"'What Matters': Documenting the Fight for Racial Equality"

Doug Swift is a documentary filmmaker who specializes in reporting from smaller communities around the Midwest. He also teaches video-journalism at Denison.

His most recent documentary, “‘What Matters’: Documenting the Fight for Racial Equality in Zanesville,” looks at a local response to the Black Lives Matters movement in the county seat of Ohio’s rural Muskingam County.

A Zanesville Recorder article quoted Swift: “My way of thinking, a good documentary poses a question,” Swift said. “As I was working to find a title, even though there’s not a question after ‘What Matters,’ because I wanted it to feel a little more definitive than that. (But) I still think it should be a search about what mattered.”