Filmmaker Michelle Mama has finally finished her documentary Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions, a long-overdue chronicle of the Rough Trade singer’s life and legacy as a lesbian icon. The film opens the Hot Docs Festival later this month.

It took six years for director Michelle Mama to complete her documentary on Carole Pope.  

Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions is a labour of love — a lesbian filmmaker capturing the life and times of Canada’s first openly lesbian rock star. It’s a captivating, moving and celebratory film that sheds light on an elusive figure. It will debut as the opening-night film at this month’s Hot Docs Festival.  

We spoke with Mama as she was gearing up for the film’s premiere, and delved into the challenges of capturing the life and times of a 79-year-old queer icon. 

How did the idea for a Carole Pope documentary come about?

It was 2020 during COVID. My friend Allison Grace and I met on a bench in Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto for a chitchat. I had gotten to know Carole socially through a friend and we had been saying, gosh, we can't believe there's no doc on Carole Pope yet. How is it possible? Allison would say, “You should make it,” and we’d laugh. And then finally, on that bench, she said, “You're making this film and I'm going to help you. We're going to produce it together.” And that's what happened.

Was it difficult to convince Carole to make the film?

No. Carole was ready. Carole was waiting for someone to do it. I think there were a few attempts previously, I don't know why they didn't work out. But it’s a story begging to be told. Here we have this 79-year-old — she'll be 80 in August — icon. She's here. She's vital. She's got all her marbles. She's still running around the world with her little carry-on bag to do little shows. I couldn't believe that no one had done it yet.

It’s one thing to get Carole on board, but was it difficult to get her to engage openly with you as a filmmaker?

Carole's got a reputation for a reason, like she doesn't suffer fools. I was very conscious of that. I was a straight shooter with her from day one. You can't play schmoozy games with her. You must be direct and that's what I was. She knew I was coming at this from the right place. It wasn't about money or exploitation. I mean, God knows Canadian docs are not a way to get rich. I was a queer woman standing in front of one of my idols, saying, “Why hasn't someone done right by you?” And I always feel like, you know, time's ticking, anything could happen at any time.

Carole played with sexuality and, with her hit song “High School Confidential,” she expressed pure lesbian lust that was groundbreaking. How important is that song to queer culture?

She inspired not just queers. In the last six years I’ve talked to mechanics on Vancouver Island, to construction guys on the East Coast. When they heard I was doing this film they’d freak out. The biggest surprise for me is how much straight men are obsessed with Carole Pope. It's so interesting because if you think about the era, any song, any nod to any kind of sexuality was going to do it for guys, right? They were like, you’re hot and you're talking about sex. On the radio!

The film pays tribute to this lesbian icon, but it’s also a meditation on the aging artist.

And a woman artist.

Yes. You show how hard Carole works to make a living and ply her trade.

My point was to do this cold open where it's Carole Pope, the bee’s knees, in her crappy little apartment in L.A. The contrast was the point. It was to say everybody who thinks Carole Pope is living high off the hog of “High School Confidential” is wrong. It could not be more untrue.

And this isn’t just a film about Carole. It’s the story of Carole and Kevan Staples, who formed Rough Trade back in 1968. Was it hard for Carole to talk about Kevan?

I would argue that Kevan, and the ballad of Kevan and Carole’s love story, is the beating heart of Rough Trade and the film. We had a whole version of the film that just wasn't cutting it. The film itself worked, but Carole wasn't being forthcoming. So, we had to do a final two-day mega interview where we went deep and I had to say to Carol, listen we're going there. It was uncomfortable, and in that interview she admitted maybe my songwriting wasn't as great without Kevan in the 1990s. It's just one line.  

It's a very revealing line.

Yes, for her to admit, maybe my best work was with Kevan, is what she was saying. Going solo maybe wasn't the greatest plan in retrospect.

Has Carole seen the film?

Carole has seen it, and she likes it. It was a very emotional time when she saw it because Kevan had just passed away. I had been racing to get the film to the hospital to have Kevan see it, and it just didn't happen. So, it was just this horrible time. I invited Marilyn, Kevan's wife, and Carole to both watch it together at our edit facility. The prevailing emotions were about Kevan at that time, and it was very, very emotional. Everyone was crying.

What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

You can look at this film like a prism, see it in completely different ways. It’s a long-lost hero film; people in Canada know who Carol Pope is. Straight men will watch it and love it. The baby gays will watch it and learn something and love it. 

And when we’re talking about pop culture, we’re talking about a flame that lights another flame that lights another flame. I just went to see Peaches a couple of weeks ago, and you can draw the direct line between Carole and Peaches, but then you've got all these new kids coming out 20 years after Peaches. It's a third generation of queer kids, where we've got Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp. All these young, proud sapphic singers who are talking about women and loving women. And I just think, wow, here's a godmother of yours you can meet.  

The post An audience with the pope appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

For several years, extended reality (XR) documentaries have been offering immersive experiences by dropping audiences directly into stories via virtual or augmented reality. How is the genre faring today?

Traces: The Grief Processor, presented at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, last March and the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM, based on its French acronym) in November, is an interactive documentary experience that uses location-based virtual reality (LBVR) to explore grief.

Before donning the virtual-reality headset, visitors are asked to contribute a written, visual or auditory memory connected to the loss of someone important to them. They then enter a virtual dreamlike forest in a small group, guided by director Vali Fugulin and actor Stéphane Crête, who also specializes in funeral rites. During the experience they can interact with the subject of their grief, then share a statement that is archived in the Traces universe.

“The frustration I’ve often felt [with immersive experiences] is that I’m dropped into something that’s happening right then and there, but it was conceived by someone else,” Fugulin explained at RIDM, where XR documentary filmmakers discussed the virtues and dangers of their field during a talk titled Memory in the Age of Digital Storytelling.

“As a documentary filmmaker, my personal obsession has become integrating reality into an experience that’s happening in real time. When creating Traces, I wanted people to be able to bring their own stories into my story,” she continued.

French filmmaker Emeline Courcier places her personal story at the heart of her work. In her video installation Burn From Absence, recently on display at Montreal’s Place des Arts and the PHI Studio, Courcier uses artificial intelligence to recreate memories of her deceased family after a relative in Vietnam burned all their family photos back in 1975.

Users hear real audio accounts while seeing AI-generated visual recreations of those memories. “Each person has their own perception of their experience; some memories contradict each other. In the end, it’s up to the viewer to decide if they are watching a work that is true or false,” Courcier said during the RIDM talk.

