S1:E6 Lauralee Farrer

Guest Introduction

For years a friend of mine spoke of a woman who made him feel seen in a business where you are highly visible but rarely known. This makes complete sense to me now that I have met her myself.  

IMBD describes Lauralee Farrer as an award winning movie director, producer, and a master storyteller. She is all of these things, and also a mystic and a monastic. 

Lauralee’s ability to see and create out of the depths of the human condition while holding in tension the reality of eternity that is here and now leads us away from our desire for control and beckons us towards our primary purpose; to love God and our neighbor. Trusting all we endeavor to create and hope to become will be and already is in God’s time.

Lauralee’s story of spiritual (re)formation begins when the platform on which she built her life fractured beneath her. She takes us on a journey to the desert, a poustinik, and a benedictine monastery where she realizes she is being (re)formed by something much bigger than the faith she had known. 

It was 2 minutes and 52 seconds into our interview when I realized I would never have the words to adequately describe the beauty of Lauralee’s story. But, that is why Platform to Table tells stories to begin with. Stories are sacramental. Their beauty will change you when you behold them. It is Beauty that gives sight to the eye of the beholder.

Guest Bio

Lauralee Farrer has been making films professionally for over thirty years. As president and principal filmmaker of Burning Heart Productions, she began her own film work with Laundry and Tosca, an award-winning documentary that  prompted an adjacent career in public speaking. The feature-length documentary that followed, The Fair Trade, was chosen as the launch film for Film Baby, Ryko and Warner series "Powerful Films." Farrer was cowriter and director on the feature narrative Not That Funny starring Tony Hale, and writer/director on the narrative feature Praying the Hours (2021). 

Each film was welcomed into multiple festivals where they all won awards, including best feature and audience favorite honors. Events with film screenings and Farrer's public speaking were presented in the years following at film festivals, conferences, colleges, and churches. 

Her current work, the Wise Woman Project, consists of twin features on the role of the female elder in contemporary Western life.

Lauralee was the founding director and Chief Storyteller of FULLER studio and magazine  from 2015-2020. She conceived and directed over 3000 original video, podcast, and text assets, including an original video series featuring Directors Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, David Lowery, Eliot Rausch, Pete Docter, and Scott Derrickson; cultural influencers such as Krista Tippett, Rowan Williams, David Brooks, Father Greg Boyle, and Walter Brueggemann, and more.

Much of the material from which her directing and screenwriting emerges comes from Farrer's seminal freelance work for humanitarian organizations. This work took her to Spain when Franco died, to Kenya during the droughts of 1981 and 1991, to Somalia when the war broke out, and to Uganda to write about early outbreaks of AIDS and the plight of its orphans. She wrote of the Sisters of Charity in Ethiopia, and was in Moscow when the 1991 coup took place. She was in East Germany before and after the wall went down, in Mexico City to write about cultures of poverty, and in U.S. cities to write about American life. 

She lived in a Benedictine community in Denver, Colorado for three years—a providential experience that formed much of the basis for her book Praying the Hours in Ordinary Life and feature film, Praying the Hours.

Farrer was born in Hollywood, California, and resides in Southern California.