Not all filmmakers are suited to working with social media to build meaningful connections with constituencies. Usually, it’s the socially committed practitioner ready to embrace conversations with followers in the early stages of the filmmaking process.
One such creative is Theo Rigby, driver behind the US based project Immigrant Nation. A storytelling initiative working on two parallel tracks, Immigrant Nation invites audiences to contribute their migration stories through online actions while simultaneously steering a KickStarter Campaign, to cash flow the production of 8 short docs profiling ‘immigrant stakeholders’.
Rigby describes why:
Immigration issues are constantly in the headlines, but the stories we see rarely reflect the complexities of our collective immigration experiences. This is a critical time to think deeply about where we come from, connect, engage and create a new kind of conversation.
Too easy to say that this interactive approach will radically alter the types of stories being told or even the documentary storytelling aesthetic (it may or may not); and Rigby’s docs are fairly conventional. Nevertheless his dedication to exploring immigration through the lens of documentary is indisputable, having produced a graduation debut film in 2010 chronicling a family’s emotional journey when facing deportation. Sin País (Without Country) was produced with the aid of a similar KickStarter campaign.
What Immigrant Nation illustrates is a more integrated, multidimensional method of storytelling and a desire to engage with audiences – testing subject relevancy through dialogue with ‘communities of place’, where people choose to watch, tell and share online. This is a filmmaker who is not simply passionate about a ’cause’ but who has the discipline to manage a large-scale social media process. Rigby explains how he and his team were mentored at Hot Hacks, an event organised by HotDocs and Mozilla bringing documentary storytellers and technologists together to produce an original web documentary (see “Living Docs’ on this doc/digital alliance).
Arguably Immigrant Nation enables a more sophisticated understanding of the notion of ‘community’, since ‘buy in’ from followers is shaped by diverse motivations not easily mapped onto some neat formula of shared ‘identities’.
Spread the word about Immigrant Nation and watch it grow – Rigby says it has the audacity and ambition to be ‘BIG’.
We’ll keep it in our sights, too, in One Stop Doc at Counterpoints Arts.
