While We Watch
= documentary about Occupy Wall Street
URL = http://www.whilewewatch.com/
Trailer w/embed: http://vimeo.com/whilewewatch/whilewewatch-trailer
Interview
Kevin Breslin spoke with Campus Progress about making #WhileWeWatch and his thoughts on the Occupy movement.
" How did the project get started?
I got a call from an Australian company I had done a commercial for asking if I wanted to do a documentary on Occupy Wall Street. We didn’t make a lot of money on it, just enough to make it viable for the team.
But here’s a joke for you—I was hired by the 1-percenters! I was shooting a bank industrial at the same time so I could pay for this project. But this took longer and got deeper.
How did you settle on the media team as a subject?
We got [to Zuccotti] the first week of October and stayed until after the eviction [in mid-November]. I didn’t know what I was saying yes to. I’d watched the news and read about it, but I went to some meetings, and I was like, oh my God, this is too heavy for me. It was like a college lecture hall. The first thing I realized is they aren’t jokers. You actually went there and you saw that these people were for real, not just imbecilic young people fantasizing.
I thought: I can’t film this. There’s too much going on here, I’m not smart enough politically. People there are very, very bright. But then I started watching the press desk, and I thought, I understand this, my father was a journalist. It was great energy, I thought—infectious. It was really alive, the fastest and most feverish bunch of people getting out an idea. They had to do their own reporting, they said, to oppose the slant or indifference of the mainstream media.
But this was something we’d never seen before. With the live streaming, what you see is what you get—you can’t edit it. And I’ve never heard so many people call themselves journalists. “Citizen journalists”—I don’t know how, but I’d never heard the term before. I was just an observer; I wasn’t adding journalistic insight, just following those guys who purported to do that." (http://campusprogress.org/articles/five_minutes_with_occupy_documentary_maker_kevin_breslin/)