Are Above-the-Line Diversity Hires “Cover-Your-Ass” Tokenism or Meaningful Collaboration?

Over the past decade, propelled by calls of #DocsSoWhite in 2016, the 2020 “summer of racial reckoning,” and the ensuing controversy around HBO’s Tiger Woods documentary series later that same year, the U.S. documentary industry has increasingly grappled with its legacy of whiteness and colonialism, trying to be more inclusive and equitable both in the ways it tells stories and in who tells them. But now, while there may be greater attention to filmmakers’ proximity to their subjects and a push for more diverse directors, co-directors, producers, and crew members, there’s also a rise in what some call “cover-your-ass” hires over meaningful collaborations. If the U.S. industry, then, has accepted that documentary projects benefit from having creatives from similar races, genders, sexualities, or nationalities as their subjects, they might be included—but are they actual partners? 

“I’ve seen people build teams that are fruitful collaborations, and then I’ve seen extractive partnerships that feel very box-checky,” says Power (2024) producer Jess Devaney, who runs Multitude Films, which focuses on projects made by underrepresented voices. “They can look similar,” she adds, “but it’s like porn: ‘You know it when you see it.’”  

Producer-director Yoruba Richen agrees: “In the last ten years, I have seen white filmmakers becoming increasingly aware that they cannot get away with that,” regarding, for example, telling stories about the Black community without “a Black filmmaker or producers on their production team.” She adds, “But it’s hard to know if it’s a face-saving thing or whether that producer has real creative agency.”

Although there have been documentary filmmakers of different identities working together for decades, recently there has been an abundance of high-profile documentary projects featuring white directors with diverse co-directors or producers, including Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony (2023), produced by Lauren Domino; recent Sundance hit Daughters (2024), co-directed by Nathalie Rae and Angela Patton; Sugarcane (2024), directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie; Bobi Wine: The People’s President (2022), co-directed by Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp; Lakota Nation vs. United States (2022), co-directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli; and Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes (2023), co-directed by Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro, along with many others. 

That’s not to say that any of these projects featured unequal partnerships, as the industry has undoubtedly worked to counteract the perception of cultural exploitation—in fact, some pride themselves on their close collaborations. Sam Pollard, the award-winning Black filmmaker who has co-directed a number of projects, says his veteran status has protected him from being exploited for his racial identity. “I might be the anomaly, but I’ve been around for so long, after over 30 years of making docs, I’m not hired that way,” he says. “When I started in 1972, there was a lack of diversity obviously, but I’ve seen that increase in both editorial and directing positions.” 

But younger filmmakers are more wary. “I have felt like a token on a project,” admits producer Nicole Tsien, a former executive at CNN Films, and a member of the Brown Girls Doc Mafia board and A-Doc steering committee. “But I was ultimately willing to do it, because the money was good, and I thought it was important for my career.”

Other diverse filmmakers also acknowledge a preponderance of offers over the last few years for work that is more transactional than substantive. “Firelight Media received calls, and yes, we were offered and accepted some of what I’d classify as ‘guilt money,’” admits Firelight’s Co-Founder and President Marcia Smith. “I don’t want to sound too cynical about it, but any time a social movement becomes prominent, it causes people to think, and that changes how money flows,” she continues. “Most of the people with whom I spoke about the new money we were offered advised me to accept it while we could because the offers weren’t going to last.” 

Devaney admits, “I don’t even think I could count how many cold-call emails I receive and ignore that are like ‘We need a queer,’” she says. “And sure, I’ve thought about saying, ‘Give me $40,000, and I’ll be your queer.’ But that’s not how I want to work.”

Scholar Kristen J. Warner names this phenomenon plastic representation, a term she has coined to describe “an empirical system of ‘box checking’ that offers the feel of progress but that actually cedes more ground than it gains.”

