Award-winning storyteller and filmmaker Elijah Yetter-Bowman grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina as a curious problem solver. They attended UNC Chapel Hill to pursue a career in public health but saw that most complex issues lacked creative communication.
They founded Ethereal Films to help solve problems with media, storytelling, and impact campaigns, and now their work focuses on interdisciplinary action to address major social issues.
Elijah was a 2023 award winner of the National Academies’ Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications with a continued passion for documentary filmmaking, storytelling, public performance, scientific research, communication, impact campaigns, public engagement and restructuring a better society.
We asked Elijah about their journey into science storytelling, their work with local communities in the South, and their perspective on science filmmaking in today’s digital landscape.
What inspired you to begin telling science stories through film?
It started with my mom. Our peaceful little life changed forever the day she got sick. I was twelve years old when she had her first neurological episode – facial paralysis and a migraine with visual aura that made her almost lose vision. She drove home from work that day yet had no memory of driving home. Over a few weeks and dozens of doctors and tests we learned she had a rare and incurable autoimmune condition.
The trauma of that and its residues, especially being a chronic condition, drove me towards public health because I fundamentally believe that she deserved better. Medicine and healthcare has to prioritize the root of issues and addressing them – not just symptomatic treatment, which is all she was ever offered.
I was a premedical student at UNC with that as my interest and passion yet at my terminal year in 2017 I learned of a massive chemical contamination impacting the town I grew up in for over 40 years yet was only recently reported. This was historical industrial poisoning of several hundred different PFAS/forever chemicals into the Cape Fear River, air-based discharges and untold quantities of soil contamination from the DuPont Chemical company (and its spinoff Chemours) situated in Fayetteville, North Carolina which was upstream of Wilmington, NC where I lived from middle school until college.
My transition into science storytelling was born out of a need to help translate complexities to my hometown, emboldened by what happened to my mom. No one should have to suffer illnesses like hers and as we know now, these environmental contaminants play the majority role in diseases, just like hers.
Your work with Ethereal Films isn’t just about making documentaries — it blends media, public performance, impact campaigns, and community engagement. How did you come to envision filmmaking as a broader “impact campaign tool” rather than simply a creative medium?
We live in a world saturated with content and that grows a void for our desires of actual story. My approach is informed by my own reconciliation of this paradox. How can there be so much to watch and yet nothing to watch? Cinema used to be a whole experience – an evening to be transported to another world. I believe we are seeing social trends to return to this deeper and more intentional use of time with stories + entertainment. As the internet gets so much worse, there’s a grasping for experiences and human connection once more. I produce works to give rise to thoughts, conversations and action. Documentary, I feel, is an exceptional format for this. It’s the perfect way to catch a room up on an issue or a story to spark curiosity with your audience.
You’ve described your work as operating on “the fringes of the fringes.” Can you expand on that?
Documentary is a tiny field in a struggling industry (film) with fewer than 20% of documentaries even making a profit. On top of that, I am based in the South where we have an even greater lack of infrastructure or funding support. Marry that with a subspeciality in science communication, and you have me on the fringes of the fringes.
How has your filmmaking evolved with cultural shifts and changes to the digital landscape over the years? (Feel free to add concrete examples here of films you’ve made so we can link to them and throughout your answers to the other questions.
I have spent most of my career nurturing a long form investigation on forever chemicals. A benefit of this being a slow process is that I have seen and adapted my plans while radical shifts have occurred in media and its consumption patterns. BURNED was our expose on the concealed presence of toxic PFAS in firefighter gear dating back to the 1980s. Our impact campaign which grew in response to huge community (firefighter) interest was a revelation for us. This campaign resulted in over 1500 in-person events across the globe including several I had the honor to attend and speak at. Most notably, a screening at the Boston State House in Massachusetts to propose a full ban of PFAS in firefighter gear and other textiles for the state, which subsequently passed into law. It taught us that impact campaigns are not just beneficial for my work, but actually essential. Impact from a story requires processing. An event can facilitate that with a structure that amplifies and encourages processing such as group discussions and activities. Experiences are what shape our lives and our identities. My goal now is to give people unique experiences with our art, not simply release it online and hope they do that work for me.
An example is our newest film The Bowl which tells the story of a group of six high school girls competing in a national ethics debate program, pushing them to be more ethical adults. We are leading a national campaign with this film supported by colleges and high schools across North America (and some parts of Europe/Central America) to bring more attention to this program for other students. We have designed a unique event structure for hosts to run ‘mock ethics debates’ with the film as an enticing form of recruitment for the activity, which is also available for college students. We are very proud of this plan because an administrator from the national program blocked funding we had committed to run this national campaign – yet we’ve been able to resurrect the plan ourselves by offering a sliding-scale event fee for each of the event hosts (colleges, high schools, etc) to make up for this unexpected gap in funding. I deeply adore this program and what it does to teach young folks how to be good people and think for themselves. While I was initially very upset about the unexpected funding cuts to our team who worked so hard on this story, I am so glad that this new campaign strategy has allowed us to move forward and rely on community support to still share this great story and campaign across the country.
Do you foresee your work scaling — maybe nationally — as a replicable model for other science communicators?
Yes, I think so many social challenges can benefit from this model. As a professional artist, this has also been a significant source of revenue to sustain my productions, which are notoriously hard to fund anyways (ask any documentary filmmaker, they will probably start crying). Becoming a mentor for other doc filmmakers, I am constantly pushing my mentees to adopt this approach for their work. Our medium is already so interdisciplinary that extending that into the ‘afterlife’ of the film and its journey into the world can come naturally.
Your films don’t just circulate, they show up, physically, in the places they’re about. What makes local communities such fertile ground for meaningful change/an essential place to create real and lasting impact?
Documentaries are best for how they can encapsulate a niche. They contextualize the experience and passions of a community in a special way that energizes that community. But it’s the community that has that passion – the films just help harness it from the people by giving them a shared and central focus. On the action side, a film can be the perfect way to summarize a complicated topic to make convincing and persuasive arguments.
If you could send one message to emerging science communicators or filmmakers in under-resourced regions such as the South, what would it be — based on everything you’ve learned so far through Ethereal Films?
Before he died, Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) gave me this advice when I was starting out. “Just go rogue.” What I took from this is that the key to success often requires making something new: pushing a limit, combining conventional ideas to generate a new one, etc. You have to generate your own path forward, your own niche. What works for me is not exactly what works for anyone else and that’s a good thing. Last advice – if anyone tells you they know everything about this industry, they are just trying to sell you something. Don’t buy from grifters.