Director’s Statement.

I was a therapist before I was a filmmaker…

and my first calling prepared me for the second. In both disciplines, we tell stories, purge emotions, express our fears and desires, all to try and make sense of the tangle of life. But when I set out to make Parting The Waters I knew I would be the one on the couch. As director and subject, I was forced to open up old wounds and revisit past traumas—growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, overcoming severe learning disabilities, suffering humiliating anti-Semitism daily, struggling to keep my chronically ill son alive, losing my best friend—all while training to swim in an elite competition after leaving the sport for over forty years. At times, it felt like this journey would break me. But in the end, it saved me. I could never have made it over the finish line without the empathy and vision of my directing partners—Marc Levy and Marc Salomon, the Emmy-nominated creatives behind The Marcs Studios. When we began our collaboration, they insisted on sitting me down for hours of interviews and heart-to-hearts, until we exposed the story’s beating heart. And like great therapists, they saw me clearer than I could. Together, we took a lifetime’s worth of drama and crystallized it onscreen. The film we made together is one of the proudest achievements of my life. From where I stand now, I can see that Parting The Waters was always about survival. It taught me that, no matter how dark things get, no matter how impossible it feels to move forward, I always possess the spark within me to keep going. I just needed to find my light and remember who I am.

I hope that Parting The Waters will help whoever sees it, and needs it, to do the same.

-Michele Kuvin Kupfer