Audience members during Kirsten Johnson’s keynote at Getting Real ’24. Image credit: Urbanite LA
“In the last few months, more than ever, it is clear how little integrity—in any sense of the word—the documentary or any creative field can claim in its current infrastructures.”
— Jemma Desai, Getting Real ’24 Keynote
Ethics and evolving forms of best practice in the documentary field are at the heart of the biennial conference Getting Real. For the documentary industry, this has been a year of splintering. Since the genocide began in Gaza last October, it has been an intense six months of both calls for direct action and business as usual; of statements and letters circulating, of filmmakers withdrawing their work. It confirms there is not an overarching shared reality in the documentary industry, and that the stakes are indeed different for everyone.
Getting Real hovers above this rupture, feeling like an ideological utopia, a space where adaptability, care, thoughtfulness, and deep listening are foregrounded. When this year’s gathering at the DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was interrupted by hotel workers demanding a new contract for their labor, it became evident that the organizers of Getting Real would need to regroup, and fast. The protest roared and hooted into the center of pass-pickup, and the conference immediately, expensively transfigured. The guests were rehoused at the Biltmore—a historical beacon of decadence on the doorstep of Skid Row, whose walls are steeped in secrets, dreams, and despair. Renowned for being the last place the Black Dahlia was seen alive, you can grab a US$30 dollar cocktail named after the victim at the hotel bar, but it won’t taste like what it feels like to be an unemployed woman, relying on predatory men for a place to sleep and a bite to eat. You step out of the high-ceilinged, fountain-featured marble lobby, where she made her last desperate calls, into a homeless community waking up, vulnerable people wide-eyed and looking for the next route to survival.
The dissonance between these neighboring realities is a microcosm of the cognitive gymnastics required to live in the now. For me, it is jarring to be in a hotel I couldn’t afford without the invitation to cover the conference and to have tried and failed multiple times over the past six months to publish an article about complicity and performativity in an industry that prides itself on making the world a better place by acting as a stage for progressive politics but that can’t even acknowledge a genocide.
All structures have their ghosts, from the Biltmore to the documentary community. And with every utopian dream, there are lost futures. There are the films we wanted to make, the jobs we hoped we’d get, the ways we wanted to contribute, and the networks we thought would hold this work we do. Within every organization there are the injustices we choose to see, those we can’t see, what remains invisible, and the politics that keep a status quo.
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Getting Real opened with Keith Wilson’s performance of Moore for Sale, a desktop cinema séance of a documentary that would never be. As Wilson grapples with questions of power and positionality around the access to performance artist Frank Moore’s story and disputed ethics within the archive footage itself, he is also faced with the labyrinthine hurdles of funding applications—the sometimes bewildering word counts for answers that can act more like barriers than suggested guidelines. Wilson’s timing is excellent, with bursts of technological intrusions and failures that destabilize the lines between past and present, performance and reality. To tell a story is a performance, to meet the asks of a documentary funding application is to perform well, and to question the performativity of documentary ethics is an interesting path to explore.
At the same time as the performance, the organizers were reconfiguring how the next few days would work without the DoubleTree as the conference hub. Ensuring all sites would be accessible for the talks and panels meant a stripping down of the in-person events. In a world that has been built predominantly by and for nondisabled people, keeping events accessible often means moving online. Half of the conference became virtual, while the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) became the physical anchor of Getting Real.
On the first morning at JANM, filmmaker and FWD-Doc co-founder Jim LeBrecht shared an anecdote as part of his talk with Barbara Twist about the Film Event Accessibility Score Card they had developed for film festivals. He recalled the Filmmaker’s Lodge at Sundance and its inaccessibility; how over the years the festival has stubbornly continued to use this space, and the only resolution offered to LeBrecht was to watch via video link—a suggestion that his industry knowledge and presence have no value. I think of funding applications I’ve read for documentary films. While the questions in these applications can seem exhausting and daunting for filmmakers—as comically addressed in Moore for Sale—they can also be a valuable litmus test. Many applicants have a superficial understanding of what accessibility means, but some question the need itself. One applicant wrote that their film would not be relevant for audiences who had accessibility needs, and that instead of experiencing it in cinematic form, they could perhaps read an article about it instead.
There is a long history of the film industry being unable to recognize how it marginalizes and ghosts, recorded in the histories of public statements and letters, by organizations or to organizations. For fairly recent, dynamic research, Jemma Desai’s This Work Isn’t for Us renders clear its logic. Sometimes the visible decision makers are puppets to the values or whims of boards, sometimes their hands or voices are tied by government funding, sometimes their own privileges make it hard to grasp the realities of others. Sometimes they simply aren’t that deep.
