Lessons learned. That’s what filmmaker Laura DeBruce will discuss when she speaks to the Sanibel Rotary Club on Sept. 26. At the top of her list will be the role luck played in making her documentary, “On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries.”
“I’m biking around the island with this stick and somehow it gets caught on something, and I fall, crash hard to the ground and jump back up on the bike and realized later that I had broken my wrist,” DeBruce recounted.
With her wrist in a cast, she couldn’t help with tearing out drywall, so on the day the Sanibel Causeway reopened, DeBruce helped her friend, Kate Sargent, hand out inventory from Sargent’s waterlogged clothing store to people in need.
“When Kate sort of had this giveaway of her inventory, it was like a big reunion,” DeBruce recalled. “I started to meet other friends. They started sharing their stories. I think that was the moment I realized what’s happening here was worthy of a documentary film about this community.”
DeBruce’s next takeaway: the role trust played in inducing those who stayed on the island to share their harrowing stories.
“It helped that I live on the island. I’m of the island,” DeBruce said. “They trusted that I wasn’t going to make a film that would judge them or put them in a bad light. They trusted me that I would tell their story as they were telling it to me and that there wasn’t going to be any judgment, one way or another, about any decision that anybody made or what they did.”
Last, DeBruce discovered the power of music to tell a story in a way words alone cannot. For that, she enlisted Kat Epple to score the film.
“She brought out emotion, so much more to each scene,” said DeBruce. “It was as if she captured what was in my heart in almost every scene. There’s just this subtle but heart-wrenching music. It totally makes the film.”
DeBruce plans on screening “The Hurricane Diaries” in the coming weeks for a gala that will help raise money to re-green Sanibel.
View a trailer of the film here.
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In May, DeBruce shared the story of the making of “On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries.”
Returning to the Island After the Storm
DeBruce and her husband, Jeff, evacuated Sanibel as Hurricane Ian approached. Once the storm passed, returning to evaluate the damage became the DeBruces’ top priority.
“In the days following Ian, everyone who lived on the island who had left, we were watching from afar and it was just heartbreaking,” said DeBruce. “All we wanted to do was go back to the island.”
That urgency was exacerbated by their discovery the following day that the storm had washed out part of the Sanibel Causeway, making it impassable.
“That made our concern even worse,” DeBruce recalled. “How were we going to be able to get home?” Two-and-a-half years later, DeBruce still chokes up at the memory of being stranded on the mainland.
“You know, it’s funny,” she added. “When I think about those days, or when I talk to people about those days, the emotions are just at the surface, and everything comes pouring back.”
As soon as the Sanibel City Manager and City Council gave permission for residents to return to the island, DeBruce found a boat and captain.
“Actually, you could go in by helicopter and there were some people who hired private helicopters to bring them back to the island, but in our case, we rushed back by boat.”
Even that was fraught with complications.
“You had to find a dock where the captain could drop you off and pick you up because the public docks had been taken over by Lee County, the City of Sanibel and the State of Florida for emergency operations.”
DeBruce describes her first day back as surreal.
“We were coming back to an island that had changed dramatically,” she noted. “It was like a time warp or something. As my sister, Nancy, said when she came over to help, it’s like ‘Planet of the Apes,’ where you’re in a place that looks familiar but yet is totally changed.”
It wasn’t just that the trees had been denuded. Everything was covered in silt and mud, which made biking from their drop-off at Sundial Resort to their home extremely difficult.
But for an Alligator, “The Sanibel Diaries” May Have Never Been Made
When they finally reached their house, the DeBruces were greeted by an alligator that was sunning itself at the foot of their driveway.
“We parked the bikes at the edge of our driveway because the driveway was clogged with thick, sludgy mud that had been washed in from the bottom of the ocean.”
They didn’t have time to do much more than take stock of the damage.
“We were on a time crunch because we couldn’t miss the boat back and we wanted to stop off at a couple of different places before we caught the boat.”
Remembering the alligator lurking at the edge of the driveway not far from where they’d parked their bikes, Laura grabbed a walking stick that had belonged to her father-in-law.
“I thought in case that alligator was still lurking around we could try and scare it away,” DeBruce recounted. “Of course, that now meant I was biking through this devastated island on a bumpy, muddy road with a stick. I should have put the stick down, but it was a sentimental walking stick that had belonged to Jeff’s dad. I could have put it down at the edge of my driveway and no one would have taken it, but I wasn’t thinking straight.”
That stick caused DeBruce to crash her bike.
