My initial thought for this assignment came to me while doing the self reflection task in Rabiger’s text. My “family drama” was heavily rooted in the fact that my older brother, Nick, is on the autism spectrum. He’s faced ableism from our own relatives in the past, and my thought was to show people that he is more than his disability. With that, I initially set out to make my brother the subject of my profile, but quickly realized that it would be difficult to sit him down for an interview. I instead shifted my focus to my mom, whose career in psychiatry has been heavily shaped by my brother’s diagnosis.
I have always admired my mom’s strength, and the challenges she faced raising my brother play no small part in this. I hope to showcase the inextricable ties between her roles as a nurse and as a mother. In editing the interview down to four minutes, however, I found that the profile also became about my two brothers, as I had initially wanted. In telling her story, my mom inevitably ended up telling my brothers’, too.
Shooting this documentary was challenging, both because my brothers are fairly difficult subjects to film, and because of the trip from Los Angeles to San Diego. Everything was shot in one weekend that I spent home with my family, and while I got plenty of footage, I found that I also needed to use a fair amount of found footage and family photos to add variety. In addition to being an exercise in interviewing and creating a documentary, this was also a passion project. Given more time and flexibility, I could absolutely see myself turning this into a longer film in order to properly say everything I hope to say about my family.
ABFuku. (2008.) Magicant [Piano arrangement]. Originally composed by Shogo Sakai. Retrieved from http://abab.dip.jp/pianolist/pianolist.cgi
Meehan, Bob. (2018). Video Resume - Nicolas Terry [Video file].
