Looking back to your childhood, is there a memory or a feeling you had that now feels like a blueprint for the kind of filmmaker you’ve become?
I do think that my childhood and particularly my relationship with my mom and community have shaped my work. I was raised by a single mother in the Bay Area, in California. I also have a younger sister and my grandma was around a lot, so I was raised in this all-female household. My mom worked at an arts education center in Richmond and she didn’t have childcare for me, so I would take all the different classes at the art center. I did drumming, and Son Jarocho, and West African dance, and that taught me how to communicate. It taught me how to laugh, dance, and speak with different types of people with different cultural backgrounds. My mom also took me to a lot of protests. My introduction to art was intertwined with activism. I grew up creating art at protests with my mom and the art’s messages being around collective freedom and liberation. So that mother-daughter relationship shows up a lot in my work, as well as the feeling of freedom when you’re in community, of communal love. The English language doesn’t do a very good job at describing it. But I’ve experienced that feeling while dancing or chanting or being on the frontline together, where you and your community have a shared purpose and feel aligned.
How do those early seeds of lineage and ancestry show up most prominently in your work now?
For many years, I was working on Standing Above the Clouds, which was a short film first, and then became a feature-length documentary. A big motivating factor of my work is exploring families and lineage–the things that get passed down, and the things that get lost. Making Standing Above the Clouds and working with the kiaʻi, or the protectors of Mauna Kea, taught me so much about lineage and culture. Before that project, I had this idea that cultural inheritance might be some sort of ancient text or oral history that’s delivered to you, where suddenly you’re like, “Okay, now I have my culture. Now I understand.” Through becoming so close with the kiaʻi that are in that film, it made me realize, yes, you do inherit things and you do learn things that are ancient, but that culture is also about creating things in the present adding onto what already exists. Culture isn’t something that lives completely in the past.
You mentioned that Standing Above the Clouds started as a short film, and then you expanded it into a feature film. How did your relationship to the story change when you changed its form?
The short was finished at the end of 2019, and premiered at the beginning of 2020. Obviously, we know some other big things that happened in 2020 in the world. As our relationships and the scope of the story grew, the film just felt like it needed to be longer. Originally, I thought that the feature was going to be all about international solidarity. When you see 7,000 people show up to a lava field in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, how did that happen? But with the COVID lockdown, what ended up happening was much more intimate. We went with a super small team and did things very “run and gun”, which complimented the emotional journey that none of us could have predicted when we had first started making it in 2018. Having the space and years of growing together changed the film a lot.
What are the concrete practices that you’ve built into your process that allows for non-extractive storytelling and putting the story back into the community’s hands?
One of my primary methods is a rigorous practice of affirmative consent, meaning that someone is not just willing to do something, but is really invested, really wants to do it, and feels good about it. I also think about who I’m asking, and, based on our power positionality, if they really have the ability to say no if they wanted to. Consent is a continuous process. It’s not like just because you film something, you’re ready for it to be on the big screen. How each of us are portrayed and how our culture is portrayed is very sensitive, and requires sensitive storytelling. In film, we can get so caught up in certain deadlines or film festival submissions that seem so important in the moment, but I was lucky to receive great advice from mentors. “Those things come and go. They happen every year. But you’re the one that’s going to need to live with your film forever.” The people in the film and their community are the ones that will live with this forever. So, if it takes an extra two or three months to make sure that everyone has seen it who needs to see it, and has had time to sit with it and discuss it, it’s worth it. As filmmakers, it’s so important to recognize that even if we’re young and broke and see ourselves as scrappy, which, let’s be real, a lot of us are, we still have power in the inherent fact that we are the ones holding the camera and shaping the story. Sometimes it can feel like, “Who’s even going to see this?” But it’s important for us to responsibly wield our power and understand what we can contribute to movements, to people’s lives, and to cultural conversations.
As documentary filmmakers, we’re uniquely positioned to be on the receiving end of wisdom about humanity. Has anything thematic come up for you through the communities you’ve interacted with?
People really do want to talk about what they’re going through and how they’re feeling if they’re given enough time and space. In general, as a documentarian, I’ve learned that it sometimes just takes asking that first question, and so much can come pouring out. And oftentimes it feels, from my perspective at least, that people have been waiting for someone to ask that question. A lot of human beings process through speaking.
Can you describe a moment in your creative process that changed your perspective on a direction that you had been heading in in the past?
During the Sundance Edit Lab, I had a protected time to just think about the creative. I think the biggest lesson was: no one knows what they’re doing, and that’s the point of this. We’re engaging with a process of creation and experimentation. I also learned to not judge an idea until it’s complete. If you judge an idea when it’s half-baked, then you are cutting off a really important conversation with your work. Even if an idea is not the final form of the thing, it’s what might lead you to something that is the thing. Basically, if you don’t know how it ends up, the idea must be a good one.
How do you figure out when a film is finished, especially when the real life story is ongoing?
I think it’s just a feeling that you have. With Standing Above the Clouds, Hāwane, who is the eldest daughter of the main activist in the film, Pua Case, had a hoʻike, or graduation ceremony, for a healing circle of women. It just felt like such a passing of the torch, a momentous occasion, the weather and the light were perfect–it was just all coming together. I remember my producer, Erin Lau, came up to me and whispered in my ear, “I think you have the ending of your movie.” It was. When you feel like you have your ending, end it. But know it’s fluid. You can always go back and get something if you need to. It doesn’t need to be an absolute. But in terms of emotional, spiritual boundaries, it’s important to communicate an endpoint with participants. You can tell them that although this part is ending, we’ll still be around, that we can of course still talk, but it won’t be filmed anymore. You’re negotiating that change of relationship.
How do you stay present during shoots that feel a little bit hectic?
It’s important to take moments to look away from the monitor and take in your surroundings. “Wow, yeah, this is happening.” I also try to do a bit of a debrief with myself afterwards, reviewing footage and maybe journaling if I’m being my highest self. It has been really nice to look back on journals from times of being in production that track what I was thinking and feeling. I try to remember that in those hectic production moments, taking even just a little bit of time to write things down can be really nice to learn from in the future. I also try to maintain spiritual and energetic boundaries. A big thing for me after a demanding shoot is taking a long shower and washing with a salt scrub, visualizing that I’m washing off everything that I heard and took in, resetting and regrounding myself in my own experiences and emotions. It’s so natural and human to take on the things that we’re hearing and interacting with, but having a moment to return to myself has been really helpful.
Jalena Keane-Lee recommends:
Going on an adventure without your phone
Reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
Reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Watching a movie in theaters by yourself (my favorite solo movie snack is an empanada)
Staring at the moon and basking/journaling in the moonlight
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Reina Bonta.
Reina Bonta | Radio Free (2026-07-16T07:00:00+00:00) Filmmaker Jalena Keane-Lee on the power of responsible storytelling. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/07/16/filmmaker-jalena-keane-lee-on-the-power-of-responsible-storytelling/
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