Accessing the Inaccessible

Ugo Arsac, a documentarian from Marseille, France, uses digital storytelling in a different way. He sees the medium as a way to let people access experiences that would generally be inaccessible to them.

One of his projects, IN-URBE, explores Paris’s labyrinth of underground sewers, crypts, tunnels and subways. Another, Girlfriend Experience, takes its audience into the brothels of Marseille. His project ENERGEIA, which was presented at RIDM, takes place in a virtual post-apocalyptic setting comprised of real French nuclear power plants.

“It’s a sort of experimental video game,” Arsac explained. “You walk around the interior of this 3D documentary. There’s no beginning, there’s no end. You enter when you want, you leave when you want.”

ENERGEIA participants meet experts who contradict each other on energy issues. “In all of my projects, I try not to give my view of things,” Arsac said. “I prefer to present people who offer varying positions. That gives the audience the opportunity to form their own opinion.”

The Risks of XR Documentary

Although he has decided to embrace the medium, Arsac recognizes that digital storytelling comes with risks. “Virtual reality has a different power than [traditional] documentary,” he explained. “A documentary remains in a cerebral place; we remember it in our minds. Virtual reality also creates a physical memory in the inner ear. The memory is located in a different place.”

Extended reality experiences can also provoke strong, sometimes unexpected, emotional reactions. “There’s a risk that the experience itself creates trauma,” Arsac said.

That’s why Courcier chose to abandon an immersive project on incest. “An immersive experience allows you to include the viewer by putting them in a position to confront a difficult experience. That said, who would want to be dropped into such a nightmarish experience?”

She wonders if that pursuit is even worthwhile. “What is a work of art if there’s no one to witness it, if there’s no one to share it with and create a dialogue? I find this type of physical and mental engagement a little risky [in the context of a story about incest].”

With Traces, Fugulin has seen the emotional power of the medium firsthand. “Even if we try to prepare people beforehand, we can’t completely control the emotional charge. There are people who have very strong reactions, even if we’ve done everything we can to mitigate them. It’s true that it can get away from us.”

The post The risks and rewards of XR documentary appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day we talk with Nuisance Bear co-directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, who just won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival, about falling in love in Churchill, Manitoba, and the joys and challenges of working with your spouse.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry.

Unless you’re a couple working on a film set.

Navigating any relationship is tricky, but when two creatives join forces professionally it can be especially fraught. Creative differences can follow you home and the boundary between work colleague and life partner may blur.

Yet, all those challenges can also fuel a relationship, strengthening a bond forged by creativity.

That bond defines Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, the filmmaking couple behind the acclaimed documentary Nuisance Bear, which had its world premiere at last month’s Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize in the prestigious festival’s U.S. Documentary competition.

Based on the duo’s 2021 short film of the same name, which you can watch here, the feature-length documentary takes the point of view of a polar bear declared a nuisance in Churchill, Manitoba, tagged as Canada’s polar bear capital. The documentary asks the question, who is the nuisance in this landscape — bear or human? The story culminates when the film’s Inuit narrator and bear come together.

Falling For Each Other, and the Subject Matter

The film has been a labour of love for Vanden and Weisman, who met 10 years ago while studying film at York University.

“We met in third or fourth year and were on again, off again. Then as part of a student project we ended up in Churchill together and the rest is history,” says Weisman.

“When we were there, we realized we could really rely on each other and we just kinda fell in love, both with the subject matter and also each other,” adds Vanden.

The pair continued to visit Churchill over the next decade realizing there was a story to be told about the bear-human connection. In all, they logged 250 days of shooting, accumulating 700 hours of footage. The 2021 short was a hit with audiences and was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination. That success fuelled their belief that a feature documentary would resonate with viewers.

Working Together, Acknowledging Differences

Chatting over Zoom from their Toronto home a few days before heading to Sundance, Vanden and Weisman are relaxed. While they don’t finish each other’s sentences, they are in sync and the conversation between them flows naturally.

One wonders if they were always in sync while shooting?

“There was definitely tension at points and there was definitely fighting ’cause you can’t avoid it,” says Vanden. “But Jack and I are both really good at conflict resolution because we care about each other and we recognize we are on the same team even when we creatively butt heads.

“Part of the structure of the film is that it takes place in two towns,” she continues, “so for a lot of it we were separate. So sometimes we’d fight about a creative choice and I’d say, ‘Well, you’re not here so I am going to do what I want,’” she says, smiling.

“And it was the right choice!” exclaims Weisman. “That moment is one of the greatest things in the whole movie because of that choice. So, you have to trust the other person, although it’s hard to always trust, especially since we both have a particular way of doing things. We don’t see the world the same way. It gives us more of a 360-degree picture if you can get past the friction it causes.”

“We are very different people,” adds Vanden. “Yet we have common goals, common morals and common ideas of what we want out of life. But we bring different things to the table. Celebrating our differences, coming together and listening to each other is really important. It’s not always easy.”

Weathering the Storms

For the most part, filmmaking couples spend more time at home than on a set. That’s where discussions, planning and differences of opinions arise.

“We are 10 years into the relationship, and the working relationship, and so we had to learn over time,” explains Vanden. “I had to get to a point where I’d say, ‘It’s bedtime, I don’t wanna keep talking about this!’ [Both laugh.] Jack is so dogged when he has an interest.”

“It’s like an addiction,” he admits. “There weren’t enough boundaries, if we are being honest, in the relationship. We’ve almost split up at times because it has become so difficult. But we managed to make it through to the other side and there’s obviously a great reward to that. I’m so glad we did it together.”

Wiseman grew up in Ithaca, New York, before moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen. Vanden is an Ottawa native, the daughter of a Canadian mother and Venezuelan father. They both cut their teeth working as cinematographers, and visual storytelling remains Vanden’s first love.

She imagines working on fiction films in the future but says the time spent making Nuisance Bear was a masterclass in filmmaking.

“Documentary is the best education for filmmaking and storytelling, especially as a cameraperson,” she says. “It just really hones your skills. It is so foundational to the way I am creatively. I think all filmmakers, at some point, should do some form of documentary.”

“We haven’t talked about doing another film together after this,” says Wiseman. “This is going to be a crazy year and we’re thankful for that. But it’s been nonstop for five years now. The short took off more than we could have imagined and there was almost 18 months of travelling with that. And then we went straight into production on the feature, and now we have another year to 18 months supporting this film. So, for me, it’s just going to be about slowing down a bit.”

What is their final piece of advice for other couples who plan to work together?

“Don’t be too hard on each other,” says Wiseman.

