Photo of Charles Fairbanks

Charles Fairbanks

Charles Fairbanks

“I recognize that there are concerns about paying subjects. If you pay your sources in a journalistic context, you run the risk that they’ll just tell you anything — even lie — in exchange for the money. But for me, it was never about paying for information, it was just about paying for time. Yet that’s still a concern for an ethnographic work. I think many ethnographers, anthropologists — old-school anthropologists especially — would think that I’m corrupting these people by giving them money, by making them, say, more dependent on money. But money is already what Juan is struggling to get every day.”

Available to Watch

    The Modern Jungle

    THE MODERN JUNGLE

    CHARLES FAIRBANKS, SAUL KAK United States, 2016

    The Modern Jungle highlights the ethical complexities of nonfiction filmmaking. What is the relationship between ethnographer and subject? What is owed and what is transacted? A daring project of documentation and uneasy exchange that explores the relationship between indigenous and Western culture.

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