In December 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled Meerkat Media, the New York-based cooperatively owned production company and media arts collective. As a radical experiment in shared authorship and ownership, Meerkat built a sustainable framework for making the kind of films they cared about, while still providing steady paychecks, health insurance, and medical leave to their members. Since the publication of their profile, the group has faced industry-wide challenges, including tightening budgets and shrinking opportunities. At the same time, they’ve experienced major creative high points. Over Zoom, Documentary caught up with Sterrenberg to talk about Meerkat’s recent creative highs, the challenges of balancing freelance work with collective production, and how Emergent City, which opens at DCTV tomorrow and will be broadcast on POV later this year, took shape within the group.
Making a Production
The narrative content division of independent music rights company Concord develops unique fare in a sea of music documentaries: Although any project about Stax Records or featuring their music would legally and logistically require Concord to be involved, 'Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.' is unique in that it actually originated from the company itself. Officially launched in 2021, Concord Originals produces and develops projects based upon the million copyrights the company owns and represents, such as the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Cyndi Lauper.
In its work with superstar athletes, Gotham Chopra’s full-service documentary studio maneuvers through tricky questions of access and creative control: Seven projects in production. Dozens more in development. And in the summer of 2024, three high-profile series about game-changing athletes: In the Arena: Serena Williams on ESPN+, Simone Biles Rising on Netflix, and Welcome to the J-Rod Show on FS1. Religion of Sports (RoS) is on a roll, having achieved a scale and consistency quite remarkable for a documentary production company.
In October 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled the London-based production company Grain Media. As a small independent production company focused exclusively on documentary, they were managing to succeed, with difficulty, in a very challenging climate for documentary. At the end of 2024, the company’s Netflix documentaries The Lost Children and Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy achieved global prominence. At the same time, the company had to make its first redundancies, letting go of a handful of its long-serving staff. Documentary caught up with Grain’s founder and head Orlando von Einsiedel to discuss the ups and downs of the last year, and how they reflect what is going on in the global documentary industry.
That NoCut has no physical office, that it is registered in Romania and India (unofficially floating into Belgium), and that its members frequently navigate three different time zones to set up meetings, are all appropriate given its origin story. Rothe, Rinaldi, and Hanes met ten years ago as classmates in DocNomads, the Erasmus Mundus master’s program in documentary filmmaking. Run by a consortium of three universities in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium, DocNomads is a fully funded course for students from all over the globe, with an emphasis on teamwork and coproduction, which explains why many of its graduates often end up working with each other later. Helping each other with student projects, the three women developed a working rapport even as they fell into a thick friendship.
There’s a scrappiness behind Memory’s sleek exterior and dedicated cult following. The L.A.-based production company has only two full-time employees: its founders Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter. The duo sought to create both a low-budget dream factory for passion projects and a sustainable network of filmmakers working in the DIY ethos of the 2000s, but with the stylistic inclinations of tidier, higher-budget productions.
Making a Production is Documentary ’s strand of in-depth profiles featuring production companies that make critically-acclaimed nonfiction film and
In the crowded landscape of UK documentary production, Grain Media is managing to steer a very difficult path. The company is completely independent and committed to making cinematic films about the issues of our day, films which they unabashedly hope will have an impact and improve the world. In a series of conversations with Documentary, von Einsiedel and his team candidly discussed the ways they work in a climate where budgets are getting much tighter and commissioners are increasingly risk-averse.
Breakwater Studios is the first spotlight of Making a Production, our new strand of in-depth profiles featuring production companies that make critically-acclaimed nonfiction film and media in innovative ways. Mark Jonathan Harris digs into the company's history from its founding by Ben Proudfoot to its recent support of other directors, its branded content division, and the key creative characteristics of their award-winning short films.