In his 2012 documentary “The Waiting Room,” the independent filmmaker Peter Nicks turned his attention to a single hospital emergency room in Oakland, California. An observational polemic, the film was widely praised for the subtlety with which it told the story of the American healthcare crisis, as refracted by one underinsured community’s dependence on an emergency room for everything from primary to urgent care. The film also inaugurated a trilogy of Oakland-centered documentaries planned by Nicks, the second of which, with a working title of “The Oakland Police Project,” is currently in postproduction. ARTINFO recently had the opportunity to see a clip of the work in progress at the annual Artists Assembly conference in Miami, and we spoke to Nicks about his planned trilogy of films dealing with health care, crime, and education in Oakland.The film you’re currently working on, about the Oakland Police Department, seems particularly significant not because it deals with a topical issue, but because it reconfigures the terms of how the discussion of police brutality is happening. At least if the clip you recently showed — depicting a fraught classroom debate between Oakland Police Academy students regarding the use of excessive force — is any indication.“The Oakland Police Project” — which is our working title, we don’t have a title yet — is the second in a trilogy of films that my production company is producing that is examining the relationship between community and the public institutions that serve them in Oakland, California. So the idea is that we can construct a grand narrative, and from that grand narrative look at the interlocking pieces of healthcare, education, and criminal justice. It's in some ways inspired by “The Wire,” and the way that it peels back the layers of bureaucracy and of institutions in Baltimore and sort of reframes how you saw both the institutions themselves and the individuals within those institutions.And that was the primary goal of “The Waiting Room,” which was to take an issue that had become extremely polarized and driven people apart and try to tell a story that would find a common humanity. But also with the political edge, that we are making a statement that doesn't shy away from the political realities: If you have a public hospital waiting room where people have to wait for 16 hours, and they are using that waiting room as their primary care physician — is that something that we as a society accept?And how does the film change that acceptability? How does that response become productive? Change happens in a lot of ways. It can happen in what I call the “deep fryer” method, where all of a sudden the film comes out and the laws are changed and all is well. But I think of most social impact surrounding documentaries as more of a “Crock-Pot.” It takes time. The most fundamental thing you're doing is building awareness — taking people places where they've never been, building apathy. And I think filmmaking on more of the activist side is trying to make people feel the way you feel. But I don't consider myself an activist, I consider myself an observer. I try not to place one person on a moral high ground above another. I try to go into that gray area.Do the stakes for the “The Oakland Police Project” differ from “The Waiting Room”?So with “The Oakland Police Project” the stakes are a lot higher, I think, because there is such a divisive climate right now regarding the police and its role in our society. There is deep distrust among some segments of the civilian population, and there’s a deep resentment and defensiveness on the side of law enforcement and those who support them. And so our film is stepping into that space and ultimately trying to not do an exposé on this particular police department [in Oakland], but trying to understand the role they play in the community.To return to this Crock-Pot metaphor — how does that Crock-Pot bubble over? I was wondering if you could speak to the relationship between journalism and civic engagement or change, particularly as an independent filmmaker and journalist.I think the idea of investigative journalism has been boxed into a corner, in a sense, because what I do is very investigative — I'm trying to discover the depths of the individuals who populate these systems and these institutions that we are critical of, to the point where people can reframe how they see those institutions. And an individual documentary has the potential to spark change, there's no question about that — look at “The Invisible War” (2012), for example, which changed the way the US military investigates sexual assaults.
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