Throughout my practical experience of creating a documentary, the relationship with those filmed, and myself as filmmaker, generated an array of questions around ethics and morality. Aristotle used the term ethics in description to the scientific occupation with customs and traditions, in which reflecting intellectually on human practice was possible for the individual as well as the collective. It paves the way for the underlying principles for the right actions, whilst focusing on the question of how to live a good and happy life, the question of eudaimonia¹. This body of work will use Aristotle's conceivement of ethical theory to reflect on one’s own challenges felt when creating a documentary film and the decisions made when deciding on the “right thing to do”. Our project is a contributor led short film, which aims to tackle the stereotyping that sex workers face within the mainstream media, giving those of the community an opportunity to present their voice and representation of oneself. The title of the film is Sex Work Spoken, a piece which presents a spectrum of subjects, discussing immigration, sexuality, media representation and societal abjection. It has an overall ethos of highlighting the progressive action which first and foremost should be taken to push for safety, security and decriminalisation. As I analyse the ethical issues that I as the filmmaker faced in the creation of this project, it is important to first make the distinction between ethics and morals and not use those two words interchangeably. Ethics of documentary should concern reflection on the practice of documentary filmmaking and Morals being the accepted norms and values of people and a community and how that contributes to the filmmaking process.


Furthermore, it makes sense to start discussing how morality influenced the project, as it certainly came up in regards to the nature of the subject that the film tackled. Within our society Sex Work is stigmatised and viewed as immoral; this is partly due to the criminalization of the work. It causes commercial sex to be seen as illicit and unlawful, declining people of their human and workers rights, through the power of negative opinions². (Neo) Abolitionism flourishes and the feminist controversy over sex work flares, making sex work morality politics mostly rooted in a heteronormative sex and gender morality, that is traditionalist and marks sex negatively. Those engaged in sex work are ethier stigmatized as villains or victims, with abolitionist morality viewing this interaction as unworthy and a violation of human dignity and integrity. This shows how the stigma appears strong as ever, despite the evidence in favor of sex work decriminalization. The aim of this film was to attempt to create an alternative media representation of a stigmatized community, but by doing so it subsequently fought against societal morals and values around sex, that many agree with. Moral issues relate to the filmmaker’s responsibility toward others as well as themselves, and these morals may be related to the filmmaker’s cultural background, religion and/or ideas about their profession³. Although I myself had not come into contact with the Sex Work community prior to making this film, I knew that it was a subject of human rights so my morals layed with making a film that aimed to change perceptions and make truthful representations of Sex Workers, fighting traditional opinions. I subsequently knew that the response to the film potentially may be diverse in agreement and disagreement, due to the confrontment of public morality. This however did not influence the way in which we went ahead with the creation of the film


I found the first ethical issue that arose for me was whenever or not we were the right people to make this film: where we taking up space for someone within the Sex Work community to create a film like ours? Ultimately we resided in the fact that we had good intentions for the project and that we had time, resources and the availability to advocate for Sex Workers rights. By constructing an honest representation of Sex Workers, through the film being solely character led, we aimed to have as little filmmaker influence as logistically possible. This therefore resulted in the formation of the title of the film, Sex Work Spoken. I was constantly aware of the film’s goal and the filmmaker’s position, aiming to make the production as un-exploitative as possible with the aims of giving a voice to marginalized people within our society, who are otherwise silenced. The academic Paul Henley⁴ however sees documentary filmmaking as, “a genre of filmmaking that involves the manipulation of a literal representation of the world that remains faithful to its everyday social and physical realities.” The audience absorbs an engagement with an interpretation of a reality through a mediation of the filmmakers own motivations and ideology, therefore making it unable to ever give an entirely objective portrayal. This is something that I came to understand more predominantly as I journeyed through the production process, ultimately influencing the thought process that guided my practical work.


My role in the project was the cinematographer and editor. I found that my contribution within the project therefore resided in art direction, visual representations, and construction of the narrative visually and sonically: in which my theoretical understanding both directly and indirectly developed the above. It is understood that  where sound shows the inside of things, picture shows the outside, therefore making the visuals partially true and often deceptive⁵. They therefore conclude that vision is necessarily speculative and incomplete. Within the film, one of three contributors agreed to have their identity shown visually, another agreed to have their identity hidden through the creation of silhouettes by using light and changing the camera's exposure, thus giving way for the film to only partially have synchronized audio and visual. In David MacDougall’s book on transcultural cinema they examine how documentary film gives us images that are indexically linked to people who have lived, however the people themselves are absent. In a way this then means that the only subjectivity in film-viewing is that of the spectator and the only subjective voice that of the filmmaker, thus making the subjective voice the means of the construction of the subject⁶. In the making of the representation of our anonymous contributor, we were first left with our Female (from east London) as an audio piece, giving us the freedom to create our own representations, and thus showing how directors and cinematographers ideology creates a fictional frame.


