Playing with people's lives

Playing with people’s lives, needs to be fairly and honestly done when making a documentary. The lecture upon ethics defined issues in relation to documentary subjects. Liam talked about ethics, manipulation, truth and performance because

‘Ethics are beyond our commonsense. Ethics are embodied in law, antidiscrimination law and not all ethics are captured in law.’

The importance of understanding the murky areas of film must be defined before and during the production, in order to complete a fair, honest and true documentary as a result. But documentaries in reality tend to step outside beyond the framework of ethics, as filmmakers and talents can have different approaches to ethics.

Interview, being the crucial bit in the production, needs to follow the guidelines of the release form and if things change, then premade plans of questionnaire and editing needs to be laid out. In the examples of the indigenous girls in ‘Kalamala’ and the misrepresentation of African women in ‘Stolen’, these documentaries ended up in court, because they were degrading, contained uninformed consent or had the issue of ridicule. Then why had they agreed on the docu in first place? Or had the filmmakers not followed up the rules of ethics? How do I as a filmmaker solve this issues before shooting Yanni.Fin.?

By following up Dennis O’Rourke’s critical thinking, highlighting the understanding of the relationship to participation, sets the principles of why someone wants to participate in a documentary. How we as filmmakers manage this is by developing the relationship: keep the subjects that are participating informed of the documentary. There were at least six reasons why talents had agreed to participate in TV2’s documentary productions:

-A friendly favor
-To get publicity for business
-The spread of an idea, a political issue and social relations.
-Ego
-For the experience of the process, know what its like
-Or maybe as part of the brave garden: the interviewed talents fancy the filmmakers.

In ‘Bangkok Prostitution’, this is an example of how some film have pushed a couple of boundaries. The prostitute talked about her bitterness of family relations, suicide and marriage feelings. For O’Rourke the reason to show this, demonstrated the real world. By keeping on to the sense of objectivity, what was said become something objective. Like Bangkok prostitution, the distance between filmmakers and people they are filming, shows how truth is contested and that documentaries are not unmediated reality. They are instead representation of reality through mediated ways.