Ad Age is marking Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Bonnie Wan turns the spotlight to journalist, filmmaker and producer Emily Taguchi. Here, Taguchi writes about crafting character-driven verité documentaries.

Having grown up in Japan, I found gun violence in the U.S.—its enormity, senselessness and violence, particularly of mass shootings—impossible to fathom. Shootings were happening all around us, from supermarkets to places of worship to classrooms, with seemingly no end in sight. And as I had children, I became haunted every morning by the fear that the kiss goodbye in front of the school gates could be the last.

Parkland, Florida, joined the ever-growing list of communities to come under siege in February 2018. But in the aftermath were glimmers of hope, as students and families refused to let their stories be forgotten, determined to channel their searing pain and rage to fuel change.

My co-director Jake Lefferman and I filmed the families over the course of eight months for our film “After Parkland,” honored each time they opened their doors through their darkest days.

I will never forget what Manuel Oliver, who lost his beloved 17-year-old son Joaquin, told us: You wake up, survive 24 hours, then do it again. 

I’ve continued to direct and produce documentaries focused on the human experience behind the most pressing issues of our time, including “Asylum” (Hulu), a short film chronicling the dreams and realities of Honduran families seeking refuge in the U.S., and “Chicago vs. Jussie Smollett” (CNN), the tangled web of race, crime and punishment in Chicago told through the celebrity case.

Today, I make nonfiction series for CNN’s longform unit, working alongside some of the most creative and thoughtful storytellers in the industry. We are in the midst of crafting character-driven verité documentaries on urgent and often divisive subjects, from abortion to transgender athletes to the war in Ukraine.

Each of these stories represent much more than “issues” to be battled over; behind the headlines are individuals and families whose lives are upended, often forever.

Some of the families who participated in “After Parkland” held vastly different political perspectives, but shared the bottomless grief of losing a loved one and an ardent desire to never see their experience repeated. It sounds awfully cliché, and perhaps a reflection of my naïveté, but I hope that storytelling might still have a chance—if not to change minds, then to open eyes to the fact that we have a shared humanity, and a shared destiny, more often than not.