One of the key questions that arises in documentary film is - the ontological status of the image and the epistemological stakes of representation. Likewise with fictional film the forms of semiotics, narrativity and questions of performance are enmeshed in on another; from which a constructor of character emerges⁷. This is something evident with our creative freedom of deciding on the visuals for our subject. We decided that we would create a reconstruction of a female carrying out normal activities within a flat in East London. This involved: making a cup of tea, washing up, getting ready, making her bed, leaving the flat. Through the vision of mundane normalised tasks, these sequences within the film aimed to humanise sex workers and show how they are normal people. In some sense we never meant for the visuals to be an implicit representation of the person speaking in the audio sequence, instead aimed to be metaphorical of how it could be anyone, and relatable to everyone. I as the camera operator decided to film this in a way that was stylistically different to the other two contributors, a way to first and foremost represent how each character was unique and how each had a different but equally as important voice to share. When creating the female (from east london) visual sequence I undertook a hand-held and almost voyeuristic approach to the camera work, a metaphor which represents how the audience are peering into what they think is the life of a sex worker. Strangely enough and little to their knowledge, they do not have access to this privilege as it is a reconstruction using an actress. I believe that this only reflects the notion of how audiences can easily be tricked into believing that what they are seeing is a truthful representation. This contrasts with the whole narrative of the film which attempts to debunk the myths of the mainstream media false representation of sex workers. When deciding on such visual imagery, one has to have a greater awareness of the ethics of representation. It is easy for films to lead to a decidedly condescending and moralistic strain of ethnocentrism, especially when the the voices of author and subject are juxtaposed, as they may also be outwardly be appearing as something quite different to each other^8. In terms of our film, the only influence from our side as the filmmakers, was firstly through the construction of the visual representation of our female (from East london) subject. We however tried our best to portray her in the most ethical means as possible, always asking for her consent and how she herself wanted her voice to be presented on screen. Furthermore, the other prominent filmmaker voice was understandably through the editing process, a role which I also undertook.


After exploring the ways in which my understanding of theory influenced my cinematography work, it is then crucial to see how it affected my role as the editor within the film. I furthermore had the task of preserving the Male’s (originally from Bangladesh) identity. When I started editing, I realised that I could still make out a lot of his facial features from the raw footage, so in the edit I decided to use colour correction to enhance the shadows and silhouettes as I had an ethical duty to make sure that his identity was safe. Problems further arose when deciding what aspects of the interview should be disregarded. An example of this was: when our contributor Male (Originally from Bangladesh) spoke of his engagement with specific clients in our first interview with them. He was however reluctant to speak of it again the second time round we interviewed him. From this we had to make a judgement as to whether or not it was ethically okay for us to include such content. Ultimately we contacted him asking whenever or not it was, instead of making up that decision ourselves. Another issue that I was confronted with as the editor of the film was the ethics around re-constructing and re-arranging the order and flow of speech. Due to the fact that an audience of a documentary prepares themselves to grasp an argument not comprehend a story, I sometimes felt that I had to neglect certain personal ethicalities in order to portray the message of film in the most powerful way. This brought up a predicament for me as the ethos of the film was to give silenced people in society a voice, so therefore had to be cautious that we were not infiltrating the speech with our own agenda. I therefore tried my best not to manipulate what anyone was saying, or to cut up sentences. Instead I tried to keep to simply tidying up their speech, cutting out “ups” “likes” “erms” in order to make their speech clearer and stronger.


The whole ethos of the film was centered around fighting discrimination that people within our society unlawfully face, so this is why the decision around subtitling brought up an important discussion. We were getting mixed responses whenever or not people could understand our contributor (Male originally from Bangladesh) due to this accent. I found myself very reluctant to the idea of singling one person out due to this and instead not subtitling everyone as a result. I referred back to David MacDougall writings that stated that subtitling is open to error and abuse, for it has the potential to make people say what the filmmaker wants them to say⁹. By emphasizing certain aspects of character through subtitling, there is in an attempt to create a more rounded portrait, there is always the risk that the subject will be reduced simply to their social roles. The way in which subtitles are written can help to offset this by stressing personal identity. By subtitling our male (originally from bangladesh) participant, it automatically placed him in the position of the other, making him different to the other two contributors, and singled out for his foreign accent. Throughout making the film the contributor explained to us the way in which he feels British and has his British passport. By subtitling him we felt that this strips that identity that he wishes to be present within the film away, and reduces him to another immigrant that society struggles to understand due to his articulation of words. With an ethos of giving truthful representations of our contributors, I felt that this was ethically wrong to carry out.

In a time where “documentary” suggests knowledge and explanations of the social world, more recently it has come to suggest impression and subjective construction which are troubled with epistemology and representation¹⁰. Throughout the process of this project I found that my theoretical understanding of ethics and morality influenced my work in numerous ways. It meant that I was critically able to identify significant solutions to such ethical issues, guiding my work in becoming a piece that I ethically felt gave an honest and powerful representation of Sex Workers. Due to the role of the filmmaker, it can be argued to have a subjective view, however it was aligned with the ideology that our contributors wanted to be presented.