During an April conversation at a cafe in her Brooklyn neighborhood, the film director Rachel Fleit was buoyant. "I just found out we are going to be a question on 'Jeopardy' tonight! We had a feature in the New York Times, which was very nice, but I think once you have a question on 'Jeopardy,' you can die."
The question: "A 2021 documentary takes an intimate look at this actress and her ups and downs living with multiple sclerosis."
The answer: "Who is Selma Blair?"
The answer to the "Jeopardy" answer can be found in Ms. Fleit's documentary "Introducing, Selma Blair," which was released theatrically in October 2021 after premiering at SXSW in Austin and winning an award for excellence in documentary filmmaking at last year's Hamptons International Film Festival.
Ms. Blair announced via Instagram in 2018 that she'd been diagnosed that summer with multiple sclerosis. She had problems with memory, fatigue, and mobility on her left side.
Early in 2019, Ms. Fleit, who by then had directed three short documentaries, was vacationing with Cass Bird, who'd just photographed Ms. Blair for Vanity Fair. "Selma had contacted Cass and said she wanted to make a movie about what was going on with her."
Ms. Bird introduced Ms. Fleit to Ms. Blair and her manager, Troy Nankin. "We started having a long conversation about what was going on, and Selma sent me some of the video diary she'd been creating." Because Ms. Blair was about to undergo a stem cell transplant, Mr. Nankin quickly found producers, and filming started a few months later.
Ms. Blair's intelligence and wit are evident from the first scene. After looking at herself in a mirror and commenting wryly that she looks mentally ill, she reaches for lipstick. "Kim Kardashian sent me some makeup. I'm gonna do a shout-out to her, because, God knows, no one knows who she is, and I'm just trying to get this girl a little support."
The actress's sense of humor and self-awareness leaven her sadness, struggles, and fears, illuminating what is at best a scary and physically challenging situation and at times a harrowing one.
The outcome of the stem cell transplant wasn't guaranteed, and "Selma did make jokes the entire time about dying," said Ms. Fleit. "We could do a 10-minute blooper reel about how she was going to die."
Ms. Fleit wasn't sure how to end the film, but then came the pandemic. The two women began having long Facetime calls, "and we would just talk about life. When I realized Selma had been quarantined long before the rest of us, unable to leave her house because of this mysterious illness, I realized what this movie was about: the resilience of the human spirit."
Ms. Fleit's path to filmmaking began with a childhood love of theater, fostered by her parents. She was raised in Stony Brook and first became involved with the stage at Ward Melville High School. She loved directing plays and loved performing, but there was a problem: alopecia universalis.
"I kept my baldness a secret in high school, but most people who had grown up with me knew: 'Rachel is bald, she wears a wig, and she doesn't want to talk about it.' " It was generally accepted, except for an occasional rude comment, "usually from a stupid boy."
"I thought I couldn't let anyone know I had alopecia, so I couldn't be a performer. Now we're in the midst of this zeitgeist moment where this stupid boy makes a comment about some woman's alopecia, and it's everywhere. My friend said about the Oscars, 'The real winner tonight is alopecia.' I loved that."
The future director majored in theater at Ithaca College and found prestigious internships during the summers, one with the Roundabout Theater Company in Manhattan in 1999; the next year at Donmar Warehouse in London.
After graduation, she moved to the city and worked with Chashama, a nonprofit that transforms vacant real estate into affordable work spaces for artists. "I met everyone in downtown theater because we were giving out space, and artists need space. I ended up producing a lot of really exciting things in my early 20s."
Along the way, however, she began losing interest. "Something was off," she said briefly. Then, in the summer of 2004, a friend needed a producer for a thesis film at N.Y.U.'s graduate school. Ms. Fleit agreed to do it.
"I know the moment I fell in love with filmmaking. It was the first night upstate, and we were all at this house, and I remember walking through the house and the camera department was putting together the cameras for the next day, and the art department was finalizing the set pieces. And I realized -- at the end I’m going to have a DVD!"
"Theater is so incredible -- [but] I would do all this work and have nothing to show for it."
Her next producing project was "Giving It Up," a feature documentary about two former gang members in Los Angeles who had become paparazzi. "I was so close to the edit on that film, and that is when I reached what I would call my spiritual bottom. I couldn’t figure out why I hated it."
Six months later, she had the answer: She wanted to direct. "Because I was 27, and felt very old, I was like, how can I pivot my career now?" But pivot she did, thanks in part to a high school friend who had started Honor, a fashion brand, and wanted Ms. Fleit to create branded content.
"So that’s really where I started directing. I feel like I’ve had a very imaginative fantasy life ever since I was a kid, and that really does channel well into making movies."
After four years of commercial work, she was ready to make her own films. In 2015 she began "Barbara and Stanley: A Modern Romance," a short documentary about two people she knew who'd been in a long-distance relationship for over 40 years without ever living in the same time zone.
Two more shorts followed, one about a Jewish family and their love affair with gefilte fish; another about two cinematographers who are not only trans women but come from Mormon families.
"I'm interested in making movies about a different way of being in the world," Ms. Fleit said. "I have a joke: I may look interesting, but I grew up bald and in a wig and Jewish in a sort of Irish-Catholic conservative part of Long Island. I felt very much other, so other is interesting to me in everything I do."
She is currently editing two feature-length docs about college girls in the South, and polishing the screenplay for her first narrative feature.
Titled "UpIsland," it is set in western Suffolk County in the summer of 1997 and concerns three generations of Jewish women who are living together. The grandmother has lost her husband, the mother "has lost her marriage and is losing her mind," and the 16-year-old daughter has just lost her hair.
In 2014, having saved enough money from commercial work, Ms. Fleit bought a house in Springs, and lived there during the worst of the pandemic. "The irony of my life is, that once I was in college, I had no desire at all to ever set foot back on Long Island. And now I’m like, when can I get back there?"
