Mea Culpa

OK, after numerous delays I am getting back to editing the documentary.  

Currently I am in the process of reorganizing material that was previously captured and edited.  Then I still have dozens of tapes to go through and hours and hours of footage yet to digitize.  But at least I am back to the task of editing my film.

However, just this week I learned a very difficult lesson about ethical filmmaking.  Without going into too many details, basically what happened was a few years ago in Costa Rica I shot a scene with a hidden camera. Grandmaster was in on it, but a woman in the scene with him did not know she was being filmed.  At the time I felt that as long as I protected her identity, I was not really doing anything wrong.  Well, I now realize the act of secretly filming the woman was a violation of her right to privacy and masking her identity in the final cut does not make it any less of a crime.  

It's easy to develop tunnel vision when you are shooting, and even though many ethical decisions are best made in the edit suite, us filmmakers must remember to respect people's basic human rights at all times.  The cutting room floor is no place for a person's dignity.  A very special friend opened my eyes to this and I will be forever grateful to her for that.  

I've since deleted the footage from my computer and destroyed the raw tape.  Lesson learned.