Citizen Screen: The Making of Feature Documentary Michael and Damian
Citizen Screen is a monthly column dedicated to film and film-related topics, sourced and curated by Port Townsend Film Festival. This month’s column is by Gabe Van Lelyveld, an award-winning writer, producer, director, editor, and DP working primarily in documentary and commercial film. He is also the founder and owner of Whaleheart Productions, a Port Townsend-based, full-service video production company serving the greater Olympic Peninsula.
It’s 2021, the middle of winter. There is snow on the ground and I’m lying in bed, listening to the wind as it whips past my bedroom window. I find myself thinking about the people living in tents at the homeless encampment that had recently sprung up at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, just a short walk from my house. I watched it grow over the past few months as I went out for my morning runs.
Prior to this, I had seen a tent or two around town, but mostly I didn’t think much about homelessness in Port Townsend. How are they staying warm, I wondered. Do they have heaters in their tents, or just lots of blankets?
I decided then to start spending time at the encampment, assisting a local non-profit that I had seen giving out food and supplies twice a week. I wanted to meet the people living there. I was also looking for my next film project.
I knew instinctively there was never going to be a film unless the campers trusted me. It took time, but eventually I began collaborating with Damian to tell his story. I was drawn toward his warmth, charisma, and, of course, his great hair.
I also met Michael, a Recovery Cafe employee, who I sensed immediately had tremendous compassion for the campers. I would soon learn that he has decades of lived experience with homelessness, substance use disorder, mental health challenges, and, eventually, recovery.
Thankfully for the future film, the two were also just getting to know each other. I shot footage with other campers as well, but over time it became clear that the heart of the film would be these two men and their relationship as it evolved over the next three years.
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Michael (left) and Damien. Photo by Gabe Van Lelyveld [/caption]
Truth be told, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t know what was going to be important and what wasn’t, so I just kept showing up. Some days I couldn’t find anyone to work with, but many others I did. I witnessed the camp through all the seasons. I saw it grow and shrink, and eventually get shut down when the pandemic-era eviction moratorium was finally lifted.
I filmed at the weekly stakeholders meetings led by the county to keep campers informed and foster dialogue between them and the various people and entities influencing the future of the encampment. I followed Damian and others to the new emergency shelter, Caswell-Brown Village, on the outskirts of town. Eventually, I had over 60 hours of footage, too much to try to make sense of on my own.
Thankfully, Port Townsend is a place that truly supports the arts. In early 2024, the community showed up for myself and this film by contributing over $11K toward a crowd-funding campaign that I used to hire an editor. I was fortunate enough to find Olivier Matthon, another local filmmaker whose sensibilities aligned with my own.
Even before the campaign launched, Olivier began reviewing the footage and taking copious notes. Over the next year, he would help me find the story that the footage could support. It’s not life exactly as it happened (no documentary is), but one that represents something truthful about Michael and Damian’s relationship, as well as their individual struggles and successes.
A critical component to the film’s completion has been the support of the Port Townsend Film Festival (PTFF), to which we submitted in April and hope to screen at in September. PTFF’s fiscal sponsorship of the film helped us pull in significant additional private funding that carried us through mid to late-post production.
The Jefferson County Filmmaker’s Collective, sponsored and hosted by PTFF, allowed Olivier and I to workshop our ideas, screen various cuts of the film and gather invaluable feedback. And perhaps most importantly, PTFF’s submission deadline lit a fire under us to finish the film this year and not the next, or in three years—or worse, never.
From that cold winter night in 2021 until now, making Michael and Damian has been an incredible journey. I hope you’ll follow along as we work to get the film out into the world. To learn more, you can visit www.whaleheartproductions.com/documentary.
We look forward to exploring a variety of film and film-related topics in the months to come. Want to propose a topic? Send your thoughts to: info@ptfilm.org.
