Documentarians turn cameras on protests

Christopher Frierson wasn’t expecting to be tear-gassed at a recent protest in Brooklyn, but he’s glad his camera was on. The documentary filmmaker has covered many protests and he’s never experienced anything like he did that day when a thrown water bottle was met with that kind of police response.

Frierson was not deterred, however. In fact, he went back the next day to interview the officers who sprayed him and the others in the crowd.

He’s one of a handful of documentarians, from Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) to Alexandra Pelosi (“Outside the Bubble”), who have brought out their cameras to capture the historic nationwide protests, despite the danger, the pandemic and even the lack of a plan for how to ultimately use the footage.

“When there is something happening in your environment, you have to shoot it,” said Frierson, whose “Don’t Try to Understand: A Year in the Life of Earl ‘DMX’ Simmons” was supposed to premiere this spring. “If you have a camera, you got to shoot it.”

That was James’ thought too. He had actually finished and debuted a few episodes of “City So Real,” a mosaic of present-day Chicago, at the Sundance Film Festival a few months earlier but restarted filming when the pandemic began. He thought maybe a postscript would be useful. When the unrest erupted after George Floyd’s death, he pivoted again.

His son, Jackson James, a cinematographer on the series, has been shooting some of the protests there. James has also been out, although not as much as he’d like, and doing more interviews remotely when possible.

“I’m being very careful about what takes us out to film,” James said. “Normally I would have been out doing a lot more.”

The decision to film on the ground is not one that any are taking lightly. Pelosi decided to film a protest outside of the White House last week on the evening President Donald Trump decided to walk out the White House gates for the first time. It took a turn when she says officers on horseback started shooting what she described as chemical bullets at the peaceful gathering, and she found herself in the line of non-lethal fire.

“I couldn’t see for like five minutes because I got shot by this thing,“said Pelosi, the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and director of more than a dozen documentaries.

Filmmaker Ashley O’Shay was putting the finishing touches on her documentary “Unapologetic,” about the Movement for Black Lives in Chicago through the lens of two young women who are queer and black, when the Floyd protests began. She hesitated to venture out in Chicago because of the pandemic.

“I was concerned about my safety and health,” she said. “(But) it’s important for me that we have black artists, people of color artists, behind the camera to capture these stories, to make sure that the people closest to the community are the ones that are deciding how the story is told.”