The standard patient advocate interview has a familiar look: clean background, rehearsed answers, the faint ghost of a cue card.

We threw that playbook out.

Through in-depth pre-interviews with each Xiidra advocate, we identified the personal objects that unlocked their stories - mementos, keepsakes, artifacts of a life lived with a chronic disorder. On camera, those objects became the interview itself. Subjects weren't answering questions. They were holding something meaningful and talking about it naturally.

The result is the kind of candor you can't manufacture: unhurried, conversational, and completely their own. No cue cards. No coaching toward a predetermined beat. Just the documentary filmmaker's instinct — do the work before the camera rolls, so the camera catches something real.