Zeitgeist's Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo Photo by Kathleen McGivney

Zeitgeist Films, an independent film company known for delivering intelligent arthouse cinema to US audiences, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a retrospective of its award-winning films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The company's co-Presidents, Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo, sat down with Premiere in their Soho office to discuss entrepreneurship, creating a girl's club within a male-dominated industry, and acquiring the documentary, Trouble the Water.

How did you meet?
ER: Everyone wants to know that story. Nancy and I met in the very late '80s. We were both working for different distribution companies and we met through the business we became friends. And at a certain point we both left the companies we were working for to pursue other things and both found ourselves communicating about what we were thinking about doing. At some point... a light bulb that went off that maybe we should start our own distribution company.

It's kind of like a late night after drinks, or something.
NG: Yeah, I'd say afternoon after a great Indian food lunch.

But before then how long had you been in the film industry separately?
NG: Well, I had been in probably a bit longer. I think my first job was in the mid-'70s. I took tickets at the Bleecker Street Cinema; then I really did a variety of things for non-profits. I worked for Landmark Theatres when I lived in California. And when I came back from California, I started as head of theatrical sales at First Run Features so that was a job that I had for a while. And really, after a number of years I just wanted to go off and do something else.

The film industry has changed a lot, but some might say it's still a bit of a boy's club.
NG: Well, it is a boy's club in general, but in our business it was a girl's club. We started the business as two women. We didn't really care so much what other people were doing or if people were going to have some attitude about that. Actually, First Run Features was a very good place for me to start, because at the time it was begun by a collective of filmmakers and it was headed by a woman, Fran Spielman, who's actually a very forgotten woman in the film business. She's an extremely interesting woman, and so I was in a very woman-oriented place. And I think you were too, right?

ER: My boss was a woman too. The company I worked for was run by a French woman named Nicole Jouve, and her company was Interama Inc. The company doesn't exist anymore but I did work for another woman, and I think there were all women working in that office, and there were no men, in fact.

NG: And there was all women working in our office except Spike Lee, who had cleaned films there. You know, in the early days he was the film shipper and cleaner because he was working on his script.

ER: But I think, you know, to get more [into] that issue, I think yes, for us we were women, but the opportunities we felt we wanted to take were not necessarily specifically because we were women working in this industry. Really, we just wanted to do our own thing. We wanted to have our own business. My family, in particular, [were] entrepreneurs... I didn't feel like I had to work for somebody.

NG: So is mine. It's all entrepreneurial.

ER: So that's something I think we had in our blood or DNA in some way. We felt like we didn't just have to look for jobs; we could really try to do something on our own and generate it, self-start it. The industry's always been sort of dominated by men and I think that's absolutely true, but by starting our business we could separate ourselves out from men and just do what we wanted to do, regardless of gender.