“Exactly,” echoes Vanden. “I also think it’s important for any relationship, even if you are not necessarily working together on a creative project, your life together has to be a project where you both have the same goals coming out of it. So, because we want the same things out of our lives, out of our careers, out of this project, we were able to weather all the storms.”

The post True romance: partners in life and filmmaking appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

A key takeaway from the 21st Montreal International Documentary Festival was that, for the doc industry to be inclusive, critics and funding agencies must also change their ways.

Leonard Cortana could barely contain his anger as he recalled remarks he’s heard from members of film commissions on which he sits.  

“I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say, ‘We have enough money for one more project, so why don’t we pick up an Indigenous project? They don’t need as much money,’” said Cortana, who is the programs and strategic partnerships manager for EURODOC, a training program for documentary producers. 

Cortana was speaking to attendees at Forum RIDM, the professional program at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (or RIDM, based on its French acronym), this past November. He’s heard the same type of comments about documentaries covering women’s issues. 

He said too many documentary filmmakers take on projects that deal with sensitive subjects without having the necessary funds for psychological support or compensation for the protagonists. “You can’t deal with a difficult issue without the proper funding,” he said. 

Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) treasurer and member-at-large Amar Lohana took a more nuanced view during a panel titled Creating, Distributing, Connecting: Challenges and Levers for the Documentary Ecosystem. He said significant gains have been made in terms of equity and diversity across the country, including programs for new filmmakers. 

However, Lohana says there’s still work to be done. “The area where we see a lack of leadership is among decision-makers in government funding agencies, who are not diverse enough. It’s an issue that we continue to bring to their attention,” he said. “If we want to achieve lasting change, decision-makers must be more diverse than they are today.”  

The Issue With Critics

Another key player for the success of a documentary filmmaker is the critic, who often acts as a bridge between the film and the viewing public. Four critics from Canada and abroad reflected on their profession during the panel titled Deconstructing Biases in Film Criticism.

The foursome agreed that criticism is a subjective endeavour. Like anyone, critics bring their own emotional baggage to watching a film. If they’re in a good mood, they may feel more positive about a film. They also bring their own life experiences and values.

Paola Casella, vice president of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI), which represents film critics from around the world, explained, “I am a feminist. When I saw the film Promising Young Woman, I was very inclined to like it. And for the greater part of the film I was enjoying it very much,” she said. “Then some things started going wrong with the screenplay and one of the characters. So, what do you do? Do you give a voice to your side that wants to support this director, this film, this screenplay, the bravery of this film, or are you a critic who points out the pitfalls of the film itself? And, eventually, I chose to be honest.”

For Inge Coolsaet, co-editor of the Belgian film magazine Fantômas, it’s better for a critic to disclose their biases than try to hide them under the veneer of neutrality. She says that at Fantômas, critics are encouraged to write from a personal perspective and bring their “backpack” of experiences with them when they watch a film. “To put all of that in the text so that the source material for the criticism is not only the film, but is yourself,” she explains. “I think that's a potential way, not to avoid biases, but to see the effects.”

Criticism With Empathy

The panellists also discussed editorial practices that can encourage an inclusive perspective on a film.

At Montreal’s daily newspaper Le Devoir, the editors assign films to critics who have the sensitivity and cultural references to understand the world presented within, explained film and visual arts critic Olivier Du Ruisseau.  

“I think that the culture is moving so fast now, and sometimes having, I don't know, the 60-year-old guy write about a story of a young filmmaker, sometimes it can feel kind of awkward,” he said. “So, I think we're trying to avoid that as much as possible, just to make sure that the criticism is as empathetic and informed as possible while also understanding that we won't know everything about the work.” 

Mathieu Li-Goyette, editor-in-chief of the Quebec-based film website Panorama-cinéma, took a similar approach when producing a special issue on Indigenous cinema. His team formed an independent editorial committee with Indigenous community members, in addition to inviting Indigenous critics to participate. 

That said, the effort broke down when they tried to create another special issue two years later and some of the Indigenous partners weren’t available. “We reflected on this a lot, and came to the conclusion that we need to do our own work, to be open, entertain conversations, and meet people from Indigenous cinema,” he said. “We need to meet Indigenous filmmakers, critics, programmers, go to festivals like Présence Autochtone [International First Peoples Festival].” 

Li-Goyette wants his team to learn to write effectively about sensitive topics. “At our magazine, we try to create the conditions so that our team can learn how to write about these subjects that ‘aren't about us’…. [That’s] what cinema is. You know, you look through the eyes of others.” 

The post Diversity in front of, and behind, the camera is no longer enough appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

Unpaid work, funding cutbacks, fragmented online audiences, mental exhaustion. Despite the documentary industry’s many challenges, solutions are emerging to make production more sustainable and humane. Here we recap the professional programming at this year’s Montreal International Documentary Festival, which took place in Montreal from November 24 to November 26.

“It used to be that making documentaries was a lifestyle,” mused TAK Films producer Line Sander Egede during the Montreal International Documentary Festival, or RIDM (based on its French acronym), this past November. “People didn’t live on big salaries, but they were okay.”

During Forum RIDM, the festival’s professional program, Sander Egede lamented that, in her experience, that’s no longer possible. Instead, filmmakers have to take on multiple projects and always project an aura of success to the institutions that finance their films.

“We all know the only way to succeed is to prove that you can do it,” she said. “Financiers are not going to finance us if we say, ‘Oh, by the way, I'm not doing this, this, this. It's not in the budget.’ Or ‘You have to give me more money because I'm not able to take care of the promotion, the social media.’”

As a result, she explained, the list of unpaid tasks grows, both in pre-production and production.

Throughout the forum, the documentary industry’s precarious position was attributed to various factors, including the economic slowdown, the erosion of institutional funding, and a decrease in revenue generated from platforms.

Mounting Difficulties in Documentary Distribution

The documentary industry has yet to find its place in a world of ever-increasing streaming platforms. Many of the platforms that once bought lots of documentaries are now producing them themselves and in far fewer numbers.

At a panel titled To Circulate Is to Exist: The Stakes of Documentary Reach, several industry experts weighed in on the issues.

According to INDOX founder Luke Brawley this new reality is forcing the industry to return to a territory-by-territory sales model. In other words, the agent has to sell the documentary to each country individually and find a local distributor before releasing the film internationally. “I would say this is sometimes a lot more valuable,” he offered, “because they can actually put it into cinemas, where platforms can’t.”

Meanwhile, alternative documentary distribution networks continue to develop.

