Over the past several years, when discussing the audience exodus to large platform streamers, I’ve encountered exhaustion from filmmakers, arts workers, funders, broadcasters, distributors, and exhibitors. Everyone wants to help fix the problem, but no one knows where to start. That’s because there are real issues that stack the deck against documentary filmmakers and our audiences. They can be classified into three main categories: funding, discoverability, and unequal market power.
Public Funding
The International Documentary Association (IDA) and five other venerable filmmaker support organizations are deeply concerned by the news that DOGE is immediately cutting U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities grant programs. The NEH’s vital support of documentaries in the U.S. includes the NEH Media Projects grant program and documentary funding grants from many U.S. state humanities councils. For decades, they provided meaningful arts programming for general audiences, bridging scholarly research, documentary-making, and the public. Since Wednesday, we have received reports of dozens of grant terminations from filmmakers, affecting their ability to pay contracted crew and deliver quality programs for audiences all over the U.S.
The outcome of the Platform Films meeting was the formation of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes Project, with 13 groups (including Platform; Trade Films in Gateshead and Newcastle; Chapter Community Video Workshop in Cardiff; Amber Films in Newcastle; Birmingham Film and Video Workshop; Open Eye Film and Video Workshop in Liverpool; Active Image in Rothertham and Sheffield; Films at Work in London; and the London Media Research Group) committed to producing footage interviewing miners and their supporters and documenting strike and fundraising activities. The material was then sent for editing down, mainly by Chris Reeves of Platform and Chris Ruston of London Video Arts, into what was originally planned to be 10 shorts and one feature-length work. The final project would consist of six short tapes.