“The next day I went to the urgent care, had the cast put on,” DeBruce continued. “We went back to the island that same day, but now I have a massive cast on my left arm and I’m not very useful. People who know me well, call me ‘Action Woman’ because I like to take action. I don’t like sitting around. I like to take action. And I couldn’t.”
DeBruce’s Sanibel home is two stories. The upper floor was fairly intact. But the ground floor had been inundated by 11 feet of surge. Everything ground level had been obliterated. What remained was soaked with sea water. They had to remove all of that before it gave rise to mold.
So, while DeBruce’s husband, son and her son’s girlfriend were tearing out drywall and removing debris, all Laura could do was take videos to send to her parents and other family members to show them the destruction that Ian had left behind. That set up DeBruce perfectly for taking the next step, producing video for a documentary on her friends and neighbors’ efforts to recover from the storm.
Diana Taylor and Kate Sargent
A number of people played crucial roles in the evolution of DeBruce’s documentary, such as Laura’s friends Diana Taylor and Kate Sargent.
“Diana Taylor lost everything, but she was on the island every day helping other people,” observed DeBruce. “In retrospect, when I think about what she was doing afterwards, it was pretty much helping other people.”
One of those people was Kate Sargent, who’d lost her Sanibel clothing store to Ian’s surge. When Sargent decided to make the store’s inventory available to those in need, Diana helped her get the word out on social media.
“For two days, so many people came,” DeBruce said. “First responders came. People who had lost everything came. And we were just really happy to see people again. Actually, now that I think about it, that was one of the really wonderful things about those two days. We were seeing each other again, something that wasn’t possible until the causeway reopened and we could drive on the island again.”
Once DeBruce decided that the stories she was hearing deserved to be preserved in a documentary, she recruited Taylor and Sargent to line up interviews.
“Somebody would say ‘Hey, did you hear, for example, did you hear Doug Congress stayed during the storm, and he has some pretty good footage. So, I called Doug and said, 'I’m thinking of making a documentary about Sanibel after the storm, and during Hurricane Ian, could I come over and interview you?’”
So DeBruce and Taylor paid Doug and Melanie Congress a visit to record their story about how they stayed on the island and weathered the storm.
“Kate Sargent was great friends with Lisa and Tracy of the Over Easy Café,” said DeBruce. They stayed on the island because of Tracy’s 90-year-old mom and their two Great Danes and French bulldog.
“I knew of them, of course, but I didn’t know them personally. So, Kate introduced me and the two of us went over there and interviewed them for the first time.”
Taylor and Sargent did more than make introductions.
“My sister worked with a woman, Laurel Bernstead, who has a long history on the island with the fishing captains. Her son is a fishing captain. And so my sister, Nancy, worked with her and said Laurel stayed on the island, so Diana Taylor went over and talked to Laurel.”
If it takes a community to raise a child, it certainly took DeBruce’s community of friends to make “On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries.”
Rachel Pierce
Rachel Pierce also helped lay the foundation for a number of the interviews DeBruce conducted for the film.
“Beautiful woman, inside and out, former newscaster,” said DeBruce.
Pierce is a lifelong artist and long-time TV journalist who had recently left the anchor desk to focus full time on her artwork. Based in Sanibel Island, Pierce paints bright abstract beachscapes and underwater tableaus in oil and acrylic that reflect the natural beauty and abundant wildlife found only in Southwest Florida. Among her motifs are loggerhead turtles, manatee, jellyfish, sharks, seahorses, octopi and other sea creatures along with soaring shorebirds and wading flamingos, technicolor palm trees and florals and mermaids and more.
“Her dream was to open up an art gallery of her beautiful artwork on Sanibel,” DeBruce noted. “She opens up her art gallery, fills it with beautiful works of art and Hurricane Ian comes and basically wipes away everything that was displayed on the main floor of her gallery, the work she put her heart and soul into.”
In spite of her own losses, Pierce took note of the plight of her fellow shopkeepers.
“Every shop on Sanibel is shut down, even the ones that are raised up because the owners of the different plazas needed to remediate, clean up the mold, tear out ceilings, tear out the floors,” DeBruce pointed out. “So, the small business owners had nowhere to sell their wares.”
After one of her employees wondered aloud if they could sell art from Rachel’s porch, Pierce went to Sanibel City Council, which passed an ordinance allowing them to operate an outdoor market that all the small stores could participate in.
“I think maybe up to 15 different small business owners gathered at Rachel’s outdoor market and set up shop, so when the causeway opened to the public, which was January 2023, people could stop at Rachel’s store and support some of the small business owners on the island.”
Many shoppers were islanders, and their stories also made their way into “On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries.”
Arlene Dillon
Editing the interviews and footage that she had gathered became DeBruce’s next challenge.
