How To Shoot Where You're Not Allowed

What happens when the community you’re filming doesn’t want you there? That is exactly the dilemma that faced celebrated documentarians Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady when they embarked on their latest project, the Netflix Original film 'One of Us'. The directing duo returns to the territory that garnered them an Oscar nomination in 2007 for 'Jesus Camp': extreme religious sects in America. In 'One of Us', we travel far from the rural Evangelical Christian summer camps of Jesus Camp to a very different world: the insular Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. The film focuses on three young people attempting to leave the community despite threats of retaliation. They are at different stages of separation but each is struggling to join mainstream America after having been raised strictly following daily religious mandates, speaking Yiddish, and with virtually no secular education. Because of sensitivities around their subjects and the community at large, Ewing, Grady and their cinematographers, Jenni Morello and Alex Takats, had to to develop all kinds of tactics and strategies for shooting very inconspicuously. Both the directors and DPs join No Film School's Liz Nord on this episode to discuss how they managed to film and craft such a sympathetic tale from within a notoriously closed community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices