An Architect's Daughter: SALTY Features' Yael Melamede on Sparking Curiosity and Inviting People In

By Julia Gamolina

Yael Melamede is an award-winning filmmaker and former architect who is interested in the intersection of storytelling, people, and design. She is the co-founder of SALTY Features, a New York-based production company whose films have received both Emmy and Academy Awards. Her recent credits include Ada: My Mother the Architect; Death & Taxes; Emmy-nominated Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely, Pay or Die, Emmy-winner When I Walk, and the Oscar-winning Inocente.

JG: Yael, you've focused on a number of topics and documentaries with your production company, SALTY Features. How did you know it was time to focus on something personal and make this film about your mother?

YM: Most of my career has been spent producing other people’s work—helping directors realize the best version of the films they set out to make. Ada–My Mother the Architect is only the third time I’ve taken on the role of director myself. In each of those projects, I’ve been drawn to people who are intensely driven—almost obsessively so—by their work. They see the world’s mysteries reflected in their chosen discipline and remain endlessly curious, always searching for answers.

My first portrait, in Dishonesty: The Truth About Lies, focused on Dan Ariely, a social scientist and Duke professor best known for his research on irrationality. My second, Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely, explored the life and legacy of the legendary First Amendment attorney, through whom we can trace the evolution of free speech in America over the past fifty years. Both Dan and Floyd are consumed by the questions at the heart of their fields.

My mother is like that too. And yet, despite her extraordinary accomplishments—she has built a remarkable body of work and received many of Israel’s highest honors—she remains deeply private, shy, and even self-deprecating. I was fascinated by that contradiction. Beyond Ada herself, I was also compelled by the legacy Ada’s part of–a family of architects who helped shape the built environment of modern Israel. Her father and brother were both prolific and influential figures and together they helped shape the architectural language of the country. I wanted to explore that architectural impact and through it offer a nuanced portrait of Israel that would be difficult to easily categorize into the binary categories of “good or bad”, “right or wrong.”

As a filmmaker, former architect, former employee of Ada’s, and as Ada’s daughter, I knew no one else could tell this story in quite the same way. And I also understood there was no time to lose. As silly as it sounds, I didn’t initially think I was going to make a very personal film. I set out simply to tell Ada’s story.

You are now a filmmaker, but you were trained as an architect! Tell me about why you chose to study it, and more about Ada's part in this.

I never planned to study architecture. Growing up, I didn’t find it particularly interesting, and I certainly didn’t think of myself as artistic. Palladio, in my mind, was less an inspirational architect and more the unfortunate reason we spent a summer in Italy detouring to seemingly endless old buildings. I started college assuming law school was in my future—but somewhere along the way, I fell in love with still photography, especially street photography. I loved everything about it: the spontaneity of encounters with strangers, the discovery of unfamiliar places through the shutter, the methodical and magical joy of developing film and printing photographs.

After college, I thought I would become a photographer. I moved to Israel and worked as a photographer’s assistant, but I quickly realized I was craving a process where the shutter stayed open longer. That led me to apply to both film school and architecture school—two disciplines where, in very different ways, the creative “shutter” can stay open forever. I was accepted to architecture school and didn’t get into film school, and took it as a sign. Ada didn’t push me at all in that direction but she didn’t dissuade me either. She asked someone in the office to show me how to draft a little bit before heading off to graduate school. My first task was to draw a plan, sections and elevations of a milk carton

How did you then evolve your career into filmmaking?

After graduating, I worked as an architect—first in London for Michael Hopkins and Partners, then in New York, and finally in Tel Aviv in my mother’s office. But as I say in the film, “I never quite found my way.” I worked at different scales, for different architects, but the most interesting and meaningful project was renovating my mother’s apartment, originally her parents’ apartment, designed by her father Dov — and untouched for over thirty years. It was an incredible experience. where I got to understand up close Dov’s particular architectural language, filled with generosity and grace, expressed in the perfect ratio of his staircases and the simple but beautiful breeze block walls of the terraces; and I got to work closely with Ada while having tremendous creative freedom - but ultimately even then, I just never felt at home as an architect.

I took a summer film course at NYU and that was that. I went from a profession where I knew many people to an industry where I knew noone – and had to start from scratch, first as an intern, then assistant, post production supervisor and then freelancer. I worked on bigger fiction films with amazing people like Wayne Wang, Paul Schrader, and Paul Auster and eventually launched our production company, SALTY Features - named after a fairy tale I love and after a habit of trying to balance a salt shaker on a single grain of salt. That silly stunt captures the difficult balancing act of making films or making anything meaningful at all – and the pure joy and magic of experiencing it when it works.

