365 documentaries in 365 days.
Meeting 365+ strangers across five continents, convincing them to appear on camera, filming a mini-documentary about each of them, editing the video and uploading the finished ‘docobites’ to social media platforms every day for a year? An inspired work of sheer genius or an undertaking of pure madness?
It could, in fact, be a little bit of both – but this is exactly the project two Gen-Y Australians, Epiphany Morgan & Carl Mason dreamt up, and they are nearly a third of the way through their year-long challenge (called 365 docobites).
Now, I’m no stranger to mad year-long projects. There was the year I declared our household would eat only Australian-grown and produced foods for 365 days, and the year I resolved not to buy any new books for a year (which made me an obsessed stalker of the bookstalls at school fetes). Most recently, on my personal Facebook page, I undertook to snap a daily photo and post it, together with a related adjective that began with the letter R, every single day for a year – which seemed like a fun idea when I started with words like rich, russet and radiant….but not so much fun by the time I was into the 300s and having to resort to words such as residentiary, rimose and recalescent. Try coming up with those pics on a daily basis. The daily commitment required was stressful.
So, when Epiphany emailed me about this project, I was immediately intrigued, and the more I found out about it, the more in awe I was of the degree of pressure these two have put themselves under to produce and upload a docobite every day.
So far, they have met and filmed strangers in the USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Iceland, Belgium and Germany. The itinerary for the future is still very flexible but possibly contains Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Serbia, Morocco, Uganda, China. South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Burma, Brazil, Argentina and Peru.
Epiphany explains, “We know where we are going to be for the next month and that’s it. That’s partly to do with budget, limited organisation time and the ability to go with the flow. We try and stick to events and festivals because the energy is high and the enthusiasm for participation is richest at these times. Next festival we are attending is EXIT in Serbia and we just can’t wait!”
I’m really hoping they make it to Morocco, and upload some docobites from there, as it has recently shot to the top of my bucket list . There’s something irresistible about the idea of riads, Berbers and Saharan sands. Plus, I hear the Moroccan hamam rival those of Turkey.
But enough about me and my plans…back to 365 docobites…
Ephipany and Carl choose their strangers purely on instinct. Sometimes someone will be doing something that catches their attention – busking, feeding birds, or they might have 9,500 piercings, and at other times they’ll just follow the pull of certain people drawing them in. It’s an almost indefinable attraction.
And are the people they approach ever suspicious of their motives?
“Oh, all the time!” Epiphany says. “Carl and I often say if someone was to approach us on the street we’d be the first to be hesitant of their motivations, but we’re learning very quickly first impressions are irrelevant. We get about one in four people say no. Either they say they’re busy, or they’re too shy or they’re not wearing any makeup. It’s a very confronting thing to have two strangers come up to you with cameras and want to ask personal questions, I think the people who say yes are wonderfully brave.”
The film-making technique Epiphany and Carl use is known as ‘run and gun’ which roughly translates to no script, no schedule, and no actors or pre-arranged interviews. It’s a technique we laymen would call ‘winging it’, and it creates a candid and natural reality to each of the docobites that is very endearing.
The stated goal of the project is to introduce the world’s strangers to each other. Each docobite (of between one to four minutes) is a unique slice of that person’s life.
I’ve been following 365 docobites via the Facebook page feed for a few weeks now. Over that period, Epiphany and Carl have been uploading docobites from Berlin, and some of the strangers I’ve been introduced to include: the chairperson (and wife of the late founder) of the Mauer Museum (Check Point Charlie); a body painter who spends her days painting faces in Mauer Park; and a pair of Scottish buskers who have settled in Berlin.
I’ve also gone through the backlist and watched a few of the earlier docobites, and my favourite so far is the very first one, No. 1 from New York:
No. 1 New York: It’s a very beautiful thing, all of that struggle.
There’s a saying that strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet. This project certainly supports that theory, by showing in each docobite how, for all our differences, people the world over share many of the same joys, concerns, hopes and fears.
Personally, some of the most fascinating experiences I’ve had when travelling have been conversations with ‘strangers’: the Australian professional rugby player now playing for a Japanese team who we met in a resort bar; the barrister-turned-children’s-book-writer I chatted to while we watched our kids swim; the waitress in Langkawi, Malaysia who had left her children with her mother in Borneo, while she worked towards a better life for them over 1,500 kilometres away; the twenty-something Vietnamese tour guide who had moved to the coast from her mountain home at the age of 14, and taught herself to speak English.
There’s a lot to be said for starting those conversations in foreign lands, but while I’m at home, I’m looking forward to meeting many more of the world’s strangers each day through 365 docobites. (And at the same time, marveling at the guts these two young film-makers have in taking on such a huge challenge.)
If you’d like to meet some strangers too, you can follow Epiphany and Carl’s amazing (and just a little bit mad!) 365 docobites project by visiting their website, or through Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Vimeo.
