New Podcast Release: Meg Smaker

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we speak with filmmaker and former firefighter Meg Smaker.

Meg is known for telling difficult stories, stories that explore the humanity of those we’re often encouraged to dismiss as evil. Her most recent film, The UnRedacted, follows four former Guantánamo detainees as they navigate life after their release. But rather than launch her career, the film triggered a backlash – from those who had never seen it - that saw Meg accused of being a white supremacist and blacklisted from the industry.

In this episode, we speak with Meg about her motivations as a storyteller, her past experiences, including being kidnapped in Colombia at the age of 22, and what it means to try to understand those who have been labelled as irredeemable. We also discuss the power and limits of empathy, the culture of cancellation in the documentary world, and why she continues to believe that nuance matters.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

The Power of Storytelling

PETER SINGER: Meg, when I first met you, I asked you what you did, and your answer was, "I'm a storyteller." I confessed that I didn't know what to make of that. I wondered if parents hired you to tell stories at their children's birthday parties. Is there a reason you describe yourself as a storyteller rather than, say, a documentary filmmaker?

MEG SMAKER: Yeah. I believe that I tell stories through documentaries, but I also paint and write. So, I think it's very limited to say I only tell stories through documentary filmmaking. There are a plethora of other ways I tell stories. Even in our conversations when we were debating certain issues, I find it hard not to tell stories when explaining things. It's my default modus operandi, I guess you can say, to understand the world in which I live. And I think that's true for a lot of people. It dates back to the days of cavemen, when we all gathered around the fire and shared stories to expand our understanding of the world.

The Boxer in Cuba

KASIA DE LAZARI-RADEK: Is there any deeper aim behind your storytelling? Do you want to reveal something to the world?

MEG SMAKER: I could sit here and say yes, but that would be a lie. What I've learned is that when you go into a story with a mission like, "I'm going to save X" or "I'm going to accomplish this issue," the only people who end up watching those stories are the ones who already drank the Kool-Aid. I think it was maybe Martin Scorsese who said, "If you want to send a message, go to Western Union."

Right now, I think the documentary industry feels like it has to make films that save the world. I didn't get into filmmaking to save the world. If you want to save things, go be a pediatric surgeon. I got into documentary film not to save the world but to better understand it. That was my only motivation. It might not be as sexy as saving the world, but I think it's more important to increase people's empathy and understanding.

I don't really pick topics thinking, "This is going to change something." My films have changed things, but it was never intentional. Hindsight might let me say, "Oh yeah, I meant to do that," but that would be a complete lie.

I just go into a story thinking, has this story been told before? If the answer is no, then I ask myself, can anyone else tell this story? If the answer is yes, I let them. Making films is really hard work - let someone else deal with the stress. But when I choose my films, it's: Has this story ever been told? No. Am I the only one that can tell it? Yes.

The last film I did before The UnRedacted was about the only female boxer in Cuba. I didn’t go into it thinking, "I’m going to change the world." I used to be a competitive boxer and had taken a break to go to graduate school. My dad aptly said, "You’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make your brain better. Why are you then going from class into a boxing ring and killing those brain cells you’ve invested in?" So I said, "Okay, good point."

But after my first year of grad school, I absolutely hated it. I hated Stanford. I wanted to get back into boxing because I wanted to hit something. I hadn’t trained for a year, so I had this bright idea that I was just going to put myself through a really intensive camp to prepare for an upcoming tournament. I decided to fly to Cuba and train there. After arriving in Havana, I quickly discovered that female boxing was banned in Cuba, which I hadn’t anticipated. It’s like soccer being banned for women in Brazil, it just doesn’t occur to you.

Eventually, I found a fight club that took me in. There, I met the only female boxer in Cuba who was secretly training. We trained together for about two or three months and became friends. Later, when it came time to do my thesis film, I decided to make a film on her. I thought it was interesting. That was it.

The film wound up winning South by Southwest, a Student Academy Award, and it played in over 175 cities. The BBC covered it, and it made news. After that, I had a meeting with the head of the Boxing Federation in Cuba, and because of the film, they lifted the ban on female boxers in Cuba. But that was never my intention, I didn’t even think it was possible. It was a byproduct of a good story well told.

If you look back at quintessential films, Blood Diamond, for example, where people shift their paradigm, I think it’s just a good story well told with compelling characters.

