An Interview with Brian Becker, JFI Filmmaker in Residence
The Jewish Film Institute pleased to welcome six independent documentary filmmakers to its 2025 Filmmakers in Residence program. The year-long fellowship provides creative, marketing, and production support for emerging and established filmmakers whose projects explore and expand thoughtful consideration of Jewish history, life, culture, and identity.
Throughout the year, JFI will be diving deep into each Resident’s creative practice here on our blog. This month, JFI is focusing on filmmaker Brian Becker and his film Malls of America.
Hi Brian! Thanks so much for taking some time for this interview! To start: What’s the genesis of this project? Why did you decide to take it on?
Brian Becker: I grew up in the 1990s in a small town in central New Jersey — an area that some consider an epicenter for mall culture in this country. My options for teenage entertainment consisted of either walking in circles around a baseball field or walking in circles inside of a shopping mall. I pursued both options, but at a certain point convinced myself that I hated the mall because I was a very anti-establishment little skateboarder. Then, in the middle of the pandemic lockdown, I felt a strange urge to go to a mall. I started research and realized they’re deeply strange places — filled with contradictions, characters, and a surprising socialist, Jewish origin.
Where are you in the filmmaking process?
We’re in the middle of edit. I’m lucky enough to work with editorial genius and longtime colleague Maya Mumma, producer extraordinaire Carrie Weprin, and AE Roscoe Bernard who is well on his way to a lifetime of Edit gigs. Watching back all of the footage that we’ve created and collected, both present-day and archival, is a gift and a curse. We have so many uncanny, funny, and emotional moments. But that also means we need to somehow distill the many hundreds of hours of footage into a feature. We think we know the way.
How is the JFI Filmmaker Residency helping you develop your project?
This year’s selected residents have a real sense of cohesion. I’ve come to genuinely look forward to our meetings every month. The space Marcia and JFI create is truly one of pure support — it’s extremely comforting to be able to discuss the trials and tribulations of making independent film with such an impressive group of people. In both structured and unstructured time, we workshop our projects, spitball ideas, and try to help each other through problems we’re facing at all stages of filmmaking.
“We have so many uncanny, funny, and emotional moments. But that also means we need to somehow distill the many hundreds of hours of footage into a feature. We think we know the way.”
What will surprise your audience when they see your film? How does this story add to our collective understanding of Jewish life, culture, history or identity?
Beginning with malls’ invention by utopian Jewish architect Victor Gruen, who designed malls to mimic his dearly missed downtown Vienna (Gruen fled the rise of the Nazis), up to our present-day mall in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve uncovered many surprises that revolve around Jewish themes of community and interdependence. Malls are weirder and more flexible than people think. They are also flawed. Malls can be redesigned, retrofitted, and redefined in interesting ways, and I hope the film inspires people to think more imaginatively about the spaces around them.
If you could screen your film as a double feature with any film, what would you choose and why?
I love Tom Cohen’s 1982 film Family Business, which is part of the Middletown series. It features a former marine attempting to save Shakey’s Pizza in Muncie, Indiana. He rotates between cooking pizza, dealing with creditors, and performing surprisingly amazing cover tunes in front of an audience in the restaurant each night. It’s weird, deeply funny, and gets at much of the strangeness found in seemingly mundane suburbs and smaller cities. There are some definite parallels to the amazing mall owner we filmed with all of last year. I might also screen Mallrats.
Brian Becker is a New York-based filmmaker who directed and produced Time Bomb Y2K (co-directed with Marley McDonald) which premiered on HBO in December, 2023. The film’s lengthy festival run included True/False Film Festival, Hot Docs, Sheffield DocFest, IDFA, Camden International Film Festival, and DocNYC. Brian served as archival producer on Free Chol Soo Lee, MLK/FBI, Spaceship Earth, and The Fourth Estate, and as co-producer on the series Bobby Kennedy for President. Brian is a 2022 Doc NYC 40 Under 40 recipient, Impact Partners Producing Fellow, Points North Fellow, and a FOCAL Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year award nominee. Before turning to production, he worked as a mosquito ecologist.
About the JFI Filmmakers in Residence Program: The JFI Filmmakers in Residence Program is a year-long artist residency that provides creative, marketing, and production support for emerging and established filmmakers whose documentary projects explore and expand thoughtful consideration of Jewish history, life, culture, and identity.