In her keynote speech closing the second day of Getting Real, below a screen illuminated by a carousel of her Instagram stories from the last six months, predominantly concerning the relentless attack on the people of Gaza, Desai shared the words of a Palestinian poet, Mohammed El-Kurd:
| Distracting questions—[in our field about open letters, who has or will sign them, where history must begin, who wears a pin to the awards, who boycotts, or does not, who uses their platform to speak]—feed the discursive loop that prioritizes a conjectural “day after” over the material present. But here, in the present, there are more pressing questions: What are the mental and muscular consequences of being forced to transform a taxi into a hearse? What becomes of the nurse whose shift is interrupted by the arrival of her husband’s corpse on a stretcher? What about the father carrying what remains of his son in two separate plastic bags? What happens to him after all of this death, once he is alone and away from the cameras? What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be? |
“What El-Kurd witnesses for himself and his people,” Desai went on to illuminate, “is that what we are constituted of is not what the nation-state and its structures of knowing say is real but from the knowledge production of our spirits and what we feel to be real. We are our perceptions, our senses, our sense-making which happens through our bodies, and through our experiences of the world, and of each other. We are all, filmmakers or not, film industry or not, implicated in making the real for each other.”
I wonder, what do we choose to make real for each other? Is it that some people are granted access, and some are not? Is it that institutional structures are required for how we need to exist? Is it that some lived experiences have hierarchy over others? Is it that documentary has a purer form of truth than other forms of storytelling? Is it that personal experience must be left out of journalism?
Unlived experience can offer a cold shortcut to lacking accountability to others, as Kirsten Johnson evoked the following evening in her keynote, talking of the digital panopticon we inhabit and Artificial Intelligence, which, despite its prolific image making and simulations of human thought, does not know lived experience: “How can you understand the stakes of what it means to be in a body if you don’t have one?”
Johnson wondered “how we can build more safety for all bodies” in her lively interactive performance lecture, which demanded attention as deeply as she, in her career as a cameraperson and filmmaker, has paid attention. Time, bodies, stakes, and images were the keywords for deep dives into the lived experience and presence of every member of the audience, both those viewers in the present moment and those of the future. As audience members, we turned and looked into our neighbor’s eyes for a minute, in which time expanded. It is an intense experience to lock eyes and contemplate someone giving all their presence to you; to witness with care, and to feel vulnerable in another’s gaze. It is also easy to do so, in a fun, low-stakes environment where the shared space is one of safety. Johnson expressed how she was feeling for other people around the world who are giving all their attention to filming what’s happening to other people’s bodies: “We can be attentive right now to what’s happening to other people’s bodies, right now, all around the world.”
Desai’s keynote also considered how truth is formed and embodied, and questioned convictions surrounding the nature of the documentary form. She shared the statement published by the ten Hot Docs programmers who resigned en masse earlier this year:
| Films are the penicillin to what ails the world because they hold the mirror up to our shared experience: Fiction lets you escape, documentary confronts. We can’t dream, change, or do better until we see who we are. |
Desai wondered about this assumed weight of truth in narrative building, of how narratives built to confront could seem more truthful than the narratives we build to escape. Is it also not true that documentary allows us to escape? Again, as El-Kurd asks, “What happens when the cameras go away?”
“Strategies, Networks, Access” was the theme of this year’s convening. But whether the values and ideas trickle out into the decision making and praxis of the wider community is yet to be seen. Beyond this space, programmers continue to select “heartwarming” documentaries about disabled people made by nondisabled filmmakers; film festivals strategize how to be platforms for progressive work without being explicitly political, especially if politics means speaking out against what their funders support; a documentary participant is tortured to death because his identity was not protected.
The furious gatekeeping of what documentary is, or illusions of what it should be, or even what it does, reeks of limited thinking. Of people who need borders and hierarchies. Who is in, who is out, who decides. There is no ghost of colonialist thinking because it never died. We all know this; we’ve always known this. At what point do these calls for care, presence, and attention become realized as opposed to being consumed by the industry as performative chess pieces, enticing provocations, or the “healthy debate” that film festivals postulate? What will it take for business as usual to stop and an embodied reality that considers these truths foregrounded? To borrow from the thinking of artist Susan Hiller, collectively we are haunted by what we refuse to see. It begs the question, what are we making real for each other, in our films, in our networks, in our strategies?
Sophie Brown is a writer, film programmer, documentary funding reviewer, and lecturer. She was recently shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & Lewitt Studios Essay Prize.