One of my favorite films I saw in 2024 is finally kicking off its limited theatrical run before arriving on VOD. Last year, I had the privilege of serving on the documentary nomination committee for Slamdance’s inaugural awards ceremony, The Indies. As a result, I screened numerous magnificent pictures, yet none delivered a knockout punch quite like Emily Sheskin’s “JessZilla.” It contains the most joyous boxing sequences I have ever seen on film because each one is infused with the exuberant spirit of its titular subject, Jesselyn “JessZilla” Silva, a remarkably gifted young pro boxer. Sheskin charts her evolution along with that of her devoted father, Pedro, until a shattering diagnosis in the last act upends all of their plans.
In light of Jesselyn’s death last August from the brain tumor known as DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma), this extraordinarily moving portrait serves as an invaluable reminder of her astonishing perseverance in the face of pain, failure and even her own mortality. My fellow jurors and I were so impressed with the picture that we gave it our Spotlight Award, and I am thrilled to report that the film will be having a charity screening this Thursday, February 27th, at The Springs Cinema & Taphouse in Atlanta, Georgia. All proceeds from the screening will help build a fund in Jesselyn’s name through the nonprofit organization CURE, and online donations can be made here.
Earlier this month, Emily Sheskin spoke with Cinema Femme via Zoom about her transformative journey in making the film, the bond she forged with her subjects and her hope to keep Jesselyn’s incredible legacy alive.
I’m curious about what initially drew you to filmmaking. Were you specifically interested in making documentaries?
Originally no. I went to film school from 2002 to 2006, and my interest in documentaries was really a credit to a friend and collaborator of mine whom I had met there, Veena Rao. She had been doing documentary-style photography, and when I’d come home, she’s ask if I wanted to watch some weird documentary with her that she had rented from Kim’s Video. That is when I really started to get exposed to documentaries, and it was at a time when filmmaking had become more accessible. I shot my senior thesis on the dvx100a, which was revolutionary at the time. Digital technology allowed you to just pick up a camera and go. Documentaries weren’t expected to be cinematic in the way that narratives were, and when I graduated film school, I had to go get a day job.
But Veena discovered the International Documentary Challenge, where you make a documentary over five days, submit it to a jury, and if they select you as a finalist, you get a free pass to Hot Docs in Canada. Veena and I became finalists multiple times as a result of the films we made together, and we always had a great time at the festival. It was easier for me to take a few days off of work rather than a couple weeks, which allowed me to keep making documentaries. I’ve always been interested in people who are trying to become great at something, perhaps in part because I see that sort of obsessiveness about certain things within myself. Sometimes I struggle to understand people—where they’re coming from, what drives them—and documentaries allow me to ask what may sound like dumb questions because the people you’re interviewing don’t seem to mind them. What makes somebody unique, what drives them and why is that the thing that makes them get up every day?
I was watching mixed martial arts during the era of Ronda Rousey. The CEO of the UFC, Dana White, said that women wouldn’t fight in his company, but Ronda’s entrance into it paved the way for women to fight on this huge stage. It got me thinking about how many athletes, specifically those who are female, do a sport for the love of the game. Historically, women’s sports have been either ignored or considered secondary to those played by men. MMA is such a physical sport, and it’s not something that you can just do on a whim. So many women had put in all this work with no hope at the time of getting to the level where they were making money from it. I had spoken to a few female MMA fighters before I first saw Jess, at age 9, pictured in a local New Jersey paper, which we included in the film. Her coach Don Somerville was holding her up, and she had the belt she had just won, and I was like, ‘Who is this kid?’ That kicked off the idea for what initially became the short film, “Girl Boxer.”
How did you go about earning the trust of Jesselyn and her family?
I had seen the article in early 2016, and wrote to the writer of it, asking if she could put me in touch with Jess’ parent or guardian. She gave me Pedro’s email, and I wrote to him but didn’t hear anything back. I figured the idea was dead. I was sitting at my desk at my day job when out of nowhere, Pedro emails me back and says, “Hey, I thought about it. Sure, let’s do it.” I was like, ‘Awesome…but also, that’s not how this works.’ I asked him if I could meet him and Jess at the gym where she trains to see if we would be a good fit. I had two concerns, one being that I had never done a documentary on a child before, and wanted to make sure that this wasn’t a helicopter parent situation. I also told Jess and Pedro that one of my best case scenarios for the film was that it would be chosen by The New York Times to be one of their Op-Docs.
