The Sidelines: Documentary filmmaking as a tool for social justice
With filmmaker, Ineza Roussille
The Sidelines is the supplementary issue to every main edition of The Starting Block. Here you will find the interview transcript and more information about the conversation of the week. The interview is transcribed by Otter.ai and edited for length and clarity. All links provided come from me, and not the guest, unless stated.
Listen to the audio version here.
TRANSCRIPT
TINA CARMILLIA: Hello, my name is Tina Carmillia and this is The Starting Block, a weekly conversation on science and society with an emphasis on disinformation, data and democracy.
As usual, the transcript, additional links and credits for this conversation are available on The Sidelines, the supplement to every main edition of The Starting Block.
Now, in the next lane: filmmaker Ineza Roussille. Our topic this week: documentary filmmaking – its similarities with journalism, and of course, the filmmaking tools and tricks that can be useful or deceitful. Ready? Let’s go.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yes.
TINA CARMILLIA: So, what have you been up to?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Well the last year has been mainly Songsang Studios. We just started season two workshops. We had our first workshop in—this is exactly what happened last year. We had our first workshop in person and then a week later, lockdown.
Yeah, but it’s been going really great. This season, [in the] first session we were kind of brainstorming on what kind of content people wanted to produce, and everyone came up with ideas and voted and what we settled on, which I love so much, is queering Nusantara fairytales.
TINA CARMILLIA: Interesting, but potentially controversial.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Potentially, but, you know, we are songsang for a reason. I know it’s so funny because we talk about these things and what is too much, right? Yeah, and it’s just like everything we do is—our base level is already too much for people.
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah, just merely existing.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yes. So, that’s been one big thing. I also started a company. Yeah, me and Mien, and Yoyo, we started what was initially going to be a production company but then we kind of decided to make it more general. So it’s kind of film and events and any creative endeavour, as long as it’s radical and feminist and all those things.
TINA CARMILLIA: I’m introducing you as a documentary filmmaker for this section. Obviously, you don’t just do documentaries, but there is certainly a distinction between documentary filmmaking and making a fictional movie, and you’ve done both. What can you say about the differences and similarities in the styles and the approach? For one, you don’t exactly have a script for a documentary that you can follow and have an idea of, say, the end of the film. That’s pretty scary, I would think. I would need a little bit more control.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yes, it is scary. And this is the thing I always have conversations with, narrative directors or filmmakers because they’re always like, “How can you do documentary? You have no control. You have no idea what the outcome is going to be.” And I like that. Fiction for me is too much control. Everything is in your control, right? So, also, if anything goes wrong, it’s all your fault.
But I like documentaries, partly because I don’t have to work with actors. Real people are a whole different challenge in itself, but I like figuring out that story. I like not having that script. You have an idea of what you’re getting yourself into, but you have no idea of the outcome, and it’s in the process of writing it as you go and especially in the editing process that you kind of figure out the story. And I love that part.
It can seem like you don’t have a lot of control, but I feel like in documentary filmmaking, you actually have so much power—so much power to determine what you want to say with other people’s stories. That part makes me nervous, a lot of the time, because you have so much power over what you want this person to say, which can be… I mean, you’re a journalist, you know. You can make people say completely different things to what they actually intended. So, there’s so much more ethical issues and responsibility that come with documentary filmmaking, which is always a tricky line.
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah documentaries have a journalistic approach to it. In particular when you’re working with social and/or political issues or subjects. You’re putting work out there that’s so easy to be criticised and discarded as propaganda, or having a biased agenda right? I think all documentaries have an objective, because otherwise why would you make it. But how do you approach that?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: You’re gonna get it, kind of, no matter what you do and you kind of have to be okay with that. There is always a bias, one way or another, whether intentional or not. If you just acknowledge that bias, it goes a long way also. So, you know like, the feature film I did, I wasn’t going to pretend like I’m not making a film about my granddad. I have to put that out, straight away at the beginning so people know that this is the perspective I’m coming from. I can’t deny that. I can’t be like, “Oh, I’m going to tell a completely objective story about my granddad,” it’s not possible. So I think being honest about those biases and the lenses you have and the perspective you have.
