“I believe in abundance,” says Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Sharon Potoker Liese ’80, MA ’82. “And that allows me to have some faith in being able to follow my heart.”
Following her heart is fitting for Liese, a Saratoga Springs native based in America’s heartland of Kansas. Liese is known for her emotionally rich films that reveal the modern complexities of being human.
In her captivating short film The Gnomist, a real-life enchanted forest has the power to heal; with Transhood, Liese captures the travails of young people and their families grappling with gender expression; her poignant film Parker (codirected with Catherine Hoffman) unravels the legacy, meaning and power of a last name; and The Flagmakers — the film for which she and co-director Cynthia Wide won the 2023 News and Documentary Emmy Award — paints a vivid and emotional portrait of citizenship and belonging through the eyes of immigrants at the nation’s largest factory of American flags.
The films are an extension of how Liese sees the world.
“We are very complicated beings, and that’s not always easy to make sense of,” she said over a wide-ranging Zoom call, the Emmy Award glittering in the background of her home office. “Everyone has a story ... and that’s one of the things that I love about filmmaking. I trust my gut that the things that I’m curious about [are what] other people are also curious about.”
After earning undergraduate and master’s degrees from UAlbany, Liese’s curiosity led her into marketing and advertising, a field she says gave her the storytelling tools and professional confidence to take a leap into a new career in documentary film.
“I was doing short-form films for charitable organizations,” says Liese. She realized that she wanted to tell stories for the rest of her life.
“I love the experience of seeing people empowered by their own stories,” says Liese, who won an Emmy for The Flagmakers.
As a divorced single parent, Liese focused (literally and figuratively) on her daughter by deploying a video camera to document the lives of 14 girls in her daughter’s high school. That early footage caught the attention of acclaimed documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler, whose interest helped Liese land an agent. A bidding war ensued, with the eventual winner — We TV channel — creating an eight-part documentary series called “High School Confidential.” The program, according to a We TV press release, was “the most watched original series premiere” in the channel’s history.
The success catapulted Liese’s filmmaking career and the Emmy win for The Flagmakers is her high-water mark to date.
“It was amazing because the room was full of documentary filmmakers who I really respect and admire,” says Liese, recalling the awards ceremony. “Then they said, ‘The Emmy goes to The Flagmakers,’ and then everything broke loose.” The film is now being developed as a Broadway musical, enabling its emotional impact to reach new audiences.
“I feel like [the film’s success] gives me credibility to help propel and get support for my other projects.”
One of those projects is an as-yet-untitled film about the 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, a small-town newspaper in Kansas that led to the death of the paper’s 98-year-old co-owner. Liese sees it as a window into both personal loss and democratic peril — timely topics given the nation’s political and cultural climate. Being based in close proximity to the story gives Liese a quick and early advantage not readily available to filmmakers based in the production centers of New York and Los Angeles.
“I feel very grounded here,” she says while pointing out that navigating the ultra-competitive documentary landscape today can be daunting. Nevertheless, she believes being in the heartland allows her filmmaking compass to remain fixed on stories rooted in emotional honesty. “There’s less distraction and anxiety-producing noise. I can be more focused on telling the stories that I feel are important to tell.”