It took me more hours than I can count. It took me months and months, in fact, probably well over a year,” DeBruce admitted. “Part of the problem was that I had so much awesome footage, so many great interviews, it was almost impossible to choose what not to include in the film.”
In all, DeBruce had 20 main subjects and an equal number of smaller roles. Sanibel’s mayor, Holly Smith, was a through line in the film as a constant, steady presence.
“I could speak for one hour about each one of them,” DeBruce noted. “Each one of them I could have made a half hour or one hour documentary about them and their story. I could have made a mini-series on ‘On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries,’ a 10-part mini-series. I just collected so much footage and had so many great interviews, so the hardest part for me was deciding what to put in and what not to put in. The hard part for me was cutting it down.”
Here again, DeBruce enlisted help from someone with lots of experience.
“Arlene Dillion, a former CBS news producer/editor, is also an islander, and luckily, she jumped in toward the end and helped me cut it down,” said DeBruce. “Arlene has that great talent of being able to be very brutal, whereas I am so wedded and committed to every single person in the film, everyone who shared their stories or shared their footage with me, I just felt so personally responsible and it meant a lot to me. But Arlene has that sharp-edged editor sense. Now, quite frankly, Arlene would tell you my film is still too long. She would have probably cut another 20 minutes, but that for me was the hardest part. So it took well over a year, year-and-a-half, and at some point my darling husband said you really need to just put this out there. You really have to put this out there.”
John Biffar
Veteran filmmaker John Biffar helped DeBruce obtain the music you hear in the background of “On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries.”
“I had been struggling with what to do about the music,” noted DeBruce. “I have a friend, David Roth, who wrote a song for Sanibel. It’s a beautiful song but its appropriate place is in the credits. So I have his song that runs during the credits.”
Listen to Roth sing “Song for Sanibel: The Gincident.”
But she still needed a score.
“I was speaking with John Biffar, well-known filmmaker around town."
Over the past two decades, John Biffar has served as a director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer and on-air talent. He has directed such notable talent as Don Shula (former coach of the Miami Dolphins), Helio Castroneves (Indy Car Champion and “Dancing with the Stars” Mirror Ball winner), Ernest Borgnine (“McHale's Navy”), Arte Johnson (“Laugh In”), Norma Miller (“The Queen of Swing”), Bill Cobbs (“Night At The Museum,” “Northern Exposure”) Ali MacGraw (“Love Story”), news legend Walter Cronkite, Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill and Jacques Cousteau.
In 1983, Biffar founded one of the first independent production companies in Fort Myers. Over the next five years, the company expanded in both sales and reputation, evolving in 1987 into Dreamtime Entertainment, Inc. As president and CEO, Biffar has expanded the studio’s client base to encompass both national and international clients. With the company’s award-winning team of producers, directors, camera crews and editors creating superior programming, including broadcast commercials, feature films, corporate videos, web video, and long-form, original programming for national, international and home video release, Dreamtime today is a leader in film and television production.
Among the Emmy winner’s independent films are “Captiva Island” (1984); “Uncommon Friends of the Twentieth Century” (1999); “The Nazi Plan to Bomb New York” (2002); “John Paul II, A Saint for Our Times” (2008); “Queen of Swing” (2010), about Norma Miller’s influence in the globalization of American jazz culture; “Cuba Reframed”; and most recently, “Curveballs,” about America’s first and only amputee baseball team.
“He and I have known each other for a long time through the film industry, like decades ago,” said DeBruce. “So I said to John that I don’t know what to do about music and he said why don’t you talk to my friend, Kat Epple.”
Kat Epple
Kat Epple is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning composer, synthesist and flutist. She has released 35 music albums internationally, composes music for film scores, and performs live original music as a solo artist, and with her various ensembles.
Epple's compositions on keyboard, digital technology, world flutes, and other acoustic instruments, include a huge variety of musical styles including World Music, New Age, Jazz, metal, orchestral film scores, children’s, electronic space music, Native, and ambient music.
She composes and produces music for television and film scores for National Geographic, PBS Nova, CNN, Carl Sagan, The Travel Channel, Valentino Fashions, History Channel, HGN, MTV, "The Guiding Light," NASA, and Apple Computers, among others. Epple has performed music at Guggenheim Museums, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The United Nations, London’s Union Chapel, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Italy, National Gallery, Africa, and Asia.
“I went to Kat’s website,” DeBruce continued. “I listened to some of the tracks. I was totally blown away. So, I contacted Kat and she said that she would have the time to score the film. I was thrilled with that. And the first time that I watched the film with her music, I cried.”
