06 – Hostile filming protocol
A hostile location is more than a country at war or in the midst of armed conflict. Countries where surveillance or government hostility toward the media are prevalent are hostile. Filming civil unrest can be hostile. Remote locations, particularly those at high risk for climate catastrophes, should be viewed as hostile as well.
Assess
We’ve developed an extensive Hostile Filming Protocol designed to help you to identify whether or not where you will be filming should be approached as a hostile location. If so, the protocol is also designed to help you to think through how this could affect you and what you can do to mitigate those impacts.
Let’s get on the same page as far as the words we use:
- Threats and hazards are the sources of risk, anything that can cause harm to you, your participants, or the film.
- A hazard is the source in a harmless state (e.g., a river ahead of you on your path).
- A threat is the source in a harmful state (e.g., you've fallen in the river and can't swim).
- The risk is the likelihood that a threat will affect you, your participants, or the film.
- Mitigation is your plan to minimize the risk.
The Hostile Filming Protocol will:
- Create awareness of the issues you may face, so you can
- Identify hazards and potential threats
- Anticipate and assess the risks posed by those threats
- Manage and mitigate those risks, and
- Establish a viable, clear, and agreed upon course of action to respond.
- Identify ongoing duty of care needs for crew and participants.
- Provide an outward facing production dossier that can be understood by an uninformed third party.
Mitigate
One thing you can do to lessen the impact is to make the decision to NOT GO. Yes, we believe that bringing truth to power often requires taking risks, but we'd prefer you to be alive and well. You may WANT to go, but that does not mean you NEED to go. If you're inclined to embrace risk, ask an impartial third party to weigh in.
Your protocol will be a meaty document. Some producers opt to hire a consultant to create it, but the team must be involved in its creation regardless — informing and understanding it fully. While everyone on the team may have a different appetite for risk, no one on a production should ever feel compelled to undertake activity that involves risk with which they are not comfortable.
The language you use in your Hostile Filming Protocol should be measured and neutral; it should be rigorously fact checked and accurate; and it should be reviewed by an independent and dispassionate third party to make sure the process isn't compromised by false positives, evidence that wrongly supports undertaking the project versus identifying reasons not to; or confirmation bias, interpreting new evidence as confirmation of your existing ideas.
Creating a hostile filming protocol should begin in the development phase of filmmaking. But throughout, you'll need to be on the lookout for new hazards and potential threats, as well as re-assessing the risks posed by the threats you’ve already identified.
For more extended projects, where the team may be embedded for months or even years, the team may face long-term, insidious threats, but still have to film and function on a daily basis. Regular whole-crew security briefings will help and should inform regular updates to your Hostile Filming Protocol.