This week has been rather challenging for our team. We are facing a major crisis in our production and even though we are all hopeful and determined to get the best out of this experience, it sucks to watch the project we’ve been planning and preparing since week 5 go down in flames. In this blog post, I’ll try to understand how it all happened and why.

Somehow, I missed the moment when the friendly and vibrant community centre turned out to be a dead end. During our first few visits there, it all seemed very promising in terms of both content and cooperation. There was a huge variety of interesting courses and services going on as well as occasional celebrations and festivals. People there were excited and motivated to co-operate. We felt like we hit the jackpot having discovered that place.

When I think about it now, knowing what will have happened, I realise it sounded too good to be true. The community centre, it has a nice colourful facade that people who work there will go to great lengths to protect. And it’s easy to make anything sound good and keep up the happy illusion as long as you don’t let the listener get too close to see the truth. That’s why the first few meeting went really well- they talked, we listened, nodded and smiled. They wanted us to believe what they were saying and we wanted to believe it too. The minute we started to dig deeper, ask questions and want to participate in their programs things went downhill really fast. It began with cancelled interviews, declining friendliness and unwillingness to participate and soon we realised that the centre simply didn’t have much to offer. Turned out that half their programs and services weren’t even running even though they were still proudly advertised on the pamphlets. People seemed excited about our project up until the point when we actually showed up with the cameras. I honestly felt like they weren’t expecting us to actually be there, it was like they thought we would just talk about it and be gone. Which is probably what they are used to in the Walker Close Community Centre.

I know I probably sound like an offended little kid who was denied a candy and it’s fair enough. I really was incredibly upset when I first realised what was happening, and I was angry at the centre too. I am not anymore. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I came to a pretty obvious realisation- they don’t owe us anything. They never did. The centre is their baby and they try very hard to keep it running, which is obviously not going very well. I bet it pains them to see something they have worked on for a very long time not being even remotely successful. When they saw some students being interested in their centre, it was like a chance to prove that things are fine, great even. It was a chance for them to do what we’ve been so desperately trying to avoid – to advertise. And I don’t blame them, I understand. Why do they have to be honest with a bunch of naive students they never met before and let them know their centre is failing? Obviously keeping up the reputation of the centre is their main priority. I would have probably done the same. They didn’t owe us anything, especially not the truth that they don’t even want to face themselves.

I am not going to play the blame game. No one is to blame for what happened. All we can do is take a lesson out of it, and as long as we can learn anything from this experience then it was never a mistake. As I mentioned before, we wanted to believe everything they were telling us. We wanted the centre to be an amazing place full of exciting programs for us to film, we wanted it to be the place they were saying it was. And because we wanted it, we didn’t bother to ask ourselves “it that really so?” and double check the facts. Of course, we couldn’t have known, but maybe we shouldn’t have blindly believed their words as well. That’s one of my biggest weaknesses right there- I am embarrassingly naive and gullible. My point is, we were ready to blindly trust their words just because we wanted to. It benefited us, it worked well with our plans so we just accepted it as the truth and were done with checking the facts. We didn’t have any reasons not to believe them, but still… I can’t believe I wrote half of my blog posts about how there is no truth, and then made this mistake all over again.

The lesson I took out from this experience is not to trust anyone. Kidding (?). But I am definitely triple-checking everything from now on, especially when it comes to working with other people. I was also reminded that what is important for me might not be as important for other people. This project plays a big role in my life right now, but pretty much no one else cares about it at all. It’s always good to get a bitch-slap from reality and be reminded that no one owes you sh*t.

All in all, what happened totally sucked, but there is nothing we can do about it now. So we are going to move on, learn from our mistakes and be better.