The Hook Was Already In

You are seated at your cramped desk, eyes half-closed against the glare, coffee gone cold two hours ago. You have an idea. Not just any idea. A story that thrives in spite of itself.

You tell yourself it’s just a concept—nothing more—but the hook is already in. Maybe it’s about the people who stay when everyone else leaves. Or the way the earth shakes when the heavy vehicles roll through.

So you start looking around. Reading scraps of local news, half-abandoned blogs, a government report or two—most of it redacted. You call someone who knows someone. You talk to people who tell you nothing and everything at the same time. And then you realise: this is a documentary. It has to be.

You make a deck. Nothing fancy—just enough to sell the story to yourself before you try it on anyone else. A few grainy images pulled from online, maybe a quote from some local you found in the archives. You imagine the voiceover, even the first few shots, the pacing, the camera moving through heat-hazed streets. You can almost hear the hum of the generator you might be sleeping next to when you’re out there.

Then comes the money problem. The eternal problem. You pitch it to small grants, big grants, friends with a suspicious tolerance for risk. You make your case: this story matters, it’s urgent, and no one else is telling it. Few bite. Hardly anyone. Eventually, though, long after you thought you’d given up—well after your despondency had settled into realism—someone does. Or maybe they just nibble, but it’s enough to get you moving.

The hostile environment part isn’t metaphorical. It’s literal. You’re stepping into a place where the wrong question can deliver trouble, where weather isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s like a character in the story. So you find someone, preferably through someone you already know. They’re your translator, guide, diplomat, occasional saviour.

You prep your kit for hard use: extra batteries, sandproof lens filters, redundant backups for every piece of media. You re-train—first aid, situational awareness, the whole bit. You reminisce about conflict training courses. You memorise emergency numbers, places to be safe, names of people you trust.

You arrive, and the place greets you unblinkingly. Everything is louder, harsher, closer than it looked on a map. The smells. The night skies. The fixer takes you around—introductions are made, hands are shaken, small talk is exchanged. Sometimes it’s friendly, sometimes it’s a test.

You shoot what you can, when you can. Sometimes you get pure gold: a confession at dusk, a look on someone’s face that says more than words ever could. Sometimes you get nothing but locked doors and “no comment.” Sometimes you don’t even film. You learn to live in that uncertainty.

Your days blur: dawn setups, midday heat, night interviews under naked bulbs. You watch your crew for signs of fatigue because out here, mistakes can get expensive fast. Nor are you as young as you were. As someone who once didn’t even know what backups were, you now keep backups of your backups, carrying hard drives on your person like they’re crown jewels. Or you send what you can down the line.

Eventually, you’ve got enough footage to know there is a film in there. Not the whole film, but the bones of it. You pack up, make your rounds, say goodbyes. But you know you’re not really done. You’ve just entered the long, quiet part of the process.

Back home, the footage looks different. Cleaner, yes, but also heavier. You remember Pennebaker’s words: “You don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve seen the rushes. Until then, it’s just hope.” The hope had been with you in the field. Now, though, you are in the territory of knowing.

You may see details you missed in the moment—the twitch in someone’s hand, the flicker of a glance off-camera. Being self-taught, you simply start stringing what you can at first together… and Leacock’s quiet credo drifts in: “We were trying to capture life as it is lived, without the interference of the filmmaker.” You think of all the times you had to bite your tongue, to let moments breathe.

Editing is where the real war is fought. You kill your darlings, rearrange timelines, sometimes tear the whole thing apart and start over.

The voiceover you imagined at your desk all those months ago—maybe it still works, maybe it has to go. You remember that when the camera had rolled at dusk and the truth just… slipped out, you’d felt what Pennebaker meant when he said, “I started out to make a film about one thing, and found out it was about something else.” The film has changed shape.

And as the sound designer re-lays the correct giant bird sound again, you recall Leacock’s own vision: “To me, film is a window through which I can look out into the world.” Next, a fresh door slam here, a faint wind there, and suddenly you’re back in that place.

Music is trickier—you want to guide the viewer without telling them what to feel. Colour grading gives it the final polish—the heat becomes almost tangible, the night more oppressive. In no time, you sit in a darkened room and watch the story you risked a little too much to capture, and for the first time, it feels real.

Then come the screenings. A festival here, if you’re lucky, a community hall there. People ask questions, sometimes the same ones you were asking when you started. You realise the film’s not just about the place or the people—it’s about the way you now see them.

And just like that, you’ve gone from an idea at a cramped desk to a finished film. You’ve got the bruises to prove it, the stories you can’t put out, and maybe—if you did it right—a piece of work that may outlast you.

Because in the end, that’s the deal with documentaries done in strange places: you don’t just record the truth. You live it, you wrestle with it, and you get to bring it all back home.

That’s if you’re lucky.

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