Utopian futures require present tense production ethics

Two years ago I sat through a documentary premiere at Visions du Réel. A beautiful film, set in 2040, about climate refugees building cooperative housing. The Q&A ran long on solidarity economies and post-capitalist futures. Then, at the after-party, someone told me their assistant camera operator had worked a 16-hour day in 35-degree heat without proper access to water, because the location permit was about to expire. Nobody on the panel about imagining better worlds had thought that worth a mention.

I keep running into this gap. Films with serious things to say about justice, equality or transformation, made under conditions that contradict those values outright. A feature about survivors of gender-based violence where the intimacy coordinator budget was cut and the DIT package wasn’t. A series on neurodiversity scheduling twelve-hour shoot days with no quiet space for the autistic production assistant. The dissonance is uncomfortable, yes. It also undermines the work.

If your documentary argues for dignity in labour while your gaffer is treated as a disposable resource, you are not making art with integrity. You are making propaganda, and not very persuasive propaganda. Audiences notice these contradictions more than they used to. Crew certainly notice. Every time the utopia on screen diverges from the reality behind the camera, trust erodes, both in the filmmaker and in the vision being sold.

The justification never changes: budget constraints, time pressure, the reality of independent production. I know those pressures well. I have produced inside them. But “we can’t afford it” stops being a valid excuse when you are asking audiences to believe in radically different social arrangements and refusing to implement basic ones on a set you control. If your film imagines a world where care work is valued, why is your craft services person on minimum wage with no meal break? If you are exploring indigenous sovereignty, why did no cultural advisor appear in the budget until week three of post?

The practicalities are less complicated than we pretend. Safety protocols do not need studio money. They need planning. An intimacy coordinator for a two-person interview about sexual trauma costs less than your colourist’s day rate. Proper hydration, reasonable hours and a harassment policy you have actually handed out cost almost nothing. A pre-production meeting about cultural protocols before you film in someone’s community costs your time, and you were spending that anyway.

The retrofit is what’s expensive. Hiring me after you have already filmed problematic material and need it salvaged in post. Reshoots because your subject withdrew consent once they saw how their story was framed. The festival that drops you after crew members go public about conditions on set. Legal fees. Reputational damage. All of it costs more than doing the work properly from the start, and the film you salvage is never as good as the one you could have made.

In my experience the resistance is rarely about money. It is about control, and about convention. Producers worry that real breaks will slow things down. Directors fear that centring consent means sacrificing spontaneity. I have worked on productions that ran rigorous safety and consent practices, and they did not move slower. They moved more intentionally. Preparation is the difference. When everyone knows the boundaries and the workflows before the day begins, the chaos goes and the creativity stays.

There is also a category error in how people think about ethics on a production. It gets treated as an overlay, something applied after the “real” work has been planned: the shots, the schedule, the budget. But ethics are structural. They should shape your shooting ratio, your crew size, your choice of locations. If you are planning a documentary about economic precarity and your line producers are on deferred payment, the structure is already broken. The film you end up with will be compromised, not despite your ethics but because of them.

This matters most in documentary and social-issue work, where the stated purpose is usually to expose injustice or imagine alternatives. When your film’s political vision and your production’s actual practices do not match, what you have made is magical thinking. You are asking audiences to believe change is possible while showing, through your own behaviour, that you do not believe in it enough to practise it where you have direct control.

I am not arguing for perfection. I am arguing for coherence. If the film is about the future, the set should meet at least the present-day minimums of labour law, consent culture and safety standards. That is not utopian. That is baseline. The utopian part, the genuinely ambitious part, would be exceeding it. Treating the production as a laboratory for the collaborative, equitable practices the film advocates. Paying people properly. Crediting everyone. Building in rest. Making room for cultural consultation and for disagreement. Actually carrying out the power analysis your documentary is presumably about.

1. Production ethics are not external to your film’s message. They are evidence of whether you believe that message yourself.

2. Most ethical production practices cost time and planning rather than money, and they head off expensive problems in post and distribution.

3. If your film imagines better futures while your set replicates present-day exploitation, you are undermining your own work before it ever reaches an audience.

The films that stay with me are not only the ones with compelling subjects or beautiful cinematography. They are the ones where the process matched the stated values. Where the intimacy coordinator was hired in prep rather than in crisis. Where the cultural advisor was credited as prominently as the composer. Where the crew went home feeling respected rather than extracted from. Those films feel coherent all the way through. Not because they are perfect, but because someone actually tried to close the gap between the world on screen and the world behind the camera.

Todd Max Carey, Seven Journeys