The filmmakers
The people behind the record.
Eileen Cleary Dougherty and Paul Dougherty began filming their neighbors in March 2020. What started as an immediate response became a six-year act of listening—an archive built in relationship with the people whose lives it holds.
Producer
Eileen Cleary Dougherty
Eileen is a journalist, producer, and editor whose career has been spent recording history as it unfolds. As a Washington bureau chief, she led coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, and national political conventions for more than sixty network affiliates and international broadcasters.
She co-founded The Camera 1 Group and founded Backstory Media in 2015, bringing broadcast production experience to deeply personal, first-person films. For this project, she conceived and produced the original 2020 archive, conducted the 2025 and 2026 interviews, and has maintained relationships with more than seventy participants.
“I did not set out to make a film. I set out to keep a record.”
Director of photography
Paul Dougherty
Paul is a co-founder of The Camera 1 Group and a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning director of photography known for expressive lighting and exacting field craft. His work spans four decades of documentaries, network news, and major live events, including presidential coverage for CBS 60 Minutes.
His honors include a 2024 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2023 National Press Club Award, a 2009 Peabody Award, and multiple White House News Photographers Association awards. He filmed the original 2020 interviews and returned to shape the visual language of the retrospective conversations.
How the film was made
Fieldwork first.
Film second.
The project began before there was a script, an ending, or even a working title. The filmmakers followed what was happening at street level: restaurant kitchens becoming donation centers, sanitation workers continuing their routes, nurses reporting for duty, neighbors making masks, and protesters entering streets that had only weeks earlier gone silent.
Five years later, they returned with the original testimony in hand. The film is built on two clocks—the immediacy of 2020 and the meaning people can make of it now. There is no narrator. The participants carry the story in their own words.
A community-built archive
The relationships are part of the record.
Interview subjects were found through congregations, neighborhood organizations, small businesses, arts institutions, and people who vouched for the filmmakers. Those relationships shaped who was heard, where interviews happened, and how the film will return to the communities that made it possible.
Community collaborators
Many doors were opened by people already trusted inside them.
Nearly fifty interviews in 2020.
More than seventy people across the complete archive.
Three neighborhoods, returning to the same unfinished year.
Made possible by
Public history needs public support.
Previously developed and submitted for funding under the working title Voices of Resilience.
A call for stories
Your memories belong in the record.
Did you live or work in Washington, DC during 2020? We are continuing to listen. Tell us about the moment, person, place, loss, or act of care that has stayed with you.