Andrew James made his first documentary as a lark.
The Utah native co-directed “Cleanflix,” the story of film studios suing corporations for modifying out their movies’ mature content material, throughout his BYU days.
“We had no thought what we have been doing,” a humble James tells Hollywood in Toto.
“Cleanflix” earned a slot on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition and generated sturdy critiques. The unintended fame upended his skilled objectives. “That was it … I wanna make motion pictures now.”
The expertise gave James a golden ticket, of kinds, into the documentary movie enviornment. He frolicked on the Sundance Institute, sharpening his storytelling abilities. Different film-related invites adopted, together with pitch classes and mentorships.
And, alongside the way in which, James noticed how the docu-sausage was made.
“It was eye-opening,” he says.
His follow-up venture, “Road Combating Males,” adopted three black Detroit residents keen to enhance their lives and people round them.
He earned a Sundance grant to complete the venture, together with unsolicited recommendation.
“It wasn’t political sufficient for them,” he says of the persistent suggestions for a movie that hit the pageant circuit from 2017-2019 earlier than its 2020 launch. Collaborators, together with these adjoining to the venture, needed a movie that captured the burgeoning Black Lives Matter motion within the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 demise.
The expertise taught him onerous classes about each the trade and its cultural expectations.
“The artwork is secondary to the messaging,” he says. “If the artwork can be there, they get actually excited.”
He tried to diplomatically hear with out compromising his imaginative and prescient.
“I take into account myself a Leftist … I used to be attempting to please these folks whereas being true to my artwork,” he says. These experiences taught him conflicting themes about non-fiction storytelling within the trendy period.
“Objectivity doesn’t exist … there’s no reality,” he remembers of the teachings, pushed by way of funding from teams like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. “Lived expertise” mattered extra, the consultants insisted.
“That’s what I used to be up towards,” he says.
In the long run, James didn’t take his friends’ recommendation. That call had skilled penalties.
“First, I used to be handled rather well. That shifted. [Later] I used to be handled just like the enemy,” he says. “Finally, I simply drifted away from the entire scene. They gained’t communicate to me now. I can solely assume why.”
His present venture, “Technology-Covid,” gained’t win them again.
The world needs to neglect what occurred throughout covid.
However our kids are nonetheless paying the value.
Technology-Covid is a documentary function movie that tells the story of this forgotten technology. pic.twitter.com/9VRxWdqMDI
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) August 7, 2025
He first learn entrepreneur and creator Jennifer Sey’s views on COVID-19 on Twitter. Sey waged rhetorical battle towards lockdowns, arguing they dramatically impacted youngsters’s lives. For that, she famously misplaced her plum job at Levi’s.
A number of clicks later, James was invited into a personal chat on the topic, throughout which he talked about he was a documentary filmmaker.
Sey, who beforehand produced the gymnastics exposé “Athlete A,” needed to make a film concerning the lockdown’s punitive impact on children. It’s a topic the Legacy Media reluctantly acknowledged years after the actual fact, however she felt it deserved extra consideration.
James agreed, setting the stage for “Technology-Covid.”
The documentary lets youngsters and censored consultants alike share how the U.S. Authorities needlessly punished Individuals, all within the title of “science.” The movie’s official description explains extra:
Regardless of clear and incontrovertible real-time proof of the harms being achieved, particularly to the poor and dealing class, highly effective forces sought to censor, silence and vilify anybody who questioned the efficacy of those unprecedented and unscientific selections, and our kids are nonetheless paying the value.
All of us are.
James isn’t a dad or mum but. He and his spouse expect their first youngster. He went into the venture as somebody terrified of authoritarian overreach. He additionally understood a core reality about life.
“Adults neglect what it’s prefer to be an adolescent or to be in grade faculty,” he says. “That’s your complete world, and also you had it stripped away [with the lockdowns].”
Cynics could label “Technology-Covid” a conservative movie, given a number of the arguments in play. Proper-leaning Individuals have been extra skeptical of COVID-19 overreach than their liberal friends. Key figures on the Left celebrated vaccine mandates, for instance.
James says politics play an element within the movie, however solely by necessity.
“The movie isn’t a pro-Trump film. We’re not letting him off the hook both,” he says. “The movie factors out that this was a systemic drawback. Each events performed a job … it’s baked into the story.”
One drawback going through “Technology-Covid?” Some could want to neglect concerning the lockdowns and the injury achieved.
“There may be positively cultural resistance to revisiting this from all political views. Lots of people participated in it and really feel some disgrace round it,” he says, referring to a interval of “mass hysteria.”
“Individuals don’t need to suppose that it might occur once more … however it’ll occur once more if we don’t have this dialog. It may very well be a lot worse … that’s why the movie is being made,” he says.
James stays disconnected from the documentary subject, which he sees as collectively out of contact.
“Each film is about local weather change or LGBTQ+ or trans points … all of them comply with the identical aesthetic tropes… I don’t need to preserve doing that,” he says. “I needed to make one thing difficult.”