In this guest post, Dr Telma Hoyler discusses her research “Democracy on the Ground”, a USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award-funded project to create a short ethnographic documentary film about how people living in the city’s peripheries engage with democracy and elections in São Paulo, Brazil.
The amount of knowledge produced today is unprecedented. Even scholars feel overwhelmed, and the general public often cannot digest it. Paradoxically, amidst so much information, misinformation flourishes — threatening democratic values, social cohesion, and even the well-being of the planet.
If the age-old question remains — How do we cultivate a society that values and uses scientific evidence in daily life? — It now carries new complexities. People draw from countless sources, many of which promote disinformation. Is dialogue in urban society still possible? If so, how are we caring not only for what we share, but also for how we share it?
Supported by the USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award, I have been exploring these questions by cocreating knowledge with neighbourhoods, movements, and community leaders through film. What follows is one of the essays that emerged from that journey. You can find an extended version and other essays on creating the image of others on the film´s website: www.territoriodoc.com
Did It Really Happen?
It’s quite possible I began making a documentary film simply to understand my fascination with the genre. I grew up in a Seventh-Day Adventist community where going to the movie theatre was forbidden. A prohibition without explanation — which, of course, only sharpened my curiosity. What magic lay hidden behind those red velvet curtains?
I was nearly ready to break the rules when I was gifted my first trip to a movie theatre. My mother took me to see Titanic, which premiered in Brazil the very month I turned ten. She warned me the theatre would be cold — how could she know?
She explained that the story of the Titanic had “really happened,” and that served as her justification for going. Her mother, in turn, had once justified watching the soap opera Terra Nostra by saying it “really happened” to her own family — Italian immigrants in early twentieth-century Brazil — though soap operas were also forbidden.
When the opening scene began, I whispered to my mother: “But isn’t this supposed to be a true film?” For me, a “true film” meant a documentary. Perhaps it was the actors that betrayed the trick of time, but I kept asking: “They filmed this now, right?”
I sailed into Titanic wrapped in confusion — only resolved at the end (spoiler alert!) when Rose DeWitt Bukater, the “real” survivor, appeared on screen. That single moment quieted my unease and opened a new horizon: the idea that fiction could carry real events so people might feel them as true. That, to me, became what a real film was.
It has been years since I revisited that memory, but it surfaces now, as I write about making an ethnographic film. My earliest experiences with cinema — first as a spectator, now as a filmmaker — drift in a space between invented truths and documentary fictions.
I became an ethnographer long before I ever made a film. Perhaps out of professional duty, or perhaps simply out of curiosity about the world. Maybe even out of incompetence — since the only way I know to pursue a question is to seek encounters with otherness. In other words, I made a film because I am an ethnographer, not the other way around.
Until recently, I had rarely used the image of the other as a systematic method of inquiry. Visual records of experiences — my own, those of my interlocutors, or shared — usually followed writing, never preceded it. Ethnographic writing is not mere reporting. It is not an objective transcript of an outside reality. It is narrative: poetic, creative, and alive. The more literary its texture, the more “true” it may become as documentation of human experience.
In earlier work, I thought of writing as drawing, as an image — abstraction reduced to its strokes. But I never realised that, beyond words, characters in my film would also have an image – how absurd! A colossal oversight. For images, even more than text, carry the superpower of constructing truth. They impose themselves, and sometimes eclipse what is spoken.
In writing, we can withhold detail until the moment it matters. A brand logo splashed across a shirt can be omitted so it doesn’t drown the narrative. Reality is too complex, so we carve compartments to approach it.
But when the camera is rolling, there is no hiding. If the character happens to pet a dog while watching the street, or bite their lips in nervous waiting, the giant Nike logo on their chest comes along too. Editing is the final judge. Sometimes, yes, we can ask for another take, another shirt, another angle, even — or especially — in an ethnographic film.
I find it troubling to construct scenes that merely prove a thesis prewritten in advance. Yet I see it as a care to build scenes that allow a character to appear as they would like to be seen. Still, by whom? The answer is never simple. At best, it is a co-creation between character and documentarian — a translation from one world to another.
Perhaps the truest act is to share with the person being filmed the path I imagine for the work: how the images might be edited, how audiences might read them. To ask: Is this how you would prefer to appear? In this way, the image of the other remains a little less under the sole custody of the one directing them.
The real film I want to make documents the very construction of truth that arises in an encounter. A film that proposes shared custody of the image.