Documentaries that expose truth and challenge misinformation are more vital than ever before, but finding funding and securing distribution for social issue and political docs has become a grueling, formidable undertaking.
On Saturday at Maine’s Camden International Film Festival, documentary filmmakers, executives, and producers came together for the third edition of “Re:Distribution | A Documentary Town Hall” to discuss building a more resilient, inclusive nonfiction media ecosystem that enables truth-telling, democratic discourse, and civic engagement.
There are several reasons for the current documentary crisis.
One is that he major streamers have made significant cuts to their documentary budgets and doubled down on celebrity and true-crime fare in the last five years. More recently, the streamers, along with television networks, have made it clear that they stay out of Donald Trump’s crosshairs, which means that their appetite for political doc fare is at an all-time low.
Another blow to the doc community came in April, when the National Endowment for the Humanities grants — historically one of the genre’s most reliable sources of funding — were terminated. That news was followed by more distressing news — PBS, a mainstay for topical docs, is currently cutting its budget due to Congress’s decision to eliminate approximately $500 million in federal funding from public TV and radio.
Documentary producer Felipe Estefan and Doc Society’s Beadie Finzi facilitated the discussion.
“We all understand the problems because we are living many of those problems directly every day,” Estefan said. “For many of us and many of our communities, our lives, our bodies, and our rights are being threatened constantly. We know that, and we know that it is a tough moment, but what we are here to do, what we owe it to each other to do, is to spend this time that we have together to think about questions deeply and come up with solutions.”
Finzi asked the crowd to consider three questions: What should we be remembering from the past? What do we need to protect in the present? And what should we be reimagining for the future?
Both Estefan and Finzi tried to keep the meeting light and uplifting. Audience members were asked to think of their worst fears, whisper them into a piece of tissue paper provided by the festival, and then throw the paper into the air. That was followed by a quick dance party.
“The shackles of our past and our present do not define the possibilities of our future,” Estefan said. “Even in the hardest and most challenging of moments, we still have agency. We still have choice, and we still have one another.”
Lauren Pabst from MacArthur Foundation on Journalism and Local News, Jax Deluca, a Shorenstein Documentary Film in the Public Interest fellow and filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz gave short presentations about looking beyond the crises and focusing on how to make a change in the present.
Ruiz, who has made three feature docs that were funded by public media, spoke about the evolution of ITVS, which has funded more than 1,400 docs. The director played a clip from 1987 of independent filmmaker Loni Ding testifying before a congressional subcommittee on building a space for independent film that would utilize public infrastructure to fund and distribute independent work.
“I am myself an independent producer,” Ding testified at the time. “I’m here…speaking on behalf of approximately 10,000 such producers…. We are a microcosm of this country…. We simply are arguing against giving market forces complete free rein.”
Ruiz told the crowd that following the hearing, President Reagan signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1988, and ITVS was created. The director highlighted the fact that Ding represented a broad and diverse coalition of independent filmmakers who spent eight years preparing for the hearing.
“It was a group of independents who didn’t agree with one another,” Ruiz said. “They had all kinds of personal shit with one another. They debated, and there were all kinds of purity tests. ‘No, this is what a documentary is. It’s journalism. It’s art.’ You can imagine. Not much has changed. There were commercial pressures, geographic pressures and questions about representation.”
Ruiz encouraged his colleagues to unite and start organizing.
“We will need to set aside disputes,” he said. “The fight is much bigger than us. Many of us who organize and push in this next wave will likely not benefit from what comes, but nonetheless, we are going to have to push forward.”
In addition to uniting and fighting as one cohesive unit, filmmakers were encouraged to consider YouTube as a serious distribution platform.
In a pre-recorded video, Harry Kalfayan, Channel 4’s distribution manager, explained that the broadcaster decided to create a YouTube channel for its documentary programming three years ago. The platform became a major distribution arm for the public broadcast television channel with 113 million U.K. views in 2024.
“We are seeing a huge appetite for factual programming on YouTube,” said Kalfayan. “We are reaching new young, young audiences that maybe didn’t grow up watching television.”
Kalfayan encouraged filmmakers to give YouTube a shot.
“The results for us have been massive,” he said. “And I don’t think (YouTube) is going anywhere.”