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First-time director Goodenough, who also served as a producer, said in an interview with BmoreArt that he’s been amazed at how “people all over the planet are relating” to the film’s themes of dysfunctional politics and violence as intergenerational trauma.

The broad appeal of a film so firmly grounded in the specificity of Baltimore doesn’t surprise Sitney. “There’s no better way to grapple with what are fundamentally national, if not global, issues than through a very intimate lens,” she observed by phone recently. “What makes documentary film important is our ability to recognize something in those details that is also to some extent universal.”

Achieving on screen the seemingly effortless sense of intimacy with Scott, a cross-section of Baltimore’s citizens and institutions, and the complex subject matter took years of immersion in documenting the city’s socio-political ecosystem from City Hall to the city streets—and some serious filmmaking chops.

Filming for the project that was to eventually become The Body Politic began as far back as September 2019. At that time, Goodenough started following the campaign of the young, Black Baltimore City Council President Brandon Scott when he announced his candidacy for mayor. He also trailed several other candidates vying in the 2020 Democratic primary, applying an observational approach to letting events unfold and characters reveal themselves while the camera rolls, a style of documentary film broadly referred to as cinema verité.

Goodenough’s peripatetic several-decade career behind the camera had taken him from entry-level positions on fiction productions like A Beautiful Mind to serving as cinematographer on the Emmy-award winning 2020 documentary A Thousand Cuts helmed by Baltimore director Ramona Diaz.

A health crisis motivated him to slow down and turn his camera to politics in his hometown for his directorial debut, called at first simply Untitled Baltimore Documentary Project. He aspired, he readily admits, to making a Baltimore version of the political documentary classic Street Fight about the Newark mayoral election contest between a long-time incumbent and his political machine and an idealistic young upstart (the now Senator Cory Booker).

Fellow cameraman John Benam joined him in the shooting, often assigned to shadowing Scott. Benam brought years of camera work experience on non-fiction films including Charm City, another documentary exploring violence in Baltimore in which Councilman Scott also appeared.

“When you’re doing the kind of verité filmmaking [Goodenough] does, there’s a risk,” explained Annette Porter, Director of the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund, which provided the project’s first grant funding in 2020, in an interview. “You’ve got to start following things early, but you don’t know what the story is going to be.”

When Scott unexpectedly wins the primary and then the general election, Goodenough and Benam, who served as the film’s two cinematographers, were well positioned to keep recording, capturing Scott’s shift from candidate to office-holder in real time. Few documentaries have honed in on that transition from the high drama of a time-bound campaign cycle to the open-ended slog of converting rhetoric into policy implementation that comes with governance, much less with the kind of magnifying glass The Body Politic ended up taking. 

“We would get the mayor’s schedule, and we would figure out where and when he was and where he’d be, and we would be there,” said Goodenough, of that period. Proximity also helped. “Our little closet slash office was right next to the mayor’s. It was almost the closest office to the door of the mayor’s office.”

At a post-screening Q&A of The Body Politic at Howard University in October hosted by WHUT/Howard University Television, Scott said he agreed to such extensive behind-the-scenes access to show the reality of how hard it is to effect policy change. However, Scott did not have editorial input on the film.

“It was about showing the city and really the world, what it is to be a mayor; what it’s like to try to really handle the city’s long-standing challenges the right way,” he said. “It’s not that you just snap your fingers and then stuff happens… You have to have support from other people. You have to develop plans. You have to go to the community. You have to do all these things.”

Additionally, Scott said he hoped these insights would give a leg up to individuals with backgrounds like his who had political aspirations. “It’s important in leadership, if you truly want to be not the only one—the first one, but not the last—to show out to the world what it is actually to be you,” he declared. 

Goodenough and Benam each operated largely as a single-man crew, agile and unobtrusive enough to film in whatever city milieu the action and their instincts took them. “We’re, like, we’ll follow this person, we’ll follow this thing, then there’s press conferences, and then we’re in these meetings,” he said of their wide-ranging shooting schedule. “Obviously there’s lots of stuff happening in the city [to film], and we’re also following other characters in the mayor’s office.” 

They were consistently present enough to develop the bonds with participants that make the film feel so authentically local. Cameras were rolling for at least 350 days, Goodenough estimates, while many more days were spent just hanging out with the participants. “If they learn to trust you, then they forget about you,” related Benam, also a producer on the film, of the diverse set of Baltimore citizens they filmed. “They start to act like their true selves, and not like there’s a camera.”

The fact that Goodenough and Benam, and most of the film’s crew, came from Baltimore proved an advantage in another way, too.  

“I think Baltimore is one of those situations where it’s like walking through a community with a big camera, people are going to appreciate it more if you are from here,” noted Jahsol Drummond, a Baltimore native who joined The Body Politic as a production assistant and ended up with an associate producer credit, in an interview. “There is a familiarity that people from Baltimore find with other people from Baltimore that’s hard to replicate.”