The first documentary film I ever worked on was My Architect, the film about Louis Kahn directed by his son Nathaniel. It was a serendipitous collaboration as I knew a lot about Louis Kahn professionally and also personally because my grandfather, uncle and mother had all befriended him separately, but I knew almost nothing about documentary filmmaking. The film was a beautiful lesson in the power of personal stories to tell epic stories that are so much bigger than what they seem to be about. The film went on to be nominated for an Academy Award and remains a touchstone for films on architecture. It would take seven years for me to venture back into the doc world with the documentary film Inocente which won an Academy Award and I’ve continued making documentaries ever since, culminating in this most recent one on my own mother.

We talk all the time about how buildings are miracles -- when you think about the financing, development, design, and construction required, they involve so many people and such long timelines. But I'm sure movie making isn't too different! I'd love to hear more on this, as I'm sure a transition from architectural design to making films is more natural than people would think.

Films are just like buildings in this context—they really are small miracles. Like architecture, filmmaking is a team sport, dependent on the coordination and wrangling of countless moving parts. There are so many variables—funding, casting, schedules, weather, world events—that any one of them can derail the entire process. And so much of the work is in pursuit of synchronicity—those rare moments when every piece, every person, every creative choice seems to fall into place to tell the same story, like the salt shaker. It requires a vision, precision, endless planning, flexibility, and a willingness to wade into and live with lots of uncertainty.

For me, the thinking is surprisingly similar to architectural design —how do you create something that sparks curiosity from the outside, invites people in, guides them through a meaningful story, makes good use of their time, and has them leaving better than when they entered? In both endeavors, you’re constantly balancing form and function, structure and intuition, constraint and creativity. But the final products are wildly different: one exists in the physical world, the other is more ephemeral. In truth, I think that building is a huge responsibility - a bad movie you can put in a closet, a bad building is difficult to ignore.

What have been some of the biggest challenges for you? For Ada?

I would venture to guess that Ada’s biggest challenge was being away from her family for so many years and working in an environment that has become so much more difficult, raw and fraught over the years - it’s a dispiriting. Architecture is an optimistic act for Ada - and I think the situation in Israel makes it more challenging to be as optimistic as she would like.

For me, the challenges have been more basic. The independent film world is increasingly struggling to find a foothold. There are fewer buyers and financiers for smaller, more original films. In the same way that Ada bemoans the proliferation of soulless glass towers in Tel Aviv, I bemoan the endless appetite for similar feeling true crime documentaries and rushed celebrity portraits in which celebrities have creative control over the final product. Filmmaking should be a thriving industry but it is becoming more like a fine art — where a handful of successful filmmakers are still thriving and the rest are struggling to survive.

What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what would you say Ada's is?

I don’t think I can answer for Ada on this one as I don’t think she sees herself that way or thinks in those terms. She would probably say something along the lines of, “I hope people would think that I was a decent architect?” For me, I hope that people will look at the body of work we’ve created at SALTY and think of them as films that helped people think differently about big and small things. I aspire to having people see our films in actual theaters with big audiences and leaving a screening saying aloud to the friend they came with, “I never thought about it that way,” and for that to lead to a longer and thought provoking conversation about the issue at hand.

Finally, what would you say are the biggest lessons you learned from your mother? What are the biggest lessons you took away from the making of this film?

From my mother, I learned a lot about perseverance—and that failure and disappointment can be surprising catalysts for unexpected and positive change, pushing you toward something new. Making this film deepened those lessons. It also taught me more about collaboration and challenged me to be bolder in the creative process: balancing aspirations with reality, authorship with partnership, giving and taking. I had to learn when to lead and when to let go, when to trust others and when to trust my own instincts. I learned about the extraordinary generosity of friends and others in countless unexpected ways.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

For those just starting out, I’d recommend watching as many foreign films and series as possible—and, spending time outside the U.S, if possible. Getting out of your own bubble, whatever form it takes, is essential. We’re often so siloed—professionally, socially, even creatively—and when that happens, it becomes harder to see the world or particular issues from more than one perspective. That narrowing can affect both our work and our lives in detrimental ways we don’t always notice.

I’ve always worked hard and been fiercely independent. I wish I’d learned earlier just how much strength there is in collaboration and community. For too long, I kept my head down, trying to do more on my own, thinking that was the most efficient path. Over time I’ve learned that sharing my process and that of others—is more productive, more rewarding, more interesting and more fun.