“First, We Learn How to Work Together”: Leonard Cortana Discusses the BIPOC EURODOC Task Force

One of the foremost critical thinkers of the international documentary ecosystem, Leonard Cortana has a tendency to speak in fully formed paragraphs. Cortana is a multi-hyphenate scholar-activist-filmmaker-nonprofit professional. He has directed documentary shorts (Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die), worked with organizations on their inclusion programs, and is currently writing his doctoral thesis at NYU on media representations of assassinated anti-racist activists. 

Cortana was tapped by EURODOC program head Nora Philippe in 2023 to manage the inclusion program and strategic partnerships after a number of EURODOC producers expressed interest in a space to discuss BIPOC-related issues and access to funding for producers based in the “Global South.” EURODOC is a venerable, Paris-based organization that runs support programs for documentary producers. Since 1999, its flagship lab has supported hundreds of projects; recent alumni include Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta’s Nocturnes, and Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith. 

The resulting program, BIPOC EURODOC, hosts bi-monthly member meetings and monthly public webinars with outside experts to support the ongoing education of its members. The task force also conducts focus groups to inform white papers like this recent study on film festival delegations, in partnership with the #Docsafe initiative. In 2025, Cortana plans to take BIPOC EURODOC members as a delegation to six international film festivals and markets: FIPADOC, Berlinale, Dokfest Munich, Cannes, Dhaka Doclab, and DocsMX. The group also aims to release a report on the ethics of international co-productions, conduct focus groups with doc producers, and host conversations between disparate film professionals to promote collective knowledge-building. 

As of writing, BIPOC EURODOC consists of 41 members from EURODOC’s signature lab and its regional programs. Roughly one-third of its members hail from the Caribbean; Cortana himself is of Guadeloupe origins. Speaking on Zoom from Mexico City, Cortana spoke with Documentary about the goals of BIPOC EURODOC, the politics of film festival delegations, and why post-screening Q&As are “an extremely unsafe space.” This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: Can you talk about what being a BIPOC EURODOC member entails?

LEONARD CORTANA: Producers face challenges that are different from other filmmakers. I’m thinking, for example, of the pitch or these kinds of networking events where the question of identifying as BIPOC or reflecting about a specific stereotype about the Global South can be a challenge when you have to convince people about the importance of funding your documentary. The idea is to create a space where all the members can express their needs but also work together. A group of producers is not by essence a space where people know how to be collective. Producing is a very transactional task. This is also a space that is very competitive and not everyone comes from an NGO or collective background. So I think that the beauty of BIPOC EURODOC is that, first, we learn how to work together.

We have members who are based in spaces where they don’t have access to electricity all 24 hours of a day. It’s very important for us to support people coming from the global majority because we cannot be strong as a collective when we know that our members who are in countries with low-capacity development are actually excluded just because of all the structural issues. This space is also helping us to reflect on what we can do to impact the ecosystem. It’s one thing to want to meet gatekeepers, but it’s another to find a collective voice and say, “I will find different methodologies and strategies to chime in and to tell the ecosystem ‘this is not right.’” 

D: BIPOC EURODOC just released a document called Delegation Roadmap for Film Festivals and Industry Markets. Can you talk about what impact you hope that a publication like this will have?

LC: People say “film delegation” and they have one image in their head: producers and filmmakers representing a country or representing a topic, meeting people, and that’s it. If we don’t make it more complex, we’ll never understand why some people feel like it can be challenging to be in a delegation.

When I designed BIPOC EURODOC, the objective for 2025 was to send people to film festivals and to become a delegation. And I was like, “I cannot send people there without us as a collective reflecting on safety.” For this project, it was important to invite Marion Schmidt from #Docsafe to collaborate and contribute her extensive experience in addressing issues of safety within the documentary ecosystem. We know that some of the recommendations are maybe extreme for some organizations. Some told us, “We never thought about creating a room for a delegation, just to give them a small room so that they can go and rest and meet,” or from the get-go, to reflect about anonymity when we have people bringing sensitive political issues. The MeToo movement and the unfortunate racism and attacks on many filmmakers dealing with topics that are sensitive showed us that many film festivals don’t know how to react.

D: What are some of the common mistakes that you see in this process, whether it’s among the host festival or the delegation organizers? 

LC: People have to meet, so people have to organize the meetings between the hosting organization and the delegation. People need to set expectations and limits. Second, we have to organize better communication during the film festival because it’s extremely busy. We know that people are running all over, so if there is no specific protocol where the delegation can contact a festival person, it’s just going to be lost in the process of multitasking. 