“Museums are extending the life of certain films by organizing screenings, and some festivals are setting up film acquisition and distribution divisions,” explained Lidia Damatto, co-founder and partner at the international sales agency MoreThan Films.

Community screenings are also valuable. Anja Dziersk, co-founder and festival manager at Rise and Shine World Sales, pointed to The Day Iceland Stood Still. The Icelandic-American co-production was screened at least 100 times in the U.S. simply thanks to promotion on the film’s website.

Documentary screenings in schools represent another lifeline for many productions. “I believe we make more money in the education market than at the box office,” said Benjamin Hogue, CEO of Les Films du 3 Mars.

Also worth reading: Making Access to Documentaries Easier for Educators

Brawley also highlighted the potential of the U.S. educational market. “When a film gets indexed in an American university library, hundreds of schools have access to it. And that can generate impressive revenue,” he said.

Less Hierarchy, More Accountability

At the event’s opening luncheon, Leonard Cortana, manager of inclusion programs and strategic partnerships at EURODOC, a training program for documentary producers, challenged some preconceived notions about the documentary industry.

“We perpetuate the illusion that people are at the heart of our industry because we’ve established all these rituals, like one-on-one meetings, conferences and consultations,” said Cortana, “but behind all of that, we have to recognize that performance also plays a significant role.”

To create more equitable relationships, Cortana wants to see change in the documentary world’s hierarchy. He criticizes some major festivals for managing access to their venues based on colour codes assigned to filmmakers, producers and funders — for example, brown allows access to the first floor, green to the bar, etc.

“Many producers have told me they’ve spent their savings and fought to get a visa, but once they got to the festival, they didn’t have access to the people who make the decisions,” he said.

Cortana also questioned the selection criteria for major festivals. “For which kind of film do we give an award,” he asks, wondering aloud if an award should go to a sensational movie that was made under unpleasant conditions, or a less dramatic one that has a more sustainable approach on set.

He’s in favour of awards that highlight a film’s accountability or, at the very least, the introduction of ethical criteria concerning the well-being of the crew and subjects. He even suggests paying documentary subjects, or co-producing the film with them, as a way to make the industry more humane.

The post The Quest for Ethical Practices in Documentary Production  appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

The producers behind the doc Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery were looking for the right director to tell the story of the all-female music festival that broke boundaries and thrilled audiences in the late 1990s. Canadian Ally Pankiw hit all the right notes.

Ally Pankiw knew she was the right director for the job. 

The job was helming Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a documentary that recounts the creation and legacy of the all-female music festival pioneered by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan in the late 1990s. 

“There was a lot of crossover in terms of my body of work and the themes the documentary explores,” says the 39-year-old filmmaker on the line from Los Angeles. Born in Alberta, Pankiw now splits her time between Toronto and L.A. 

“I really wanted to do the doc because I was resentful of how Lilith had been framed for me and my generation,” she says. “How things that were feminist and female-focused in pop culture were trivialized and made fun of in that era. Things that were vulnerable, soft and feminine didn't have as much cultural currency as male things. And I was pissed that for a large part of my life that's what I was taught and told.  

“So that’s what I wanted the film to do, to look at the power and strength and joy of these women. And we wanted to honour what Lilith actually was — a massive f-cking success and such an underdog success story.”  

The Doc’s Origins and Source Material 

Based on the oral history of Lilith Fair Vanity Fair published in conjunction with Epic Magazine in 2019, the film draws from more than 600 hours of never-before-seen archival footage as well as new interviews with fans, organizers and the artists.  

Original Lilith Fair musicians, including McLachlan, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Erykah Badu, Jewel, Natalie Merchant and Indigo Girls, share their stories of coming together at a time when female artists received limited radio airplay and rarely toured together for fear they wouldn’t attract large audiences. 

Pankiw was too young to attend the Lilith Fair tours, which were staged annually from 1997 to 1999 (a 2010 revival didn’t spark the same flame), but was aware of the female artists involved.  

“I was only 10 or 11 in the festival’s first year, so I didn't go, but I had a cool older sister who was a grunge queen of the ’90s,” recalls Pankiw. “She was very much one of the reasons I knew about all those artists and loved them. I was also a dancer, so my childhood and teenage years were filled with lyrical and contemporary dance competitions where those artists were the soundtracks for my pieces and solos.” 

What Pankiw Brought to the Project 

A quick look at Pankiw’s bio and you’ll understand just how suited she was for the task of condensing Lilith Fair’s history into a 99-minute film. 

Born in St. Albert, Alberta, Pankiw moved to Toronto to study journalism but realized that she wanted to tell stories rather than report them. She began her career directing commercials and music videos featuring mostly female artists. She created the CBC Gem series Terrific Women and then worked as a writer and story editor on Schitt’s Creek.  

An openly queer director, she’s helmed episodes of Black Mirror, The Great and comedian Mae Martin’s show Feel Good. Her acclaimed 2023 debut feature I Used to Be Funny, about a female comic dealing with PTSD and depression, drew on her own experiences. 

Her background as a journalism student came in handy when it came to conducting the film’s myriad interviews.  

“It was a return to something I did a very long time ago in university, but [interviewing] is also akin to directing. Your job as a director is about getting an emotional performance out of someone, whether it's someone talking about their own life or telling an anecdote, or an actor acting. Your job is to create a safe, open channel for people to be vulnerable.” 

And the artists didn’t disappoint. 

“They were all truly amazing,” says Pankiw. “Every single one of those subjects was delightful, funny, sad and rage-inducing. They just are all such funny people and have such a great sense of humour about everything that they've had to be up against.  

“And then there were some really beautiful surprises,” she continues, “like Sarah [McLachlan] allowing us to read and use some of her journal entries. And Natalie Merchant brought her journal from her time on Lilith. It was like poetry, she was reading from it and we were all crying. There are so many moments like that, many didn’t make it in the doc or it would’ve been 100 hours long.” 

Dan Levy’s Involvement 

Pankiw’s good friend and Schitt’s Creek collaborator Dan Levy is one of the film’s producers. The pair met in Los Angeles more than a decade ago, and Pankiw says working alongside Levy, a huge Lilith Fair fan, made her job easier.  

“Dan was working on the first season of Schitt's Creek when we met,” recalls Pankiw. “We were both gay Canadians in L.A. and it was kind of inevitable that we’d meet. We started talking about comedy and being from Canada, and then he saw one of my short films, which led me to writing on Schitt's Creek. 

“We both respect each other's work ethic and taste. I also think we're both relentless in terms of trying to do things for the right reason. And, especially on this doc, he's a very good producer to have in your corner because he will fight for the right thing. For all those reasons he's a lovely collaborator.” 

