For ‘Procession’ Director Robert Greene, Release Is Just the Beginning

When Robert Greene began work on “Procession,” which follows six middle-aged survivors of abuse as they work together to reenact their traumatic memories on film, the director wanted to upend long standing documentary models.“I didn’t want to have a traditional film where you put the camera in someone’s face, they feel a lot of stuff, you edit it into something powerful, and they feel left out,” Greene tells Variety. “Throughout the making, the more power we gave [the film’s six leads], the more cathartic and beautiful the experience was, and somewhere along the way I realized that every step of [the filmmaking and promotional process] could be part of that therapy.”On paper that meant splitting up the “film by” credit, sharing it with the full cast and crew. In practice that meant breaking down certain divisions between pre-production, production and release, working together with the film’s leads (and co-authors) as much today as over the past few years,...