Devyn Bisson, a 24-year-old internationally acclaimed filmmaker, traveled to Greece in 2015 to document the volunteers who save refugees’ lives during the dangerous sea crossings. Her movie premieres this summer. Photo: Kate Spencer
From: Outside
By: Shelby Stanger
Apr 11, 2017
Devyn Bisson is a filmmaker who spent most of her life dreaming of becoming a lifeguard. The native of Huntington Beach, California, participated in the Junior Lifeguards program from the age of 8 and became an official city lifeguard by 18. Then, a year later, Bisson found herself in Orange, California, at Chapman University’s film school.
“Like lifeguarding, I knew that storytelling had the power to affect and literally change lives,” says Bisson. “I just wasn’t sure how.” In film school, she quickly learned she had a knack for finding great stories that she could execute on a shoestring budget. Bisson made her first film, Sikh Formaggio, as a sophomore after winning a grant from the SikhLens Film Festival, which took her, a friend, and translators to Italy to create a short about the Sikh’s involvement in saving the ancient craft of making Parmesan cheese. “My professors couldn’t believe we pulled it off,” says Bisson. It won best documentary at festivals like DocUtah and the West Chester Film Festival. “I realized I loved doing the stories no one wanted to do, and that if you pick those underdog stories, you get crazy access to the characters in them,” she says.