Lilith Fair’s Legacy 

For Pankiw, the film represents a chance to inform and inspire a new generation of female musicians and music fans.  

“I'm really interested in stories around intergenerational relationships, between women specifically,” says Pankiw. “We were able to connect Lilith Fair artists to modern-day artists like Olivia Rodrigo. Again, it’s that idea of the cool older sister in society. The women who come before, like a whisper network, or passing the baton, or sending the elevator down and opening doors as they go and leaving them open.  

“That’s such beautiful legacy of Lilith and Sarah especially. Her wanting to inspire other artists to behave in that way. I'm so happy we were able to celebrate that contribution.” 

The post Ally Pankiw focuses lens on Lilith Fair  appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

Usually, cinema revolves around images. Yet with documentaries, a project’s source material can sometimes be sound. Last year, two documentaries demonstrated it’s possible to construct a hard-hitting narrative around audio: Like a Spiral, by French-Moroccan director Lamia Chraibi, and Intercepted, by Canadian-Ukrainian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych. The two filmmakers spoke about their projects. 

In the documentary short Like a Spiral five migrant women tell director Lamia Chraibi about the traumas they experienced working in Lebanon under the kafala system. The sponsorship program connects migrants’ residency permits to their employers and exposes workers to exploitation and other human rights violations.

Some of the women requested anonymity for safety reasons.  

“I must admit that at the beginning of the project I saw this as a constraint,” explained Chraibi during a discussion titled Navigating Sensitive Topics at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). “I thought it would be complicated to make a film without seeing their faces.” 

But Chraibi knew the risks for the women were real — loss of employment, passport confiscation, imprisonment or deportation. So she decided to conduct the interviews alone, with neither a crew nor a camera.  

The choice paid off.  

“It allowed me to establish a real closeness with them,” Chraibi said.  

A Dialogue With the City

The tone is set from the beginning of the film, as the domestic workers explain the heart-rending experience of leaving their young children at home in the hopes of earning money through the kafala system to provide their kids a better future.  

The women speak of feeling rejected by their employer families, the harassment they experienced in the street, and other daily acts of violence. “They allowed me to access something very authentic,” said Chraibi. 

She took inspiration for the film’s visuals from what her protagonists said in their interviews. 

“The women started to speak to me about Beirut by personifying it, as if they had a love-hate relationship with the city. From a creative point of view I thought it would be interesting to establish a dialogue between them and the city.” 

As we hear the migrant workers’ stories, a camera weaves through the city, showing various beige buildings in a sequence shot, static nighttime shots punctuated with fireworks, balconies, low-angle shots, and a window lit up at night through which we see a woman in a kitchen. This all conveys the feelings of dizziness, being trapped, and uprootedness experienced by someone living under the kafala system. 

Singing and Smiling Faces

Halfway through the documentary, Chraibi broadens the film’s scope by showing a wide shot of the capital with its cluster of residential buildings and skyscrapers. The migrant workers explain how they were affected by the port explosion of 2020, when improperly stored ammonium nitrate detonated causing more than 200 deaths and thousands of injuries.  

“With this crisis…Lebanon crumbled,” one says. “Even if we are of many colours — Black, white, yellow — at heart, it hurts us to see the Lebanese in this state. Before, we witnessed a very nice, bright Lebanon. Now, Lebanon is dark,” says another. 

Chraibi took care not to “invisibilize” her protagonists through her creative choices. “The fact that these women are already invisible in society raised a lot of ethical questions for me.” 

Instead, she created a visual montage where the sequence shots of building facades give way to Beirut at night, punctuated with fireworks, then to a “dancing” Beirut, where we see women’s faces. They’re dressed in bright colours, full of life, dancing, singing, smiling, all to lively music.  

“I want to speak for those who cannot,” one of the protagonists says, as if to offer solace to the women still living under the kafala system.  

Intercepted: Putting Images to Phone Calls

The soundtrack that inspired the documentary feature Intercepted feels like it belongs to a horror film. 

Soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filmmaker Oksana Karpovych learned that excerpts of intercepted phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families back home were being posted by Ukrainian security services to their YouTube channel every day.  

In these three- to four-minute excerpts, the Russian soldiers expressed all the bad things they thought about the Ukrainian people, often using brutal, cruel language.  

“At first, I was very disturbed,” Karpovych recounted at a discussion dubbed Socially Engaged Cinema and Contemporary Forms during RIDM 2024. “Then I thought it was extremely important material, and I have to absolutely do something with this.”  

The challenge was how to create images to accompany a soundtrack that conveys the war’s worst atrocities. “The way we decided to approach the film visually was as a sort of nontraditional road movie,” said Karpovyck. “We travelled across Ukraine with a small crew of four people.” 

She decided to focus on three visual threads.  

The first was a series of long sequence shots that showed vehicles driving through the devastated country, creating a disturbing, oppressive atmosphere. In the gripping opening scene we are in a Russian tank, captured by the Ukrainian army, that is advancing on the small, muddy road of a Ukrainian village.  

“It was very important to me, and also very subjective, to create a nightmarish vision,” the filmmaker explained. 

The second visual thread is made up of static shots that testify to the impact of the war. We see classrooms, kitchens, living rooms, courtyards and public places devastated by what we presume to be shrapnel. 

The third thread shows scenes of daily life: Ukrainians cooking in a bunker, gardening, taking care of their livestock, playing volleyball, smoking while looking out a window, all with stoic, unshakeable expressions in the face of war.  

“Another expression of the resistance is that people get very quiet, and each time the attacks happened, the ones that I witnessed, people were not crying; they were always very, very quiet. They looked deeply sad, but there was something in the silence that I found very strong, and something that eventually [I was] trying to bring into the film,” explained Karpovych. 

She chose not to show any scenes of war, bombing, or explosions. Nor did she show any Russian or Ukrainian soldiers. Instead, she concentrated on the Ukrainian people’s daily resistance.  

“It’s thanks to this part of the film that I found the courage to listen and to work with audio material as heavy as these Russian conversations,” she said. 

The post Building a Documentary Around Sound  appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

Showing documentaries in classrooms is a valuable tool. It can expose students to cultural content while teaching them important lessons. But, in reality, teachers often have a hard time finding and sourcing documentaries, making them inaccessible to students. 

Reel Canada executive director Jack Blum has every right to be proud of what he and his team have done to fulfill their mission — promoting Canadian films in schools.  

They amassed an inventory of 148 documentaries, created a comprehensive teaching kit, and organized 1,000 screenings at schools across Canada in 2024.  

