Paradise Hills filmmaker looks to share the love and joy in stories, even when life is tough

Filmmaker J.J. Anderson is grateful. She was trusted with witnessing deeply personal and vulnerable storytelling from an early age. As a young kid, her parents were committed to their sobriety in a way that included Anderson spending a lot of time at their regular Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which would influence her approach to the work she does today as a filmmaker.

“As a kid, there was definitely the thought that maybe I shouldn’t be listening, that this is a very adult conversation, but I’ve always been a sensitive child, so I can absolutely always recall a sense of gratitude for these people allowing me to be there, and also for the love that they showed me,” she says. “When you are a child of folks going through recovery and battling their addiction, there are moments that you can feel very lost in the process because it requires so much energy. I felt that, perhaps, what felt lost to me was being subsidized by these other folks’ love and validation and care. So, always a sense of gratitude. Always.”

With that, she found an approach to storytelling that led her to focus her lens on more joy and less trauma, particularly in telling stories of Black and Brown children and adults, like she’s done in her film “Sacred Soil: The Piney Woods School Story.” Her documentary follo...