The Good Candidate

The Good Candidate started out as a final project for eight students of the 2020 Institute for Documentary Filmmaking at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In March 2020, as the students trained on camerawork, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and in-person classes and workshops disbanded. With this curveball and intense lockdowns through the summer, their future as emerging filmmakers was uncertain. They persisted, developing innovative and collaborative production processes to complete the film remotely. The film premiered at a private virtual showcase hosted by the university in the summer.

After the summer semester ended, four of these students—Dan Byrnes, Walker Hull Flemming, Pablo Henrich, and Stephanie Hydal—formed 5Doc Productions, LLC to see the film through further distribution.

Dan studied journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has a background in environmental media and works for a communications firm outside of Washington, D.C. Walker has a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and a background in ethnographic filmmaking working with indigenous communities in the Andes and the Amazon. Pablo is an opera singer who has performed in opera houses around the world. His latest debut was in 2019 at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center. Stephanie has a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a background in audio storytelling and disability justice.

5Doc Productions, LLC is as a filmmaking collective that continues to work with The Good Candidate and is dedicated to continuing the conversations on the film’s themes, including coded extremism and language in politics.