Two Lessons From the Biggest Failure of My Career

I spent two weeks in a country at civil war, filming interviews that turned out to be completely fabricated. People pointed at the same man in the same photograph and said, that is me. That is me. I saw the signs. I said nothing. This is the story of the biggest failure of my career as a cinematographer, and the two things it taught me.

To understand how I ended up there, we have to go back almost a hundred years.

At the beginning of the 20th century there was a German filmmaker called Leni Riefenstahl. She pioneered tracking shots, unusual camera angles, the camera as a tool for emotion rather than documentation, and her technique still shapes how we think about camera work today. She is also one of the most controversial figures in film history, because she put all of that talent in the service of the Nazis. After the war she was banned from filming.

A few years later she read Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa and saw photographs by the British photographer George Rodger of the Nuba people in the Nuba Mountains. She became obsessed. The cruel irony is that Rodger had gone to Africa looking for something pure to heal from what he had just photographed: the liberation of the concentration camps. When this German filmmaker asked him where those people lived, he did not want to tell her. She found them anyway. From the late sixties into the seventies she stayed with the Nuba many times, for months, and made two photography books that became worldwide bestsellers.

In 1956, on her first African shoot in Kenya, she was hit by a truck and ended up in a hospital in Nairobi in a coma. In that same hospital, a woman from New Zealand was giving birth to her son. The two women met and had a short conversation.

That is where I come in, about sixty years later.

That woman never forgot the encounter. She bought the books. She fell in love with Africa, lived there, built a career as an art director and producer of brand films in the Asian market, and eventually ended up in Australia, which is where I met her while I was shooting The Journey to the Climate. She liked my work and she told me about a dream she had: to make the trip Riefenstahl never got to make. To go to the Nuba Mountains, follow her tracks, find the places she stayed, maybe even find people who still remembered her. She was 86 years old and she wanted to hire me as her DP.

I said yes immediately. I had just come off two feature documentaries, I was hungry for the next adventure, and this one had everything.

You have to understand what the Nuba Mountains are. The area has been fought over for twenty years. The Nuba do not see themselves as belonging to the north of Sudan, the region sits near the oil, and for two decades they were bombed by Antonovs from Khartoum. They now call themselves the Nuba Republic and want recognition from the United Nations, which of course nobody is lobbying for. In 2023 a coup dissolved the government and two militaries that were supposed to keep each other honest started a brutal war against each other. That war took the pressure off the Nuba, and that was the window that made our trip possible.

We flew in without a visa from Khartoum. We had a visa from the Nuba Republic instead, which still amazes me: I was holding a visa for a country that almost nobody knows exists. The plan was a bush plane north to a refugee camp, then several days by car across the border and into the mountains. Our contact told us there would be no food to buy, so we brought a pickup truck full of cans. I soldered my own wiring system to charge cameras, laptop, lights and drone in the desert, and built a power station out of V-mount batteries, about 1.5 kilowatt hours, so we could work at night.

For all of that I was paid a lump sum of 6,000 euro. For two weeks, or for five weeks, whichever it turned out to be. Same money either way. That should have been my first red flag, and it was not.

We arrived and started looking for Leni. We asked every old person in the area whether they remembered a German woman with a camera. Nothing. Not one memory. Then one morning a driver came back from the market and said he had spoken to somebody who knew somebody. There was another town. She had stayed there.

And suddenly it was a jackpot. A very tall old Nuba wrestler who said he was the man in her photograph. A man who said he had lived close to her and could take us to her house, and then walked us to the ruins of it. Her old neighbor, an elderly woman who remembered her. We filmed interview after interview and I shot B-roll all day.

The whole time I was asking myself the same question: what is the story? Where is the red thread?

To me the answer was obvious. The story was her. An 86 year old Australian woman entering a country at war without a government visa, to retrace the steps of a woman she met on the day she gave birth to her son. One of them coming out of a coma, the other one just becoming a mother. What better story is there.

I shot it that way for three days, and every time I pointed the camera at her she got angry. She did not want to be in the film. This is not my story, she said. So I asked her what the story was, what the beginning and the middle and the end should be, what I should film to serve her story. And she said, I do not know what we will find.

