OhOn a recent early-morning flight to Atlanta, I sat in the middle seat next to a jovial, middle-aged Michiganian. Since we were both in a chatty mood, we started a discussion about what movies we wanted to watch on our plane ride. The topic of documentaries quickly came up, as my new friend said she absolutely loved documentaries. At this point, the conversation was in danger of becoming a danger zone. Even though I’m a documentary filmmaker and run a nonprofit organization focused on documentation, the stakes remain high for me when a conversation moves in that direction.
“I like true crime documentaries the most! ” she says. “Especially The staircase. It’s from this man who thought he killed his wife when he said she fell down the stairs. She smiles. “And he did it to another woman too.”
She looks to me for affirmation. I am stunned. She obviously doesn’t recognize me in the documentary – the daughter of the man she just described inaccurately. Panicked, I scan my brain for how to react.
What my new boyfriend didn’t realize at the time was that the people featured in documentaries are real people with experiences that may impact them in the future, even after the cameras are turned off and the documentary has been distributed around the world. It can take a lot of time, courage, self-care and support for people to recover from the events covered in a documentary or, in some cases, the experience of being in the documentary itself.
My own transformation from a fearful young woman to a confident, free-thinking filmmaker of my own story has taken 20 years and is continuing. It took me a while to realize that I was a traumatized victim of the true crime genre, not at the hands of any specific author, but at the hands of the documentary medium itself. When we take a closer look at true-crime documentaries, podcasts, and fictional stories based on true events, a whole host of ethical questions arise. How can there actually be consent from participants in true crime stories when the stakes are so high and they are often under extreme duress? How can we take care of the mental health of everyone involved, both participants and filmmakers? What trauma will persist for generations to come? Who benefits from true crime stories, and how are those profits distributed?
How could I even begin to answer all these questions, barely 22 years old, fresh after my mother’s death and my father’s wrongful conviction for her murder? The eight original episodes of the documentary by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade The staircase I was floating somewhere on pay TV and battling severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Looking back, I imagine I would have responded to my friend on the plane directly out of pure trauma. “Oh, I don’t know,” I might have said, before stopping, crying and shaking softly, then running to the plane bathroom to sob once we reached the altitude of cruise.
Eight years later, my father was exonerated and released from prison three days after my 30th birthday, and two new episodes of the Lestrade series The staircase added to the series, I would have had more confidence in my answer. “I think you have it all wrong!” And then I would have quickly and angrily corrected everything she had presented as true. Our conversation would come to a screeching halt.
Add another seven years and I would happily have had decades of EMDR trauma therapy, which helped soften the shock of society’s new developments. The staircase. Just before my 37th birthday, de Lestrade sold the ten-episode documentary (including three newly added ones) to Netflix. The staircase was broadcast in more than 200 countries and there was talk of a dramatized version for HBO Max with high-profile actors. My family was furious at the way our story had been commodified and sold.
By then I had been approached by many strangers, some even following me to a friend’s wedding, begging me to tell them how they knew me, but weren’t really sure from where. I brought my deep sadness, anger, and fear from these experiences into my therapy sessions, and I found the obvious answer: “This documentary is about my family, and it’s a very sad story that I don’t understand. don’t want to talk. .” The goal was to establish a polite boundary and walk away, which is difficult to do on a long-haul flight.
But now, after traveling the world for just under two years with our new documentary Subject (produced in association with TIME Studios), which explores the life-changing experience of sharing one’s life on screen and addresses vital questions around the ethics and responsibility inherent in documentary filmmaking, I had the courage to say, “Well, my film explores the ethics around this film. Can you imagine getting consent from his poor children to appear in the film? They were so young.
To which my shipmate replied: “Oh yes, it’s terrible. I did not think about it. When can I see your film? Her demeanor changed from a true crime aficionado with a murderous glint in her eye to an empathetic mother, still not realizing she was sitting next to one of those poor children.
The ethical dilemmas surrounding documentaries led me to Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera, the co-directors of our film. Subject. They, too, wondered where the documentary industry was going and how the participants in each story were being treated. We met for the first time five days before the Netflix release The staircaseand out of curiosity and a desire to find a better solution, we started filming Subject. Knowing we wanted to hear about experiences from different types of films, we reached out to participants in some of our favorite documentaries: Hoop dreams, The place, Capturing the FriedmansAnd The pack of wolves.
Camilla and Jennifer gave us the space to safely look back at our past; highlighting needed changes in the way we produce, finance, distribute and consume documentaries. We explored the idea of conscious consumption, with a focus on the audience for these stories. Many of us are starting to become more aware of where our clothes and food come from, so perhaps we can also be mindful of the digital content we consume. In the questions and answers for Subject At screenings, we are constantly asked: what is all this consumption of true crime doing to us? As an audience, do we consider how polished the characters in these films were?
It is these questions that helped create the Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance (DPEA), an organization whose goal is to bring vital resources, such as legal, mental health and advocacy resources, to participants in the documentary. on a film means that the audience can be confident that the participants in the film have been treated ethically and with care. So when my new girlfriend from Michigan watches documentaries in the future, she will be informed by our film, Subjectand guided by a DPEA stamp in the end credits – and will understand that the people in documentaries are real people who deserve respect and attention.