Erika Dilday, the AmDoc executive director and POV executive producer, estimates that about half of the industry hires diverse personnel because “[they] don’t want to get in trouble,” she says. “It’s person to person with each company,” she continues. “I know some people who absolutely get it and others who are still completely clueless. I do think that there is a box-checking that goes on at the top level. Depending on the people who are bringing in the co-directors or the co-producers, that box-checking can [either] be extremely advantageous because it’s saying you’re missing a crucial element here, or incredibly demeaning and paternalistic.”

Dilday herself recently decided to co-direct Emancipation to Exodus with PBS veteran Ken Burns, who has notably made several films on Black historical subjects with a lack of diversity on his team, which includes his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, as co-directors. When the news was announced, fellow documentary filmmakers were suspicious. “A lot of people said to me, ‘Why are you just a shield for him?’” admits Dilday. “And quite honestly, it took me about three months before signing on to the project to make sure.” 

For Dilday, the decision to move forward was based on the first interview she did alongside Burns. “At the end of the interview,” she recalls, “he turned around and said ‘Was that okay? Was there anything I missed? Is there anything I should or shouldn't have done?’ And that was when I knew that this process was going to work.”

Documentary filmmakers say communication is key when historically marginalized individuals are coming onto a white-led project.

Nicole Tsien, speaking on behalf of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, is proud of the organization’s substantial crew database and the number of members who have transitioned from indie to commercial projects, but she acknowledges there can be “fear and apprehension” working in these spaces. “When you’re doing work for hire, it’s very different territory, because you don’t know who your advocates are,” she says. “So that’s where conversations are really important.” 

“There has to be a values alignment,” she suggests. “And I’m a big fan of accountability buddies. And how do teams navigate conflict? If you’re the only person of color or woman on a team, and you’re trying to speak up, it can be hard to be heard.”

Firelight’s Marcia Smith advises, “One of the first things to evaluate is the state of the project,” she says. “Are you being approached as a co-director or collaborator at the last minute? Is the project already shot? We counsel people to ask these questions. And if you don’t want to be a figurehead, don’t accept it.”

“Co-directors can be tricky,” she continues. “The more you can negotiate what your role as co-director will be upfront, the better. It can also work if everybody’s clear on their role, and their power and authority. These relationships can also evolve and change, so sometimes you have to keep negotiating.”

According to Smith and others, such collaborations also work well if you have a strong pre-existing relationship. As an example, Sam Pollard brings up his longtime partnership with filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir. “It works because she’s been working with me since 1994, first as an assistant editor, then as an editor and then as co-directors, so we have a 30-year history,” he says. “Creatively, we’re in sync and we respect each other’s opinions, and when that happens, it’s effective.”

According to Devaney, the contractual language for a project can also specifically describe the equanimity of a collaboration. For instance, a co-director can be brought on as a work-for-hire with “meaningful consultation” or “mutual approval,” two similar-sounding phrases that define very different levels of sway on a project. Contracts also outline “who has the ‘tie-break’,” adds Devaney, referring to a term used to establish how creative or financial differences are resolved: mutually, unilaterally, or via a majority approval of the members of the team.

Devaney and others also believe it’s important that the industry isn’t too quick to judge a project based solely on the director’s identity, even though there is now a widespread acceptance that the director’s background always comes into play when executives, grant-makers, or programmers are evaluating a project.

“If you have, for example, a white director making a film about a marginalized, historically excluded community, it’s not just about whether they have the identity of the film’s participants,” argues Devaney. “Let’s take a look at the whole creative team, and the constellations of the identities of the entire team. And it doesn’t have to be co-director—a DP or editor can also be a very important position.”

Devaney mentions Luke Lorentzen’s Midnight Family as a positive example. Though Lorentzen and producer Kellen Quinn were white outsiders making a film in Mexico City, their collaborations with Mexican producers Daniela Alatorre and Elena Fortes brought genuine local perspectives to the project, such as humor and a Mexican style of showing up to a crisis. “It was really about how they were valued,” she says.

