Creating a Bilingual Documentary That Encapsulates How People Process and Cope With Grief

I've always had mixed feelings about death. When I first learned about it, I cried, thinking of everything around me, eventually disappearing in the end. Now, I either move on with life or face it through the loss of family members I felt meant something to me. I’ve gone through losses since first grade, but my family and I most recently experienced my uncle's death. His loss made me reflect on my relationship with him and his kind-hearted nature. However, my father had his most challenging emotional journey, as they grew up together, and my uncle passed away unexpectedly. It struck me that everyone grieves differently.

A thought intrigued me to document how people deal with grief in their separate ways, so I set out to do that. With my project, I aim to create a bilingual documentary that encapsulates how people process and cope with grief. This is a highly challenging goal. It requires getting in touch with a side of my family I’m not familiar with and their grieving side. It’ll also force me to improve my skills with editing softwares and the time and energy to complete and satisfy the documentary's needs alongside hours of research and documentation.

I selected this project for a few reasons; to further understand how people cope with loss, gain insight into how people I know deal with their losses, and improve my use of editing softwares. This personal interest in expressing these themes in documentary form comes from my love for film, and I feel it’s important to me to apply what I’ve learned about film techniques.

By creating a documentary exploring different coping methods, I’m able to provide my loved ones with a cathartic release and attract those interested in said topic, which helps me strengthen my social and research skills.

Global Context

My project aligns with the global context of Identities and Relationships, focusing on how people bond. I focused my report this way to accelerate grief and loss themes through the focus of Identities and Relationships. The project explores strands of identity, personal, physical, mental, social, and spiritual health, along with human relationships including families, friends, and communities. The grieving process relates to the person’s identity in the deceased’s life. It could affect their health - personal, physical, mental, social, and spiritual, affecting their human relationships.

Product

The end product is a documentary exploring the five stages of grief through 5 stories of loss during the pandemic told by five people who lost a loved one throughout the pandemic. The documentary is titled The Loss and explores grief through denial. This defense mechanism numbs the situation's intensity, followed by anger, a masking effect of hiding grief's pain and emotions. It's continued with bargaining, feeling like one could affect an event's outcome to postpone sadness. Then there's depression, tremendous sadness and more prolonged than warranted, and acceptance, coming to terms with the loss and understanding what the loss means in one's life.

This product responds to the global context strands relationships, including families. It explores the personal relations that five people had with their lost people. It also goes through what role those relationships played in their lives and identities as they reflect upon how they shaped them into the person they are today. The documentary encapsulates informative and insightful content into what the five stages of grief look like to people of different ages and backgrounds. Hence, the product exceeds my goal of creating a bilingual documentary that encapsulates how people process and cope with grief.

Watch my video below!

Reflection

In response to completing the Personal Project, I felt as if I learned more than I expected to learn. My perspective on how people cope with loss through grief had vastly expanded from what it originally was, along with my skills in editing softwares. Before, I used to think that grief was a complicated process that could completely change a person’s life. Now, I see grief as a process that can be broken down into different parts and help someone grow to be a better person.

If I had the opportunity to meet with all of the interviewees in real life, I would gladly take that chance to have made a much more intimate perspective. However, that’s out of my control, and I at least got to physically interview one of them. Through the various obstacles and challenges that came my way, I believe that they helped me grow my critical and creative thinking skills. I was also able to create a documentary, something that I thought would take years to make, but I proved to myself that I could do it in the course of a few months.

Referring to the global context, relationships including families, I’ve grasped how people connect and how those connections make everlasting impacts on one another. After seeing and listening to people talk about their losses, what they regret, how much they miss their loved ones, and how some of them feel like better people now. I also enhanced my knowledge in the editing software department by editing the project with Adobe Premiere Pro, which I had not utilized before.

IB Learner Reflection

As an IB learner, I am continually looking for room to grow, and throughout the process of my project, I feel that I have improved most upon Risk-Takers, Caring, and Open-Minded.

Choosing a subject that some people would consider unusual to talk about in the open was something I felt not entirely sure about initially, but it felt as if I had to do it out of instinct. I would say this is where I applied the Risk-Takers profile into play. In doing so, I opened myself up to getting in touch with people about a heavy subject, developing a bond with a professional editor who comes from a very different background than mine, and learning the higher perks of creating better editing choices in the creation of a documentary. Admittedly, I feel as if I did not learn enough as I had someone to guide me through the editing process whenever I needed help or went in a panic, but then again, I was grateful to develop a bond with him.

I put some people who I wasn't close to in a vulnerable position. So, I had to make sure that they were comfortable enough to open up about it in a detailed manner to gather an insightful stance into the grieving process, which I think is where Caring takes place. I made sure that I cleared my headspace to listen to what they have to say instead of thinking about what the next thing to do is, and because of that, I was able to interview them in a light that feels a little more like a conversation rather than something all too formal.

I had assumed that because I did not talk much or kept to myself a great deal when dealing with loss, everyone would go through it the same way as I did, and though a portion of that is right, I learned about others' perspectives along the way. This is where Open Minded enters. To get the most out of new experiences, I would have to hold back whatever judgment or thought comes to mind and take in and listen to what is going on to develop a good understanding of what is being discussed and to empathize with it.