It was a very pie-in-the-sky scenario when I said it, but I made sure to caution Pedro by saying, “If this happens, there may be people who will make mean and critical comments. Jess may also receive a flurry of attention where she’s asked to be on a talk show, yet that attention goes away as quickly as it comes. That can be damaging for a young person. Do you feel equipped to handle this as her parent?” We had these kinds of conversations, and from the beginning, Jesselyn was like, “Yeah, I wanna do it,” yet I insisted that the adults needed to have a plan in place. I sent in a cut to The New York Times, and they told me they were interested, though they asked me to make some tweaks. Once we officially became an Op-Doc, they did a pretty good job of promoting it. “Girl Boxer” screened at several film festivals and played before movies at the IFC Center. It also brought me more requests for commercial work, which allowed me to build my reel and leave my full-time job at an ad agency, giving me the push I needed to venture out into the world on my own.
People were so celebratory about the Op-Doc and kept patting me on the back about it, but Pedro was upset. He had seen some very unkind comments left by readers, and told me, “I remember you warning me about this, but it’s still hard to see it in writing.” A lot of the criticism centered on the danger of the sport. There’s a scene in the short where Jess complains about having a headache, and it was literally because she had a cold that day. It had nothing to do with the brain tumor that was later found, yet after her diagnosis, people picked that moment apart in a way that none of us had expected. For me, it was a good lesson in how your film is going to live on without you there to guide people to the conclusion that you hope that they come to. You have to be aware that whatever you make will take on a life of its own. But to answer your question, that comfort that you see in Pedro and Jess during that first interview was a result of the months we spent getting to know them before we began filming.
The uplift your film provides comes largely from how well you captured Jesselyn’s spirit in and out of the ring. I love the big hug she gives her opponent as soon as their big Olympics-qualifying match is over.
It makes me really happy to hear that came through. I wanted to play with the cinematic language that had been established around boxing. Most films about boxing, even those featuring young women in the sport, try really hard to be gritty and badass. In the original treatment I wrote for the short, I juxtaposed the boxing with moments of childhood and femininity. I had an idea for a scene where she is punching a bag in slow motion, and then all of a sudden, her hair tie falls out and she says, “Dad, can you put my ponytail back?” That didn’t exactly happen during filming, but we captured moments that had a similar spirit, such as when she’s getting her hair and makeup done for her appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and is flipping her hair. We didn’t want to make Jess someone that she wasn’t, and she was playful, especially when she was younger. Like many girls, Jess loved her long hair and liked to have her nails done, and it was important for me to have that part of her be present in the film.
I loved seeing Jess in my neck of the woods during the sequence set at the Chicago Humanities Festival. It is at that event where she is publicly asked about her mother, who is absent from the film.
When I first met Jess and Pedro, there was a kind of unspoken boundary when it came to her mother. At the Humanities Festival, we showed “Girl Boxer” before Jess came out to talk about her memoir, My Corner of the Ring. A woman in the audience asked about her mother, and that topic also came up during a radio interview around that time. We had a one-on-one interview coming up, so I asked Jess, “Do you want to talk about this?”, and she did. Something I am very proud about is that Jesselyn, in many ways, drove what ended up being in the movie. It’s still true to my vision, but it was always important to me that she and her dad were comfortable with what was being presented, especially since she was a child. I never wanted to push her into talking about things that she didn’t want to discuss, but by that point, she felt she needed to set the record straight. Her mom was still in her life, and that’s all people needed to know.
Then when Jess got sick, Pedro and I were just a mess. Nobody was thinking about a movie until Jess asked, “When are we gonna film again?” I asked Pedro how he felt about that, and he said, “You guys have always been a part of her normal, and I don’t want her to feel like a cancer kid.” Before her diagnosis, I had always thought that film would be about Jess going to the 2024 Olympics. Now we needed to talk to Jess about why she wanted to keep filming, and that became the film’s third act. It’s hard because when people learn that Jess has died, they often go, “I don’t want to watch a sad movie.” It may sound weird, but I don’t find our movie sad because Jess was never sad. Her bravery continues to inspire me whenever difficult things come up. I think about her resilience, her joy, and her spirit, and it makes me much stronger. I have carried her with me and I will do that for the rest of my life. To reduce her story to being sad is too reductive. It’s not who she was, what her spirit is or even what she continues to do through us.
You can see in the film how Jesselyn’s input helped form its structure, such as when she answers your questions about how she would begin and end the movie. By keeping the narrative linear, as she suggested, the film is like a microcosm of Michael Apted’s “Up” series.
