The Feeling That Doesn’t Go Away
On Zoe Dirse, CSC - President of Canadian Society of Cinematographers, and the ongoing vocation of inclusion
I remember the first time I walked down a hallway waiting to see whether I had done something properly.
It wasn’t a film set. It was a control room. Radio. Years ago now. The red light would come on, and suddenly everything you thought you understood about your own competence seemed… provisional. You waited for the broadcast to end, not so much to hear the audience reaction, but to confirm that you hadn’t made a fool of yourself.
You told yourself this would pass.
It never quite did.
Zoe Dirse, the Canadian cinematographer, describes a similar walk. A corridor at the National Film Board. Film rushes waiting at the end. A mentor beside her. Her heart racing, despite the fact that she already knew—technically, at least—that she had done the job correctly. She had exposed properly. Lit properly. Done what was required.
Still, she asked the question that tends to surface when you’re close to the thing you care about: Does this feeling ever go away?
Her mentor didn’t hesitate.
The minute it goes away, you’re no longer a good cinematographer.
It is not a comforting answer. But it is an honest one.
Dirse did not begin young, which is another way of saying she began with a certain awareness of time. By the late 1970s, when she entered the film industry, she was already in her late twenties—older than most of her peers, and perhaps less inclined to accept the pace the industry had prepared for her.
She was told, as many are, that it would take ten years before she might reasonably expect to operate a camera.
Ten years is a long time to wait for permission.
She decided she would be shooting by thirty.
This was not rebellion in the dramatic sense. No speeches. No grand gestures. Just a quiet recalibration of expectations. She found another route—the National Film Board of Canada—and got to work.
Seventeen years. More than seventy documentaries.
There is a tendency, particularly in film schools, to talk about vision as though it arrives fully formed. As though one wakes up one morning and sees differently, more clearly, more artistically than others. Dirse has no time for that idea. You do not wake up brilliant, she says. You become competent by doing the work. Repeatedly. Relentlessly.
It is a craft.
That word matters.
Craft suggests something built, not bestowed. Something shaped by hours rather than inspiration. It is not glamorous, but it is dependable. And in a profession where so much feels uncertain—freelance contracts, shifting technologies, the next job—it is one of the few stable things a person can hold onto.
There was, however, another uncertainty that was harder to ignore.
When Dirse entered the industry, she noticed something that, at first, did not quite register as a problem. It was simply… unusual.
There were no women.
Or very few. A handful, scattered, difficult to locate. She had read film credits, of course, as many young people do, scanning names at the end of a movie without necessarily noticing the pattern. But once she began looking closely, the absence became harder to explain.
Where are they? she wondered.
It is a simple question. It rarely has a simple answer.
When she joined the union, there was one other woman. When she entered the Canadian Society of Cinematographers, there were two.
You can work for a long time in a system like that without anyone ever formally telling you that you don’t belong. The system doesn’t need to say it out loud. It is implied in the room, in the crew list, in the quiet assumptions about who holds the camera and who does not.
Dirse’s response was not, at least initially, to challenge the system directly. It was to master it.
She focused on the technical side. Exposure. Lighting. Efficiency. She wanted to be as good as anyone standing next to her—not as a symbolic gesture, but as a practical necessity. If she could do the job at the highest level, then the rest—why she was hired, what perspective she brought—could be sorted out later.
It is a familiar strategy. Earn your place first. Ask questions later.
And yet, the questions do come.
They tend to arrive in quieter moments. Watching a film. Reading credits more carefully than before. Noticing something you might once have overlooked.
Dirse describes watching The Wire and sensing a difference in the way the camera engaged with the characters—an intimacy that felt particular, almost tactile. Later, she discovered that the episodes had been shot by a woman. When the cinematographer changed, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not in a way most viewers would articulate. But enough.
A certain closeness was gone.
You hesitate, in moments like that, to draw conclusions. Correlation is not causation, as the saying goes. And yet, if you spend enough time behind a camera—or in front of a microphone—you begin to suspect that the way we see the world is not entirely neutral.
Dirse puts it more carefully. When she looks through the lens, she asks herself what is shaping that act of seeing. Is it gender? Background? Politics? Experience? Some combination of all of them?
There is no final answer. Only the recognition that the question matters.
Teaching, for Dirse, becomes a way of making that recognition useful.
She did not set out to become an educator. Like many things in her career, it happened gradually. Invitations to speak. A part-time role. Eventually, a full-time position. But the motivation is clear enough.
Visibility.
If you are the only person of your kind in a room for long enough, you begin to understand what it means for others not to see themselves reflected there.
Dirse wanted to be present in a way she herself had not experienced—to show students, particularly young women, that this path was not theoretical.
It could be done.
Her advice is, in some ways, disarmingly simple. Shoot as much as you can. Volunteer when you have to. Work for free, if you can afford it. Collaborate. Find mentors. Stay close to the work.
There is nothing particularly glamorous about this list.
That is precisely the point.
Perhaps the most useful thing Dirse offers, though, is not advice about cameras or careers, but about temperament.
The industry she describes is not stable. Jobs come and go. Technology changes. You wonder, from time to time, how you will pay the bills next month. And yet, she observes, people tend to find a way. Artists, in particular, have a habit of continuing.
This is not optimism in the cheerful sense. It is something quieter. A kind of endurance.
You stay with it.
You stay with the feeling.
That feeling—the one in the hallway, the one before the red light comes on—never quite disappears. Nor should it.
We have, in recent years, developed a habit of treating confidence as the goal. Be certain. Be assured. Know what you are doing at all times. It sounds appealing. It photographs well.
It is not, in my experience, how careful work gets done.
A certain level of unease keeps you honest. It forces you to look again. To check the frame. To listen more closely than you might otherwise. It reminds you that the work matters, and that you are not, in fact, entirely in control of it.
Which is probably as it should be.
Dirse understands this. She has built a career not by eliminating uncertainty, but by working within it—using it, even, as a kind of instrument.
The camera, after all, does not simply record what is there.
It records what someone chooses to see.
And that choice—shaped by experience, by discipline, by doubt—is never as simple as it looks.
Full disclosure: I just became a Companion Member of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers. That happened because I met Zoe after she spoke to one of our classes taught by the great Rick Grunberg here at the RTA School of Media. She stayed extra long to first speak to every student that wanted to ask questions, and then she stayed an hour longer with me, just talking about films, life in Montréal, and everything you just read above. This article was written before that happened, and I’m grateful to the CSC for bringing me in. But I’m also grateful to Zoe for being so engaging with all of our students, especially minorities, and making all of us feel like we belong behind the camera.
a perfect read for the end of March, endurance! that will stay with me. Thanks for featuring Dirse and delving into that * feeling *, that it never goes away if you’re doing it right is such a comforting and motivating reminder.