Long Live the Longitudinal Doc!
katy
A strong cohort of Arts Engine’s production team (Beth Davenport, Elizabeth Mandel and Angela Tucker) is in Amsterdam attending IDFA’s Forum. On Wednesday they are presenting one of our latest documentary features Rose & Nangabire before a couple of dozen broadcasters from around the world.
We started shooting Rose & Nangabire over 18 months ago, when we learned that Rose Mapendo was about to be reunited with her daughter Nangabire for the first time in 12 years. Rose was separated from the 5-year-old Nangabire in 1995 during the conflict in Congo. After 12 torturous years of wondering and not knowing how her daughter was surviving, Rose met long-lost Nangabire, now 17 years old, at JFK airport. We filmed their touching reunion as well as Nangabire’s last days in Nairobi on the eve of her departure to the U.S. And thus launched a filmmaking adventure for our team.
We committed to the production of a longitudinal documentary, a project that promises surprises and requires a leap of faith. Now, a year and a half into filming, several events have taken place that none of us could have predicted when we first started filming: most significantly, Rose has emerged in the last 12 months as an impassioned and recognized advocate on behalf of women in Congo. She was the first refugee to testify before the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, she spoke at the Rose Garden on World Refugee Day and she was invited by Congo’s President Kabila to advise him on women’s issues.
It is a challenge to make a longitudinal documentary - which by definition is filmed over a long period of time with little knowledge of how the story will “end up” - and yet the creative rewards of such filmmaking are great. I was reminded of this when I encountered Steve James’ article on the decline of the longitudinal documentary (Steve and his comrades at Kartemquin Films are some of the bravest contributors to the genre - unforgettable films like Hoop Dreams and Stevie put the “long” in “longitudinal”)
Reading James’ article made me newly invigorated to keep this form alive, when an amazing story like Rose Mapendo’s provides an opportunity to do so and grateful to those brave funders who shoulder the risk of projects like this with us - Chicken & Egg and ITVS among others who have joined us in this filmmaking journey.
One of the great things about the documentary form is how varied it is - how many different ways there are to approach a story - and the longitudinal documentary is a special, perhaps endangered, species deserving of continued cultivation in the nonfiction landscape.
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| Posted on November 25, 2008
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