Navigating the ethics of film always sounds much easier than it is done. Numerous meetings, interview-question drafts, and weeks of email correspondence went into preparing for our first interview with Sindi. I’m the type of babe who always says that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail —and trust me, our team planned to the point where we were more than prepared for what we had in mind.
Then reality came to slap us in the face. I woke up to a phone call from Shirley telling me that Sindi was hospitalized due to diarrhea from drinking tap water. The interview that we had scheduled with Sindi in the next few days was inevitably postponed, and our team was focused on trying to get updates on Sindi’s condition.
Surprisingly, my mom called me a few hours later telling me that my own grandmother living in Nigeria was hospitalized with diarrhea for a day prior and that I should call her to check up on her. It was a bit disorienting and emotionally conflicting to realize that my own grandmother and Sindi were both hospitalized around the time with the same health issues. My grandmother would never become a character in my mind. She was simply my grandmother. But with Sindi, I caught myself thinking about postponed interviews, production schedules, and deadlines before I thought about the fear of being hospitalized.
I really started to think deeply about the ethical qualms with prioritizing the progression of a film before the humanity of the subjects agreeing to be filmed. As a team, the HRMC group obviously wanted to produce a film within a reasonable time frame so that we could edit efficiently and before the deadline; however, at what cost? I’m glad that we were all in agreement to prioritize Sindi’s condition before anything else. I also wondered whether I would have felt the same urgency to pause production if I hadn’t simultaneously been worrying about my grandmother.”
If my grandmother was in Sindi’s position, I obviously would have halted all filming and future plans of interviews with no hesitation. I think that’s why it was so easy for me to let go of all the extensive planning my group and I had done in preparation for Sindi’s initial interview. But I also think about whether my stance would have been different if my grandmother wasn’t sick around the same time as Sindi. It’s left me questioning how easily compassion can become conditional.
My grandmother was discharged from the hospital a day before Sindi was discharged, and I thank God that both of them are okay. I don’t know if any of this happened for a reason, but I’m glad that the lessons I’ve learned from it aren’t filled with reason to worry.
Maybe that’s what ethical filmmaking really is—not always knowing the right answer, but refusing to let the film matter more than the people who make it possible.
with love,
Kehinde.