That’s also why I really enjoy documentaries that put the director or put the filmmaker in there, meaning the filmmaker has a voice in the story itself. It doesn’t work for everything, of course, but I like those kinds of documentaries because you see the process that the filmmaker went through as well, in kind of trying to tell the story, and I think that makes it way more objective and less bias. I mean, you know you can see exactly what you’re getting.
TINA CARMILLIA: I’m also wondering whether—with streaming and hosting services that are now accessible to everyone, basically—I’m wondering whether the tools of documentary-making have been co-opted. We make documentaries like Plandemic and creating chaos and spreading misinformation. I mean it’s taken down, it’s been banned on all these platforms now but not after millions of people have watched it.
I wonder what your thoughts are on streaming services because I subscribe to several streaming services, which is so strange, because, in the early days when there were few players in the market, the whole idea was that you can get everything in one place. You don’t have to have like, 100 terrestrial channels on your TV because you would have everything in this one, streaming platform. But now you have to subscribe to five, six different streaming platforms to watch all the shows that you want to watch. So we kind of reverted to the old model, just that it’s not terrestrial TV, it’s online services. It makes it so easy for people to—you’re watching the trailer, or you’re watching the first five or 10 minutes, if you don’t like it, you can move to the next.
If you go to the cinema, there’s a lot of costs involved, not just financial. It’s your time, your energy. You’re buying the ticket, you get your seat, your popcorn and your coke. If you have your bum on the seat, you’re gonna sit through the whole film.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Hopefully.
TINA CARMILLIA: It has to be so, so awful for you to want to leave because you’ve already invested all of that time and energy, whereas streaming services—you’re just sitting on the couch, flipping through, and you see five, 10 minutes of it. If you don’t like it, you just move on. So it’s so easy to just put, I mean—it’s not easy but you can even put a feature-length video on YouTube. And it’s so easy to share it.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: As a documentary filmmaker I can’t complain. The documentary industry has always been quite inaccessible, you know. Besides your NatGeos and Discovery Channels, feature-length documentary is, especially in Malaysia, who watches that, right? The fact that there are so many different platforms that you can put yourself out—the fact that Netflix has basically brought up a whole generation to watch documentaries, which I love, and just the access and just the appetite to watch documentaries has soared in the last 10 years or whatever. So, I can’t complain about that I think that is great.
And on the other hand, you do get rubbish like Plandemic and…
TINA CARMILLIA: Goop. Is Goop a docuseries? I think it’s a docuseries.
INEZA ROUSSILE: Oh yeah, that is on Netflix, right? But I think those have always been around and they’re always going to be around—these conspiracy-type documentaries. I feel like that was always a huge genre on its own right. I remember in, in high school, watching—I don’t know where I got them but—watching DVDs of documentaries about how 9/11 was a hoax and this will like a full-on feature-length documentary that people have produced that was going around on DVDs. So yeah, I think that kind of rubbish will always be around. I think it’s easier now to debunk that kind of rubbish. As viral as Plandemic went—I didn’t watch it, by the way—it got debunked quite quickly as well. It got de-platformed and all those things. So I think maybe in that sense it’s easier to fight those battles, but in general, I think it’s really great that this so much access to documentary now.
TINA CARMILLIA: I don’t know if I’m just approaching our conversation by pitting one thing against the other, but I feel that that’s the direction I’m heading, because the next thing that came to mind this feature-length versus shorts, versus, you know docuseries because some of the docuseries that I watch it could have just been a feature-length. I mean it’s not a criticism of this generation, but I am wondering whether you know shorts—it has a place. A lot of really really short-form stuff that you can find on TikTok or Instagram, sometimes are just so well produced. And that’s when I’m thinking, “Oh, this should be a feature-length!” which I’m not going to watch, because it’s too long.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah, I think it really depends on the subject. Some things deserve a feature-length, but also the thing with docuseries—and I totally get what you mean, sometimes I think this happens a lot with crime docos, as well. But like, because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be, you kind of just keep documenting right, and that can go on for years and years and years, and sometimes you’re like, okay crap, my production deadlines coming up, I can’t just keep waiting to see what happens. So you have to wrap it up and that’s why sometimes a lot of docuseries kind of leave you hanging…
TINA CARMILLIA: And you’ve exhausted all your time watching it, and you’re like, well, I still don’t know.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah, is he guilty or not?
