Start the Conversation

When I first began telling stories inside large institutions, I carried the instinct to explain. To prove understanding. To translate complexity into clarity and show that I had done the work. That instinct came honestly. I spent ten years at a policy center in Washington surrounded by experts, data, and the comfort of certainty. In those rooms, the measure of competence was mastery. You were expected to arrive knowing the landscape and to speak with authority.

But stories do not respond to certainty the way policy does. And early in my filmmaking, I learned that the instinct to explain everything can suffocate what most needs air.

At the Wilson Center, we had numbers that pointed to success in development programs. Survey results. Impact evaluations. Evidence that something meaningful was happening in communities around the world. But the numbers lived high above the ground, and I wanted to understand life at street level. I wanted to meet the people behind the charts. To see what change looked like in real time, in real lives.

So I traveled. I packed outlines and research and careful plans for each shoot. I believed preparation would carry me. Then I stepped into stories that moved in unpredictable directions. Scheduled interviews vanished. Local realities reshaped priorities. Some days, what I thought would matter did not. Other days, an offhand comment shifted the entire frame.

Planning was necessary, but it was not the point. That took time to learn.

I remember a late night in India before filming Broken Landscape, a short documentary I co-directed about rat hole coal mining. I sat across from a local reporter in a neon-lit cafe, my notebook full of questions. I felt the familiar pull to show how ready I was, to signal competence through preparation. But as he spoke about the region, the people, and the land itself, I realized something quiet and humbling. My real job was not to ask every question. It was to listen. To let his experience unsettle my assumptions. To allow the story to teach me instead of confirming what I thought I already knew.

That was the shift. A quiet loosening of control. An invitation to presence.

I used to believe the work was to have the conversation on screen. Now I understand that the work is to start it. Let one voice open the door to many. Let emotion be the first step, not the summary of the journey. When films try to carry every idea at once, the emotional thread frays. Characters flatten. The story thins. But when a film holds a single human truth clearly and honestly, it has room to breathe. And audiences have room to enter.

“I used to believe the work was to have the conversation on screen. Now I understand that the work is to start it.”

This is the part that matters most to me now. The question is not whether a story captures everything. It cannot. The question is whether it creates space. Does it open a door? Does it spark curiosity? Does it make someone who has never stepped into this world want to know more?

Impact is not always loud. Often it begins as a quiet shift, a moment of recognition or wonder or ache. You do not need to solve the conversation in one film. You only need to start it. Let the story breathe. Trust that the audience will follow where you gently point.

Do the prep. Learn the landscape. But when you arrive, be willing to set the plan down and meet the world as it is. The truth will not always match the outline. Often that is the gift.

Starting the conversation is not smaller than trying to finish it. It is more honest. It honors complexity instead of compressing it. It trusts the audience and the subject at the same time.

Stories are not conclusions. They are beginnings.

And beginnings are where change really starts.