A documentary shot over eleven years wins the festival’s top prize, and its subject sees it for the first time

A documentary shot over eleven years has taken the top prize at a major festival, and the family at its center watched it for the first time the night before the award.

The film follows a single household through a foreclosure, two relocations and an eventual return to the same county. The director shot roughly 900 hours of footage across the period, visiting between two and six times a year.

An unusual arrangement

Before filming began, the director signed an agreement giving the family final approval over the finished cut. The arrangement is disclosed in the credits and in the festival program.

It is not standard practice, and it is disqualifying at two festivals whose rules require that editorial control rest with the filmmaker. The director has defended it as the only ethical basis for filming ordinary people through the worst years of their lives.

They were not sources. They were a family who let me into their kitchen for eleven years. I was not going to show them the film at a premiere and watch their faces.— The film’s director, at the post-screening discussion

What the family changed

Asked what they had asked to remove, the family named two things: a scene in a hospital waiting room, and roughly four minutes involving a child who is now an adult and asked not to appear. Neither, the director said, altered the film’s argument.

Documentary ethicists remain divided. Some argue subject approval is the only defensible standard for long-form intimate work; others that a film whose subjects can veto it is a collaboration rather than journalism, and should be labeled as such.

• Production: eleven years, about 900 hours of footage
• Access: two to six visits a year to the same household
• Arrangement: family held final approval, disclosed in credits and program
• Removed at their request: a hospital scene and about four minutes involving a child

The film has been acquired for distribution and will open in twelve cities in the fall before a streaming release. The director says the family will receive a share of net revenue, an arrangement also disclosed on screen.