“We have achieved far better results than we had initially imagined,” says Blum. But it’s been a tough slog.  

The team’s first challenge was to choose which documentaries would be included based on their educational value and the cultural context in which they would be presented.  

“Films must be appropriate for schools,” Blum says. “The criteria vary across the country depending on the school’s teachers or principal. It varies between rural and urban communities, and particularly between Quebec and English Canada.”  

Reel Canada’s programming team does test screenings with teachers and students to determine the right matches. 

Hard to find

Another issue is discoverability, or making content easily searchable online, especially for those who don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.  

Unfortunately, there’s no centralized platform in Canada where teachers can search for appropriate documentary films. Instead, they’re left to their own devices as they bumble through a half-dozen existing, unconnected educational platforms.  

Alongside Reel Canada’s Education Program, there’s NFB Education, Radio-Canada’s Curio, and Télé-Québec en classe. There’s also the Hot Docs festival’s Docs For Schools, which is expected to return in 2025. 

“The Canadian educational system is extremely tricky,” says Blum. “There’s no central organization whatsoever. Every school and every school board makes its own decisions. It certainly wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of national education strategy, especially now, when the political climate in the U.S. is showing signs that we need to reinforce national ideas if we’re going to protect our sovereignty.” 

Quebec’s homegrown solution

Until a national Canadian strategy can be put in place, Quebec is tackling the problem at the provincial level.  

In 2022, the Documentary Observatory (Observatoire du documentaire) began an ongoing consultation process with all concerned stakeholders — teachers, the Quebec Ministry of Education, SODEC (Société de développement des entreprises culturelles), documentary filmmakers and producers, the major viewing platforms — in order to develop a solution for educators. 

Last November, during a roundtable at the 2024 Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), Documentary Observatory director Amélie Lambert Bouchard announced the publication of The Action Plan for the Integration of Independent Documentary Films in Quebec Schools.  

“We came up with a splendid solution,” she said. 

Their first project, steered by the Arrimage (anchoring) committee, is to compile a standardized educational information sheet for each documentary, also called an educational-cultural information sheet, that can be easily accessed from anywhere in the school system.  

“Teachers have a lot of subjects to teach,” said Arrimage committee member and learning specialist Jade Ménard. “And so, if a film has no direct link to the content or skills they need to develop in their students, they won’t get access to show it in class.” 

The educational-cultural information sheet will make it easy for teachers to determine the value of any documentary based on the subject matter and grade level. “The information sheet needs to be produced with the help of educational experts who speak the same language as the teachers and are familiar with the curriculum,” said Documentary Observatory member Denis McCready. 

Libraries to the rescue

The Documentary Observatory has been working on a content discoverability system that won’t require a new viewing platform. According to the authors of the action plan, “The Ministry of Education has made it clear that it has no interest in developing or funding a new platform.” 

Based on its consultations, the Observatory chose the library network for its referencing portal. “It’s not well known, but librarians are the experts in how knowledge is categorized and how it’s best presented to different audiences,” said Mathieu Thuot-Dubé, senior director of education and cultural initiatives at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ).  

The Observatory decided the BAnQ catalogue is the best choice to serve as the master database for all cultural content, including documentaries. 

Finding the best place to store and host the films, on the other hand, has yet to be resolved.  

“The three leading platforms in Quebec have shown great interest in collaborating to host participating independent documentaries,” said Lambert Bouchard. “However, they do not want to deal with the technical side or to include educational-cultural information sheets on their site.”  

So, what’s the next step? 

This year, the Documentary Observatory will continue conversations with streaming platforms about hosting docs, with the library network about a portal to catalogue titles, and with the Ministry of Education to confirm funds for the creation of educational materials and to pay copyright fees. 

According to the Observatory, this extensive project is expected to take two to three years. 

The post Making Access to Documentaries Easier for Educators  appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

What is the state of documentaries today? Industry professionals are noting a decline in diversity initiatives, a reconfiguration of North/South relations, and an online distribution system that has run out of steam.   

The top concern for documentary professionals at the recent Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM 2024) was how support for diversity in the U.S. working world has fallen.  

“One of our New York partners was actually told not to use the word impact anymore because it makes a project sound too wokey,” recounted Leonard Cortana during a talk dubbed Toward a Fairer, More Inclusive Industry at the November 2024 event. Cortana is the manager of inclusion programs and strategic partnerships for EURODOC. “It’s nothing new that groups are no longer using the terms like BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Colour] or ‘Black filmmaker,’ because funders won’t invest in any proposal containing those words.”  

Of course, there have been conservative shifts like this in the past, from the McCarthy era to Reagan. Cortana sees today’s shift as a battle that must be fought with education.  

“It’s very important to reinvigorate these words to meet this movement — one that could easily turn very violent in the years to come — head on,” Cortana said. He singled out the work of Marion Schmidt (DocSafe) and Jane Mote in their “Safer Spaces” report presented at Durban FilmMart 2024, an initiative for developing the African film industry. 

While the threat to diversity may seem less immediate from a Canadian perspective, there is still a long way to go before we see full inclusion in documentaries produced here, including our idea of how stories can be structured.  

During a talk dubbed Reinventing Co-Production Between Francophone Regions, Eric Idriss-Kanago, a producer with Montreal-based production company Yzanakio, pointed out that funding bodies still have a bias toward stories told in three acts with one main character at the centre of the story.  

“When we talk about the narrative or the identity of storytelling, we must also remember that there are countries that have other ways of telling their stories. In Central Africa, the stories I hear grandfathers telling don’t have three acts,” Idriss-Kanago said.  

“My dream is that the day will come when projects get funding precisely because they move away from the Manichean [good vs. evil], three-act structure and have stories with characters that evolve through a series of stages. If you’re talking about inclusion, you need to include other ways of telling stories as well.” 

Putting North/South exchanges on an equal footing

Diversity was also a hot topic during a discussion of North/South co-productions, which have historically grappled with an unbalanced dynamic. Because wealthier, more industrialized northern nations throughout the world have been privileged in terms of funding bodies, they’ve had more sway in imposing their way on how a film should be produced, including narrative norms like the three-act structure, than developing countries in the world’s South. 

On the other hand, Senegalese producer Souleymane Kébé (Sunuy Films) offered a refreshing view of these relationships. “We’re really fortunate. Our FOPICA [Fonds de Promotion de l’Industrie Cinématographique et Audiovisuelle] funding organization provides financial support for the production of feature films in Senegal,” he said. “This gives me the confidence to look my co-production friends in the eye and have a serious conversation.”  

