Filming and participating
Working with Sunrise Project is always exciting and fulfilling, and gives us a chance to partner with an organization in a really close way. We not only helped them to organize activism around climate change, but were deeply embedded in that activism, filming events as they unfolded in often unpredictable ways.
A documentary purist (or more technically a “direct cinema” purist) would say that you need to keep a distance from your subjects in order to record events as they happen, to not effect them in any way. Aside from the fact that purity in any artistic venture is a dead end, we also find that being good filmmakers requires that you go on every journey with your clients or subjects, even if you disagree with them or their methods (in the case of Sunrise Project, we agree!), instead of maintaining distance. Truth isn’t always about distance, but more often about knowledge.