One scene, in particular, touched DeBruce’s heartstrings.
“It’s of Bridgette Budd, who’s a well-known wildlife photographer,” said DeBruce. “She used to have a restaurant on the island called The Pecking Order, which was destroyed by the storm. Bridgette was putting out fresh water for the wildlife, because they didn’t have fresh water to drink. All that Hurricane Ian storm surge flooded our fresh water, which is critical to our island for the wildlife. So, there’s a scene where Bridgette is talking about the fresh water, and her pictures of the animals coming to the watering hole, as she calls it, are on screen. And Kat puts in this cool, low-key drumbeat, and it just fits it perfectly.”
Not Without Humor
As serious and emotional as the subject matter may be, “On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries” is not without humor. The story of Fred and Mary Bondurant provides a glimpse into the film’s lighter side.
“Another friend and sort of famous family on the island, the Bondurants, Mary Bondurant and her husband, Fred, stayed on the island,” said DeBruce. “Mary always left for storms, but for this one, her son was coming out to stay with them with a relatively new girlfriend named Liz. So Mary’s like, ‘Have Liz come out. It’ll be fun.’ They’re great cooks. They’re known for great hospitality. And so John and his relatively new girlfriend, Liz, come out to spend the hurricane with Mary and Fred Bondurant. Well, of course, it was a very different weekend than what was anticipated. But the one line in my film that gets a laugh is when Liz says very sweetly, ‘I thought why not come out and get to know John’s family better? You know, what could go wrong?’”
Well, of course, everything went very wrong, and Liz certainly second-guessed her decision as she and the Bondurants watched the water climbing up the stairs higher and higher as they were all sitting inside.”
The Bondurants are also illustrative of how trust played a major role in the telling of their story in the film.
“Even though Mary and I are friends, and we have been together with different volunteer organizations, she was hesitant, she wasn’t sure [about sharing their story]. And John and his girlfriend, of course, they didn’t know me at all and they weren’t sure either.”
Many of the thousand or so people who chose to ride out the storm rather than evacuate came under criticism in the days and weeks following Ian’s passage. None of them wanted to be second-guessed or ridiculed for choosing to remain on Sanibel notwithstanding the dire warnings being issued by the National Hurricane Center and local meteorologists in the days preceding landfall.
“But they trusted me.”
And there’s no judgment in the documentary about the decisions or actions that anyone made or took before, during or following the storm.
Two Other Enduring Themes
In the end, DeBruce said that what she hopes she conveyed to audiences who see her film is the compassion, generosity and optimism displayed and shared by Sanibel residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
“It’s interesting how much you heard the word ‘lucky” in the aftermath of the storm,” noted DeBruce. “It took on a totally different meaning because almost everyone you met on the island, which I think goes to the incredible spirit of Sanibel, almost everyone you met on the island afterwards, regardless of the amount of devastation they had suffered, they all said actually, 'I’m lucky. I’m fortunate,' no matter what they had lost."
DeBruce heard many stories like that in the weeks following the storm.
“Another of the things that touched me while I was making the film was the unbelievable compassion and generosity of people who, again, had lost everything.
Such as Diane Taylor.
And Rachel Pierce.
And Kate Sargent, who in spite of her losses said there’s no place else on the planet that she’d rather be.
And Mayor Holly Smith, who “The New Yorker” referred to as “impossibly upbeat.”
“So, there’d be these moments of just true gratitude,” DeBruce concluded. “In fact, Rachel Pierce has a comment in the film where she says, ‘I’ve never cried so much, but they were tears of gratitude. I couldn’t believe what others were doing for us.’”
It was also that spirit that helped DeBruce complete the highly emotional editing process.
“It really helped me move on. It was very cathartic to work on this film in terms of my own recovery, if you will.”
DeBruce screened the film multiple times during the 15th annual Fort Myers Film Festival in May. The film received the Audience Choice Award.
Starfish Lane Productions
“On Sanibel: The Hurricane Diaries” is the property of Starfish Lane Productions, a small, independent company focused on documentary films founded by Laura DeBruce. Laura’s previous work in creating films was with her friend and then-neighbor, Laura Hambleton, through their mutually owned company, Hunt Avenue Productions. Hunt Avenue Productions films include: “Speed Skate,” a story about young speed skaters in the Washington, D.C. area with dreams of competing at the Olympics co-produced with Sarah Patton of Stone Lantern Film; “Pink State Politics: A New Virginia,” a film that explores the women in the state of Virginia prior to the 2008 Presidential election; and “The Pantheon de la Guerre” for the National World War I Museum.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.