03 - CRAFTING THE STORY
Updated: Aug 22
Writer and Director Dan Sanguineti reveals the behind the scenes stories while making BEYOND THE RUN.
It remained important that I instilled genuine authenticity into the story, rather than manufactured moments.
To seed this correctly, in the months leading up to the Run itself, I chose to be curious and inquisitive with my main subjects and looked to get to know them and understand them. I achieved this by often re-asking similar but differently worded questions I had asked in a previous filming session. This created a lot of material I was never planning to use in the film but ironically, some of it did end up in the final cut. More importantly, it consensually conditioned my interview subjects: by the time we reached their final interviews, they already understood what I was looking for from them.
The dichotomy of Beyond the Run's narrative structure stems from a deep affection that I have for storytelling that makes characters earn their place in their own story, where a mid-point reversal is significant to their character arc. With ten key subjects featured within the film, I felt it was important to have individual personal stories contribute to a collective character arc, as a running group, where elements of one runner's story answered that of another. I also wanted the film to argue something the runners couldn't say outright.
The first half is about labels. We meet all ten of them the way Australia currently meets international students and migrants: as categories. A name card. An age. An occupation. The word "current" or "former" attached to "international student" like a status that never quite expires. Cut against that, the film plays real news footage of politicians arguing about student caps and rental markets, the same conversation happening in the country these ten people were building lives in. By the time we know each of the runners who will embark on this epic journey, we also know exactly what box each has been placed in by the public conversation around them.
