Above: The Lovings, who won the right for interacial couples to marry in Virginia, USA in 1967.

When we make films we tend to concentrate on understanding the lives and issues of a few key respondents. We do this because we want to build trust and openess and that’s easiest to do when you identify and focus on a small number of key informants rather than skating over the lives of many. Our clients often have a question for us though, can a few people really represent a much larger majority or help understand an issue?

We have all sorts of ways to ’scale up’ our findings but after seeing the films our clients never feel as if they are missing out. Ultimately, the respondents, just like ourselves, are all part of a wider society and culture and in the end our respondents act as guides to a wider experience, even at their most personal. Unfortunately we can’t show you those client films but the US radio show This American Life does illustrate what I mean. The show is all about personal stories that have more resonance than they may first suggest. In this episode, Take a negro home, a son of a divorced interracial couple talks about his parent’s marriage as he tries to unravel his own attitudes to interracial dating. As he investigates we learn about racial and social politics in the 60s, the influence of the family, Southern versus Northern urban American attitudes, the social impact of college life, racial norms and racial relations today.

Not bad from a 27 minute portrait of a marriage.