WHOSE STREETS? is a powerful and moving documentary about the protests in Ferguson, Missouri following the police shooting of Mike Brown. Director Sabaah Folayan spoke to RogerEbert.com about the filmmaking process. Folayan explained the difficulty of maintaining objectivity during production, “It was hard because we [her and co-director Damon Davis] are not separate from this situation, we lived through all the same things that all the people in our film lived through. And so to be putting ourselves in that position of taking on a third party stance, that we’re going to watch and observe, that we’re going to ask you emotional questions, we’re going to ask you to relive those moments, it was kind of like, we just had to go on faith that this was really, really necessary. It was really really hard to do.”
Folayan expects that some audience members may have a difficult time with the brutal honesty of the film and Folayan’s response is an admirable gesture to prioritize her art and the voices in the film above all else: “Empathy is kind of this, unquestioned mission statement that a lot of filmmakers take on. We have to build more empathy, we have to build more empathy. But there are some relationships that are assumed in that, that we deeply question. The assumption that the core audience is someone who does not understand, and the assumption that by them understanding that they’re going to act differently. But those two assumptions are not necessarily… and so for us, what really feeds me after these Q&As, we get some of the same questions. We get some good questions, sometimes we get people who ask, ‘Why didn’t you interview any police?’ Well, actually, we talked to the mayor, the police chief, the city manager. This is not the movie that we made. But I think what feeds me when I get those interactions, after the Q&A and that one black woman will come up to me and she’s crying to me how this is everything that she’s been living through. We were really confident that if we could make the film that was going to speak to people who live through and speak truth to them, that everyone else would be able to see the same truth.”
