Sensory vérité merges tactile imagery and sound within a cinéma vérité format, providing space for a deep engagement with the film’s subject, characters, and environment. Sensory vérité is akin to a layered process. First you start with the bottom layer of the character of an ecosystem interacting the ethnographic and the sensory, haptic imagery, heightened sound design, and layered with a patient observational, handheld technique of the vérité tradition. Above that, the improvisational interview is infused, occasionally lingering, percolating down to all the other layers, providing context, fodder for the mind, and the steam of the imagination.

In our real lives, we constantly sense both our physical environment and whatever is living in it. In a film, what the audience sees and hears guides their journey and is encoded against a backdrop of time. If the human experience is rooted in the natural world, then the ecological context and human voice is critical for representing that experience in a film devoted to a sensory exploration.

To this end, the sensory vérité style approaches film as a device with the power to draw in both the senses and the intellect, informing a social conscience.

For example, there is little doubt that the climate change we are facing will need a human populace with great empathy and willingness to help each other face our uncertain future. Perhaps film can be one way to help us to not just see and hear the world in front of us more deeply but to also feel it? Perhaps the broad and deep resonance elicited through a sensory vérité approach will engender greater motivation toward the positive social change we will need in the coming years? This is what we strive for in our work.

To read the full chapter, find it here via Routledge.