Re: The Telling
Reece Pourier
I first formulated this question about 10 years ago, when public discourse and debate around hashtags like #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite was still many years off into the future. At the center of the documentary world that I was entering, I was experiencing a core disconnect. I had the knowledge from my own lived experience, and from that of family members and friends, that not all of the stories in the world were truly being told. So many crucial perspectives were still missing, because they were missing from the broader sphere of storytelling in our society as a whole. And I had been craving these perspectives my whole life. To try to explain to myself what was going on, I came up with that question.
It was in high school that I first noticed the disconnect between the stories I was taking in and the stories of my own life. We were reading work by Margaret Lawrence, George Orwell, Shakespeare. I was a teenager, a girl. I had not yet realized that I was queer, and it was not until I was figuring that out that it also landed on me like a ton of bricks that I was a person of color as well. I had never consciously admitted to myself that I was not white until then.
I am half-Filipino, half-Swedish American, and I was born and raised in Canada. The few Filipino family members I grew up with were not that connected to Filipino culture or community. So it was during high school in 1986 that I remember seeing media representations of Filipinos for the first time in my life, when People Power overthrew the Marcos dictatorship in The Philippines. There were news reports on television, and the TV footage showed thousands of Filipino faces protesting on the streets. I was so struck by my first visual proof that there were more Filipinos in the world than just my mother, my aunt and grandparents. And they were taking bold actions in defense of their lives and their communities.
I must point out, however, that I have also taken in messages of worth, of relative importance, about myself. As someone who is middle class, from a Christian background, able-bodied, cis-gendered, I have also taken in the message that my perspective is the normal one, the worthy one. I am part of the groups in society that count.
Let me focus on the colonial process. As most of the world was being colonized by a number of European countries, the stories of the people being colonized were being told to European audiences, by European priests, merchants, scientists, military leaders. This storytelling did not paint a picture of the colonized people as equals worthy of dignity and respect, however; instead they were savages, heathens, less than human. These stories were crafted specifically to convince the citizens of the colonial powers that people around the world needed to be colonized because they needed to be Christianized and civilized. This was of course part of a grander scheme to control and exploit the natural resources and human labor where the "uncivilized" people happened to live, but grounding the colonial project in a moral rationale was much more palatable to the European citizenry back home.
The final part of the colonial cultural process was then to replace the cultures of those groups with the colonial story. People of color around the world were brainwashed into believing that Europeans had saved them and civilized them often by Christianizing them. The most insidious form of this narrative takeover is the internalized oppression that often results. Most devastatingly, I received negative messaging about my Filipino background from my own Filipino family members. Their internalized colonization was so thorough that we ourselves thought that our own history, struggles and dreams did not matter, not even to us. All that mattered was to become as culturally white as possible, as quickly as possible.
As documentary filmmakers, we don't inherently have to care about any of this. But if we care about justice and equality, if we are driven to contribute to "changing the world" with our documentary filmmaking, then these are realities we will need to understand very thoroughly in order to be effective. Because to work for justice and equality, we will have to work to change who is telling whose stories to whom, and why.
Let me frame this first from my position of privilege that I referred to earlier. If it is predominantly those of us whose stories and voices have been prioritized all our lives, who are now telling the stories without having done deep unlearning of the historical messages that we have been taking in all our lives regarding who is important and who is not, then the stories that we tell will continue to be framed from that same imbalanced perspective. We will continue to portray people like ourselves as the worthy ones. And we will continue to portray the people unlike ourselves as less important and less able to take charge of their own lives.
Now let me frame this from my position as a queer woman of color. If we are members of groups that have been marginalized, and we also have an analysis of the oppression we face, and then we tell our own stories, our storytelling will be framed from very different, rarely acknowledged points of view. Our stories will portray us as always having had agency, as always having resisted our oppression in countless ways both public and private, as always having seen and understood the forces of domination imposed on our lives. We will not tell our stories in a way that makes it seem like we need "help" from the privileged. Our stories will show us as fully worthy, as complex, nuanced and complete human beings.
