The specific topic that I approach in my documentary is the mental health crisis particularly about international student (Chinese student) who study in United States. Since my mom suffered from depression when she was finishing her master degree, she truly knows how wellness of mental health matters. She cares about my mental health wellbeing since I was really young. However, when I come to study in United States, I find out that a lot of friends around me are somehow suffered from these problems such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, etc. However, even though they feel those symptoms has already affected their lives, only some of them know this is some problem that they need to seek help from professional psychologist. Lack of knowledge on mental health issue lead some of them suffered more and lead to more dangerous condition such as drug abuse (without doctor’s prescription).
What’s more, cultural stigma of some asian culture also push the condition even worse. Since most of international students come to US by themselves, they are lack of communication with their families. When they feel depressed and mentally break down, it is hard for themselves to talk out the problem. Even when they try to communicate with their family, many of their parents still have cultural stigma about mental health issue. They ascribe the problems to students being too sensitive and may even blame their children not paying enough effort on study. Talking about this issue make them feel humiliated. As I saw more and more news about international (asian) students committed to suicide due to the mental health problem, but college does not really pay much attention on this subject. They did not provide enough mental health support for students and even did not recognize the seriousness of the condition among international students since rarely of us speak this out. I feel like it is a good chance to bring up this problem and at least reveal the reality of mental health crisis of asian international student.
The three interviewees that I chose are all chinese international students (one of them is American born Chinese) who suffered from mental health problem in college years. Although their stories different from each others (Conor suffered from depression and lead to drug abuse for two years, Jennifer experienced cultural stigma while she talked about her issue to her parents and Robles had dissatisfied experience from CAPS), the common thing among the is none of them get enough and proper help while experiencing the difficulty. Thus I tried to combine their stories together and show the seriousness of current condition of mental health problems of asian international students. Since I cut pretty frequently between my interviewees, the B-roll I chose was basically used to hide the cut and resonate with the subject they talk about such as Jennifer’s family picture, the medicine Conor used before and the scene of Robles studying.
Since I interviewed around 30 minutes per person, and their stories are all pretty long and personal, I feel like it is impossible for me to include the whole stories of them. I also want all three of them to be my main subject and do not want to exaggerate the experience of one of them since everything they talked are important to my project. Thus what I tried to do is cut frequently among three of them and just cut the meaningful short sentences they said. I arrange the footage in the way that connect with subsequent one and organize them into a whole story. First I chose to interview them all in front of a white wall because I want audience to focus on the content and not be distracted by the background. However, when I editing the interview, I do feel that I need to setup multiple camera to make the visual part richer. I fellowed a pretty linear progression by first states the problems they encountered, how they seek help, what they experienced while seeking help and what their life become now. I feel the completeness and diversity are both important for my project.Throughout the process, I learned a lot of difference of documentary compared to other genres. Although pre-production plan is important for leading a successful interview but there will be a lot of unexpected staff happening through the process because you cannot expect interviewees answers the way you want. And if you find some more interested subject during the filming process, you need to dig in deep by yourself. What’s more, you can’t be biased while doing the interview and make interviewees say what you want otherwise it will be unreal. During the interviewing process I do find more unexpected stories and really surprised me but since this is the first time for me to make documentary, I do find my shot be pretty plain and I wanted to make it more varied and make the stories more interesting if I had a second chance to do so.
I choose to Sungod status as my trigger image because firstly it stand for UCSD. More importantly, Sungod symbolized positive energy, gathering and happiness to me which conveys my wish that all of us can face the mental health problem in a proper way and overcome the difficulty all together.
