Gabriella García-Pardo on Creating a Visual Language

Your fellowship project and forthcoming film FENCED touches on everything from community land trusts and zoning reforms to Indigenous land sovereignty. What policy questions do you hope it will drive lawmakers, voters, and community organizers to start asking?

FENCED doesn’t offer policy solutions, but instead asks what our policies reveal about our values. I hope it pushes viewers and lawmakers to question who gets to define boundary lines and what collective forms of stewardship might look like instead. The film highlights how zoning, conservation, and development often reproduce racial and economic limits under the guise of “order.” That, without them, there would be utter chaos. I want audiences to ask: What would it mean to plan for permeability instead of rigidity or exclusion? To see land and other beings as something/someone to be in relationship with, not to own or extract from.

Directing your first feature-length documentary film probably means trespassing on a few comfort zones of your own. So far, which boundary —creative, emotional, logistical, or literal—did you need to cross often, and how has that influenced the way you now tell stories?

This film has stretched me in each of those realms, and beyond: creatively, emotionally, logistically, physically, and professionally. As a first-time feature director, I’ve had to step across the boundaries of being a cinematographer and producer to let my voice and presence seep into the frame. Each step of the way, I’ve challenged my own notions of filmmaking and temptations to control the process in order to feel safer. I’m often asked what answers this film will provide. How will it end? How many places will you go? Are fences good or bad? But I have a growing allergy to the expectation that most stories should be character-driven or heroes’ journeys. I want to soak in nonlinear approaches that play around within an inherently linear form.

The film moves between observing life unfold and then talking directly to the people living it. What made that combination of cinematographic approaches essential for this story?

Our approach of creating a visual language, only to break from it unexpectedly, feels right because FENCED is about challenging rigid rulemaking. We follow a group of guiding questions through exploration, not enforcement. My goal is to create an experience that’s as interactive as possible. Meaning, the moments on screen aren’t meant to be passively absorbed, but questioned. And the ideas expressed come from multiple points of view. The images are juxtaposed in a visual conversation between the screen and the audience. After seeing the film, people will hopefully go about their days churning these ideas around and noticing the fences and lines that surround their unique lives.

Subscribe here to receive next month’s issue of The Fifth Draft.