People think that the delegation is just during the time of the festival. What we stress is that there is a before, a during, and an after. We have to expand the timeline when we think of festivals. There is preparation, and that’s important. There is the institute’s safety and performance, but there is an after. This is a space where we exchange, we give feedback, we think about specific trainings to improve the delegation or to improve the hosting or sending organization. 

Accommodations are also important. How do we include people with specific bodies or linguistic abilities? I believe that by the presence of, for instance, a Deaf or visually impaired filmmaker in a space where they are accommodated to pitch, we’re going to stop thinking that you need to speak perfect English to have an impact and to win a pitch.

D: There’s a chapter in your dissertation on post-screening Q&As, and I read that you led a session on Q&As at Cannes Docs last year. I’m curious what interests you in this subject. I don’t think I’ve ever read a rigorous analysis of post-screening Q&As before.

LC: So are you sure you want me to talk about my dissertation? [Laughs.] OK, I’ll try to be succinct. For some movies that are very political, or sensitive, sometimes the Q&As become a space of transitional justice. In the same room, you have people victimized by the system, people being the crime perpetrators, and they meet because in our societies we don’t have political forums all the time. The space of the Q&A becomes much more than speaking about the movie.

I’m sure you have attended Q&As when you have people asking questions to the director as if they were a policymaker or a president and they’re like, “Okay, I did a movie. I don’t have the solution for running a country.” The way people address the directors as if they had a vision for change shows that the Q&A is not only a space to talk about the making of the movie; people expect a radical-vision experience with a community. It is a very political space. Many filmmakers feel that space is extremely unsafe, especially women and people of color. Sometimes moderators don’t know how to react, and I see so many examples of very racist and sexist comments being made.

D: When you say that, do you mean from the audience or from the moderator?

LC: From everyone. That can also come from the director. It’s an extremely unsafe space because usually there are no boundaries; you don’t know who is sitting in [the audience]. Some people come to a Q&A and they don’t care about the film; they just want to jeopardize the conversation. The Q&A is a space of education, but it’s also a space of miseducation. In the worst Q&As I’ve seen, I see people crying on stage. I’ve also seen people in the audience leaving with so much hatred that I’m like, “We actually made someone angrier than ever.” 

D: How receptive have film festivals been to your outreach to have BIPOC EURODOC programming? Do you sense a hunger for this type of programming at festivals?

LC: Absolutely. I think people feel lonely when they do programming in film festivals. And let’s be super honest: many film festivals we work with lack diversity, full stop. We come with a group that is fully diverse, bringing diverse topics. We come with a solution-oriented kind of program. Some [programmers] also shared that sometimes there are impositions on their work and they’re not free to do the programming that they want. So to have an organization come in, it’s easier for them. It’s easier to export and translate to a festival something that hopefully was successful at another festival. It’s less challenging for someone who has to deal with imperatives from their heads or from funders.

D: BIPOC-focused programs are very much under attack in the United States at the moment. Have you felt any similar pressures impacting EURODOC or other arts organizations based in Europe?

LC: It’s important to acknowledge that the U.S. needs our support. Many programs in the U.S. have been an inspiration for groups in Europe. This is for us the moment to step out and support, so that’s why in our programming we have organizations coming from the U.S. to share a space to process what’s happening and to find allies outside of the U.S.

One time, I was in a festival and I was being presented as an inclusion manager for EURODOC, and a woman working for a very big TV channel distributing content from the Global South asked me, “What is it for? It’s not really needed, to have inclusion. What’s that word, inclusion?” And I said, “Look, in my group, I have people working on very personal stories with the possibility of being re-traumatized if their movies are not being discussed and reflected the way they should be. So I’m saying, for this movie, to teach and to create a space where people understand that behind complicated narratives coming from the global south, there is also a need for transformation and responsibility from everyone in the room. We exist.” 

She said with a lot of anger that I was right and she left. She didn’t even have the imagination about that, and she was distributing very political content from the Global South! So I’m like, how can a person working 20 years in this space never really think about that? What is broken in the dialogue between filmmakers and producers that some people just withdraw from reflecting about these topics?

What we speak about is also films. We want the audience to speak nicely and to understand the film without having a miserabilist point of view of the same movies coming over and over because festivals think this [one film] is going to be the only digestible thing for an audience. I want to recenter the conversation that we are also here to speak about movies and the ecosystem. It’s too easy to just say, “look at them.” No, we have a global vision; we clearly put on the table the issues of racism, access, and south-to-north collaboration.

Soheil Rezayazdi is a digital course and event producer at the Sundance Institute, where he produces courses, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, and other digital programs for Sundance Collab. Soheil is a freelance writer on film and pop culture whose work has appeared in Indiewire, McSweeney’s, Vice, Filmmaker Magazine, Documentary Magazine, Paper, Paste, and elsewhere.