PETER SINGER: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and sounds like a great story. Just to take the epilogue. How did the boxer you featured do once the ban was lifted?

MEG SMAKER: By that time, she was too old. You have to be a certain age to compete in the Olympics. So she became a trainer and inspired a lot of women. A year later, there were over 50 women training to be boxers in Cuba. She was a huge catalyst for that, which was really awesome.

Being Kidnapped in Colombia

PETER SINGER: You told me a story about how you were hiking in Colombia and you got kidnapped by one of the private armies fighting in Colombia’s internal civil war. Is that right? So what were you doing in that region?

MEG SMAKER: Yeah, the AUC. I think it was late 2002 or early 2003. I must've been 22 at the time. Every year I got time off work, and rather than go to a beach and relax, I would travel to places I was curious about. I had always read about the Darién Gap, which back then was considered the Bermuda Triangle on land, people go there and you never hear from them again.

Probably a week into it, I was there with two other Americans I met along the way. We were kidnapped by the AUC. Some people we met along the way were killed, they were dismembered and decapitated. A little less than two weeks later, we were released.

PETER SINGER: So there were people who were dismembered and decapitated by the group who were holding you prisoner at that time. And you saw that happen?

MEG SMAKER: I don’t know how much you know about Colombia, but most people are familiar with the FARC, communists, right? So if you’re a landowner with a thousand hectares, the FARC want to take that land and give each hectare to one person. If you’re a landowner, you don’t want that. The AUC was originally a special ops group of the Colombian government that the Americans trained to hunt the FARC. Then they went rogue and started doing really awful things. Eventually, they were disbanded. The landowners thought, "Here's this highly trained, highly armed group, let’s hire them to defend our land."

It’s more complex than that, but basically, that’s the group that kidnapped us. They were known as the Headhunters because they would find FARC sympathizers and dismember and decapitate them in front of their families to send a message: don’t support the FARC.

That was a really formative experience for me. I think it led to me doing all these stories about people who are otherised—the so-called evildoers of the world. It was eye-opening. When you're young, you read stories about the good witch and the bad witch. The good witch is good because she was born that way; the bad witch is bad and does bad things.

When you come face to face with what many would call evil, people who just dismembered someone in front of their family, you expect them to be bloodthirsty psychopaths. But what shattered me was how normal they all were. One woman was doing her makeup and talking to me about her high school crush. Another guy was chatting about his favorite sports teams.

Getting kidnapped isn't like the movies. It's not explosions and black-clad men giving speeches. It's boring. You just sit around in the jungle all day. So you talk. You talk to your captors. And eventually, you talk to your captors like people. Someone who just killed someone might be chatting about football.

What really shocked me was how normal they were. Not psychopaths, just people. And I think that’s what triggered my curiosity to understand that side of the world better. Our mainstream narrative is one-dimensional. Good people get nuance; these people don’t. But to understand the world, you can’t just look at the victims. You also have to understand the perpetrators. Only then do you get a fuller picture.

There’s that Dostoevsky quote: "The easiest thing in the world is to denounce the evildoer; the most difficult thing in the world is to try to understand them." That really stuck with me.

Understanding ‘Evil’

PETER SINGER: That’s very interesting, and of course, I completely agree that the world is more complex than just good and evil. But it takes a certain kind of courage to look at those we call evildoers and say, “I want to understand them.” Most people recoil from that.

MEG SMAKER: I think part of the reason is we’re afraid of what we might see in ourselves. When you realise that these people aren’t that different from you, that they laugh at the same jokes and miss their mothers too, it forces you to ask hard questions about human nature and the circumstances that shape us. It’s easier to just label them monsters and move on.

That’s what motivated me to make The UnRedacted. I wanted to talk to the men the U.S. government had detained and labelled as terrorists, the worst of the worst. I wanted to understand how they got there, what their stories were.

PETER SINGER: So how did you gain access to those men?

MEG SMAKER: It took years of building trust, working through channels, showing that I wasn’t there to create propaganda or score political points. I just wanted to hear their stories. And what I found were people, people who had been through extraordinary things, who made mistakes, who were shaped by environments most of us can’t even imagine.

The point isn’t to excuse actions but to understand them. We can’t solve problems we don’t understand. And we can’t understand people if we refuse to listen to them.

