About

About
Cannabis Portrait

01
What We Are

Cannabis Portrait is an independent documentary media outlet. We make portraits of people whose lives intersect with cannabis: video interviews and written Stories. We are not a cannabis channel. We are a journalism project.

Cannabis is the world we enter. The people are what we document.

We are driven by a single impulse: curiosity about why people do what they do. Every subject is a world. Every interview is an act of recognition, of placing a person inside a frame and holding still long enough for them to be truly seen.

Stigma survives on abstraction. It cannot survive a face, a voice, a story told in full, a life held in the frame long enough to be seen whole.

yesIndependent documentary journalism
yesA global portrait project in six languages
yesPress, with editorial standards
yesAccountable to the person in the frame
noA cannabis lifestyle channel
noAn advocacy or lobbying operation
noA platform for sponsored editorial
02
How We Work

We make two kinds of work: video portraits and written Stories. Both are portraits. Both place a specific person inside the frame and hold them there long enough for something true to emerge.

The video portrait is a structured interview filmed in the subject's environment. Ten to fifteen minutes in the final cut. The interviewer is audible but not visible. The subject is the only person on screen.

The written Story is a piece of literary journalism, reported over time and written with the precision of someone who was in the room. It is not a transcript. It is a separate portrait of the same person, built from observation, from what was not said on camera, from detail.

We do not editorialize. We do not judge. A person seen clearly cannot be easily dismissed. That is the mechanism. That is the work.

03
The Writers

Cannabis Portrait does not translate. Each language edition is written by someone who thinks in that language.

EN
Gay Talese
Esquire / NYT Magazine
The observed detail that unlocks a whole person. Short declarative sentences. Never stating what the reader can already feel.
FR
Florence Aubenas
Le Monde / L'Obs
Radical presence. The plain sentence as an act of respect. Going where the story is, for as long as it takes.
DE
Alexander Osang
Der Spiegel
Single telling detail as structural anchor. German precision without coldness. Portrait built across multiple encounters.
ES
Leila Guerriero
La Nacion / El Pais / Gatopardo
Long immersion. The refusal to simplify. Warmth that does not compromise precision.
IT
Concita De Gregorio
La Repubblica / L'Espresso
Making the subject feel safe enough to be honest. Intimacy as a journalistic method.
NL
Joris Luyendijk
NRC Handelsblad / The Guardian
The anthropologist's eye. Suspending prior judgment. Making the strange human.

For press, partnerships, or subject nominations: one address.

[email protected]