Filmmaker Statement

While shooting "First Month", we were consumed with the question of how an eight-minute and eighteen-second documentary could provide meaningful insight into one of the most widely analyzed and recorded events in human history. With 24/7 global media coverage already providing an endless stream of images and statistics, we sought to communicate something of the collective emotional experience of that time and place. We hoped to document feelings, not facts; to construct a visual tapestry that would convey the collective by abstracting the personal. Journalists’ interviews with people affected by the pandemic have provided history with an invaluable anthology of personal narratives. These subjective stories communicate the human experience with a vividness that is beyond the scope of statistical record. In this film, however, we eschew individual accounts and instead create a visual document of shared experience through a collage of faceless narrators, silent, masked commuters, and the