As the 2004 presidential election approached, Katy Chevigny knew that the country would be paying more attention to the process of voting than they had in the past, due to the debacle at the polls in 2000. She wanted to step back from the horserace that the media so often focuses on to figure out what those voters were thinking. What would their experience of and perspective on voting be like in the wake of 2000? As an independent documentary filmmaker, Chevigny knew that she was in a position to go after this story. After all, while we in the independent documentary community don’t have the financial resources of CNN or MSNBC, we do have the editorial freedom to go after the story we think is important.

So Katy pulled Dallas Brennan Rexer and I onto the project as producers in September 2004 and we all set to work to find the kinds of human stories that would illustrate the systemic electoral problems that the 2000 election had brought to light. And in addition to problems, we wanted to take the temperature of the electorate: Did they still have faith in the electoral process? What types of concerns did they have about voting and about the bigger issues the country faced? And how did the vastness and diversity of our country and difference in state-by-state election laws affect people’s voting experiences?

The result was a cinema-verite documentary film, Election Day, which has been playing the festival circuit around the country since last spring and will be broadcast on the PBS series “POV” in summer of 2008. The film follows voters in a dozen cities around the country from dawn til dusk on November 2, 2004. An ex-felon votes for the first time in his life in New York; an Arab-American woman takes her husband to the polls, where he is embarrassed after making a mistake on his ballot; a Republican pollwatcher in Chicago rails against the shenanigans of the Democratic machine; and an 18-year-old farm girl registers and votes on the same day in rural Wisconsin.

As we approach the 2008 election, we are thrilled that our film has been a part of the public dialogue around how we as a country vote—and why. We have gotten incredibly positive feedback from audiences about how much they learned about the electoral process, the passions of American voters, and the people whose efforts make our democracy tick. The public is hungry for another type of story about elections. What will it take for the media to provide that story? There were a couple notable factors in our process that made it possible to tell the story we told.

Access to polling places: One of the biggest challenges in the pre-production of the film and on Election Day itself was gaining access for our 14 camera crews to polling places around the country. We operated on the basic conviction that the process of voting should be transparent and therefore our cameras had a right to be inside. But because we were not considered a “news crew” by some, we had to fight our way in to many polling places. We got press credentials from an indy media outlet, LinkTV, that helped in some cases. And the crews behaved as though they were just supposed to there, which worked in many cases. There were a few officials who shared our belief in transparency and others that had laws against it, such as Florida. In the end, we gained significant access to the majority of polling places we filmed at—this was essential to telling to the story of what happened at the polls.

Public media support: Arts Engine and Big Mouth Films funded the bulk of the costs of the shooting day, which yielded 105 hours of footage. The film was in the can. But the majority of a documentary film budget is in the post-production. It was a year later when we got the green light on funding from the Independent Television Service, and about a year later that we had the green light on broadcast from “POV”. Both ITVS and POV are committed to supporting independent filmmakers and providing a showcase for independent media. The important factor here: we retain final editoral cut on the film. We worked closely with ITVS and POV to make the best film for the public television audience, but they gave us wide latitude in major editorial choices. It’s a very unique experience in television today to be allowed to make your film as your want to make it.

The road to making an independent documentary is a long one—in this case it was almost a 3-year process. Throughout it all, we were motivated by our interest in telling a more complex story about American democracy than we had been seeing on the news. And we also felt an obligation to do so. We make independent media because of the opportunity to tell a story in our own way. And with that opportunity there is a responsibility to contribute stories to the public dialogue that enhance our understanding of each other as fellow citizens. This is not a responsibility that often coincides with feeding the bottom line, as the big networks must do. So it is left to the independent media community to find a way to put our stories out into the world. In that vein, I can’t wait to see what stories might emerge from fellow indy-media makers in the 2008 election cycle. As always, I’ll be watching for less horse-race and more voices of the citizenry. They’re an interesting bunch, those American citizens, don’t you think?