Quote:
"In retrospect, it is possible for us to see that the film [The Things I Cannot Change] underwent a scrutiny that most observational projects of the time did not. The filmmaker was held accountable in a way that by today's standards seems excessive, not only against the measure of the ethical debaucheries regularly committed by producers of Reality Television (one wonders what Nanny 911 would have done with the Baileys) but against that of even more respectable longitudinal documentary projects (i.e., films where the filmmaker embeds with his or her subjects across periods of time), like Michael Apted's 7Up series. Ballantyne Tree was criticized primarily for what she did not do—pre-screen the film, leave out potentially defamatory scenes, protect the father from self-harm, intervene in a violent situation. Yet all the things she didn't do, in the end, tell us very little about what she did do. At the very least, the project was an attempt to do something about chronic problems associated with poverty, and to do this by bringing the issue before the public eye, being the film with the largest television audience to date for any NFB documentary."
-- Marit Kathryn Corneil

Source:
Corneil, Marit Kathryn. "Winds and Things: Towards a Reassessment of the Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle Legacy." In Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, edited by Michael Brendan Baker, Thomas Waugh, and Ezra Winton. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. (p. 393)