Michael Joseph McDonald on Holding a Camera Responsibly in ‘6,000 Waiting’

Michael Joseph McDonald did not come to filmmaking because he grew up obsessed with movies. In fact, he barely watched them. What eventually pulled him behind a camera was something much less romantic: watching someone be denied the ability to move freely through the world.

While living in Kenya, McDonald knew a woman, Susan Wagothi with Down syndrome who had been invited to the United States to speak at an international meeting. Her visa was rejected. Even after she returned with a personal invitation from the governor of Oregon, she was rejected again. McDonald remembers realizing, “her body is not going to be allowed to cross the border, but a camera is like a passport, and the internet is a plane.”

Before McDonald became a documentarian, he spent several years working as a ghostwriter in Kenya, where he learned that telling someone else’s story meant getting comfortable with being corrected. He had been hired to write books on social justice issues and, for one project on educational reform, interviewed more than 500 people. Drafts were then handed back to large groups of students, parents, teachers, principals and others who would openly tell him when he was getting their experiences wrong.

When he finally got it right, he secured a grant, picked up a DSLR—despite having a little high-school video experience—and made a video with her. Within two weeks, he said, it had been viewed in 80 countries and screened at the United Nations. Suddenly, film could do something writing could not. That realization eventually became part of the path toward documentaries like 6,000 Waiting, but McDonald’s relationship to disability began long before he picked up a camera.

He started volunteering with people with disabilities around age 10 and later became a disability caregiver. After university, he moved to France and worked in a shared home with eight people who used little or no speech to communicate. McDonald had also been diagnosed with a learning disorder when he was young, placing him, as he describes it, “always in the disability advocacy world.”

McDonald’s career as a writer and ghostwriter would eventually take him to Kenya, where he interviewed hundreds of people while working on books dealing with social issues. That experience taught him that telling someone else’s story required something other than arriving with the right answer. “It really forced me to learn how to listen and to try to get out of the way and to be a midwife for other people’s voices,” he said. That willingness to get out of the way became just as important when he transitioned into documentary filmmaking.

McDonald speaks about caregiving in unusually direct terms. He remembers intimate situations in which another person might already feel exposed or ashamed and the responsibility that comes with making sure they do not feel diminished in the process. “The last thing you want them to feel is small,” he said. From those experiences, he learned the importance of communicating something without necessarily saying it aloud.

“When you’re helping someone in the bathroom, you don’t want your face or manner to make them feel ashamed or give them the impression that you’re disgusted. That’s stayed with me in documentary. Someone might tell me about something terrible that happened to them, something they regret doing, or just something small that’s hard to say. I don’t want them watching my face and thinking, ‘He thinks less of me now.’ I want them to know, ‘He hasn’t checked out. He still sees me as a person.’”

For him, that becomes especially important when filmmakers are dealing with painful stories. A camera can amplify someone’s experience, but it can also turn that experience into material. McDonald is aware of the difference.

He describes interview subjects watching the filmmaker just as carefully as they are being watched, looking for the moment when curiosity turns into judgment or, worse, excitement over somebody else’s pain. His answer to that instinct is deceptively simple. “I believe in your dignity. There’s no perimeter.” That philosophy extends beyond what makes it into a film. It also shapes what never gets filmed.

McDonald talked about situations in which a person with limited verbal communication has rejected an interview. Rather than seeing that as a lost opportunity, he views the refusal itself as meaningful.

“I’ve had people reject an interview, and I think that’s a win because maybe that person gets forced to do things by the folks around them,” he said. “And if they say no, I’m like, hey, you exerted your power. That’s great.”

That distinction matters. Documentary filmmaking inherently gives someone with a camera tremendous control to decide what gets recorded, what gets cut, whose voice leads and how another person is eventually understood by strangers. For a filmmaker working so consistently around disability, surrendering some of that control becomes part of the job.

That philosophy helps explain McDonald’s approach to 6,000 Waiting, a documentary short that follows three people on Georgia’s waiver waiting list for community-based disability services. This is a list that currently holds more than 6,000 people.

His work is interested in disability advocacy, but he knows advocacy alone is not enough. The method matters too. A documentary about people whose choices are already constrained cannot reproduce that same imbalance behind the camera.

McDonald’s filmmaking grew out of years spent learning to listen to people whose language he did not speak, people who communicated differently and communities whose experiences were not his own. Even his ghostwriting work taught him that representation sometimes means resisting the desire to become the authority. Today, he describes his filmmaking career with some humor, saying “it’s just been public embarrassment that has taught me filmmaking.” But underneath the joke is a much more serious standard. He says the people he makes films about are among his toughest critics. 

For McDonald, perhaps that is exactly how it should be. The camera may be a passport, but it does not make the filmmaker the owner of the journey.