Design the Story of Your Life
There is someone in your family whose story everyone half-knows and nobody has ever written down.
Five questions about them. About ten minutes. At the end, a first look at the film their life would make.
Start with the first questionNo pitch at the end. You keep what you make.
How it works
Five questions
The ones we open with when we sit down to direct a family documentary. They are short. They are not small.
Three acts
Your answers get arranged the way a film is arranged — a beginning that sets something in motion, a middle that costs something, an end that earns itself.
A first look
You see the shape of their film — the treatment a director would work from, in their words and yours.
Ready when you are.
Tell us where to reach you. The first question is on the next page.
One email, then the first question. No newsletter, no sequence you have to escape.
Your answers are used to build your first look, and nothing else.
Or talk to Mari directlyThe outline is free. The film is the next part.
These questions come from Mari Bonnemaison, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who has spent her career asking people about their lives — from Dr. Maya Angelou to families who had never been filmed before. She built Story of a Lifetime after filming her own father telling his stories, months before he died.
Mari ✺