I want to share with you some specific examples from my films of how the documentary filmmaking teams that I have been blessed to be a part have tried our best to apply these principles to our craft, and how our efforts have been received.
Call Her Ganda, which was released in 2018, tells the story of the brutal murder of a trans woman in The Philippines by a US Marine, and the three Filipinas who then fight for justice. Director PJ Raval was adamant that the documentary not have a typical "Third World" aesthetic of gritty footage, poor production values and a sensationalist tone. Instead, it was of the utmost importance to him to show the beauty of the country and its people, and the dignity of their lives. So PJ insisted on gorgeous cinematography, a lush color palette, a moving score and a lyrical quality and feel. Indeed, it was those very aspects of his storytelling that made me jump on board as a producer. But aesthetics alone were not enough. It was also essential to us that we frame the story in the context of the history of colonialism and US militarism in the country.
Yet this was simply not satisfactory for some people, who could not accept that the film was not told in a "true crime" kind of way. Variety critic Nick Schager stated this plainly when he wrote that the film "should function as a murder mystery, courtroom drama, and expos." His review went on to detail his dissatisfaction with Call Her Ganda. I was baffled when I read his words, wondering immediately for whom the film should function in that way. Was it basically just for him that it should be told in that style, with the salacious crime aspects at the front, and the crucial context left out? I have since learned that many queer and trans people, and many members of the radical activist Filipino-American community, have all found so much to connect to in the film. Would they have connected more to a murder mystery, courtroom drama and expos?
I have experienced this repeatedly when marginalized storytellers approach material from our own, often rarely heard point of view, in direct contradiction to the mainstream framing of our lives. The reception from mainstream reviewers is sometimes instantly dismissive. I realize that in those instances, the stereotypes of what is important and noteworthy about us, the default settings for how the stories of our lives should be structured and framed, completely override how we are insisting we be heard. Instead, our perspective is perhaps too unfamliar, too confusing, too contrary to deeply held beliefs, and rather than embraced, our perspective is simply rejected.
And now I ask us all to consider: whose stories are you working to tell, to whom, and why? I hope this question becomes fully incorporated into your own processes, for each of your projects, every step of the way.
Having heard all of this, some people may wonder which stories you are now "allowed" to tell, and which ones you are not, and you may be feeling annoyed or even resentful that you have to consider this question at all.
This question is a very common one these days. As underrepresented people insist on being heard, insist on centuries of misinformation about ourselves finally being corrected, it is not uncommon for those of us in positions of privilege to react perhaps with fear, defensiveness, dismissiveness. This is because these topics strike at our core sense of value in the world, our core sense of our worth in relation to the worth of others. And when I suddenly receive the message that I am not as superior a person as I have always been told I am, I may well feel a major sense of discomfort, even hurt and pain. And I may well therefore react with great resistance to the message, because the message feels like a threat to myself.
So to me, a huge goal is for all of us to realize deep down in ourselves that it is in fact beneficial to everyone that we diversify the storytelling. Why would any of us want anything else than for everyone to feel of equal value, equal worth to everyone else?
When I apply that understanding to the question of which stories I am and am not "allowed" to tell, the answers should not be about hard rules. Rather, I focus on why I am working to tell a story. If I want the resulting film or interactive piece to truly empower a community, and also to create solidarity among people who are in a position of power and privilege in relation to that community, if I want my work to truly contribute to shifting power dynamics in our societies, then I always want the key members of the storytelling team to be from that community to a certain degree. I also always want all the members of the storytelling team to have a certain degree of awareness and analysis about the dynamics of cultural oppression in our society, and an understanding of how those dynamics damage all of us at deeply personal levels. Then I will know that the storytelling team will be telling the story for their own benefit as well. Some, if not all, of my team members will have hungered, sometimes their entire lives, to hear the story they are working to tell told from their point of view. And I will know that all of my storytelling team will be committed to the importance of the project we are involved in, the perspectives it will hopefully share, and the stereotypes it will hopefully challenge. That is the storytelling I want to support.
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