That’s what storytelling is for. Not to vindicate or condemn, but to illuminate.

Controversy and Cancellation

PETER SINGER: I’ve seen The UnRedacted, and I didn’t see anything that suggested your film was made by a white supremacist. On the contrary, I thought you gave those men a genuine opportunity to speak about why they got involved with Al Qaeda and how they felt about it after spending years in Guantanamo. You gave them a voice they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

MEG SMAKER: I agree with that. But hindsight is 20/20, and looking back, I should’ve had my eyes checked for colourblindness, I missed a lot of red flags that were building up to the cancellation.

PETER SINGER: What were the red flags?

MEG SMAKER: I wasn’t tuned into the cultural zeitgeist at all. I was busy making the film and had no idea about cancellation, woke culture, or identity politics. I wasn’t online much. I was literally filming in Saudi Arabia. I didn’t realise how the culture had shifted to this kind of online vigilante mob mentality. And I didn’t know how the documentary world had changed, from making films to understand the world, to making activist, issue-based films pushing a narrative.

The film I made was open-ended. It doesn’t tell you what to think; it leaves it to the audience. That’s the opposite of the issue-based, social justice documentaries that now dominate the space. So we got into Sundance, Toronto, South by Southwest—all the big festivals. Everyone was excited. That film took six years to make. Getting into Sundance is like winning the filmmaker lottery.

Sundance is supposed to launch your career. Instead, it ruined mine. The day Sundance publicly announced the lineup, two months before the festival, the attacks started. No one had even seen the film. But they saw: film about terrorism, made by a white woman. The assumptions started: it must be racist, Islamophobic, white supremacist. The usual buzzwords.

It was humbling. I came from firefighting, where loyalty, honesty, and sacrifice are part of the culture. I approached filmmaking the same way. I thought we were truth-tellers. But I saw filmmakers making bold claims about the film and me, people who hadn’t seen the film and had never met me. Others jumped on the bandwagon to appear as allies.

And I realised truth wasn’t the priority. Perspective was. And you can shape perspective by getting enough people to repeat the same thing. So they started attacking me. When I didn’t apologise, they attacked my crew. They screenshotted credits, reached out to people in the film, and said if they didn’t publicly denounce the film, they’d be labelled racists and have their careers destroyed.

This wasn’t just executive producers. It was translators, cinematographers, assistant editors. The threats were intense. When that didn’t work, they targeted Sundance and Abigail Disney. Sundance, being a liberal organisation, caved. They apologised for the film. So did Abigail Disney. Abigail Disney was one of the executive producers on the film. She helped fund it and loved the film. But when they came after her, she caved too.

I didn’t understand cancellation. I thought it only happened to famous people. Suddenly I was buried in this wave of hate and disinformation. Sundance, Disney, South by Southwest, they all bent the knee.

I thought these organisations cared about truth. I realised they cared about their popularity. When Sundance apologised, I spoke to their new director. I said, “You validated the lies and the disinformation by apologising.” He said, “I’m so angry we did that. It set a terrible precedent.” I said, “Great. Retract the apology.” He said they couldn’t. That it would cause more controversy. That’s when I knew: they cared more about avoiding controversy than about truth. That’s when I knew I wouldn’t fix this inside the industry. So I looked for people who cared more about the truth than popularity. I reached out to the New York Times, The Atlantic, and found journalists who were willing to actually watch the film and report honestly.

For almost a year, I wasn’t just cancelled, I was blacklisted. It wasn’t just that the film didn’t get picked up. It ruined careers. I couldn’t get work. I had to move out of my house. The worst part was what happened to my crew, people who trusted me.

After Sundance apologised for having selected the film, every other festival pulled the film. Except one. A small festival in New Zealand called Doc Edge. When they screened the film, I asked the festival director, “Why did you stick with it?”

He said, “Because we’ve been down this road before, and we know what happens when you give in.” They had previously screened a film about Israel and Palestine, and were pressured to pull it because the filmmaker was Israeli. There were boycotts, harassment, even a bomb scare called in at the premiere. But they went ahead and screened the film anyway.

He told me: if you don’t stand firm, you reward bad behaviour. You show people how to get something banned. And that’s what Sundance and others did, reinforced bullying and censorship.

These festivals are supposed to be where independent voices are heard. Instead, they silenced one. Salman Rushdie said it: “Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist.”