That was a huge inspiration! I wanted to make an “Up” series about a champion in order to chronicle what kind of attitude, grit and perseverance a person needs and what must happen in their lives in order to keep them on this path. I was lucky enough to see the last film in the series, “63 Up,” at a screening attended by Michael Apted, and I got to ask him a question during the Q&A. This was before Jess had gotten sick, but I had already gotten entrenched in her life. I asked him how involved he is with his subjects, and he was like, “I just show up once every seven years.” It was very arm’s length, and when I told Pedro about it, he said, “No, that wouldn’t have worked for us.” [laughs] I look up to Michael as being a huge inspiration, but you have to navigate your own way through the work you do. If I had done my film in the way he did his, it would not have worked.
I don’t think we would’ve gotten the moments we got, and there’s one in the movie that is among my favorites. It happens when Jess is older, and I ask her a question that I know is ridiculous. She laughs and says, “Emily, that is an insane question.” Then you watch her compose herself before giving her answer. Allowing the viewer to look behind the curtain is really important, especially when Jess gets sick. There’s a moment where Pedro comes in and comforts her before looking over at me and saying, “Okay, ask your question.” I wanted the audience to be aware that there is a lot of love and respect between the director and the people onscreen. This was a collaborative effort, and those small details help convey that.
Another great documentarian, Barbara Kopple, told me that she always stays in touch with her subjects after filming ends. How did you go about filming Jess and Pedro in the room with the benches that they return to year after year?
The ad agency where I worked had a studio space, and they let us use it for free. After I left that job, they gave us a “friend of the family” rate whenever I needed to film with them there. We’d do a side-by-side interview, then speak one-on-one with Pedro and Jess before filming her shadowboxing. In the early years, we shot all this footage of her playing the saxophone poorly, which I loved. Before she got sick, I thought that the film would end with Jess, at age 10, playing a not great rendition of “Happy Birthday” as the credits roll. Tournaments would happen twice a year, and we would be there to film those, along with the prep around them and perhaps a scene where we see her returning to school. Our crew was pretty small—sometimes it would just be me showing up with a camera—and it was important to me that the people were kept consistent so that Jess would know them.
There’s a scene toward the end where Jess gets emotional and blows her nose before saying, “Sorry, Lucas,” who is our sound guy. She knew him from the very beginning, and he was still there at that last shoot. Our cinematographer, Paul Yee, and his daughter visited Jess in the hospital, and I remember Lucas coming to the funeral. We were a consistent part of her life, which is important when working with a child. The amount of time we spent with them each year varied. For example, during the first year, we interviewed her and Pedro for one day. Then we’d do three lifestyle days where we’d see her playing football with her brother in the summer, going to the gym with Don, and attending a Puerto Rican pride event. For the tournament, we’d spend about five days in West Virginia. To be honest, there were days I filmed footage that didn’t end up being used. It was a pretty manageable time schedule on paper, but in the early days, you’re just kind of getting what you can because you’re not totally sure how it’s all going to work.
What, in your mind, distinguished Jesselyn as a fighter, not only in terms of boxing?
She did so much. She did more in her short time here than I think many people do in their whole lives. That’s just who she was. Being a fighter, there was a level of intensity that she had for the things that she loved—that could be people, it could be subjects, and it could be the sport. It was an attitude epitomized by Pedro when he says, “Silvas never quit.” You get faced with difficult things, but you don’t quit. That’s what failure is, quitting. You can try and miss, but it’s not a failure. You only fail when you quit, and that’s something that I think about a lot.
I love the fact that Paul lensed the superb and underseen film, “The Fits,” which is also about a young female boxer.
Paul and I went to college together. He’s a year older than me, and I knew him socially. I’m also friends with Lisa Kjerulff, who is one of the producers of “The Fits.” It was during a lunch I had with Paul that I told him my idea for a movie about Jess, and I asked him, “Would you like to expand your little girl boxing reel?” [laughs] He was like, “Yeah, definitely.” Paul is not only incredibly talented, he is an amazing person. At the time, his wife was pregnant with his daughter, so after we did that first interview for the short, two or three months went by before Paul called saying, “Okay, the grandparents are in town, my wife is set. We can film!”
When the project became a feature, I asked if Paul wanted to continue and he did. To be honest, I always felt like Jesselyn liked him more than me, and I was happy about that. He brought his daughter to set when she was one and a half, and we have pictures of Jess sitting with her on the interview set. Pedro looked at Jess playing with Paul’s daughter and said to me, “Damn, I’ve got baby fever!” It was a funny thing for a guy who looks tough on the surface to say, but it also didn’t surprise me, now that I had known him for a while.
The dynamic between Pedro and Jess is so much fun to watch, such as when you ask him whether he’s interested in dating, and Jess goes, “Good luck with that!”
