Seeing

It was great to tour round some of the locations with our DOP Tom Burstyn last week. Strange how you see things with new eyes when you're looking alongside a cameraman. The image to the left is of the interior of the church which we'll be using for the funeral scene. Tom could immediately see the beauty and potential of it.

This afternoon I was down at the boarding house (another location), drinking coffee and talking to the owners. They are the very best of people, and in the midst of a million distractions it was good to be with them. We had a wide ranging conversation about all sorts of things, but primarily about allowing people the dignity to be themselves without the constant pressure to be someone else.

There's not only stigma with mental illness - there's the constant attempt by agencies to make people 'better' or 'normal'. It was so wonderful to be in an environment where aroha is the norm, and you're allowed to be mad if you want to be mad. We swapped some stories of the enriching moments we'd experienced by living with people who are 'different'.

Film, like life, is a way of seeing. Cropping the boundaries provides focus and perspective, so that sometimes you are aware of things which have always been there, but become newly evident.