Truth or Consequences, as a film, is part of a larger project of elevating conversations around listening, co-creation, integrity of process, and how documentaries represent the world and thereby shape the future.

These guided all parts of the process from filming, to editing, to the speculative premise, to articulating an ethos around form as ethical and political, to collaborating with the town of Truth or Consequences and people in the film to co-create an art & film festival.

For a project like this, the process is the film and the film is the process, and we’re excited to share the ideas behind it.

The film began by director Hannah Jayanti doing an arts residency in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (“TorC”). She then spent five months over the next three years living and filming mostly by herself. She filmed in an intuitive and exploratory way, without a set idea of what she was looking to find.

She felt that most documentaries were far from her lived experience. Specifically, the way that exceptionalism is prioritized, crystalline moments are created, narratives are distilled, and people’s lives are moulded into arcs with clear causality. Watching these, she felt a disconnect between what she was seeing and the texture of her own life - which was more complicated, messier, and endlessly coming in and out of focus.

She went to TorC hoping to make a film in a different way - to capture the more ambiguous parts of our lives, and elevate the moments that are so rarely considered valuable or worthy of being shown on film.

After filming for three years, Hannah showed an early rough cut and was humbled to discover she had made the film she set out not to make. She had edited people into a more conventional narrative, one about a small town struggling and an outside influence, in this case the very real Spaceport, wielding the power to destroy or redeem.

In collaborating with her partner in life and art, Alexander Porter, they felt narratives like this create a power dynamic that is all too common in documentaries, one where people seem to have agency but are ultimately contextualized by their circumstances. For them, whenever they tried to follow the conventions of good documentary filmmaking they made choices that felt extractive, othering and even violent - distilling people into story arcs and character trajectories and 3-act structures that had nothing to do with them, their lives, or what they had shared on camera.

This realization is what created the speculative premise for the film.

Since the allure of the Spaceport was why the film kept dipping back into these more conventional structures, they started wondering what would happen if they shifted the premise. Instead of the Spaceport being something that may or may not affect the town - thereby creating all too common conversations about the failed American dream, poverty, and rural communities being left behind - what if they borrowed from speculative nonfiction and acted like the nascent technology of commercial space travel had already happened?

It turned out to be the most liberating and surprisingly genuine way to make the film because it asked different questions. It allowed them to create an emergent structure borne out of listening to the footage, especially what the people had chosen to share about who they were and what mattered to them.

For them and their collaborators including the producer Sara Archambault, choosing to create Truth or Consequences as a speculative documentary was a practice in formal experimentation as an ethical and political act.

They discovered that sometimes it takes breaking form to get back to the foundations of documentary filmmaking which for them are about listening and using the camera to elevate parts of our lives and worlds that are overlooked or considered unworthy of being recorded.

Ultimately, that is what Truth or Consequences is dedicated to and what led them to collaborate with the town and people in the film to co-create an art & film festival built around the same principles of listening, trust and collaborative experimenting.

In 2018 a group of artists from within TorC and without started having year long conversations about what they wanted for themselves and their community. They began wondering if it was possible to create sustainability out of what makes TorC so unique - this incredible time and space to create, both art and a life of one’s choosing. From this, they created Meteoric, a public art & film festival in the town dedicated to re-envisioning what a community led festival can be.

The 2019 inaugural year was a three day weekend in TorC that was free and open to all with film screenings, workshops, art installations, performances, facilitated conversations, public forums, and collective meals. Hundreds of people came to the town for a celebration of the character of the place, on their terms. It was a remarkable collaboration between a group of acclaimed artists and storytellers from TorC and around the world imagining a sustainable future based on communities working together, and how people from diverse backgrounds can learn from each other and create together.

You can discover more about the project and collaborators at www.meteoric.world.