Notes from the field — what it takes to make a documentary the community will recognize as theirs.
Three years in, the most important thing we've learned about making The Jacka Project is that access is earned in years, not weeks. The family knows when you're there for the long haul and when you're there for a sizzle.
We started with archives — tapes, photographs, flyers, voicemails — and let those drive who we approached. By the time we sat down with collaborators, friends, and family, we already knew the questions worth asking.
Live experience has been a parallel track from the beginning. The Jacka Art Experience, the Aug. 12 'Jacka Day' celebrations in Oakland, the Grand Lake premieres — these aren't promotion. They're how the work belongs to the audience it was made for.
We are not making a fairytale. We are making the most honest portrait we can manage of a man who shaped a region and is owed the kind of documentary the industry has not historically extended to artists from the Bay. That's the bar.
