On April 12, Oregon’s black forests and silver belts of water grew indistinct as our plane rose through the ever-present fog. The flight was a straight shot from Portland to San Jose, California —home to one of the largest groups of Superfund sites nationwide, a place of profound pollution and inequality, where the working class lives in poverty mere blocks from unprecedented wealth reserved for the few. The reality is such: “You could not think of a higher stakes arena for that than the court system, and you couldn’t think of a more daunting venue than Silicon Valley.” (Raj Jayadev, Debug Magazine.) Looking at Silicon Valley, a complex capitalistic machine designed to continue the cycle of inequality, we ask: What happens when students, researchers and local institutions step into a system so corrupt, a historically vicious cycle, not simply to study its inequalities … but to challenge them?
The Navigation Project began with just a select few volunteers. Stanford students, overseen by professors, worked with over eighty defendants as public defense navigators, aiding their clients to understand their circumstances and access all resources available. In doing so, they challenged the values behind mass criminalization and brought humanity into justice. When Stanford reached out to Complete Picture, a 501(c)(3) criminal justice reform nonprofit focused on telling the stories of defendants through film, and asked the director to create a film representing the Navigation Project, it wasn’t very long before I was boarding the plane.
Despite my fancy title as assistant director, my many more unglamorous roles included food wrangler, camera assistant, sound recording artist, grip, and hapless mule accepting bag after bag of equipment. I checked cameras, monitored the audio mixer and set up the boom pole to collect sound. I complained and injured myself several times, and I carried more tripods than should ever be laid in the arms of a skinny teenager. It was painful. It was intensive and irritating and not at all fulfilling in the moment. I dropped important things. I cried more than once. It was hot, so hot, with the California sun, a fierce temptress, lashing my neck with her unforgiving rays. At times I thought of throwing my hands up and staying at my hotel, in the dark on my computer, until the shoot was over. That way, at least, I could stop messing it up.
Film shoots are always a wild sort of experience. If the product of all that hard work is mediocre, it’s not forgiven, it’s entirely forgotten. Countless factors are at play, a great majority out of one’s control: a lens cracks; a cat urinates in the camera case; a car runs over someone’s foot; a boom pole falls, nearly concussing a crew member (me); an unexpected parking ticket eats up your lunch money; you come home at midnight to have dinner and it’s so spicy that you involuntarily weep (me again).
On a film shoot, if something can go wrong, it will. At the time, walking into it, knowing very well the nature of these shoots, everything seemed insurmountable – a beast to tackle whose face we could not even yet see. I was all set to interview Stanford professors, defendants and their loved ones, students and attorneys alike. I was terrified of messing up in front of the brainiacs. Could I seriously help put the spotlight on this incredible project that was so much bigger than myself?
Scurrying is the main mode of transportation for film shoots. A single day could take one from dawn into dusk: At six o’clock in the morning, you wake up, wet your bangs in the hotel sink, eat something, anything, and begin hauling equipment. You help conduct an interview with a professor at Stanford until eleven, then hit up a courthouse in Palo Alto. Then it’s off to a nearby building to gather footage of attorneys, perhaps B-Roll of them conversing or drafting emails. Then you head back to Stanford for another shot just to find out that you are on the mathematically perfect opposite side of campus from where you need to be. You are also 10 minutes behind schedule. As you rush to the building in a blind panic, you lose control of the cart carrying your multi-thousand dollar equipment. It careens into an onslaught of cyclists.
While true that something always went wrong, and it was somehow always my fault, I was learning. After everything, when I stood back to see all that had happened, it was breathtaking. The experience was unrivaled by anything I had ever known – the pressure entwined with the purpose; the exhaustion with satisfaction; the stress and the joy like a bittersweet song, one incomplete without the other.
The night before the shoot, I almost decided not to go. I was convinced the pressure would crush me. That I would forget to press record during the heart of some critical interview. That I would fail the entire crew and every sharp mind that worked on this project, or that I would be the fatal crack in the marble that causes the sculpture to give way. Those scenarios did not unfold.
So, don’t let any opportunities pass you because they seem impossible. I would have missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime if I had let my insecurity consume me. I wouldn’t have been able to help showcase the Navigation Project, a phenomenal approach to how we treat defendants. The challenge you face, whether academic or otherwise, will always seem impossible, impenetrable, insurmountable, before and during, until you have finished it.
Even as the temperatures rise, the crops turn to dust and the industries prevail, you still hold in your hands an inviolable power. Your complex brain, yes, that selfsame brain that convinces you that everything is futile, is also your greatest tool. Using that power, fighting for yourself tooth and nail, taking advantage of every opportunity even when you feel so deeply that you do not deserve it – that is how you make progress. Write the article, go on the shoot, take the internship, join the club, deliver the speech, draft the email, wake up in the morning, take the chance. You’ll never know what it looks like on the other side of the door until you walk through it.
The documentary, All Rise, will be screened on Stanford’s campus and will be available freely online in the winter of 2026.
