When three women step into the icy water of Lake Michigan, everything that is wrong or stressful in their lives just seems to fade away.
Jennefer Hoffmann, Deirdre Hamill-Squiers and Helen Wagner all had very difficult times to endure during the pandemic: bereavement, illness and isolation. As Chicago Tribune journalist Mary Schmich noted in a front-page column in 2021, getting up every morning in the winter “in the midst of a pandemic” is what carried these women “through the days. Let other people call it crazy.”
Accompanying the story was a video clip from photographer Stacey Wescott showing Jennefer climbing down into the frozen lake.
Chicago-based filmmaker Samantha Sanders read Schmich’s story and was immediately intrigued and moved. “It offered a little peek into each of them and their lives,” Sanders says of the article that inspired her film Swimming Through. The 15-minute doc about the women has now screened at around 40 festivals, winning more than a dozen awards. This week it will appear on the New Yorker website (December 6th) and is an Oscar Contender.
The filmmaker is an early riser herself. During winter, she will regularly venture out at dawn to take photographs of the lake. 2021, she remembers, was “a polar vortex, an especially ferocious winter.”
People thought Sanders was crazy but at least she was warm and “all bundled up.” The three women, on the other hand, all over 50, were taking off their clothes and getting into bathing suits in temperatures a very long way below zero.
“I just knew I wanted to tell their stories,” Sanders remembers her admiration for the weather-hardened trio.
Sanders lives on the north side of the lake and the three women do their swimming at Promontory Point, on the south side. The director contacted Jennefer through Facebook and soon afterwards turned up by the shores of the lake to meet them. At first, she didn’t bring her camera. “I just wanted to let them meet me and get to know me a little bit.”
Over the last year, the director has given plenty of interviews. Almost everyone, including Business Doc Europe, asks if she too took the plunge into Lake Michigan in the dead of winter, when you had to use a sledge hammer to cut through the pancake ice.
The documentary includes some underwater footage but Sanders admits she wasn’t the one shooting it. “I have a very talented and brave cinematographer Ben Kolak. I never would have asked somebody to get in the lake and shoot in February or March but he said that he wanted to,” the director remembers how her DOP jumped into the water.
She may not have joined in the swimming but says “watching them and the joy they were experiencing was definitely contagious…maybe I’ll try again this winter.”
Sanders and her editor, John Farbrother (also her husband), spent a long time in the cutting room, shaping their story. (They run production company Green River Films together). Early on, Sanders hadn’t intended to include any direct interview material but she eventually decided it was “important to see” the faces of the women on camera, away from the swimming. “Especially for the more emotional moments, it helps to connect with them and to see them…we see Helen at one point talking about her excitement at swimming through the ice and you can see it through her face. I just felt it helped us connect with them a bit more than just having their voices.”
Filming lasted from February until early November. Alongside the shots of the punishing winter swims, there is also footage of the women enjoying their dips on balmy summer mornings.
The documentary was self-financed in its early stages but then Chicago Media Project provided some funding, as did Columbia College Chicago (where Sanders teaches).
“For self-financing, it helps that I am married to my editor for sure!” Sanders laughs.
And, yes, the women still swim almost every morning. “They do see each other every day,” the director notes of the friendship that has grown up between Helen, Jennefer and Deirdre. They only know each other because they happened to be swimming at the same place. They were casual acquaintances who would say hello – but they began to talk more, encourage one another and to make a “deeper connection.” They talk in the film of the “feeling of not being broken anymore,” and of the “marvellous antidote” that the cold water swimming provides to their everyday problems. A deep friendship has sprung up between them.
“They each had their own reasons for why they wanted to do it. Deirdre’s is pretty clear in the film, just not wanting to be alone and grieving…I think Helen was just up for a challenge. Now she is competing in triathlons. I think for Jen, it was something deeper and more spiritual and poetic,” Sanders reflects on the different motivations of her protagonists.
When the documentary was being made, the pandemic was still raging and lockdown rules made it hard for the women to meet up outside swimming. They were just about the only ones turning up every day for a dip. (One man sometimes joined them and is showed briefly in the film, breaking the ice). “They would swim and they would meander to the parking lot and hang out for another half hour, just chatting.” Once Covid restrictions were lifted, the women began to go for coffee together after their swims.
Their feats in the winter of 2021 inspired “a lot more people who swam through the next winter. They inspired a lot of people to try it who now are there pretty regularly throughout the year.”
In the meantime, the doc is winning plaudits wherever it is shown. “We have had a real positive response to the film, people just relating to it either about the isolation of Covid and how difficult that was or the issue of grief and losing someone unexpectedly…or just swimming as a way of healing in general,” Sanders explains just why the film is resonating so strongly.
Now, the director is planning a fiction feature film spin-off based on the three women. “I’d love to have more time to go into their lives and their characters…I just don’t think we have enough films about women over 50.”
