AN APPEAL BY SOMY ALI WHOSE Fight Or Flight starts streaming from May 26

AN APPEAL BY SOMY ALI WHOSE Fight Or Flight starts streaming from May 26

Please set your reminder to watch something special, premiering next Thursday.Next week, an incredible series I executive produced on the work of Somy Ali will premiere on Discovery+.  You can watch the trailer here, and read up a bit on it here.

Anyone that has worked with me on a TV series knows how seriously I take the importance of strong ethics when producing TV and film. As I’ve always said, most of my job as a showrunner is emphasizing the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what’ of good storytelling to my team.
You can’t make rewarding work or tell impactful, entertaining stories unless you and your team always stand below the show itself, holding it aloft, taking care of each other in the process. You have to put your ego aside and get out of the way to tell the best stories for them to land to the largest audience possible.
A little over a year ago, with my role of Head of Current and EP for Cineflix, some great colleagues and I began a series following the heroic work of Somy. Working with her and telling her story is one of the proudest achievements in my life.
For more than 15 years, Somy and her nonprofit No More Tears have rescued thousands of men, women, and children from domestic violence and sex trafficking. And during the pandemic, as we started filming, domestic abuse and human trafficking spiked. We all saw it. As Somy puts it, “Domestic violence is a pandemic within this pandemic that we’re going through. People are dying. My goal and my responsibility is to change that.”
Knowing the serious nature of the subject material, how delicate we would need to be when managing access to survivors as they share their stories, and the potential challenges such stories and events could have on our crew, we had to do this right.
I can’t speak highly enough of the team we built, and the leadership behind them. When staffing our crew for Fight or Flight, we were intentional about designing a team that could support Somy Ali and the survivors by generating a healthy working dynamic that allowed for sustained trust. Our core field crew was staffed with qualified professionals who are also strong, empathetic women. This created an environment where survivors felt safe to share with us intimate details of their experiences with domestic abuse and human trafficking,
We also enrolled a trauma consultant with experience counselling survivors through their daily work to help our crew feel safe and supported while remaining both productive and empathetic during the entire production process.

I believe all of this matters, and especially considering the challenges of producing during COVID, we wouldn’t have accomplished what we did without this intentional approach.

Please, enjoy the series, and consider donating to Somy’s foundation, ‘No More Tears’.