Panel: Filmmakers Must Make Rent

Getting Real 22. Panelists: Jon-Sesrie Goff (Program Officer, Ford Foundation, and filmmaker), Sarath Davala (President, Basic Income Earth Network, and economist), Jad Abi Khalil (Executive Director, Beirut DC, and filmmaker), Khushboo Ranka (Co-Founder of India Doc, and filmmaker)

Moderator: Jess Search (Chief Executive, Doc Society)

In our current funding system, independent documentary filmmakers rely on the commodification of their individual projects to stitch together a living — not knowing if, when and how much money will be available at the end. This is a hard path for those without private wealth and has driven many talented directors from the craft while keeping other artists from entering. The political slogan "bread for all, and roses too” is over a hundred years old. It was a reminder that the revolution should enable people to eat, but they need art too. We need a revolution in independent documentary economics. One which ensures that those who are creating  flowers in film, can also pay their bills.  We need "Roses for all, and bread too.”  There are global experiments in Universal Basic Income for artists - at both institutional and national levels.  How could Filmmaker Basic Income work in the US and globally? How do we get it now?

At this event, our panel is presented with a hypothetical scenario: a new major funder has arrived in independent documentary and wants to fund a major Universal Basic Income pilot for filmmakers. The panel’s job is to design it over the course of the panel. The panel contains a UBI expert economist who can talk about what has been learned from other pilots. There are also funders and filmmakers to frame this pilot in a way that can work for both sides of the table in the independent doc field.

This session will be pre-recorded and available to Getting Real attendees for a two-week window starting September 27. The listed time is a suggested time to play the recording and experience a live chat with other attendees.

The IDA is currently working on securing CART captions for this pre-recording. When we receive the captions, we will reupload the recording file with open captions and update this event listing with the "CART captioning" label.