Since completing the Africadoc Training Program in Saint-Louis, Senegal, a decade ago, Kébé has been active in arranging 50/50 partnerships with producers in northern countries. He’s also encouraged other African producers to take advantage of co-production agreements with Algeria, Morocco, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.  

“If I can set up a co-production with a partner from Ivory Coast, for example, we can then go together and knock on the door of European funding organizations,” said Kébé. “It can shift the balance of power to our advantage.” 

Cortana also mentioned a positive development in North/South relationships.  

“There’s a major movement in returning film archives from the North to the South,” he said. “Governments, including the Netherlands, are now doing this. There are also African coalitions working on this and requesting that archives be returned.” 

The collapse of online viewing

Challenges regarding financing and streaming platforms have been discussed at these events for years and are still a big concern.  

There is no longer hope that online platforms will save the documentary industry. The pandemic is over, and the limitations of the online model simply can’t be overcome. 

“When I started working as a producer I thought the internet was the most democratic platform out there,” said Wouter Jansen, owner of the Square Eyes distribution company, during a talk titled Breaking Into the International Market. “All we had to do was upload our films and everyone would get to see them. I uploaded a film to Vimeo and in two years only one single person bought a copy.” 

Cortana agrees the pandemic fuelled false expectations that streaming platforms would be a panacea. “The hope was that there would be an audience for documentary films online, but that was immediately dashed after the pandemic,” he said. Today he has little faith in all but a few specialized platforms such as Doc Alliance, True Story and Criterion.  

“While they pay a pretty penny, their real value is only in making films available,” explained Cortana. “It’s also a question of extending the shelf life of films by keeping them in the public eye.” 

María Vera, founder of the Lisbon-based Kino Rebelde distribution company, feels the same. “As far as I’m concerned platforms are not a place where you can do business. They’re more about just showing films,” she said.  

She’s also frustrated with broken promises made amid the explosion of platforms. “You’ll sometimes hear a small platform brag about its global reach. My reaction is, how can it possibly reach an audience in China? It’s not even indexed on Google.” 

Vera emphasized the importance of working with distributors who know how to reach their audience. ‘‘We should be paying closer attention to platforms that have local clout,” she said, citing the European platform True Story and its well-established position in the UK.  

For Vera, the platform of choice will always be festivals.  

The post Documentaries: Diversity stays in the picture  appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

Creating documentaries with racialized, transgender, traumatized or marginalized protagonists can raise some serious ethical concerns about consent. How do you get them to tell their stories without causing painful flashbacks? What if you create a situation that exposes them to trolling? These delicate issues have been the topic of roundtables at the past two editions of the Montreal International Documentary Festival. Here’s how some documentary filmmakers have approached the issue 

When filmmaker Lamia Chraibi began shooting her short film Like a Spiral in 2022, she and her production team had their protagonists sign release forms agreeing that their images would be used without “right of inspection,” meaning those partaking in the film had no right to weigh in on how footage in which they appeared was used.  

Chraibi’s team used this industry-standard clause not only to preserve their creative freedom but also to reassure financial backers that a film would indeed be produced at the end of the process.  

However, the standard clause soon proved ill-suited for telling this true story of five migrant domestic workers who came to Beirut to work under the sometimes oppressive Kafala sponsorship system. 

At one point, Chraibi wanted to shoot an event organized by a migrant workers’ support group called Anti-Racism Movement. She was told that her production team would have to amend its release so that anyone participating in the event could have a say in how their image was used.  

“It was a big wake-up call for me and an even bigger one on the way we do things in this industry,” Chraibi told the audience at last year’s Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM 2024), where she was taking part in the Navigating Sensitive Topics roundtable.  

“We just can’t take it for granted that those in the film will accept the way they’re being presented on screen,” she added. “They must have the option of changing their mind at any time.”  

Not only did Chraibi modify the release for that Anti-Racism Movement event, the production team made sure that all participants had the right to modify their agreements for the rest of the shoot. “A final viewing was organized before picture lock to make sure everyone was comfortable with what they saw,” Chraibi said. 

A limit to modifying consent terms

There is, of course, a limit to consent, and that limit goes into effect when the film goes into distribution.  

“In the current production model we’re funded by public institutions,” explained Chraibi’s fellow panel member Vuk Stojanovic, producer of the 2024 documentary feature Billy. “We need to produce a film that can be released in theatres, broadcast on television or streamed on platforms. From a legal point of view, consent must be signed in no uncertain terms,” he said.  

“We’re not forcing anyone,” Stojanovic continued, “but it must be clear to protagonists who agree to take part in a film that they won’t be able to withdraw their consent after the project has been broadcast.”  

Stojanovic said that for Billy’s director, Lawrence Côté-Collins, this approach was particularly important since the film’s protagonist, Billy Poulin, was a convicted murderer with schizophrenia. “Billy’s consent was verified several times, including at signing and in the presence of lawyers, to confirm that his consent was genuine,” said Stojanovic. 

Explain the project clearly, and allow time for participants to decide

A signature on a legal document is not enough. Instead, consent must be validated at every stage of the creative process.  

“You need to show plenty of goodwill in making documentaries,” Stojanovic said. “We ask people to disclose secret facets of their private lives, often digging deep to find what we find most interesting. You need to be careful how you approach your protagonists, never going beyond their limits or pushing them too far. If they don’t want to discuss some item, that should always be respected. And if we think something is really important, we must find another way of doing it while making them feel comfortable at the same time.” 

Quite often, you have to give the idea time to sink in.  

While making the documentary LARRY (they/them) (2024), filmmaker Catherine Legault wanted to involve the parents of protagonist Laurence Philomène, who was transitioning.

Initially, Philomène’s parents were not comfortable participating. “It wasn’t going to jeopardize the project, but it was an important element that we wanted to incorporate. And to be completely transparent, it did cause a fair amount of stress,” recalled producer Isabelle Phaneuf-Cyr at the 2024 panel.  

“But I think they had to follow their own path to decide, which they finally did. For them, it was a question of understanding the filmmaker’s approach and building up their trust in us.” 

Providing absolute “right of inspection”

For her 2023 documentary The Hearing, about a family navigating Canada’s asylum process after fleeing the Democratic Republic of the Congo, filmmaker Émilie B. Guérette decided to give the film’s protagonist, Peggy Nkunga Ndona, a say in “absolutely everything” by making her co-director.  

“Peggy and I made the film together,” said Guérette during a roundtable called Changing the World One Film at a Time at the 2023 Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM 2023). 

