The documentary field is currently flooded with standards and best practices. I get emails about them constantly—new guidelines for ethical production, protocols for trauma-informed filmmaking, frameworks for community engagement, best practices for collaborators. Documentary has published some of these (we are particularly proud of Robert Bahar’s introduction to budgeting, and we interview the initiatives designing harm-reduction frameworks) because filmmakers need practical tools. But I’ve long wondered why so many of these initiatives, especially the ones aimed at preventing harm or ensuring care, seem to forget about what happens after a film is ostensibly done.

Over the last decade of programming, editing this magazine, and sitting on grant panels, I’ve watched filmmakers who meticulously followed every best practice end up at the center of crises anyway. In fact, most of the serious issues I've seen arise from conditions outside any individual’s control: distribution economics, political shifts, institutional failures, subjects’ changing circumstances after filming ends, and the perceived success of a film.

I started paying attention to the phrase “unexpected circumstances” after seeing it appear in too many festival program changes, too many last-minute cancellations of planned guests. I started wondering why we both fear the unexpected and use its specter as a defense. Just like best-practices guidelines, the phrase signals the gap between the tidy lifecycle we imagine for films (production, postproduction, premiere, distribution, done) and what actually happens when we try to turn the stuff of reality into a mass-reproducible object like a documentary film. What we do is messy, and we should expect its reverberations to last as long as a lifetime.

Documentary has always required adjustment. When something surprising happens during filming, that should be productive—even creatively inspiring. It should be how the form works. But what happens when the unexpected occurs to the film after it is finished? Perhaps that, too, is how documentaries should be. That’s what this issue is about.

Scott MacDonald’s interview with Ross McElwee about Remake fronts the issue. McElwee has spent decades literally remaking his earlier films as his life accumulated complications no one could have planned for. His latest film is about time and filmmaking as a crucible for grief, but it’s also about documentary as a personal practice that doesn’t stop when you finish one film. The other three pieces in the special section discuss the promotion of social issue documentaries on social media, Jane Mote’s attempt to green her work as an advisor and funder in documentary by not flying for all of 2025, and the twists and turns making and releasing The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru.

Elsewhere in this issue, Vadim Rizov and Hugo Emmerzael debut as print contributors with feature essays on Melania and mint film office’s Fortuyn: On-Hollands, two monumental works for very different reasons. The “Making a Production” profile is written by Documentary’s own Manuel Betancourt on Artegios, a Mexican distribution and production company that formed to carve space for creative documentaries in the “hegemony” of mainstream media.

The festival dispatches cover IFFR and the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, which have two different approaches to how the many political crises of the world are folded into their programming. Our columns include a “Legal FAQ” on production insurance (protect yourself from the unexpected!). Both of the cinematographer/editor’s guest columnists, Katy Scoggin for “What’s in My Bag” and Daniel Garber for “What’s on My Desk,” express preferences for being nimble and working on the fly. And we close with another edition of Screen Time.

Abby Sun
Editor, Documentary