Making documentaries that give the subjects their say

As Elif Shafak writes, ‘Stories bring us together. Untold stories keep us apart.’ I have spent most of my film-making life working with communities and individuals who rarely get the opportunity to have their stories recorded and witnessed on a public platform. This has been more than an individual journey, one shared not only with the participants in the documentary films and projects but also with the teams who have collaborated in the films’ productions.

My new book, Challenging the Narrative: Documentary Film as Participatory Practice in Conflict Situations, documents these filmmaking projects and the journeys we took using participatory film practices, in producing It Stays With You (2018) in Haiti; Right Now I Want to Scream (2020) in Brazil; We Never Gave Up (2023) in South Africa; and the Prisons Memory Archive in the North of Ireland.

Participatory practices in film-making operate on at least two levels: first, they encourage trust between film-makers and the ‘subjects’ of the film, by providing a degree of co-ownership, and second, they minimise the risk of re-traumatisation by sharing authorship of the survivor’s story; a key consequence of trauma can be the fracturing of one’s sense of self, or self-narrative.

The films that I have worked on have all contained a degree of participatory practice, that is, those being filmed are also participants in the project. Given the differences in resources, languages, cultures and so on, the degree of participatory practice possible varies along a spectrum of co-managing the project to co-ownership of an individual’s contribution.

My son still hasn’t selected his CAO courses - and the exams are around the corner

---

Kevin Kilbane: All that may remain for Pep Guardiola to do is sign a few Irish internationals and get Man City promoted

---

David McWilliams: The British act of genius that Brexit couldn’t kill

---

Colm Tóibín: ‘Writing a sequel to Brooklyn? The risk is cheapness’

---

While the geographical locations involved vary across the globe, a key element in each project is the attempt to challenge the dominant narratives in each society. For example, most of those killed by United Nations ‘peacekeepers’ in operations in Cité Soleil, Haiti were not ‘gang members’, as described by those responsible and repeated by most mainstream media, but people caught up in lethally militarised raids in densely populated, poor neighbourhoods.

The film It Stays With You (2018) challenges the ‘peacekeeping’ narrative of the United Nations in Haiti, in the context of established interests in the international arena – the violence perpetrated by the Brazilian-led ‘peacekeepers’ was one the most shocking examples of my career. The day after we filmed Joseph Pierre-Louis in the Bois Neuf neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he told us that he ‘feels taller. I don’t know if I have grown taller, but I feel taller.’

We had visited the area in 2018, 10 years after a UN peacekeeping mission raid had left scores of civilians dead and many houses demolished. Edren Elisma, whose 10-year-old daughter Vanne was shot in bed during the same raid, said ‘It’s the first time since it happened that someone has come to talk to us about it.’ He showed the project team the bullet holes in the roof of his house in which he and his daughter were shot. He continued, ‘I think that thanks to the strangers’ mission and what they do I have the opportunity to be heard.’

Our research in Haiti led us to investigate Brazil’s security forces’ reputation for perpetrating the highest death rates against civilians in the world; the story is told by residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in Right Now I Want to Scream (2020). The film questions the Brazilian state’s claim to establishing ‘law and order’ in the favelas. In both Latin American cases, these issues are raised by those whose lives were violated in the so-called interests of ‘peace’ and ‘policing’.

The first two films in the South African trilogy – We Never Gave Up I (2002) and II (2012) – were made in collaboration with the Khulumani Support Group Western Cape, which was formed at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings into apartheid. The narrative of a post-apartheid and democratic society is questioned by the continuing marginalisation and impoverishment of those who previously endured and resisted apartheid’s racist policies.

The third film We Never Gave Up brings us up to date with the film’s characters and their years of campaigning and survival from one of the most racist societies in history. Their endurance and mutual support is a remarkable example of community activism. Brian, who was imprisoned and tortured during apartheid ends his contribution to the film by calling for the ‘second stage of the struggle’ - the first being the overthrow of apartheid – meaning the creation of a more equal society.

The Prisons Memory Archive engages with the complex realities of North of Ireland society that is in transition out of 30 years of political violence, where no clear victor exists and, therefore, no clear narrative of that conflict has been agreed or imposed. The concept of a ‘sectarian’, that is, ‘two sides’, war is challenged by offering a platform for multiple experiences in the political prison system with the archive including prison officers, teachers, journalists, chaplains, probation officers and visitors, as well as prisoners. The archive’s protocols of inclusivity, co-ownership and life-storytelling are an attempt to address a political situation where the narrative of a conflicted past has yet to be agreed in a contested present, if it ever can/ could be.

The archive was achieved in the country where I reside and continues to be overseen by an advisory group consisting of participants in the project, working in partnership with the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

The films in Haiti and Brazil were more challenging, given the resource differences in income, language and equipment between westerners and residents of extremely poor neighbourhoods, but a degree of trust was built up by creating a co-ownership protocol, i.e. each participant had to agree to their contribution in the final edit before public exhibition.

The We Never Give Up trilogy in South Africa, filmed over a period of 20 years, provides a good example where project-level collaboration may vary due to changing circumstances and managing limited resources, but with a constant producer in the Human Rights Media Centre, Cape Town.

The critical reflections of the production processes identified in these projects are written from a personal perspective. It has been many decades since documentary film left behind its claims to ‘capture reality’ from an objective positionality; I am aware of the subjectivity of filmmaking, and I bring a personal interest as someone who has witnessed and experienced political violence at first-hand, albeit not to the extent of most of those in these projects.

Elif Shafak asks, ‘Once we have witnessed the suffering, the injustice, the immorality, what do we do next? Do we tell our eyes to forget what they have seen, tell our mouths not to whisper a word, tell our hearts to go numb, slowly? Or do we choose to speak up, speak out, connect, organise, mobilise, and demand justice, until justice is served?’ In their own limited ways, these projects attempt to address these questions.

Cahal McLaughlin is Professor of Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and author of Challenging the Narrative: Documentary Film as Participatory Practice in Conflict Situations (Anthem Press, 2023)