To echo Tessa’s comments, I think it is important for a filmmaker to be clear about the story they are telling. No story can be all things to all people, and no story can be THE story of reality. Many people attempt to tell REAL, ACTUAL or TRUTHFUL stories–all honorable pursuits–but as an audience for these stories, we have to be aware of their limitations.

At its best, a film will represent an accurate analogy for people, events and  ideas, as experienced by the filmmaker. If certain items are presented as facts, they will be thoroughly researched and verifiable. But again–the filmmaker must chose a focus to avoid telling a hundred stories that run the risk of being narrow and one-dimensional.

Our focus for this project has changed a lot since Tessa developed the original idea nine months ago. Instead of of interviewing mostly IE NGOs in Beijing, we also met with economists, professors, students, entrepreneurs and historians. As our information acquisition techniques grew more sophisticated, so did our understanding of the environmental movement in China. We now understand that there are many fronts of the “green” movement in China, but this is something that we needed to be here to learn.

To be truthful is to be loyal to your own experience–but it is also to be open to the UNKNOWN. If we had remained loyal our original narrative, we wouldn’t be telling the truth as we experienced it. The reason I am so confident that this is the story to tell–is because I know we’ve kept our minds ready for new lessons. And now the task is to convince our audience of that loyalty. Which is not the same thing as convincing them that we are telling the Truth with a capital ‘T’.