Filming a Documentary in Secret: A Dual Approach

I’m preparing to shoot a documentary inside a dictatorship. I won't tell you in which country: this magazine could end up in the wrong hands and I must be discreet. I prefer to sign this article with a pen name, as a precaution. You know what they say: « better safe than sorry ».

How, then, can we enter the country, film political opponents, and leave with the rushes safely in our suitcases? Curious minds that come asking questions about political prisoners, torture and corruption are usually intercepted at the airport. Just before boarding, a big moustachioed man asks you to follow him, and to show him what you have in your camera… If you don't take serious precautions, you can say goodbye to your film, to all the energy your crew has invested in it and to the production money. You also put the people who took the risk to talk to you in danger. 

Curious. But discreet... Not so easy to do when you have to move heaven and earth, sending emails, making calls and traveling, incognito, in a country that you don't know. I always get slightly dizzy when thinking about my Internet search history: what if the secret services tracks it? They might not even let me get on the plane. Visa request denied. Move along, there is nothing to see!

You need to find an excuse, a credible story that would explain why a French television channel decided to send a film crew to this country to talk about something other than the dictatorship's crimes. To say that we came to film something else - some cultural or sporting event, or a painless documentary on touristic sites - may seem like a good idea, but it's not. It can work if the consular services are not too vigilant. But I doubt it... and I already tried it once, on a shoot in Venezuela: we said we had come to make a movie on the indigenous populations, but we were really there to work on kidnappings. It was hell. To cover our tracks, we had to set up fake shoots while we were doing the real ones, it was twice as much work just to throw half of it away. I would only do it again in a case of extreme necessity. 

The other option is to use your connections. To play the reference game. But still, you must be careful as you can put people in awkward situations, and this can have serious consequences on their lives. In these types of situations, half our job is to devise the right strategy, to get in touch with the right people at the right time, with the right arguments or references, to maximize our likelihood of success. That is also the case when directing a movie. 

Curious. But discreet... This double bind is at the heart of my work and not only in difficult countries. Contrary to a television news camera, that always makes its presence felt, the documentary camera has to go unnoticed, in order to show situations as they are, real and without interference. I shot two documentaries last year. The first one about primary school teachers starting their careers, the other about Pôle Emploi administrative agents in the north of France. You'd think it would be much easier than working inside a dictatorship, but not really. Obviously, you are in less danger, but the difficulties are the same: to convince the Education Nationale or the Pôle Emploi management to let us film in their schools or offices for many months is also an uphill battle.

To open the right doors and earn the trust of the people so that they’ll accept the camera, you need tact and patience. For the recent graduates that don't yet have a good command of their craft or their pupils, it's complicated to welcome a crew, a filmmaker, a director of photography and a sound engineer in their class. It's not an easier approach with the Pôle Emploi employees, always subjected to much media attention and controversies. What reason would they have to let us in and film their work? We inform them that we will be as discreet as possible and that they will be free to stop the filming at any time. That the images will be shown to them after the shoot, to be approved together. That's how I learned to do this job, in full transparency and mutual trust with those who give us the gift of talking, who let themselves be filmed and open up to our curiosity. 

Being discreet does not mean being invisible. Our presence can never be forgotten: a crew covered with electrical cables, flashing lights, collapsible booms. But there comes a time when, we are not an inconvenience anymore. It’s about finding the right distance. The « observed » know that we are here, but their behavior becomes more and more natural. That's when we really begin a documentary approach. We slowly get used to each other and the images become more authentic.

Discretion is not invisibility, but a faint presence. Curiosity is not spying, but to observe without bothering. The documentary film, when successful, seems to me a happy marriage between the two. Their offspring, even.