Jonathan Wang's Inspirational Sundance Keynote

At this year's Sundance Film Festival's Producers Celebration, Best Picture Academy Award-winning producer of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Jonathan Wang, delivered the keynote address. (Jonathan is a colleague from the Producers Guild of America's Asian American and Pacific Islander Working Group, and a terrific guy.) His words were a welcoming rally call to be good to fellow film folks, and made the world and our industry a slightly better place.

Here are some excerpts. (You can read the full transcript at https://www.indiewire.com/news/festivals/sundance-2024-keynote-speech-jonathan-wang-1234946499/ .)

In this room nine years ago, I witnessed something quite special. I watched filmmakers support each other and welcome each other for the very fact that they shared in the struggle of telling stories. That was powerful to witness.

I ask that we as a community link arms together and all strive to make safer connections on our individual sets, in our individual offices, and between each other. Because, if we are able to unite under the central premise that we will support each other in our needs to feel safe and to feel seen, then our cups will be filled; and from a place of abundance we can then help our filmmakers, our actors, and our crews also feel safe and supported.

What is critical to see here is that behind this is a reorientation of our ultimate incentives. Meaning, when we put reciprocal care at the center of our process, then the desires for profit, fame, power, you name it, will all feel subservient to a higher order goal—one that is seeking the good of others. And in so doing, we make the first step towards flourishing on healthier and happier sets and offices.

That is the beauty of this room. Yes, we are independent filmmakers but we do not make things independently. We don’t have to go it alone. In fact we can’t. We are a community and we must prop each other up and help shoulder the load.

So how can we do this, really? I believe that the key is in upgrading the stories we tell ourselves about our work and each other, just like we are doing now. Story is our most important social technology. Every belief we have is built off a story. If we believe the story that the person standing next to us is our ally, our partner in arms, then we will strive to collaborate and seek to help them. And therein lies our power: we are the storytellers, the ones who can rewrite the narrative to build spaces that heal rather than divide, that renew rather than destroy. We are given a huge responsibility, and sure, not all of us are screenwriters, but all of us are storytellers. We tell a story in the way we treat each other, in the way we cast our films, in the way we build our productions, in the way we schedule our days and manage our budgets. And here, within these walls, is where I hope the story of old ends. The tired old story where fame, fortune, and power were the virtues to strive for. And from the ashes of that old tale, I hope new heroes emerge—heroes of kindness, collaboration and profound care. That is the story I want to tell.

I challenge us to pause and take inventory of the story we embody. I challenge us to be present with those we are here with and to make space for them to be seen. And I challenge us to take this spirit of care, and to infuse it into our lives, our sets, our stories, and our planet. Thank you all.

#film #producing #Sundance #care #kindness #collaboration #heal