One of the biggest challenges of storytelling -- particularly when dealing with stories of emotion -- is determining what to leave out.
As a reporter for a local news station, I will regularly shoot several hours of video for a story that lasts several minutes. I realized early in my career I would never be able to tell someone's full story -- only as much of that story as I could fit into the allotted space. A news director of mine once crystallized the appropriate mentality: it's all about eliminating the "good" in one's story and keeping the "great".
Of course, sometimes you don't even get to keep all of the "great".
And sometimes, as in the case of filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, you shoot 800 hours of video for a two-hour documentary -- a documentary in which you are two of the main characters.
Brewster and Stephenson are the husband-and-wife duo behind American Promise, currently playing in select cities and premiering on PBS in February 2014. The documentary follows two young boys from Brooklyn, both black, whose parents enroll them in a prestigious, mostly white collegiate prep school in Manhattan. Brewster and Stephenson began filming in 1999, when both boys -- Idris and Seun -- were starting kindergarten.
They stopped filming after the boys' graduation from high school -- 13 years later.
To make matters trickier, one of the boys, Idris, is Brewster and Stephenson's son.
But the hard work paid off. American Promise is a truly powerful film, a nuanced discussion of race, parenting, child psychology, and the meaning of success. The filmmakers and editors selected strong moments to keep throughout the film, showing the growth of both the boys and their parents without requiring any narration or overt messaging. I saw American Promise this past Saturday and was so moved by its storytelling that I immediately reached out to Brewster and Stephenson for an interview.
They agreed, and five days later, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson are my guests on Episode #12 of the Telling The Story podcast.
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