Seeing the Person, Not Just the Story
From its earliest days, documentary filmmaking has allowed glimpses into other ways of living—like the Inuk subjects in the seminal 1922 Arctic docudrama “Nanook of the North.” However, according to documentarian and SA国际传媒 associate professor, Nico Opper, the genre’s focus on sensationalizing the “other” has left a complex legacy of harmful, dehumanizing narratives.
“We often assume that documentaries are these machines for empathy because they put a ‘human face’ to social issues, but due to the colonialist roots of the genre and the personal biases of filmmakers, that’s not always the case,” they explain.
“As the field diversifies, we’re called on to think about how film can move beyond empathy to serve the harder, messier, but ultimately more transformational work of building solidarity,” they continue. “This is what motivates me as an educator.”
Opper
Opper, a recent Chicken & Egg Award recipient, has made documentaries exploring various subjects—including race, foster care, adoption, housing insecurity, and family. Often hiring SA国际传媒 students to work on these productions, Opper emphasizes the importance of ethics, empathy, and compassion in this field—and brought these values into the classroom by developing a new Experiential Learning for Social Justice (ELSJ) course which launched last fall.
Inspired by SA国际传媒’s Jesuit values, the 20-year-old, University-wide ELSJ requirement places students across disciplines in a variety of community-based projects where they reflect on the critical problems of our world and develop the compassion to accompany those experiencing these problems first-hand.
In collaboration with Gabriela Hamm and Marisol Chavez at SA国际传媒’s Arrupe Engagement, as well as Recovery Café’s executive director Julie Anderson and Elena Ajluni, student groups were matched with volunteers from the café to create documentaries about their lives. Assistant professor Michele Sieglitz was a crucial member of the team too, helping students hone their camera and editing skills throughout the quarter.
“We all know and love someone who’s struggled with addiction and recovery,” says Opper. “This is a topic that anyone can connect with while also grappling with the ethics of documentary filming, so it seemed like the perfect place to launch this class.”
More than empathy
Documentaries are a unique form of film, as the filmmakers rarely know how the story will come together until they edit the footage. With only ten weeks to make a film from start to finish, preparation and relationship-building are all the more important.
To better integrate their students in the Recovery Café community, Opper set aside the first two weeks of the course for students to volunteer at the café and get a sense of what this community space was all about, from open mics to hot cups of coffee.
During that time, students honed their interviewing skills to empower their documentary participants—whom Opper encouraged students to approach as collaborators not “subjects.”
“We really wanted to build a sense of safety and trust, as opposed to just extracting a story and moving on,” Opper explains. “We explored all the ways to integrate anti-oppression practices in our work to respect the dignity of the people whose lives we were filming and ensure their well-being was at the center of everything we did.”
That respect took on a variety of forms in the final films.
In the film “,” the participant, Rosanna, was not only interviewed, but she brought viewers inside her life by recording herself on walks and while dogsitting, using a handheld digital camera given to her by the student team: Morgan Srednick ’26, Amy Suh ’25, Katherine Buse ’25, and Sophia DeFonzo ’26.
Rosanna in the student film 鈥淜eep the Light On.鈥�
For them, it was a way of giving Rosanna, a survivor of domestic violence, agency over her story.
“A big theme of the class was about bearing witness to these really hard stories,” reflects Srednick. “I really learned that for somebody to open up to you, you have to be a grounding force, and no interview is a one-way thing. There’s a lot of responsibility and vulnerability in that. It’s a lesson I’ll carry with me through not just the rest of my education, but also life in general.”
Meanwhile, in “,” the camera followed not only participant Adrien’s story of mental health struggles and addiction, but turned around onto the filmmakers, featuring behind-the-scenes moments of the team bonding, recorded phone calls discussing the project, and meta voiceover narration.
According to Philip Serewicz-Movery ’25, Jake Caprini ’26, Nico Suppiah ’25, and Rex Ward ’25, placing themselves in the story was a way to show how much Adrien’s story impacted their lives and growing friendship.
“Adrien’s message was so meaningful in its simplicity,” recalls Ward. “At our age, he struggled with feeling alone, and he really showed us that it's so much more manly to be able to tell your boys, ‘Hey, I’m struggling, and I’m hurting.’”
Beyond the final six films that premiered at the end of the quarter, Opper is hopeful that the deeper impact and new relationships will follow their students long after the credits roll. After all, filmmaking is about process over product.
“In the context of a Jesuit education, I think we’re called to consider how film can not only be a reflection of the human experience, but also a reminder that we all share one world, and our struggles are bound up together.”
Rooted in a faith that does justice, the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education partners with local community organizations whose members and clients serve as co-educators for SA国际传媒 students.
