Personal Exposure

It was early in the edit when I experienced my first moment of panic. I had just brought on a co-editor to help me sort through hours and hours of footage. It’s the critical stage of any documentary project, when you put all your footage out on the table to get those first emotional reactions, to sift, examine and catalog it all. But unlike any other film I had made, this footage was uniquely different, because it was personal.

My new documentary, The Gas Station Attendant, tells the story of my father’s unlikely journey from the streets of India to the U.S., and grappling with the realities of raising a family here. It’s a deeply intimate story, looking at the complicated relationship between my dad and I through the lens of the immigrant experience. It’s a film created almost entirely in the edit room. Most of the footage is made up of home movies shot over decades on Super 8, VHS, MiniDV and smartphones. It’s intimate, unfiltered footage of vacations and celebrations, piano recitals, road trips, hanging out in a college dorm, clips of my kids running around in the park. None of it was ever recorded with the intention of being shown to strangers. Yet here I was, playing this footage for my team to watch and discuss how we could shape it into a documentary film for countless others to see.

And then it happened. My co-editor innocently asked some questions about who the people in the shot were, and I had an immediate and overwhelming reaction to shut it all down, to close up shop, to protect my family. I suddenly realized that I had given full access to my life – for others to rifle through my personal belongings, to rummage around in the back of my closet and start pulling stuff out. That wasn’t really what was happening, but that’s what it felt like. Being violated. I began frantically dragging clips into a special bin marked “PRIVATE” – the equivalent of the flimsy little lock I had on my pink childhood diary.

The edit room is a sacred space, and what’s said there, stays there. In my experience, no matter how much you respect and care for the people in your film, there are things said in the edit room you would never want them to hear.  It’s because you’re having to do the work of turning a person, a human being, into a “character.” The reality of what happens in editing is that you have to simplify someone’s life into story beats on postcards, rearranging them on a wall into three acts that are entertaining enough for people to watch in a theater for 90 minutes. There is an objectification that happens. And in this case, I was the objectifier and the objectified. It freaked me out.

I only worked with the co-editor for a couple of months. I realized that, in a sense, I needed to set up my own edit room within myself. I needed to feel safe, to examine and try things out beyond the gaze of someone else. So I worked mostly by myself, with my producer extraordinaire, Rajal Pitroda, and my two incredibly experienced and thoughtful consulting editors, Francisco Bello ACE and Andrew Fredericks, to guide me.

I like to work in the dark, to block out all the sun where I edit. My husband would walk by my little home office, concerned by the lack of light. How can you work like that?! But the dark makes me feel focused and protected enough to be open. I would write and record narration directly into the timeline – saying things about my life, my grief, my guilt that I had never said out loud. There were moments I would be editing with tears streaming down my face. Some of those very raw takes ended up in the film.

But then it was time for me to emerge out of my little cave and into the glaring bright light, aka my first rough cut screening. Francisco encouraged me to show my film to people who knew nothing about me, to help us find the blind spots, the blanks that we’d unknowingly filled in, because we were all too close to my story. I had gone to a similar rough cut screening for a personal film, and the director was present for the post-screening discussion. I found myself not giving the honest feedback I would have if they had not been in the room. So I decided I wouldn’t be present at my screening, so we could get truly unfiltered reactions.

While this audience of strangers watched the film, my hands were cold and sweating the entire time. I had unlocked that pink childhood diary for all to read, albeit with many sections redacted. But I kept thinking, What have I done?! Why did I expose myself in this way? Francisco came out to get me, like the doctor entering the waiting room while he pulls off his mask to say, “It’s all over. You can come back now.” I wanted to personally thank everyone for coming and sharing their feedback. One audience member told me I was “brave,” which made me panic a bit. I was worried my story was too personal, too specific of an experience. But the feedback was so encouraging. People found themselves in my story and began sharing their own personal reflections and experiences. And that was so gratifying to hear. Because that is the ultimate goal.

As The Gas Station Attendant has its world premiere this week, I’m now about to show my film to a lot more strangers. I’ve been told not to use the word “personal” when I describe the plot. I suppose because unless you’re a celebrity, why would anyone want to see a story about you? But yet, I’m so grateful to have made a personal film. Recently, there have been many discussions in the documentary community about the relationships between “participants” and the filmmakers, and to be mindful of how films freeze people and their stories in time, even though people and their stories are constantly changing and evolving. But to take the discussion further, I believe that everyone who works in the documentary industry should make something personal, to really understand what it’s like to be on the other side of the camera, to have your life cut up into bite-size pieces and rearranged on a wall. It is a humbling, vulnerable and sometimes embarrassing experience, but I think it makes us better filmmakers. And in the future, when I’m having those discussions with someone I would like to film, I can be honest and tell them what it feels like and how we can work together to protect them throughout the process. I can speak from personal experience.