Helen Kapalos: Getting Real With A Life Of Its Own

By Dov Kornits

“I literally saw children dying,” Helen Kapalos tells FilmInk. “It was a sobering reminder that when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got everything too. So for me, it was a great opportunity to do what I’d originally set out to do as a journalist, which is always a quest for the truth, and I guess to be a voice for the people that don’t have a voice.” Kapalos is talking about her deeply personal new documentary, A Life Of Its Own, which traces the controversy around the subject of the use of medical marijuana. And if you feel that Kapalos looks familiar from the above photo, you’d be right. Though this is her first feature, Kapalos has worked extensively in the field of television journalism, and also as a newsreader for Channel 7.

In fact, it was while working on Channel 7’s current affairs programme, Sunday Night, that Kapalos’ eyes were opened to the subject of medical marijuana. She was assigned to do a story on a young man named Dan Haslam, who was dying from cancer and using marijuana as a way to alleviate the excruciating pain that he was experiencing. “He’s just one of those people that you’ll only meet once,” Kapalos says. “He was just an extraordinary person. He just had such wisdom…he was a cool, beautiful person, and he was wise beyond his years.” The powerful story of Dan Haslam – as well as having spent many heartbreaking years watching her own mother crumble physically and sadly pass away due to cancer (“She died a really slow painful death, and had terrible reactions to the treatment that she was being given at that time”) – pushed Kapalos to investigate the subject of medical marijuana in greater detail.

Touched deeply by the subject matter and its importance, it was essential to Kapalos that she retain creative control of the project. “It would have had a short life span in commercial television, and the networks were pretty myopic in the way that they were looking at the story,” Kapalos says. “I don’t think the television networks could see the general applications for how medicinal cannabis was being used in Australia. I don’t think that they had an accurate snapshot of how desperate people were across the country, and how it was affecting so many different disease states. It wasn’t just something that was applied to people that were dying of cancer, or to kids with epilepsy. Making it into a film happened accidentally, I guess, and it was a happy accident too.”

That happiness wasn’t there all the way through the project. “Oh, God, that’s a very painful question,” Kapalos sighs when FilmInk asks about the financing of A Life Of Its Own. Sticking to her guns, the journalist (who was also starting to tire of being pitched on TV stories that “involved a more light-hearted brand of journalism”) turned down offers of pre-sales and other more traditional funding approaches. Instead, she went into a bank and asked for a $40,000 loan to “renovate her kitchen”, thinking that this seemingly ceiling-level amount would be more than enough to finance the project. “I thought that I would be able to pay that money back, through saving or the sales of the documentary,” Kapalos reveals. “As it turns out, the figure grew, and I think I’d spent about five times that amount by the end. There were a couple of people that offered to finance it along the way, and I did do crowd-funding, which managed to raise $10,000 at one stage, but it’s probably cost me around $200,000. I couldn’t work whilst I was editing for six or seven months either. But if I’d gone with a network pre-sale, there would’ve been no way that I could’ve written, edited, and produced the material to the same degree. And it could’ve gone into strange territory. During my initial discussions, some people said things like, ‘Let’s put Russell Crowe in there.’ It was deviating from the story that I wanted to tell.”

For Kapalos, A Life Of Its Own also signals a major career shift for the journalist, who is looking to move outside the realm of television reporting. “I just got to that point on Sunday Night when I noticed that all I had control over really was the interview,” she offers. “You didn’t really get to write the story, or even be that closely involved with the editing process, so halfway through last year, I made that decision to leave. I could have paddled like crazy underwater, trying to stay afloat, or I could just look at the writing on the wall and say that I’ve done what I have to do here. I might re-enter it in some other capacity, as a producer perhaps further down the track, but I’ve made a pretty definitive statement to myself that I couldn’t go back, and that it was against what I believed in. I’ve been really happy with that, because I’ve ended up doing something that’s fantastic with this new role. Funding the film was probably the best money that I’ve ever spent. I haven’t seen a cent of it back yet, but it’s always going to be something that I’m proud of. I’d love to eventually go back and study documentaries again.”

And for Helen Kapalos, A Life Of Its Own has indeed seen this seasoned journalist experience a major personal shift. “The whole thing has changed my life profoundly…it’s bizarre,” she laughs. “I started doing weird things like packing up my clothes and material things, and sending them to friends. I just started going without, and living really simply. There’s an overabundance, and a gluttonous approach to things. We’ve got all these riches around us, but I’ve always been one of those people with a more egalitarian approach to the world. My dad lives in a village, and it’s still always good to be reminded that you can live differently. This documentary turned my world on its axis…I just knew that I couldn’t live my life the same way again.”

A Life Of Its Own will screen at the 23rd Greek Film Festival from October 11, 2016. For more on A Life Of Its Own, head to the Facebook page.