They were always so funny about that. [laughs] With the “Up” series being a huge inspiration, there were certain questions that I would ask them every year. There’s one that I wish had made the final cut and we had included in early work samples. Jess was 11, and I asked her about dating and going to prom. She enthusiastically answered, “My dad says that my whole team is coming with me,” and Pedro quietly replied, “That’s right.” What’s so funny about that is she thought the idea of all her teammates escorting her to prom was a great one. Paul and I were laughing about that for days because we understood that by the time Jess would be going to prom, she would be bringing along with her a bunch of thirty year old men. No boy in his right mind was going to approach her!
I liked the moment in their first interview where Jess says that she wants to go pro, and you see Pedro widen his eyes at the lens.
The second I met them, it was apparent to me that Pedro was the parent, but in so many ways, Jess was driving the car. He always seemed to be thinking, ‘How am I supporting her dreams, holding her up, and being present as a parent?’, but also, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I gonna do?’
How closely did you work with your editor, Katie Turinski?
I can’t say enough good things about Katie. She also did the short documentary on Netflix, “The Speed Cubers,” which is a delight if you haven’t seen it. It’s about the friendship between a boy who is autistic and a champion speed cuber. Katie is a partner at Exile Edit, which is a commercial editing house. Coming from a commercial background myself and wanting to make a film that felt a bit commercial, I really appreciated working with Katie. She knew that while, of course, I wanted to have moments that we live in, this film needs to move. I wanted it to be the sort of film that could be watched by my fiancé, my mom, and people who are not used to sitting through a long, vérité documentary. I am making this movie for general audiences, and I want them to be able to enjoy it and keep up with it.
Katie and I had originally talked about doing something nonlinear, where we use Jess becoming a junior Olympian at 15 as the backbone of our film, and then we go back and forth in time to these moments of her youth to see what has and has not changed. Once she got sick, that was impossible. The film’s very first scene, which subtly foreshadows what’s to come, was an important addition that we made after receiving feedback from our associate producers, Amanda Branson and Jason Kohn. They had seen an earlier cut that didn’t include any sort of warning that Jess gets sick, and they thought it was almost cruel not to give the viewer an idea that this film wouldn’t be leading up to simply a girl winning.
In general, it was Katie who made the movie. I gave her points that we were looking to hit, and there were times where I got really specific, but a lot of the film is just a credit to Katie’s ability to tell a story by condensing all of this footage. She found moments I had long forgotten about that are great. An example of this is the scene you mentioned where I asked Jess, “What do you think about your dad dating?”, and she says, “Let me tell you, he’s gonna need a lot of help because to get through me, good luck!” It’s such a wonderful, funny moment, but it was Katie who pointed out the significance of it. This is a child who has divorced parents. She is very concerned and protective over her dad, and does not want to lose him. Instead of having to make this clear through exposition, it’s conveyed in such an elegant way with subtext, humor, and humanity.
It’s incredibly powerful how the new cut suggests at the end that the years she fought cancer and managed to live longer than doctors had predicted was her Olympics.
That all comes from Pedro. I made the decision to put cameras down when I did for very specific reasons. My aunt had brain cancer, and when you’ve experienced that sort of decline, it’s not pretty and can get very ugly. This is a story about a young girl, and I wanted to respect both her and the way that she is portrayed. Pedro would send me pictures of her smiling and wearing sunglasses on a day she was getting surgery. People don’t understand how incredible it was that Jess lived for three years following her diagnosis. It was three good years until the end, which was mercifully, in some ways, kind of quick. Eventually, Pedro told me, “I’d like it if you could come out and see her. I don’t think she has a lot of time.” So we went out and visited Jess. Afterward, Pedro told me, “For years, I was focused on the 2024 Olympics, and then it hit me—this was the fight. She fought to get here to be here for this moment. I think she’s going to pass after the Olympics. She doesn’t need that anymore because she’s won. She did what she needed to do.” And he was right.
If it had been the timeline that the doctors had envisioned, she wouldn’t have even been around when we premiered the film in 2023. So that language is all because of Pedro and I obviously agree with it. There was always something happening related to her treatments that prevented Jess from attending any of the screenings, but she did see the film multiple times and loved it. She and Pedro gave us feedback, all of which has been addressed in the final cut. Anytime the film would screen at a festival, I would send her a photo of the opening title projected in the theater. One of the last messages I received from her was when the film was shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in late 2023. After I sent her the photo, she responded, “Aren’t you tired of watching it?” [laughs] I was like, “Nah, don’t worry. I just stay for the beginning, and then I come back for the Q&A.”