But yeah I think that’s definitely the case with a lot of docuseries just because, especially for TV or Netflix or something, you have a deadline, right, whereas with features you’re probably going to work on it a lot longer and have a lot more space and time to do it and kind of come to a conclusion before you kind of wrapped it up in this one-and-a-half-hour package. Definitely, a docuseries has that issue of, kind of, just keep on going and you know, see what’s going to happen. But it’s just the nature of documentaries, really, you a lot of the time you just have to follow and see what’s going to happen and sometimes nothing happens. And then sometimes, a huge thing happens and you hit the jackpot and you have a great documentary, but not always.
TINA CARMILLIA: I’m still on the online streaming train. Just thinking, like, some things are made for mobile. It also means that it’s easier to be shared, it’s easy to go viral. With the DVD you watch, it’s so much more difficult to make that go viral because you’re going to need to pass a DVD to me and I’m the next person to watch it and then I'm going to pass it to someone else. But if it’s on YouTube, you’re sharing that link to all of your contact lists, and we’re all gonna watch it at the same time. I don’t want to make the Internet such a scary, dirty, bad place.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Well, it’s the work you do, I don’t blame you for being like, “Oh my God, how is this going to be ruined.”
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah, yeah.
You grew up in the 90s, correct? So I’m sure you’ve done film photography, versus now where everything’s digital, no?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: You mean actual film? Of course, I did, yeah.
TINA CARMILLIA: And there’s something so precious about film, because, well, first of all, it’s limited, you buy one, you could burn everything you. Digital is such a—it democratises photography and capturing moving images. Do you have a particular philosophy around this?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Every time I watch old things now, it just blows my mind, especially old documentaries. If you watched those World War video footage, there was someone on a battlefield with a massive film camera going, tick, tick, tick, tick, and then having to change your film reel on the battlefield itself, put in a new roll of film and then go tick, tick, tick, tick. I mean like, that stuff blows my mind. I don’t think any of us could imagine doing that now.
And that lends itself to getting a certain kind of footage that maybe, you know, it’s a different way of thinking. When you’re shooting with film, it’s a different approach to it. You don’t just press record and wait and see what happens. You’ve got to know what you’re aiming at, you have 10 minutes of film roll in your camera so every time you hit record and stop record, you’re going to count how many seconds is that, how many seconds I have left. There’s a certain beauty in that that I absolutely admire and respect.
But the fact that nowadays, literally, everyone has a camera in their pocket is a good and a bad thing. Initially, 10 years ago in the early days of social media, I was so like that grumpy uncle that goes, “Oh, everyone thinks they can make a video,” you know? But now I’m like, “Everyone can make a video.” I think it’s interesting because like I look at InstaStories—I’m not really on Instagram, but I hear of InstaStories, I know they exist, and TikTok, and I feel like this is totally a new form of documentary filmmaking, especially the TikToks. You know there’s intent, there’s messaging, there’s research and information and presenting your facts in a certain way. These are all documentary things, and the fact that we’ve—well, at least the younger generation has—become so adept at documenting and putting these kinds of things out is awesome. I’m all for younger people making videos in whatever form. People are not just making rubbish videos, people are putting out really well-produced informative things, I think it’s great. But like we were saying also, technology throws up its different challenges, especially with manipulation that you can do now the deepfakes and all those things.
And I really want to watch Welcome to Chechnya, I haven’t watched it yet but—
TINA CARMILLIA: Oh, I did just now.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Oh, did you?
