Elisa Gambino
on Turning art into action
“I'm no Greta.”
She affirms, humbly.
“At 14, 15, or 16, I wasn’t thinking or worrying about climate change. I started as an adult. I had to learn how to talk about it to people who don't want to hear about it. I had to learn to start those conversations.”
Throughout her career, producer and documentary filmmaker Elisa Gambino has dedicated her life’s work to spearheading pivotal dialogue on a myriad of challenging subjects.
Listening to the stories of others and impacting communities in need has always been at the forefront of Gambino’s aspirations. While she once dreamt of pursuing social work, she instead stumbled onto journalism with the aim of sharing the pressing stories of our time.
“I became a journalist by accident— and I share that because I think sometimes a lot of things happen by accident. Even so, we shouldn't dismiss them. We shouldn’t be so entirely focused on what we want to do that we don't accept happy accidents along the way,” she advises.
The Happy Accident
After graduating from Virginia Tech with a degree in Marketing, Gambino returned to Italy where she had spent the majority of her young life. She secured a job at the CNN Rome Bureau, staffed by a mere five employees at the time— none of whom spoke Italian. They were in dire need of an Italian-speaking office assistant to perform the most trivial, yet necessary of tasks, such as taking the laundry to the local laundromat or looking after the Bureau’s car.
In her words, she was tasked with “all the nonsense that really requires Italian, but that nobody could or wanted to do.”
As the times changed, so did the nature of her work— and consequently, the trajectory of her career. With rising political and societal tensions within Europe, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, CNN was in need of more bodies. A new task was swiftly added to Gambino’s job description as office assistant: to go into the field alongside reporters and produce.
This unexpected shift marked the beginning of Gambino’s lifelong career as journalist and filmmaker– an origin story that speaks to her uncanny ability to rise to the occasion at a moments notice.
“The mayor called me after the announcement. She said it was your film. It was your film that made this happen.”
An Issue of Waste
Human waste.
How do we deal with it?
This question is the pinnacle of Wasteland— a four-part CBS docuseries directed by Gambino in which she exposes waste-related environmental crises in four states: Florida, Alabama, Iowa, and New York.
“New York is a coming together of systemic racism and climate change. We see that certain communities are much more impacted by climate change than others— poor communities, and communities that are often denied resources, bear the brunt of this,” she explains.
In the city of Mount Vernon, located in Westchester County, New York, raw sewage has infiltrated the homes of residents near daily as a consequence of the city’s failing sewage infrastructure.
The sewer crisis affecting Mount Vernon residents is fundamentally an environmental justice concern. Mount Vernon has a demographic composition that differs significantly from the majority-white population of Westchester county. With an 82% minority population, Mount Vernon is a community where environmental inequities are not only prevalent, but explicit. As the second most densely populated city in New York State, Mount Vernon's sewer infrastructure has failed to keep pace with its growth. Consequently, the repeated sewage backups faced by residents can be attributed to two main factors: a longstanding neglect of sewer infrastructure investment and a historical pattern of systemic racism that has unjustly burdened low-income communities and people of color with disproportionate environmental consequences.
One resident Gambino interviewed explained that, with each rainfall, her basement and home would ‘flood with her neighbor's shit.’
Every time, without fail.
“Imagine how dehumanizing that is,” Gambino prompts.
The city had become a sewage dumping ground— a wasteland.
From its homes, sewage would continue to leach into runoff and into nearby rivers, bringing about more issues than the city was equipped to face. Here, you have a community inherently void of the economic resources needed to fix its infrastructure. Yet, as sewage leaks intensified, the city would be fined by the EPA– upwards of $7,000 every day.
In a city already impacted by suffering, a plethora of punitive actions were leveled against them. Yet, the neglect persisted.
Shawyn Patterson-Howard, the current mayor of Mount Vernon, requested profusely for state and federal funds to repair the defective system. Funds, however, were never awarded, and her complaints never answered.
With the airing of Gambino’s docu-series Wasteland, she attempted to nudge Governor Hochul into action. She forwarded the episode specific to the Mount Vernon tragedy to Hochul, the Environmental Facilities Corporation, and the Department of Health.
Hochul watched.
It was this action that prompted our governor to extend a $150 million grant to the city of Mount Vernon to fix their sewage systems— the largest environmental justice grant ever awarded in the state of New York.
At a news conference announcing the grant, Patterson-Howard encouraged the public to watch the film to understand the horrors of what Mount Vernon residents were experiencing.
“The mayor called me after that announcement. She said it was your film. It was your film that made this happen,” Gambino says with pride.
In an interview with CBS News, Patterson-Howard explained that Wasteland "made it real."
"It was no longer us whining. It was no longer us crying. You took notice and we sent that out to everyone that we could, and they no longer needed to hear it. They saw it," she said.
A Change of Heart
Prior to her work on Wasteland, Gambino admits that, while she spent ample time reading about climate change and watching films surrounding the issue, she did not feel personally invested in the cause.
“I was of the mindset that if I recycle, if I use reusable bags— all things that we all should be doing— that I was doing my part.”
It was through her work on Wasteland that she began to recognize we cannot buy our way out of climate change; and that her personal actions– while important– were not enough to change the system at fault.
“There are systemic issues at play here. As I started speaking to people who were impacted by climate change, I began to realize that this issue was way bigger than any of the important small actions that I, alone, could take.”
Throughout her life, Gambino experienced little anxieties about the state of the environment, born of the idea that it was a bigger problem than something she, alone, could tackle. For Gambino, being asked to do this work triggered a recognition of the horrific effects climate change can have on people and communities— in particular, in areas where significant barriers to resources exist.
As her work in the realm of environmental justice has expanded, so have her environmental related anxieties.
“The way I deal with that is to try to have conversations with people who don't want to talk about it– and I do that through my work. That's what I have to offer: to reach those who might be interested in hearing the stories I produce, and even those who might not. Either way, they are being heard.”
According to Gambino, we still need more filmmakers who have important stories to tell.
“They are everywhere– especially when it comes to climate change, and especially when it comes to climate change and human health. I think we are just scratching the surface of what this issue is doing to people physically and emotionally. There are important stories to tell, and there are people available to tell them. I think their role is extremely pivotal to the movement.”
The problem is, the film industry is valued as a money making machine rather than as a catalyst of change.
“What we're seeing today are a lot of celebrity-backed, highly produced, formulaic documentaries. They are very glossy, and many are celebrity focused and celebrity driven. The kinds of films that are about really difficult issues do not have a lot of support, as far as the platforms that show them and as far as getting people to watch them. It's tough right now, out there— for people that want to do this kind of work.”
For the aspiring documentary filmmakers of the world, Gambino deems resilience to be key to success— the same resilience required to find solutions while on the brink of a climate crisis. For her, the opportunity to direct and produce her own powerful work has been nothing short of a gift.
She attributes her greatest takeaways from her Wasteland journey to the people on the ground– those who we do not see, and we do not celebrate– who are doing the important work.
“They are so driven, and passionate, and so well spoken about why they do what they do, that once you encounter them, you simply can't get them out of your system,” she says.
“It is those individuals that I carry forward with me.”
“That’s what I have to offer: to reach those who might be interested in hearing the stories I produce, and even those who might not.”