Jess was always so excited anytime the film was screened and we won an award. As part of a special education program we participated in, teachers collected letters from students of all ages who were encouraging Jess and talking about how she inspired them. I sent them to Pedro and he’d read them to her while she was recovering from a treatment. He told me that she was in bed with her eyes closed, and the letters kept making her smile.
Tell me about the upcoming charity screening of the film this Thursday, February 27th, in Atlanta, Georgia, that will be done in partnership with CURE.
CURE is a really fantastic organization that my producer Ben Kainz and I found, and we were ecstatic that they were open to partnering with us. If we can raise a minimum of $20,000, we can have a fund put on their site in Jesselyn’s name that will go to DIPG research and support for families with children undergoing treatment. All the proceeds from this screening, which will be held at The Springs Cinema & Taphouse, will be going to CURE, which is based in Atlanta. People who can’t make it to the screening can still make a donation on the organization’s website. When I asked Jess why she wanted to keep filming after her diagnosis, she told me that she wanted to show other people that you can be brave in the face of something very difficult and to raise awareness around the kind of cancer that she had because it’s historically very underfunded.
How did you and Ben go about forming Chicken Wing Pictures?
I met Ben when he was a junior producer at the ad agency where I worked. He started out as a PA on a job we did in Buffalo, New York, which is where Buffalo wings come from. At one point, a bunch of the crew members decided to partake in a hot wings challenge—I said, “No, thank you”—and it was hilarious watching all these giant men fall, while our young, rosy-cheeked, cherubic PA Ben put them all to shame. When my boss told me he was considering hiring Ben for a full-time position in which we would be working together, I gave him my full endorsement.
When you’re an indie filmmaker, you don’t have a ton of money, and a lot of the partnerships you are relying on are in some ways just that. They are partnerships in which you are not able to pay people, and so you are all doing it for the love of the game. That is what Ben was like from the beginning, when we first partnered to make “Girl Boxer.” His passion for film and for people has always impressed me. He is one of the kindest, most empathetic people I have ever met, and he’ll always have really insightful points to make. He’s very good at listening and making the work better. Making “JessZilla” was a huge labor of love for us both, and now, we are just trying to keep the good times rolling. We would like to make more films. We’ve got a short, “Livestreams with GrandmaPuzzles,” now playing at festivals, and then we’ll see where we’ll go from there.
I thought your promo for the “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge” ride at Disneyland was lovely, showing how emotional adults can get when reconnecting with their nostalgia.
That was a very fun project for me because I got to think about how the cinematic language of “Star Wars” could be translated for a documentary. We were really lucky with the people who were selected to be the first to experience that ride because they were all awesome. Over the years, I have learned that I am a filmmaker who really loves telling stories about good people. Yes, it’s important to tell stories about controversial figures, but I think I would really struggle as a filmmaker to do that. I feel so lucky that everybody I’ve been able to work with has been genuinely kind and smart. They are the sort of people that I want to celebrate through my work.
Anything you’d like to tell us about your upcoming feature, according to IMDb, “Puzzle People”?
I would love to be able to explore the world of puzzlers in a feature. Whether or not we get funding is another story. Film is at an inflection point right now where documentaries are heading back to art houses. There was a big boom where documentaries could reach wide audiences, until the tech companies came in and destroyed our industry. I urge people to support filmmakers and creators, especially since there is a fundamental lack of understanding about how much things cost. There is so much content to choose from right now, and people can get a lot of it for free. Even with our film, people have asked me many times, “Why don’t you just put it on YouTube?” It’s frustrating, as you might imagine, to spend the necessary money to make a film like this, and then be faced with people expecting it to be free. Maybe AdSense will kick you $1.50, and that’s it.
We are losing a lot of arts programs right now, and my hope is that the future of filmmaking will be made possible by people who are excited about ideas. If you’re making a film about a community, they may be just as excited and passionate about helping you reach your goal. At this point, for us, the more coverage we can get from people like you who are established in this industry, the better chance we have of when we go to VOD, people being like, “That’s a real movie,” versus, “Oh, that’s just some thing that people made.” I obviously love Jess. I miss her and I want her legacy to live on. I want to do something good by raising money and paying it forward to help other kids and families, and hopefully we can find a cure for this horrible disease. Even just being able to keep her memory alive and share her story with other people is really meaningful.
To order tickets to the 7pm ET charity screening of “JessZilla” on Thursday, February 27th, at The Springs Cinema & Taphouse, 5920 Roswell Road #C103, in Atlanta, Georgia, click here.
If you’re unable to attend the screening and would like to make a donation in order to help create a fund in Jesselyn’s memory, click here.
For more information on the filmmaker, visit the official sites of Emily Sheskin and Chicken Wing Pictures.
