Documentary director Jennifer Redfearn DS ’03 illuminates social issues through “the humanity of the people who are at the center,” she says.
The 2024 Guggenheim Fellow’s work has a clear theme: curiosity. Curiosity about the natural world led her to an environmental studies major at Wellesley. Though Jennifer found “becoming a scientist wasn’t the best fit for the way my curiosity worked,” taking photography and film gave her new ways to explore. Both the still and video camera offer “a way to bear witness,” she says. She learned during her Wellesley darkroom days that capturing images could be “a bridge to communities I might not have encountered otherwise.”
The communities whose stories Jennifer tells make visible the real impact of issues like climate change and mass incarceration. Each production has unique challenges, whether logistical, ethical, or emotional. The Academy Award-nominated film Sun Come Up follows some of the first people displaced by rising seas as they search for a new homeland. Filming in the Carteret Islands, a place without regular electricity or stores, meant “everything we needed for ourselves and for the film had to fit into two backpacks.” In Apart, she shares the daily realities of “three mothers parenting from prison in Cleveland, Ohio” and participating in a reentry program. While working with women who had little control over their lives, “consent was an ongoing process,” she says.
As director of the documentary program at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Jennifer guides students in creating well researched professional-quality films while teaching them to lead with curiosity and humility. They should “build trust with the people they’re filming with, rather than just parachuting in and extracting a story,” Jennifer says. Her responsibility as a professor, more than teaching young journalists “the right way or the wrong way to make a documentary,” is to create “the conditions for the students to be their most creative selves.” With that approach, she empowers them to tell important stories in their authentic voice, just as she does.
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