He Filmed His Boyfriend's Fashion World. Then the Relationship Ended.
Douglas Keeve's 1995 documentary Unzipped followed Isaac Mizrahi, then a rising fashion figure — and Mizrahi was also Keeve's boyfriend at the time. Keeve tells IndieWire that the relationship fell apart after he made the film. His insistence that follows is the interesting part: the film, he says, is not what split them. Three decades on, he is revisiting the movie and that period of his life, a reminder that the documentary a person makes about someone close to them can outlast the relationship without having caused its end.
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Making a film about your partner is an unusual kind of collaboration: the movie preserves a version of the person at a particular moment, which is not the same as preserving the relationship.
Keeve's point is more precise than that. Something ending after an event is not the same as the event causing it — he can date the breakup to the film without blaming the film for it.