This post comes a little late for our group, but I thought it was important to debrief about what we learned from the President of the Board of Directors at the International Documentary Association. One of the big issues that Marjan focused on was how to get your work noticed. The idea community has been brought up in many of our class discussions and I think I finally understand what that means. Building a community means growing a base of people that care about your work and feel emotionally (and maybe fiscally) invested in the content that you produce. This means that all of the work that you produce must continue to amaze your community base or else you won’t gain more investors and you may even drop some investors that were once highly engaged with your work.
Bringing this back to our story, I think that our community will involve not only people interested in the current status of the transition process of prisoners back into home life, but also people who want to see past stereotypes. Our piece is trying to show our viewers that this piece is more than a story about troubled Native American women in Oregon, but this is a story about survival and self-worth. As Trish Jordan, founder of Red lodge, once said “These women have been to hell and back”. We want to show who these women are after they have left hell.