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: I was reading an article with the director and he said he made it a point that you should be able to recognise the deepfake, that you know it’s happening on screen. He also used queer activists in New York, to do the deepfake, which I thought was also very interesting.
I never really thought about it in this kind of activist-y type of setting and use. When you do risky documentaries, there’s always, the question of how do you protect the person who you’re putting on camera? You don’t want to do the blurry face or just showing the hands or the silhouette. It’s so boring, it’s been done. I think this is a very interesting avenue that it’s possible for people with riskier contacts to kind of use the deepfakes in this way. And I don’t think at this point the technology is that accessible that anyone can do it, but I think there still has to be a lot of ethical conversations going around it, because it can easily go the other way, also, right?
When you first mentioned it, the first thing I thought of was, oh, it might make editing easier because editing is one of those things I always notice in documentaries, especially crappy documentaries, or reality TV, is that the manipulation in the editing is so obvious. Of course, you have to edit people in some way. But, sometimes you cut up sentences and take—it’s so obvious that you take a little bit of this sentence, you put it in this sentence, and you put it there, and you create a new sentence, basically. And that can be really obvious sometimes. If you’re really good at it, it won’t be, but sometimes it is. And if you’re really conniving, you could use deepfakes to get around that because then you wouldn’t really have to cut so much, you can just present all this inaccurate information as if it’s one take. You wouldn’t have to cut around it.
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah, I remember that there was this viral news clip. And the reason it went viral was because, I suppose, they used the morph cut. It was for vox pop, so it was just someone on the street talking, but because there are people, so many things happening in the background—when you do morph cut, it’s supposed to make it look seamless, correct? But, if you notice the background, you’ll see this child suddenly appearing out of thin air, as though he’s just been released by the aliens who abducted him, because the cut is so clean on the subject, but not on this kid behind her.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah, it’s scary how—I mean, editing software’s also come so far, right? So doing a morph cut like that is so easy now. And if you just have a talking head with a plain background and you do that kind of morph cut, which is just literally one click, the computer can make it so seamless that you don’t even realise. But if you have obviously a whole background behind you, then people are going to notice. And if you are a news channel, then you absolutely shouldn’t be doing that, obviously. I don’t even understand why they would use a morph cut instead of just like a jump cut.
TINA CARMILLIA: Or, you know, use your B-roll or something.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah, exactly.
TINA CARMILLIA: Speaking of elements of technology in filmmaking, let’s take it a couple of decades back and look into the early years of CGI. The pivotal point was probably 2001: Space Odyssey, I guess I’m not surprised that a lot of moon-landing conspiracy theorists believe that the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was behind the faking of the moon landing because I guess the audiovisual medium is just such a powerful device, in that it engages the emotions, but at the same time it can create this kind of scepticism. So I’m just wondering whether it takes away magic from cinema, or is it what makes cinema magical—this CGI and other special effects?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: It’s a huge difference between documentary and narrative, of course, right, like the use of CGI and all that. I generally am not the biggest CGI fan. Just in general, I think it has come a long way, but I think my favourite uses of CGI are always subtle. When you use CG with the practical elements of your film, that’s what makes it magic, I feel. If you’re making just a complete CGI environment that looks like an animation, then I feel that that’s not magic to me. I can play a PS5 game and it looks just as good. Harsh. But yeah, because people go to the movies, to escape, right? It’s escapism. People like going to see New York City get blown up once again. The CGI of it is only going to get better, which I’m excited for, and it’s always going to be the magic of cinema. I mean, it’s not necessarily what I look for in movies but—
TINA CARMILLIA: What do you do in movies?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: A good script. Good Lord. I don’t—I don’t care how many buildings you want to blow up if your dialogue is terrible, I’m just going to shut you off.
TINA CARMILLIA: Welcome to Chechnya—I did watch it, just before our conversation today because I want to see this technique that you’ve mentioned. And you’re right, that they made it obvious that it was deepfake, but there was a reveal at the end, where they shifted back to the original face of one of the interviewees because he decided to challenge the torture that he underwent. And that reveal was just so breathtaking, you need it in HD to really see because you can see some artefacts along the hairline, especially when they’re not forward-facing the camera. It doesn’t distract you, it doesn’t make you lose your focus on what’s actually going on.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: I mean one of the reasons the director said he did it was because he wanted the emotion of their stories to come through. Do you think that worked?
