"I feel like I was born asking questions," director and Brandeis alumna Debra Granik '85 noted thoughtfully. "That's how some people's brains are formed." Granik's film Winter's Bone addresses an important question: whether a single young girl can prevail against insurmountable odds. Earlier this month at the Wasserman Cinematheque, Granik appeared at a special screening of her Oscar-nominated film. The event, presented by University President Frederick Lawrence and organized by Prof. Alice Kelikian (HIST) in conjunction with the Film, Television and Interactive Media program, was followed by a question-and-answer session with Granik.

Winter's Bone is the moody and harrowing tale of a young Ozark mountain girl named Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) who goes on a quest to find her drug-dealing father in an effort to prevent her home from being torn down and to keep her family from living on the streets. The film is a gripping depiction of Ozark life that-judging from the film-few people would want to live.

The audience at the cinematheque was very receptive to the film and to Granik, who was greeted with a standing ovation when she rose to take her seat on stage for the Q-and-A with Kelikian. Granik put her heart and soul into telling this story, and she shared many of her experiences during the Q-and-A, the highlight of which was hearing about how she came to be interested in adapting Daniel Woodrell's novel of the same name.

Responding to a question from an audience member, Granik said that one day she sat down on a park bench and read the entire book in that single sitting. She had many questions about the novel's details: "Is this really contemporary America? Does she really live in a house like this? I felt clueless as to whether the material existence as described by [Woodrell] could be in any way accurate," Granik explained. Her question over whether she could successfully depict a story about this region as an outsider became the challenge that drew her to make the film. Granik also found that she had a strong empathy with the character of Ree, saying, "[I was] very attracted to her as female protagonist. [I] felt she would be an enticing character to depict."

The Q-and-A contained many fascinating moments, particularly Granik's revelation that the young girl who played Ree's sister, Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson), was an actual Ozark girl whose parents lived in the house which appeared in the film as Ree's home. After the Q-and-A, Granik agreed to do a private interview with justArts, in which she revealed some interesting tidbits, beginning with her view on the social issue of drugs.

One of the subtexts of Winter's Bone is drug use, specifically methamphetamine, and how it permeates and degrades the Ozark community. "It scares me," Granik said. "I try to avoid that subject, but in contemporary America I feel like it touches way too many lives. Different regions struggle with different substances, different people are vulnerable to things that sweep through their community. I don't feel like I look for [the topic of] drugs, I feel like drugs find me. I'm very interested in what it takes to get over an addiction or to protect your kids from one."

Granik finds that her experiences at Brandeis helped to inspire a lifelong passion to ask questions. "You never leave the 'why' stage. When you come to a school where there is a tradition of people interrogating social conditions, [you wonder] what are the roads to social justice? What role can a student, faculty member, activist or a filmmaker play? [Brandeis] was a place in which many people got to ask that."

On the subject of what she hopes audiences will take away from the film, Granik had a societal message to offer. "People take away many things," she commented. "I would say everyone is driven by a house that has a lot of debris in it, and it's easy to say, 'I know who lives there.' But what would happen if you actually sat down and talked to someone who lived in that house, and you found out where the debris came from? I would love for people to somehow have an affection for [Ree] and the life that she leads. To understand that in the lives of many ordinary Americans conditions are extremely hard. [I hope the audience can] somehow factor that in to their appraisal of how they assess the material conditions of her life and who they think she might be.