When the Mob Came
Release date: Friday, May 5 2023 Is “cancel culture” a real thing? Are public shaming and de-platforming campaigns justified as a way of advancing social justice and holding the powerful to account, or are they evidence of a creeping proto-totalitarianism? What happens when these tools are weaponized for personal or political advantage, and how does a person rebuild after public cancellation?
In this, my third and (I hope) last feature documentary film, I answer these questions by turning the lens on my own life and experience of cancellation. This is a story of media credulity, political calculation, betrayal, and obsession. It’s about the failure and the triumph of friendship, the spiritual struggle to believe in things unseen, and the need to make meaning out of suffering. It’s also a re-litigation of Plato’s Gorgias dialogue, and a test of Socrates’ claim that “to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things.”
On the making of this documentary
This was a project was borne of necessity. Were it otherwise, I never could have overcome the horror of making an autobiographical film, let alone one that involves so much raw emotional self-disclosure.
The necessity arose when I was left unemployable and reputationally destroyed in the aftermath of a political mobbing in 2019. False allegations about me were plastered across front pages and broadcast on national television. Friends faced pressure to disown me, and former colleagues who tried standing by me were targeted for harassment. No employer would engage with me. Journalists and media producers who attempted to give me an opportunity to defend myself faced denunciation, boycotts campaigns, and threats of legal action — until they relented.
Unable to find work to support my family, or a platform to respond to my accusers, I decided to draw on previous documentary filmmaking experience to tell my own story. I was fortunate to still have a few friends willing to provide seed funding for the film, and access to a wonderful and talented team of film producers at Vek Labs who (unbeknownst at the time) had already begun filming this project a year earlier.
The purpose here is not really to defend myself — it’s four years too late for that. Instead, it’s to try to show that suffering, whether justly or unjustly, may have some redemptive purpose, and can be turned to the good.
Past Projects
LETTER FROM MASANJIA (2018)
In 2012, a woman in Oregon opened a box of K-Mart Halloween decorations. Inside, tucked between the styrofoam tombstones, she found an SOS note from a man imprisoned in China’s Masanjia labor camp. Her story went viral, helping to catalyze major reforms to the barbaric reeducation-through-labour system.
Through an underground network of dissidents and journalists, Canadian filmmakers connected with the letter-writer, an unassuming engineer named Sun Yi who was living in hiding in Beijing. With a camera in hand and police on his tail, Sun travels the country interviewing family, former inmates, and human rights lawyers, piecing together an extraordinary account of his time in Masanjia. (Read more)
ASK NO QUESTIONS (2020)
When Chinese state-run television blames a religious minority for a fiery public suicide, Chen Ruichang is detained in a Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing facility and forced to accept the government’s narrative.
But Chen, a former insider of the state TV himself, believes it was all a frame-up to justify a nationwide crackdown on the regime’s opponents. Ask No Questions shows the deadly power of media under authoritarian control. It also shows the remarkable power of individuals who refuse to compromise the truth.