Thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes footage were shot of the former first lady’s disastrous bid for the White House. How did film-maker Nanette Burstein turn it all into a story of hope?
Shortly before midnight on 8 November 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton dozed off in the bedroom of her Manhattan hotel. The presidential candidate was exhausted from the rigours of a bruising election campaign and rattled by a flurry of early results that suggested the verdict was far from a foregone conclusion. She closed her eyes as the slight favourite to become the US’s first female president. She opened them to a nightmare and a world turned upside down.
Clinton’s shock loss to Donald Trump – the embodiment of chaos to her bastion of control – left so much destruction in its wake (a victory party mothballed, shell-shocked staffers out of work, 66m futile votes) that it was easy to overlook the small matter of 2,000 hours of behind-the-scenes campaign footage, shot in a spirit of cautious optimism but now left to languish. Clinton’s office suggested cobbling it together as an official record, an insider’s account of what went wrong. But film-maker Nanette Burstein recoiled when the idea was put to her. “Too soon,” she says now. “Too raw. Too disturbing for the public. I know I wouldn’t want to watch that myself, never mind make it.”
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