Your current project, Earth Camp One, will be your first feature-length film since Paris Is Burning. Can you tell us about the project?

JL: It is a memoir and an essay, and it basically started 10 years ago. I lost four family members in five years. My grandmother and mother died in 1996 within a few months of each other. My uncle died in 1998, and my brother died in 2000. My grandmother and mother died of cancer. My uncle died in a freak accident on the Long Island Expressway. And my brother died partially as a result of pneumonia, but also drug use.

So I had this experience of having this level of loss that nobody that I knew my age had or understood. And I found that it was very isolating, not to mention difficult. People in our culture don't know how to talk about this, which really is amazing, because death is the most universal aspect of life.

In the trailer for Earth Camp One, you say that "death is not political." That's such a powerful statement. What led you to it?

JL: Different genres — like poetry, theater — have fashions. And what's happening right now in nonfiction film is that films are expected to illuminate a particular social, political, or environmental issue. But if you're raising money [for your film], and you're saying, "Well, actually, this is more of an essay film. It's a story I want to tell. And, yes, there are definitely political, social, and environment antecedents to talking about how we deal with mortality through the lens of my particular story." But it isn't primarily about global warming or women in Afghanistan or about a particular environment crisis.

So, as an example, when I was making Paris Is Burning, a lot of people I went to [to talk about fundraising] felt "no one" would want to see this story, meaning no white people, meaning no middle-class moviegoers — in other words, "there aren't people of color or gay people who pay for movie tickets." I [also] had gay white people saying, "I don't think you should tell this story of that corner of the gay world. I don't think it's going to make us look good." And I had straight people of color saying, "Don't show that. That's making us look bad." And, of course, interestingly enough, Madison Davis Lacy, the executive producer who made it possible for me to make the film is a straight black man. He just saw it as a great story.

The point is, I loved the ball world because I just loved it. I loved what I saw. I felt it was about everything I cared about: how we construct identity in a materialist culture, how people create strength and sustenance for themselves when society doesn't give it to them. So I saw it as a beautiful mixture of personal — great folks — and aesthetics — great events — and all the political events that I happened to be thinking about that time, but people didn't see it that way. They saw [the subject matter of Paris Is Burning] as obscure. And I feel like here I am again now [with Earth Camp One]. And if we, at heart, feel that death doesn't exist, or that we're impervious to pain, or that other people's pain is not as significant as ours, then everything we're doing is based on psychological and physiological lies. So I feel like there are circles of largeness around my little story.

The movie is about my experience losing these people and about a summer camp I went to in the '70s in northern California. The connection between loss and the summer camp being that when we're young, we often want to break away from our family and find different cultural markers. My parents were not hippies, but I wanted to go to a hippie summer camp. But what happens when [your parents] leave you? We're going to lose them, so eventually — so what are the oppositions between who they, the people who made us, are and who we are and who we become? There's also animation about different conceptions of the afterlife. Every culture says that when we die, we go somewhere. Do we? Or is that just a very elegant construction related to our fear of annihilation? And if we talk about cycles of grief in a personal life, what about cycles of grief in a political life?