Ultimately the production amassed 700 hours of footage documenting countless slices of Baltimore political and community life. For about a year in the editing process, Goodenough and the filmmaking team played around with a number of different narratives to concentrate on, including the project’s original premise of following the mayoral election campaigns of 2019-20. 

Eventually, out of all the material one story started cohering: the political courage to take a long-term view on a topic that Baltimore has wrestled with for decades, in the face of a system that demands quick fixes. 

Of the many policy initiatives and priorities Scott championed when he took office, at the top of the list was addressing the city’s pervasive gun violence through a public health lens and as a cause and consequence of intergenerational trauma. Looking to the root causes driving violence and offering wrap-around services to those engaged in and affected by violence flew in the face, however, of persistent calls for law-and-order interventions. 

So the stakes were high in pursuing this strategy—for the quality of life and safety of residents, for the rehabilitation of the city’s reputation, and for Scott retaining the political clout to carry out his vision. And the roadblocks were many—skeptical entrenched interest groups, distrusting communities, gaps in funding.

In addition to Scott, the filmmakers had gained access to other key actors in the holistic violence prevention movement: members of his administration like Shantay Jackson, whose role oversaw several of the violence prevention initiatives that ended up featured in the film; peace activist Erricka Bridgeford; and leaders of the frontline community violence interrupters initiative Baltimore Safe Streets, Dante Johnson and Tater Barksdale, in neighborhoods like Belair-Edison.

Over the following six months of editing, Goodenough and editor Thomas Niles used these compelling characters, the built-in dramatic tension of the push-and-pull of policymaking, and the depth and breadth of recorded observations about so many sides of Baltimore to craft a pacing 90 minutes of engaging storytelling with meaningful, real-life implications. While remaining true to its hyper-local origins, the film allows Scott to become a stand-in for all young, idealistic leaders pushing for change, and Baltimore to represent every city.

Although The Body Politic doesn’t sugarcoat the frustrations and formidable forces pushing against the rollout of multi-faceted violence prevention initiatives, it does conclude on a hopeful note, citing the reduction of violence in the neighborhoods targeted by Scott’s programs and the community-level peacemakers.  

Since wrapping post-production in the spring of 2023, the film has been on a nearly non-stop journey of screenings to audiences from Alaska to Zanzibar (literally). Most have been attended by Goodenough (or other members of the filmmaking team like Benam or producer Dawne Langford), and film participants like Bridgeford or Johnson. Scott makes regular appearances as well. 

With gun violence and the search for solutions being a perennial subject of policy and public interest, the appetite for what the film has to bring to discussions is high. Recently, the film was screened at the White House, for instance, in association with a convening of the group Mayors Against Gun Violence. 

The team has been especially gratified by the reception to the film among fellow city residents. At the Baltimore premiere screening I attended last fall at The Charles Theatre, The Body Politic received multiple standing ovations and a second theater had to be commandeered for the overflow attendees. 

“I was extremely nervous about showing the film in Baltimore,” said Goodenough of that event. “The reaction was amazing. It was cathartic. It made the previous, at that point, four years [spent making the film] worth it.” 

Two hundred students and administrators from the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School took a recent field trip to Parkway Theatre to watch the film, greeted by Mayor Scott who, according to Benam, asked the kids to think about, while watching the film, how to deal with their emotions and their frustrations and anger in different ways that doesn’t lead to violence or shootings. 

The students’ level of enthusiasm and engagement in what was happening on screen floored producer Benam. “We’ve never had such a raucous kind of audible celebration in a screening.”

The Body Politic team remains committed to having the film seen even more widely by Baltimore audiences following its national broadcast. Goodenough is working to make the film accessible at no cost to schools and libraries in Baltimore City and surrounding areas. Scott’s recent re-election will doubtless ensure the film remains salient in continuing conversations about ending gun violence in the region.

Fundraising for more community screenings and a wider impact campaign that could involve communities, policymakers, and interested citizens in the issues raised by The Body Politic is ongoing.

“I would love, love, love to do impact activities” says Goodenough. “It’s really a question of resources, and hopefully the film’s success so far will lead to even more success that will help make that possible.”

Associate producer Drummond, 24, agrees that broader local distribution would be particularly impactful. He attended the film’s Zanzibar screening and appreciates how The Body Politic is resonating with audiences far from Baltimore. He feels, though, that it’s his peers close to home who could most be in need of the sense of hope offered by the film’s depictions of everyday heroes in their city trying to make positive change around gun violence. 

“I think a lot of young people don’t realize that there are people who are doing the work. It’s not a hopeless void as it can be depicted. Sometimes it can be hard to understand that there are people doing the work, even if you don’t see them or know that you’re seeing them every day, and the work is simpler than you think,” he said.

“This documentary in the purest sense is a message of how people in Baltimore help people in Baltimore.”

The Body Politic will make its national broadcast premiere on POV Monday, November 25, at 10pm ET (check local listings) on PBS Television. The documentary will be available to stream until February 23, 2025, via pbs.org and the PBSApp.