Joy Tan

Cinematographer Bella Graves and producer Adam Dietrich speak to Incubator and The Paly Voice students about their “Rabbit Hole” documentary yesterday in the Media Arts Center. According to Dietrich, the years-long production process of documentary filmmaking requires sustained commitment from creators who must dedicate themselves deeply to a single story over time. “For a documentary, because it’s different from a written piece for a newspaper, you have to live with your story for years,” Dietrich said. “Really good documentaries can take decades to make. You have to be ‘obsessed’ with your topic.”

The still-incomplete documentary “Rabbit Hole,” which examines Wikipedia’s growing censorship and political pressure, will be presented at 6:30 p.m. today in the Palo Alto High School Media Arts Center.

Rather than a full screening, the event will feature select excerpts from completed portions of the film, followed by an on-stage discussion moderated by former Campanile adviser Esther Wojcicki, who previously taught cinematographer Bella Graves. Director Meg Vatterott, producer Adam Dietrich and Graves plan to share details about funding and their creative process about the project, which is not expected to be released until at least 2027.

In a talk with The Paly Voice and Incubator, Graves — a  2014 Paly alum who worked on C Mag — said the film team for “Rabbit Hole” is actively seeking financial support and has a lot of support from the Bay Area.

Graves said the documentary’s early funding came from the Silicon Valley area, and the team is now returning to the region to build additional support for the project.

“Our first seed financing came from Silicon Valley, and we used a lot of that money to make Rabbit Hole,” Graves said. “We’re going to come see if we can draw more momentum,” Graves said.

According to Graves, Americans often underestimate the fragility of open information by contrasting U.S. access to global censorship realities.

“In America, it’s easy for us to take for granted our freedom of speech and our access to information,” Graves said. “But there are so many countries in the world where even in the last decade, their ability to have that resource of knowledge has been stripped.”

Graves said the film also warns of emerging domestic threats to Wikipedia and raises concerns about who ultimately controls public knowledge.

“The existential threat to Wikipedia is coming from people in our country who don’t want information to be for everyone,” Graves said. “The question we want to ask is ‘Wikipedia is the largest scale of human knowledge that has ever existed, and would we want that to fall into the hands of somebody who wants to control it?’ Probably not.”