many -- because I think, you know, we have 8500 people in town, and sometimes days we have more than people, more people than that, visiting town. But then other people are expanding their businesses. We have more food trucks; we have more tours. So, it's very unsettled. There isn't one answer, but a lot of the businesses, local businesses, do say they agree that more is not better. I mean, they actually find that the more people you bring to a place, they don't spend as much per person. And it's really hard to get data, so I don't think, I think we remain in a polarized, tense situation.
 
John Betancourt: That’s fair. I would imagine the important thing is the discussion gets underway. Now, something that I noticed about this feature that I loved, is the sheer balance you maintain in telling the story, and I’m curious, how did you maintain that balance being so close to the topic?
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Oh, it was very difficult. I mean, I think I made films and other topics where sometimes you get caught with this thing, where folks who are called critics and activists, which I don't think they should be called, that they should be people care about their community. They feel you should fight harder. You should have more things about environmental damage. You know workers. You know what happens to workers on cruise ships and on the other side, so to speak, any kind of question, especially with something like tourism, you're being negative. What a negative film. So, I don't – again I'm not answering you very well. But I think the film kind of wanders purposely and raises a lot of questions. It’s really hard with polarizing topics to like, to deal with them, to do them in a way. But my thing is, can, and there's been some great community screenings and use of the film where people are using it to think about, what do we want for our communities? How do we how do what kind of shape or control? What leverage do we have to make this work as best we can for everybody?
 
John Betancourt: And speaking of that, what do you ultimately hope that people take away from this feature when they watch it?
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Well, one of the things is to think about how we travel and the choices we make. Um, because I think a lot of people don't know how cruise ships work, and how they're registered offshore and how they push back and play communities off each other. So I just think that realization, um, in your impact when you travel, that you do have an impact, and then for communities all over I mean, I think the film does call and make pay a lot of attention to how community looks at itself, how we work together, how we shape the places we live and keep the things that we love. I mean, the thing about Alaska is it's a beautiful place. One thing I want people to feel when they watch this film. I want them to feel confused. We have whales, eagles and bears in the film. We have totem people working on totems polls. We have an amazing section about indigenous tourism. So, I want people to feel kind of torn like, yes, I want to see that, but what is the impact of our wants and desires? I had a friend during Covid who said, “If I don't get to travel, it impacts my mental health.” And I was like, wait, you're not living in a war zone. You're not ill. Why do you think travel is – you know what I mean? It was an interesting concept. And there's even a thing that talked about in some literature about revenge tourism, post-Covid, people felt they deserved to travel. So, do we deserve our bucket list? The other thing is, I want people to think about their bucket lists. Your wants may have an impact.
 
John Betancourt: I think that’s great. That’s something we don’t think about, in the slightest and clearly, the companies don’t think about the impact either.
 
Ellen Frankenstein: I mean, in the film, I was really lucky to have a representative from the the international cruise line agency, and from Royal Caribbean speak, and they say they want to be partners, and I think we need to hold them accountable. One of the things in the film, there's that scene where they've donated for a parking lot at the Raptor Center, and I'm really glad they did that, but they didn't give money to the women's shelter. They gave money for a parking lot, to bring in busses. So, my thing is, and I've helped with some films like The Proposal and Further Tales of the City that have come to town, I think we need to extract as much as we can from them as they're extracting from us.
 
John Betancourt: Absolutely. It was also shocking to learn how much money they’re swimming in.
 
Ellen Frankenstein: I know people that have seen that one section in the film and then they've said they didn't realize how a multinational works. So, I'm really thrilled that this could be an insight into that for people. I mean, the film's gonna be airing on PBS, streaming for free, Pbs.org, starting September 14. It's on Kanopy. I just encourage people to watch it and think and to use it and talk about it. I don't know… it's hard sometimes with choices, right? You can try to like, “Yeah, I'm not going to eat this I'm not going to take this flight.” But what do we do in this world where capitalism is everywhere? What choices can we make?
 
John Betancourt: Speaking of lessons. What did you learn as a filmmaker that you didn't know before you stepped into this project?
 
Ellen Frankenstein: Well, one of the challenges in this film, you know, when we watch films… they're character driven. Well, when we started this film, we wanted characters, and then we realized the town was a character. So, one thing that's really hard is, how do you do that? And I don't know if we succeeded. Can you make a place a character? What else did I learn? Well, one thing is, as I said, I make films that involve people talking about self-mutilation, suicide, grief, people who work in tourism are cheerful and the people who -- most people, when they're traveling, are really excited. They I mean, it's really exciting to see a beautiful place. So, it's an interesting tension. I think to make a film about something that's like, it's this happy realm on the one hand, but it has this other impact. What I learned, you know, it's also a really hard time to be an independent filmmaker. It's a struggle. If you look on, let's say, Netflix or Hulu or whatever. It's stories of celebrities and crime and you gotta be someone famous. It's really, it's a rougher time than it was when I started making films, in some ways, but I love, there's more voices out there, but it's harder and harder to kind of get through and get your films used well. So, I think I may be learned that and may go back… I did a whole series of shorts between longer films. And I think I'm going back to shorts.
 
John Betancourt: Last question I have for you today, what are you most proud of when it comes to this film?
 
Ellen Frankenstein: I'm most proud of use. I'm all about… I've had some great discussions with college students, with communities using this to think about what's going on in their community. That also makes me proud. I really like to think about what happens after a film. And I love my collaboration. I had this young collaborator Atman, who's now getting his PhD in economic history at the University of Chicago. It was a lovely collaboration. And the thing about an independent film like this, it’s based on collaborations, and I really am happy with all the people that were willing to be in the film, all the people, the sound, the score, the sound designer. I mean, I just love that process.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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