The Sixth
Filmmaker Sean Fine ’96 set out to make a documentary about the peaceful transition of power. It did not go as planned.
The assignment was fairly straightforward. Academy Award-winning documentarians Sean Fine ’96 and his wife, Andrea Nix Fine, founders of Change Content, had hired a crew led by cinematographer Caz Rubacky to capture what was expected to be then-President Donald Trump’s last speech in office. It was Jan. 6, 2021.
“Ironically, we were making a film about the peaceful transition of power,” Fine explains.
Just before noon, Trump began addressing thousands of supporters from a park just south of the White House fence. As he had done for weeks prior, Trump repeatedly questioned the validity of the 2020 election. “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing,” he said. After speaking for more than an hour, Trump invited supporters to march to the Capitol, where Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to officially certify the electoral vote and declare Joe Biden as the next president. “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump told the crowd.
Twelve minutes after the speech’s conclusion, reports indicate as many as 15,000 people moved on the Capitol from multiple directions. Thus began an insurrection that would not end for nearly six hours.
“He had numerous chances to stop them, to get people to calm down,” Fine contends. “You see in our film that when he finally did, it was too late.”
Rubacky, watching firsthand as the crowd began marching toward the Capitol, reached out to Fine and Nix Fine to ask if he should go as well. They gave him the green light as long as he continued to feel safe. The footage Rubacky and his team captured would become the backbone of THE SIXTH, a feature documentary produced in collaboration with A24 and released in May.
Even for seasoned documentarians, the footage was shocking.
“It was like seeing the worst of human nature unfold for hours,” Nix Fine says. “There’s this one moment that always sticks with me. There’s this man up by the tunnel. He’s there within the whole group of insurrectionists, but he’s screaming, ‘We’re better than this! Stop!’ And he’s trying to scream into this crowd of 10,000 people. It’s just heartbreaking. But it also pisses you off.”
THE SIXTH tells the story of the day from the perspectives of six individuals who were there: freelance photographer Mel D. Cole, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Congressional staffer Erica Loewe, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Robert J. Contee III, and MPD Officers Daniel Hodges and Christina Laury.
“We wanted the film shaped by the words and emotions of people who went through it themselves. Everyone had a moment—or a few moments—where they thought their life might end or something really bad would happen. It was so important to us to show that,” Fine says.
“We always talk about [the severity of] things based on how many people died. But I think there’s a toll that something like this takes. It’s not worse than people dying, but it’s bad.”
And yet, the film also reveals moments of hope and bravery, Fine says, pointing to the fact that each of the film’s subjects—and many public servants on the scene—chose to stay and defend the established democratic process.
“Jamie Raskin, he did the right thing; he stayed all night. [Officers] Daniel Hodges and Christina Laury, they did the right thing, stayed on for hours, kept returning to the front line. They all were injured; they all could’ve just gone home. They believed in something about this country,” he says.
Despite the fact that the attack on the Capitol is “the most filmed crime scene” in U.S. history, Nix Fine says many Americans haven’t truly grappled with its impact.
“This film felt like what we can do—to be good citizens, to be good filmmakers, to be good human beings,” she says. “You owe it to yourself, as a citizen of this country, to understand what happened that day.”
THE SIXTH is available for purchase or rent on streaming services including Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube, and Fine and Nix Fine have also launched a “Stream It Forward” campaign to bring the film to as many theaters and college campuses as possible.
To learn more, visit thesixthmovie.com/#impact.