TINA CARMILLIA: Yeah I can see why he used that approach because a lot of the footage that they got were from hidden cameras. And so, if you were to even reenact it with like A-list Hollywood stars, you know it’s acting.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: I’m sure there’s a lot of ethical considerations to whose face you put on people. How do you decide what face I’m going to cover your face with? And who decides that? Is it the subject that decides I want a specific kind of face to be on my face? Or is it the director who gets to make that decision?
TINA CARMILLIA: Casting, in general, is already such a controversial subject. And now you’re doing this digital facial replacement. When you mentioned this film, and as I was watching it, it reminded me of this story in 2016. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it was a journalist in India called Yusuf Omar, who use—I mean it’s nowhere near as advanced as this, but he used Snapchat filters to tell stories of sexual assault. So these women were using Snapchat filters, which mask their voice and their face (Simran Singh, CBC).
It’s just so interesting to see examples of this kind of technologies used—and not in a way that’s associated with catfishing or identity theft but to actually use it as identity protection.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah, because originally, it came from revenge porn (Tamsin Selbie & Craig Williams, BBC). So, there’s so many malicious things you can do with it, especially in the form of a documentary. You don’t have to deepfake some well-known person, you could just make up an expert on something and have them talk complete rubbish.
TINA CARMILLIA: And you have a whole genre of mockumentaries that could then use that as a way to evade responsibility.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah, the legal aspect is also another—because every time you interview someone then you get them to sign a consent form and all that, of course, right? But if you’re not using their face, does that consent stand? That’s a very interesting legal question, you know what I mean? There’s definitely a lot of ethical questions.
Of course, you have to edit people in some way. But, sometimes you cut up sentences and … you create a new sentence, basically. And that can be really obvious sometimes. If you’re really good at it, it won’t be, but sometimes it is. And if you’re really conniving, you could use deepfakes to get around that because then you wouldn’t really have to cut so much, you can just present all this inaccurate information as if it’s one take.
TINA CARMILLIA: You work on queer issues, do you see yourself doing something like this?
INEZA ROUSSILLE: I think I would definitely consider it if I had access to it and if it was affordable. I’m not sure how much or what the process is like to do it right now. But yeah, I would absolutely consider it just because it is so hard to get queer people who are comfortable enough showing their face on camera and speaking, especially in our context, of course, right, for a very good reason. So yeah, if it gives them that kind of security and anonymity, I would definitely consider it, yeah. I’m just trying to think of how… this could go wrong, in our context.
TINA CARMILLIA: If you racially miscast them.
INEZA ROUSSILLE: Yeah that’s—that’s the thing I keep coming back to, like, how do you decide whose face you put on top?
TINA CARMILLIA: Which country’s activists, would not have that their lives feel threatened…
INEZA ROUSSILLE: But at the same time I don’t necessarily want an American’s face on me, you know? It’s interesting, I mean, I say I’m not a tech person but we’re constantly inundated with questions about tech, and especially as a filmmaker who puts their content online, I’m constantly thinking about this stuff. So yeah.
TINA CARMILLIA: We’re hitting the half-hour mark, and there’s still a lot to talk about. So, we’ll take a pause here.
You’ve been listening to a conversation about documentary filmmaking as a tool for social justice, using Welcome to Chechnya as a case study, with filmmaker, Ineza Roussille, who will be back again next week, on The Starting Block.
If you would like to join me on the show for conversations like this, get in touch here. Again, you can find the transcript to this conversation there. Don’t forget to subscribe, if you haven’t, and if you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with someone.
’Til the next one, goodbye for now.
CREDITS
Guest: Ineza Roussille
Producer/Host: Tina Carmillia
Music: Theme for Harold (var. 3) by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Nice can't wait part 2 !!
when is your podcast coming back