At Firelight, Marcia Smith also advises filmmakers to ask questions that will tell them the director’s connection to the project. “If the originating director doesn’t feel deeply connected with their film’s protagonist or doesn’t have some kind of special access to the individuals or communities portrayed in the film,” she says, “it doesn’t mean that they can’t or don’t have an organic connection to the material, but you have to suss out what their interest is in telling this particular story.”

“We want stories that are authentically told,” adds Dilday. “I think it is far easier to do that when a story is told directly by someone from that community or who’s telling their own personal stories. But I don’t believe that that is the only way. You just have to work really hard to make sure that you are serving as a conduit and not as an interpreter.”

Not all diverse partnerships are imposed, of course; many filmmakers find creative partnerships worthwhile. Brad Lichtenstein, a white filmmaker who has made several films with co-directors of color, says their partnerships were hugely important for the stories he’s wanted to tell, helping to identify his own blind spots, whether on the radio series Precious Lives (2015–16), about gun violence in Milwaukee, or Messwood (2022), a film about a team of white and Black high school football players. 

Lichtenstein also found co-directing There Are Jews Here (2016), about America’s disappearing Jewish communities, with Black filmmaker Morgan Elise Johnson useful, even though the subject was closer to home. “As a pastor’s kid in a Black Church, [Johnson] was someone who got the religious community and culture, but came from a different perspective, and solved some problems for me,” he explains. “Because there were things I was blind to, being from the [Jewish] community that I was born into.”

Yoruba Richen, who is Black and who has collaborated with Lichtenstein on a few projects, says she can also be the person on a project to emphasize and foreground a white experience. For their project American Reckoning (2021), for example, Richen says the editors wanted to leave out testimony from an expert about white supremacists and white businesspeople who were complicit in the murders of Black people. “But one of the most important things for me as a filmmaker is that we also include the descendants of the white perpetrators,” she says, “because these stories of race in America are not one-sided. It’s not just black stories or black suffering, we have to hear the stories that the white people have been told.”

Richen emphasizes that documentaries that don’t incorporate these multiple perspectives ultimately suffer. “People don’t talk enough about how it affects the actual work,” she says. Alluding to, but not naming the Tiger Woods docuseries that was directed by Matthew Heineman and Matthew Hamachek, she says, “Critics were surprised that the series shies away from racial identity. But yes, that’s precisely it. If there was a Black person on the creative team, some of the blind spots of this much-lauded film would have been addressed.” Sam Pollard, who was hired as an executive producer of the series, told Indiewire at the time, “I should have asked that a filmmaker of color be included as part of the directing team.” 

But filmmakers suggest that despite efforts to be more inclusive, “when you look at who has the power, it’s still white men,” says Richen. “We need more gatekeepers who look like us, that are more diverse, and that’s always the issue.”

Indeed, given that most corporate nonfiction division heads, nonprofit funders, commissioning editors, and film festival programmers are white and embedded in Eurocentric perspectives, filmmakers who come from outside of those spaces are always going to have to navigate the industry in a different and more precarious way. 

“It should be acknowledged that when you’re working with people of color or minority groups, the burden of cultural expression or cultural understanding falls to the minority,” says Kenyan filmmaker Debra Aroko. Originally hired as a translator on the documentary Searching for Amani (2024), Aroko was brought on during postproduction as a co-director with California-based producer-director Nicole Gormley, because of her specific understanding, both linguistically and culturally, of the subject matter—a transition that came with complications. 

As an outsider to the industry, Aroko says she “has been taught or programmed to assimilate and make myself, my message, and my speech more palatable toward foreigners, so there’s always going to be a power dynamic.” When Aroko first met Gormley, for example, she remembers her first instinct was “to be afraid of her and want to agree with her, no matter what she said. So we have to acknowledge that there is this big wall there, and we have to break that down and then figure out how to work against that.” 

“I think the industry is shifting,” continues Aroko, “but there’s still a lot of work to be done and you can’t pretend to be perfect, and we can’t pretend that this movement is perfect.”

Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Documentary and Filmmaker magazines; a film instructor at the New School, DePaul, and Loyola Universities; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.