Not long ago, I sat in the back row of a documentary film festival, watching a montage of collapsing ice shelves, carceral mugshots, and floodwaters climbing the steps of a southern porch. It was the opening reel—a victory lap for films that had, presumably, confronted the truth. The audience clapped loudly. And I thought: we are drowning in crisis imagery, and we’re applauding its curation.
Since then, I keep thinking about a very different screening—one we held on Tangier Island, a tiny strip of land in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay that’s predicted to be uninhabitable by the end of this century. We brought our film Been Here Stay Here there for a free screening—hauling a screen and projector across the water, unsure how many people would come. It’s not easy to get to Tangier. There are no cars. Just golf carts, boats, and long stretches of water that separate it from what most of us consider “the mainland.”
We didn’t promote it as a climate film. That word—climate—doesn’t carry much meaning there, or rather it carries too much of the wrong kind. Instead, we simply invited people to come see a story about their own island. And they came. Almost everyone came. Whole families. Teenagers. Elders. Crabbers who’ve worked the water for 50 years. People who rarely, if ever, see themselves reflected onscreen.
They watched in silence. And when it ended, no one rushed to the mic or asked about carbon offsets or sea-level rise projections. Instead, there were long pauses. A few tears. Some memories shared. And one man, after a stretch of quiet, simply said, “It felt true.”
That moment, quiet as it was, felt radical. Not because the film shouted. But because it didn’t.
We didn’t make a conventional climate documentary. There is no expert testimony, no charts, no apocalypse soundtrack. There are no heroes, no villains. The story unfolds slowly—across open waters, through church sermons and through prayer. The stakes are existential, but they aren’t performed. What we made is not a film of solutions or slogans. It’s a film of presence. And that, I now realize, is the boldest thing about it.
We live in a time that rewards urgency, performance, spectacle. Documentaries are not exempt. We are trained to pursue the emotional high note, the dramatic arc, the big reveal. But often, what we end up making are films that replicate the very dynamics they claim to interrogate—more adrenaline, more consumption, more righteous pain. We gather the symptoms and serve them back to an audience already overloaded by them. And we tell ourselves we’ve done something good.
But what if the real crisis is not just out there in the weather systems or courts or food chains, but inside us—in our way of seeing, our way of knowing, our inability to attend to what is soft, slow, or unresolved?
We’re tearing each other apart—politically, emotionally, ecologically—and most of our storytelling is, at best, documenting the blood spatter. We’re diagnosing a body in shock without asking how the nervous system got this deregulated in the first place.
With Been Here Stay Here, we’ve been trying—imperfectly, but insistently—to offer something else. To slow down. To listen. To build a bridge between worlds that rarely speak to each other. Our audiences include climate scientists in D.C., artists in New York, and deeply conservative churchgoers in small coastal towns who shrug at the term “environmental justice,” but know intimately what it feels like to lose a way of life.
We didn’t set out to change minds. We set out to hold space. And strangely, it’s working. Slowly. Quietly. Not in headlines or metrics or viral clips—but in conversations that continue long after the lights come up. In invitations we never expected to receive. In communities that tell us: this is the first time someone got close without trying to fix us.
We need a new paradigm in documentary—not just in content, but in form and intention. One that doesn’t confuse information for insight or pain for power. One that recognizes that what we’re experiencing now—ecological collapse, political fracturing, despair dressed as attention—is not a series of discrete problems, but the fallout of a deeper misalignment.
We are trying to treat symptoms without changing the organism.
We say we want to help, but we keep replicating the logic of harm: urgency, domination, extraction. We want to save the world without ever asking what kind of world we’re trying to save it into.
If we are to be of any use as filmmakers, we must begin to reorient: away from spectacle, away from the dopamine rush of “impact,” and toward something humbler and harder. We must become students of attention. Builders of steadiness. Architects of listening.
And to do that, we have to ask a question too few of us dare to pose: What is a “social issue film,” really—and what is it designed to do?
The gatekeepers—the funders, programmers, critics, distributors—may not say it outright, but they speak clearly through pattern. The films that get elevated tend to reinforce a familiar formula: a crisis clearly defined, a villain exposed, a protagonist you can root for, and a narrative arc that promises catharsis or at least a sense of moral clarity. The pace is often slower than cable news, but the structure isn’t all that different. It’s still about gripping attention, building urgency, delivering meaning.
But what if the meaning doesn’t come in a single arc? What if the real work is not to amplify the spectacle of collapse, but to reveal the quiet systems that allow collapse to happen unnoticed? What if the deeper crisis isn’t just what we see, but how we’ve been taught to see—and what we’ve been trained to overlook?
It’s easy, frankly, to predict what next year’s festival docket will include. A rising fascist here, a melting glacier there, a mass shooting, a failing system. All of it important, and none of it new. Everything clamors for our attention—and in a landscape this saturated, urgency becomes its own kind of narcotic. We’re meant to react. To feel disturbed. To share. To perform knowing.
But the kind of attention I’m speaking about is different. It’s quieter. More relational than rhetorical. It resists the performance of awareness and instead asks for presence—stubborn, sustained, often uncomfortable presence. The kind that sits with ambiguity. The kind that doesn’t scan for heroes or villains but listens for the tension in a person’s voice, or the silence between their words. It takes courage to make this kind of work. And more courage still to defend it.
Because defending it means asking audiences, funders, and ourselves to value something less legible, less easy to summarize. It means saying: this won’t fix anything overnight. It won’t tell you who to vote for. It won’t trend. But it might change how you walk through the world.
That is no small thing.
It may not look like marching in the streets or hoisting a sign overhead—though those things matter too. It looks like refusing speed. Refusing the script. Refusing the shape of stories that turn grief into a teachable moment or collapse into content. It means, instead, fighting for stories that let people feel what’s still intact, what’s worth staying close to, what refuses to be reduced.
That’s the battle I find myself in now—not against apathy, but against distortion. Against the well-meaning acceleration that masks itself as engagement. And I believe we must be bold enough to say: this kind of filmmaking is not less political. It’s more radical. Because it begins not with spectacle, but with the sacred act of paying attention—honestly, generously, and without flinching.
Anne Lamott once wrote that the purpose of art is to shine a light on the soul of things. But you cannot do that if your light is always flickering, if your lens is always zooming in on the wound. Sometimes the soul lives in the waiting room. The kitchen. The pew. The tide.
So we go back. To Tangier. To the places that have been abandoned by capital and narrative alike. And we sit. And we listen. And we try, one frame at a time, to remember how to be in relationship with something that does not need to be resolved—only witnessed.
That is the work now. To look—not for proof, or pain, or plot—but for what is still alive. To name it. To tend it. To hold it, quietly, like the beginning of a prayer.