“You try to imagine which way it might go, and you game out scenarios, but you can’t ever really know.” “When you’re making a vérité film, you never know what the story’s going to be,” Lears says. And she took a special interest in a bartender from the Bronx named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a far-leftist with new ideas and an electrifying presence with which to sell them. She went to West Virginia’s coalmining belt, where Paula Jean Swearengin ran on a platform of cleansing the pollution that had choked out their community. She followed Nevada’s Amy Vilela on her tireless crusade to overhaul healthcare after insurance complications resulted in the death of her daughter. She trained her lens on Cori Bush, a woman of color who thought Missouri’s seats in the House of Representatives should reflect its diverse populace. Lears selected four subjects for the feature that would ultimately blossom into her film Knock Down the House, premiering on Netflix this week. Each of them saw the value in telling their story even before they knew what the story was going to be.” “They were recruiting people, and some of our conversations started before the candidates had even launched their campaign. “I started this process working with the organizations Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats to get in contact with the people that they were considering supporting,” Lears tells the Guardian.