Unsettling Nonprofit Filmmaking

I have a dream job. I get to travel the world making films about inspiring change makers doing incredible work on many of the world’s thorniest problems: environmental degradation, human rights, poverty, water and sanitation, peace building, and gender equity. Recently though I’ve become aware of how my presence as a filmmaker may contribute to the colonialism which has created many of these problems in the first place.

For a white American man to parachute into these communities where I have little connection and extract their stories for a mostly foreign audience can be ethically problematic. Despite my best efforts to always ensure consent to film and to avoid presenting people in as helpless, or needy, I’ve become less comfortable with my role in this status quo. If this is my dream job, then why the cognitive dissonance?

Last year while filming in Africa, on separate occasions, I had two young African filmmakers ask me if they could shadow and assist me, at their own cost, so that they could learn my technique. Because of the logistics, I was unable to take them on. But those requests haunted me and helped me see how there’s an eagerness among local emerging filmmakers to do this kind of work. It pointed to a problem of opportunity, access, and experience. I’m often asked for referrals to indigenous filmmakers by communications heads at NGOs and am usually at a loss for who to recommend

Then, at a Sundance event, I met Judy Kibinge who runs Docubox—The The East African Documentary Film Fund in Kenya. We talked about this troubling contradiction in the NGO space—how so many are about empowering communities, and the need to tell those stories about those empowered communities, but it’s outsiders who most often tell those stories. We hatched a plan where I could offer a boot camp for emerging East African filmmakers to do this kind of work. My team at the Skoll Foundation were in complete agreement around the need to shift the paradigm of how these stories are told. I now have the support to bring gear and a stipend to pay these filmmakers to create films for some high level East African NGOs that will hopefully become their clients.

My dream job just got a lot bigger.

The photo above was taken after a day of filming in Mukuru slum in Kenya in 2013. While it was a memorable day for me, and I am proud of The Slum Dwellers film I shot, this post is about changing the power dynamics of filmmaking so INGOs and foundations more often employ local storytellers.