Writer Nancy Semin interviews Ted Gesing, director of the SXSW award-winning short film about Myocastor coypus, the rodent that is Nutria.

NS: You’re from Austin.

TG: I’m not. I’m from Boston, but I live here. I’m a graduate student here.

NS: In RTF [radio-TV-film] at UT [the University of Texas at Austin].

TG: Yeah.

NS: So how did you get the idea for your topic? How did you “discover” nutria?

TG: They don’t have any nutria in the northeast, and in college a friend from Seattle—we were just with a bunch of friends and telling stories, and he started talking about nutria and none of us knew what he meant. He had assumed we knew what it meant, and it doesn’t even sound like an animal name. At that point, I had learned about it and then a few years later I was actually working for a producer in New York who was doing a piece, sort of “an interesting stories up and down the Mississippi River” and so I started researching the nutria story for him. And he put it into the piece but it was fairly brief and I always felt like it was something I wanted to go back and revisit, and so that’s what happened. And then I decided to come down to graduate school here [in Austin], and it seemed like a great, almost regional story, being about a seven-hour drive.

NS: This is the first short that you’ve done?

TG: It’s my second actually. The first was called Saturday AM and it was about yard sale shoppers, that was a six-minute film.

NS: So you’re serving the nutria sausage in the lobby before the screening, what kind of reaction are you getting from audience members after they see the film?

TG: I’ve gotten good reactions. At the award ceremony last night Angela Lee joked that serving this tipped the judge’s hand. I won the best documentary film. But I get the same question we got here, which is, “Is that really nutria that I just ate?” You know, I think people are surprised. And I actually had a moment of concern as this screening started because someone came back to [me] with the stick and they weren’t angry or anything but they said, “Oh, when you said nutria I thought you meant…” They thought it was some equivalent of like tempeh, like some weird vegetarian substitute. But luckily they weren’t allergic to meat or anything like that.

NS: What’s your next project?

TG: My next project is very different. This was sort of my take on a natural history film and now my next project is my take on an historical documentary. Actually using archival footage and looking at some of the utopian ideals of urban renewal in the 1950s.

NS: Where specifically?

TG: Looking at the town of New Haven, Connecticut, which was one of the first of the cities that they poured tons of federal money into, and just sort of the aftermath of that. It was sort of going on with the birth of TV, so there is a lot of cool footage of just a boosterism mentality, like “We’re going to change the world and make a utopia.”