Telling True Stories with Cecilia Brown
Cecilia Brown’s documentary filmmaking chops are clear: After she received the “Best Oregon Filmmaker” award at the McMinnville Short Film Festival for her moving and enlightening doc Root Shocked in 2019, Cecilia went on to produce many more powerful and noteworthy short nonfiction pieces, including Finding Bennett, Day 54 of Portland Protests, and Brown Girl Rise (a collaboration with ZP Productions).
But in 2021, Cecilia put her camera down to focus on a different kind of storytelling when she was invited by the acclaimed radio show/podcast, This American Life, to produce a deeply personal story. So Nice to Hear Your Voice is based on phone conversations between Cecilia and her late grandmother Dee, as she suffered through a tough combination of dementia and the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cecilia has told audio stories before-- while a producer for the University of Oregon's Listeners Podcast, she explored her love of connecting with people over audio interviews. “I always liked having really deep, intense conversations with people. And that's the part about audio that appeals to me: people will open up more than they will in front of a camera sometimes.”
When Dee passed away, close people encouraged Cecilia to do a story with the recordings she had. She thought it would resonate with people, too. “But I also had a lot of questions about, is this my story to tell? Yes, I recorded these phone calls, but I'm not the closest person with my grandmother. I felt like I battled a lot of guilt around whether or not to do this story.”
She reached out to Invisibilia, and they recommended pitching to This American Life. “I thought, oh my god, what, I can't do that. That's totally out of my league. There's no way they're going to take it.” But they liked it.
“I pitched it in October, and then I was really working on it every single day starting in March.”
“It's an incredibly collaborative, intense process. They prefer that you pitch stories before you've actually written anything. I basically just sent them three to four minutes of selects and gave them a short, three paragraph written pitch in an email. They actually pick most of the tape. Because it was a personal story, they were much more sensitive about that process, where they really wanted to make sure that it was representative of what I wanted and they were really respectful.”
“Then it's a process of scriptwriting and writing between tapes and choosing what tape ends up coming out. You have edit sessions, one after another. They bring on two to four people per edit session, like David Kestenbaum or Miki Meek, to give feedback. Then you incorporate it. And then you do it again. Over the course of the editing, they probably brought in 10 to 15 people on the team, to listen in. They try to get as many people to listen so that they know it will resonate with as many people as possible.”
“It was a really personal story and they were checking in with me every step of the way to make sure it felt representative. And most of the writing is my writing, but Ira Glass reviewed every single word of my script.”
“It took months. They do that with every story. Because they have a very particular style. And they have someone on the phone with you while you're doing the final recording; coaching you, being like, "Can you say this word differently?" Just like to make sure that you're speaking in that classic This American Life, super flat affect tone. So ultimately it ends up being a very This American Life story. I'm sure if I made it, it would've been different. But I liked it. I'm happy with it in the end.”
Turns out, a lot of other people liked it, too. Since the story aired, Cecilia has received about a hundred emails from strangers. “It's been really awesome. People are saying things like you made me feel less alone, you made me feel less guilty, or you made me finally call my dad, who I haven't talked to in years. Or just like, this is the first time I've cried and processed this person's death.”
“And another thing a lot of people said was, ‘I heard you talking in the story about questioning the ethics of sharing these recordings and I just want you to know that I think you did the right thing.’ And that felt really good.”
Currently, Cecilia is working on producing a new episode of the 70 Million podcast, and editing a documentary for The North Face about the Gwich'in people, an indigenous tribe that lives in the Arctic. Despite her recent success with audio storytelling, Cecilia says she’ll always make videos, too. “You can be a lot more creative with it because you're working with several different mediums.”
As Cecilia experienced when creating So Nice To Hear Your Voice, documentary storytelling can often raise a host of ethical questions and storytelling puzzles. Thoughtfully navigating these challenges can add new dimensions to stories and lead to complex, nuanced pieces that any viewer or listener can connect to in their own way.
