Commissioned work

A film can be paid for by a brand and still hold to the discipline of reporting: you go to the place, you film what is actually there, and you do not ask anyone to say a line they do not mean. Five of my films with BBC StoryWorks were made on exactly that arrangement — advertorial in purpose, journalistic in method. The two are further apart in reputation than they are in practice, provided you stay honest with yourself about which one you are doing.

I also do not accept that everyone on the client side is working in bad faith. People inside companies are people; they want something good — however relative that word is — for themselves and for those around them. Anatman screens for this before a project begins. We are a certified B Corporation, among the first production houses in Southeast Asia to hold the certification, and that standard rules out extractive industries as a matter of course. The effect over the years is that the companies who come to us are already standing on similar ground — Gojek, Amartha, FDC Dental Clinic — built on some idea of a better Indonesia rather than a campaign about one. It is also what separates Anatman from most documentary houses here: our clients are not only NGOs and international news desks.

Then there is a third kind of work — very large organisations with genuinely complicated things to say. A corporation is not one voice. It is many divisions, and some of them carry messages about fairness and access that deserve to be told properly. When the client is one we can stand behind, the film gets the same attention any film of my own would get. The inDrive documentary is one of those. So is the body of branded documentary work we have made with Google since 2017.

None of it is on this site. The complete body of commissioned work — far larger than everything here put together — lives where it belongs, at anatmanpictures.com.

One practical note. Commissioned film work reaches me only through Anatman; that is the single door, and it is deliberate. Photography is the exception — those assignments I can take on directly.