Documentary as Impact

This week I thought it would be useful to focus on documentary impact and the strategies that are involved. The context here is quite large scale documentary projects that require much time and resources. There is a lot of discussion in these strategies around how we can measure the impact of documentary, but I also want to stress that not every impact of documentary can be and should be measured in such a tangible way. So in making your projects think about the kinds of effects you want you project to have for yourself and for your participants, These can be small and personal, they don’t have to change the world.

This week we were required to think about the type of documentaries that we have seen that have had a profound impact on us and whether they have encouraged us to take a stand or feel a particular emotion towards a topic we have viewed.

The greatest documentaries are we ones that leave us with a burning emotion, either towards the subject matter, a sense of injustice or even a call to action towards a breaking of moral or ethic codes shown on screen. The greatest impact documentaries are not only effective in showing the audience the problems bur actually providing solutions, strategies and sustainable plans for the future. The cliche of making a documentary to change the world is a bit overused, I believe every documentary has the desire and intention to not change the entire world but potential change the world of its viewers, world of its subjects and participants and world of the documentary landscape.

After watching the trailer of ‘The Hunting Ground’ I was not only shocked to hear large American colleges with great academic reputations such as Harvard were the “hunting grounds” for such malice sexual assault attacks. The documentary can be argued an subjective account but equally the film for being like this gained great political attention, much of this was actually shown through the film with the victims protest.

“The statistics are staggering. One in five women in college are sexually assaulted, yet only a fraction of these crimes are reported, and even fewer result in punishment for the perpetrators. ” (from The Hunting Ground Website).

Films like this shocked the college populations and students worldwide, it opens up the floor to discussion about how this can be prevented and how much of this actually happens at some of the lesser known colleges around the world. This documentary fights for the subjects education but more importantly their justice. That is what a true impact documentaries purpose should be.

Michael Serpell