Fine. We found something. So I asked again, how do you want to connect all these places, all these interviews. We will have to see.

The third time I asked, she snapped at me: I have been doing this for fifty years, how long have you been doing this, why are you questioning me.

That was the moment I stopped asking. It is her film, I told myself. My job is to make it look as good as possible, not to tell her what it is.

Then there was the shot. She wanted a forward dolly move through the desert with the village and the mountain in the distance. Too many bushes to walk it, and on foot I was too slow and too low anyway. I offered the drone. No drone, she said, we need the best possible quality, this is the hero shot. What she wanted instead was for me to stand upright on the roof of a Land Cruiser, camera over my head, while the car drove across open desert at 30 kilometers an hour. Nobody can stand on the roof of a car driving off road, with or without a camera. That request came back again and again over the following days.

And then the signs started stacking up. The same person, pointed at again and again in different photographs. Somebody producing an old file case. A necklace that was supposedly hers. It was too good to be true, and she did not seem to notice, or did not want to.

The mood on the team fell apart. Everybody was on a lump sum, everybody had understood it could be five weeks, and after two weeks everybody wanted to go home. One local team member started giving her unpurified water in the hope that she would get sick enough to leave sooner. I saw it. I said nothing. What I did instead was make sure she always had filtered water from me, which is how I kept my conscience roughly intact, and it is still the part of this story I am least proud of.

On day ten she came to me and asked whether we had enough to tell a story.

I remember standing there and deciding. I could have said: I do not know what your story is, you never told me. I do not know what I am filming. I do not know how you want to connect these interviews. And I have serious doubts that any of these people are telling us the truth.

Instead I said: yes, we shot a lot, I think there is something in there.

I lied, because I wanted to go home. Staying longer paid me nothing, I had diarrhea every day, and there was no version of this where I saved the production by being honest. That was my reasoning at the time and it was wrong.

Two days later we flew out. In Juba we went through the footage together and she was mostly happy. I went home and sent my invoice.

Silence. One week, two weeks, three. I sent three payment reminders. After about six weeks I got an email instead of a payment. She had gone through the material with her editor, there was no story in it, most of my footage was unusable, and I should think again about what my work had actually been worth and send her a new invoice.

That one hit me in a place I did not expect. I went into a proper spiral, questioning whether I can tell a story at all, and honestly it still nags at me on bad days. I spent a week writing an answer. I explained that I had asked, repeatedly, and been told to stop questioning somebody with fifty years of experience. I assumed I would never hear back and wrote off the money. She lives in Australia, I live in Germany, what was I going to do.

She wrote back with an apology.

It was her fault, she said. She had not known what she was doing. She was sorry she had sent that email at all, and of course I would get my 6,000 euro. And then she told me why she had been so angry: she had gone to the Berlin archives, read Riefenstahl's diaries, and found out that Riefenstahl had never been in that town. Not once. Every interview, every memory, the house, the neighbor, all of it had been staged for us, to keep us and our money in that town instead of some other town.

So all of it was for nothing. There will be no film about that place.

I learned two things, and I am going to be blunt about both.

The first one: never again a fixed fee with an open time frame. Six thousand euro put a hard ceiling on my effort. If I had known that every day beyond two weeks was worth another 500, or even 200, I would have pushed to stay and to shoot more. Instead I spent the second half of that trip calculating what I was losing. That serves nobody, not me and not the client. If you want more of my time, you pay for the time.

The second one, and this is the real failure: speak up, no matter how much experience the other person has. I saw that there was no story. I saw the fake interviews. I saw that we never reviewed footage. I saw the water. And I decided every single time that it was not my place, because I had been belittled enough that I believed it. Experience is not the same thing as competence. We can see that everywhere in the world right now, in much bigger rooms than a film set.

What still bothers me most is not the money. It is that the Nuba Mountains were extraordinary. Nobody was offended by my camera. Nobody gave me a bad look. People handed us mangoes for free. The governor of the region walked me through his computer rooms and told me about the projects they are building. It was the most welcoming shoot of my life, in a place the world has completely forgotten, and none of it will ever be seen.

Tell me about your biggest failure at work and what it taught you. I read every comment, usually twice, and I would like to learn something too.