Conference-goers in between events, outside the Japanese American National Museum Pavilion. Image credit: Urbanite LA
In the first days of Getting Real ’24, IDA’s biennial documentary conference, which ran April 15–18 in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo district, two major events crashed the proceedings. First, the event’s host location, a DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel, faced a labor action from UNITE HERE! Local 11. As dozens of documentary filmmakers picked up their badges at the DoubleTree, workers picketed the hotel lobby, marching for a fair contract. It was not a good look. Within a day, the entire conference picked up and moved. Hotel rooms were rebooked; in-person panels were relocated or shifted to Zoom; and what could have been seen as an organizational disaster and terrible inconvenience was quickly transformed into a radical act of solidarity and community.
The following day, there was a very different kind of disruption when news dropped that Participant Media, the film studio known for supporting some of the biggest documentaries of all time, from An Inconvenient Truth (2006) to Food, Inc. (2008), was shutting down. Its billionaire founder, Jeff Skoll, was getting out of the nonfiction business altogether, dealing a major blow to those committed to creating social change through media. But at Getting Real, reactions to this seismic shift in the nonfiction landscape were similar to the one that preceded it the day before. Filmmakers spoke of new opportunities, a younger generation of philanthropists and funders, rising distribution platforms such as Kinema and Jolt.film, various grassroots collectives, and finding new power within their own communities.
That was Getting Real ’24—a reality check, indeed. The only people coming to save independent documentaries were independent documentarians themselves. With nary a streaming executive or corporate suit in sight—and with keynote speakers such as Jesse Wente, the Indigenous Screen Office’s first executive director; Jemma Desai, a curator, cultural worker, and programmer of next year’s Flaherty Seminar; Cameraperson (2016) filmmaker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson; and veteran Cameroonian doc-maker Jean-Marie Teno—the conference was almost singularly focused on those working outside the commercial system and how to bring power back to the filmmakers.
Consider the event’s “Meet the Funders and Buyers Lunch,” which included dozens of nonprofit organizations like Chicken & Egg, Firelight Media, CAAM, and the Southern Documentary Fund in attendance; the only real buyers were from U.S. public television. This was the anti-corporate doc conference.
At a panel titled “The Hot Seat,” billed as a chance for filmmakers to question gatekeepers, Bryn Mooser, head of XTR, the only studio speaking at the conference, offered a sobering picture of the larger commercial doc market. “There were funders out there who were reliable longtime documentary investors who had put millions of dollars into [projects] and those films didn’t end up anywhere. They lacked distribution,” he told the crowd, explaining the abrupt shifts in funding that affected his own company the previous year. “Philanthropists don’t mind losing money,” he added, “but to both lose their money and to have their film sit in a hard drive somewhere is very hard.”
But across panels, conversations, and convenings, there was a general refusal to accept defeat. At “Build Your Own Breakout” sessions on the final day of the conference, impromptu groups were formed to build community and hash out a host of issues, including a discussion about a post-Participant, postphilanthropic funding landscape for docs. Looking for solutions, this particular breakout group brainstormed ideas around financing media by focusing on key issues (rather than individual film projects), new “donor activist” groups such as Solidaire, and aligning with efforts and organizations centered on an anticapitalist “solidarity economy.”
At a game show event titled “What’s the Deal?”, multiple-choice questions reflected 2020 statistics from the last State of the Documentary Field survey, which reported 42% of respondents did not make any revenue from their projects, 50% said their main source of revenue was educational distribution, and the second largest source of funding (after grants) was their own money—constant reminders that filmmakers have long had to navigate their own ways. Getting Real even contained a “Sources of Income” confessional booth in which attendees could anonymously post the ways they financially stay afloat—which gathered over 80 responses ranging from “Airbnb host” to “DoorDash” to editing corporate videos.
Keith Wilson, producer of Reid Davenport’s acclaimed 2022 documentary I Didn’t See You There and one of the “game show” contestants, relayed some positive news about the film’s distribution travails in the absence of the hoped-for and now increasingly scarce all-rights deal. There was a TV sale to POV (“not a ton of money, but good exposure”); a solid film festival run via Film Collaborative; educational rights via Good Docs; and licensing to six airlines, the latter of which netted them $45,000. But he also divulged a disheartening story about paying a few thousand dollars to an aggregator to get it on streaming platforms, followed by months of struggling over accessibility issues key to the film. The film is now selling on transactional VOD for just 99 cents, “which I’m not happy about and the revenue is so minimal,” he admitted, “but it is out there and can be seen.”
But such old models, as producer Amy Hobby, one of the co-founders of Distribution Advocates, said during a breakout session on the collective’s new Marketing Innovations Fund, needed “a multipronged critical intervention.”
“How can we grow audiences for inspiring and thought-provoking films?” Hobby asked the gathering of some 40 filmmakers in IDA’s conference room. One of Distribution Advocates’ answers is to provide funding for innovative marketing campaigns for independent releases and then take the data and experiences of those releases and create new models for the field. With a four-pronged approach—grants, education, case studies, and the power of the collective—the collective is planning a way forward. (Postconference, further details released at Hot Docs revealed that Distribution Advocates will provide grants ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 to independent distributors working with film teams, starting with 4 to 15 releases this year.)
At Color Congress, an organization that serves nonfiction organizations led by people of color, member organizations choose to devote collective resources to similar distribution plans. During a presentation at the conference, Color Congress’s Sonya Childress publicly announced a new “collective distribution project.” With an initial annual budget of US$300,000, they will support the release of 10 to 15 films directed by filmmakers of color and supported by member organizations over the next two years. “Designed as a series of experiments intended to seed the infrastructure needed to collectively market a range of films,” Childress explained to Documentary, the initiative would “secure new audience data and identify best practices that can inform new distribution pathways to center filmmakers and audiences of color.”
In addition to marketing, data was another buzzword at this year’s conference. During a “fireside chat,” former Sundance Institute CEO and Walter Shorenstein Fellow Keri Putnam discussed some preliminary research for her upcoming report on the documentary industry, which sifts through hundreds of interviews and data points. And like Distribution Advocates and Color Congress, she came to similar conclusions.
“One of the big findings,” she said, “is that a lot of these independent spaces—whether it’s an individual film team releasing their film on their own, or community releases, or art house theaters and film festivals—don’t actually have sophisticated marketing that actually enables them to use data to know their audience and then reach their audience.” Putnam also relayed drops in average monthly reach and digital users for PBS, despite relaying robust “audience demand” for the POV and Independent Lens strands.
Meanwhile, Barbara Twist, executive director of the Film Festival Alliance, shared similar concerns about the exhibition of documentaries in theatrical settings. “We are still in recovery,” she admitted, noting a 25–30% drop in the theatrical audience for independent documentaries. “Our revenue sources are somewhat reliant on donations and support from the community. But we do also rely on ticket sales, so we are still struggling,” she added.
But outside the talks, at the Japanese bakeries, or taco trucks, or sunny plazas, the some 750 in-person attendees appeared undeterred by the bleak landscape—of the industry and world events—and ready to fight. At the conference’s closing remarks, even IDA’s new Executive Director, Dominic Asmall Willsdon—who oversaw his first Getting Real conference and “first en masse experience of this community”—seemed to be taken aback by the can-do optimism on display. “I am genuinely moved by the experience of this past week,” he said. “I can’t believe just the emotion and the dedication and the concern for the field that is expressed throughout this conference by everybody who attended.”
Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist; film instructor at New School, DePaul, and Loyola Universities; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.