A Voice from the Field     

The past four months, with support from Invoking The Pause, have inspired an acceptance in my life: that my individual voice as an activist filmmaker does not just matter in the fight to transform the agricultural system but is, in fact, a critical component in the struggle.

You see, not even so long ago, I insisted on maintaining a professional distance between my relationships with the people whose stories I was telling and the narrative of the films I created, as I thought that’s what made a good filmmaker.  

I didn’t want my personal experience to contaminate their stories, and so I kept my voice out of my films.  I despised first person narration because it seemed a way for filmmakers to insert themselves into other people’s stories, and I purposefully and precariously positioned myself on a line straddling the roles of the uninvolved observer – the cinema verite filmmaker – and a fellow human being processing the experience of the people who appeared in my documentaries.  I denied the fact that a true, uninvolved observer is an impossibility: observing something as a filmmaker or otherwise, forces a person to become involved.

Nonetheless, for one year of shooting my documentary The Organic Life, I pretended this was the case.  I tried to make the story about anyone but me – I focused on my boyfriend, Austin, who is a vegetable farmer in Sonoma, California, an amazing area of California that we call home. I focused on his coworkers and friends.  I filmed sunsets, time-lapses, canning sessions and crafts fairs – pretty much anything that distracted myself from the obvious missing element: me. 

In essence, The Organic Life chronicles my boyfriend’s and my story. Our story.  My story. It is my first venture into a first-person nonfictional narrative documentary, and it has required more than one “pause” to take a step back and see the big picture and to remember why I’m making this film.  To transform the current agricultural paradigm and to move it closer toward a more sustainable, more local, and seasonal food system (one that is inarguably as beneficial for its patrons as it is for the earth), we must have the courage to raise our individual voices, knowing that together they will become an ineluctable demand for change.

That is what Invoking The Pause supports and that is the reason behind The Organic Life: at the heart of my “pause” was a quiet acceptance that my voice matters.  As an individual through my personal choices, as a filmmaker through the stories I tell, and as an activist through my support, I have the power to make a difference to the people of this planet and the planet itself.  To view a short clip of the film, click here.

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