“It’s my position to take. So, if I include her, if we co-create the film, if we discuss things together, if the protagonist has a say in absolutely everything, do I lose my creative freedom, my voice as an auteur, or my independence,” mused Guérette. “I don’t think that’s the case at all. As a university-educated white Québécoise I have many privileges. My question is really, how can I use these privileges to help others? And how can I share that power to make the world a better place?” 

Guérette acknowledged that her position led to some difficult moments. “For example, I wanted to use interview clips where Peggy was very upset and critical of what she was experiencing. I thought the clips were terrific but Peggy didn’t want them in the film. I mean, how far can I go on insisting this? It’s her life, her image and her story that’s being told. I had no choice but to take them out so that Peggy could be proud of the film, too.” 

During the roundtable, Nkunga Ndona explained why she had to set certain limits. “Going through a hearing in Canada was a real shock for me. I do realize that I live under this system, but I don’t want it to destroy me. I know it’s not forever and that it will pass. I don’t want it to change who I am. I want to keep my cool and my values intact while going through a difficult process.” 

• Before you start filming, familiarize yourself with the concept of ethical storytelling

• Gain the trust of the communities affected

• Call in a trauma expert, such as a psychologist

• Guarantee continuous consent throughout the project

• Focus on the well-being of the team, creating an inclusive working environment

• Conduct regular debriefings with protagonists and members of the film crew

Source: Keira Seidenberg, representative of the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Navigating Sensitive Topics roundtable (RIDM 2024) 

References

https://ridm.ca/fr/evenements/naviguer-le-sensible

https://2023.ridm.ca/fr/evenements/changer-le-monde-un-film-a-la-fois

The post Dealing with delicate issues of consent when making documentaries  appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

Few documentaries have fuelled conversations this past year quite like Adonis, a Télé-Québec documentary about young men's obsession with the perfect body. We can thank Jérémie Battaglia, a 41-year-old filmmaker from the South of France who’s called Quebec home since 2009, for the hit doc. Battaglia, co-founder of the Extérieur Jour production studio, has long been interested in the body’s relationship with performance, feelings of inadequacy, and peer pressure. 

The premise for Adonis is based on Battaglia’s own experience. Bullied at school, he resorted to the weight room to become more imposing. While the director generally avoids putting himself in his films, his story was a great way to gain the trust of his subjects and alleviate any concerns they might have had of being judged. 

“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard young men that age speak out like this,” Battaglia said. “What I realized in talking about men is that we tend to first and foremost talk about problems caused by men. These young men feel that the only time we actually talk about them is when they’re making trouble or being violent. The documentary allowed them to open up about who they are and how they feel in their own words. I think that’s another reason it’s had such a big impact.” 

Battaglia finds it disturbing that few male artists are interested in the well-being of young men, especially considering social media’s wildly disproportionate influence—a danger the documentary highlights as a major concern. He’s particularly taken aback by the gap between the real lives of the young men Adonis follows and the image they project online. 

Fortunately, Battaglia had an ace up his sleeve for helping them see the difference between the two: time. Thanks to support from the broadcaster and other organizations, including the Canada Media Fund, he was able to devote twenty shooting days to the project, a rare opportunity for any documentary. 

“It makes a huge difference, especially on TV projects,” he said. “It gives you the leeway to develop a strong auteur approach, with a compelling directing perspective to present the subject in a way the audience hasn’t seen or thought about before. Typically, you’re lucky to get a total of eight days. In this case, I was able to take four full days for the on-camera interviews alone. The difference is like day and night.” 

Battaglia can devote years to a single project. That's the case for his upcoming documentary film, Une jeunesse française (A French Youth), shot over five years with young men from the Maghreb in Camargue, France stadiums. Part of the 2024 HotDocs Official Selection, it’s set for theatrical release this fall.  

With Adonis picking up five Gémeaux Award nominations, Battaglia is already working on another documentary for Télé-Québec. And as always, he has others on the drawing board. When the world is your source of inspiration, you can never run out of ideas. 

“The fascinating thing about documentaries is that they give us access to lives and ways of seeing things we could never have had otherwise,” Battaglia said. “The very essence of the documentary is, of course, providing a factual record of what’s happening in the world around us. Being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes and understand life from their point of view, is an opportunity just too good to pass up." 

The post Creators Who Inspire: Meet Jérémie Battaglia appeared first on Canada Media Fund.

Have you seen a Canadian documentary lately? Not a series, but a feature-length film? Sarah Spring, executive director of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC), worries finding one may be getting harder.

When DOC released the latest edition of its “Getting Real” report at TIFF last year one bit of data set off alarm bells for Spring. “There was a drastic drop in feature doc production and a massive increase in low-budget documentary series,” she says.

That seventh edition of DOC’s survey of Canada’s documentary sector covered the fiscal years from 2016/17 to 2020/21. While there was a lot of good news—overall documentary production went up approximately 32% in that period, in part led by those low-budget series—the creation of feature-length documentaries shrank from 5.1% of Canada’s overall doc output in 2016/17 to a paltry 2.4% in 2020/21.

To note, it was only in the final two years of that study that features declined as a percentage of all doc content in Canada. In 2018/2019 features actually spiked to 6.1% of the whole, then dropped to 4.6% in 2019/2020 before reaching 2.4% in 2020/21, the first year of the Covid pandemic.

DOC won’t have data about the years following 2021 until the next “Getting Real” report comes out in 2028, but anecdotally Spring says, “From what I can tell the downward trend has continued in terms of financing for feature or long-form documentary films.”

Spring says if the decline continues it’s a problem because in that same study 43% of DOC members said they make films about their family and community. “You know, very personal stories, so this is one of the ways that we see ourselves in Canada and that we can look back and see what Canadians thought about our world.”

Lessons from the south of the border

Spring is watching what she calls a “rapid contraction” in the American documentary feature-film industry. In April, Participant — a long-time, major supporter of docs including An Inconvenient Truth, John Lewis: Good Trouble and Food, Inc. — shut down. “We're looking at some real canary in the coal mine stuff in the U.S.,” Spring says.

A Hollywood Reporter article published in the wake of Participant’s demise noted “the options for documentaries about weighty subjects appear to be narrowing after major mergers and an industrywide contraction.” It listed CNN Films, Showtime, HBO and Netflix as broadcasters that have cut back on documentary films.

What can the Canadian documentary industry learn from this?

Spring says we have to lean away from an American-style model, “which is purely market-driven and not driven by cultural policy.” She laments that in the current climate, where streamers and broadcasters are competing for eyeballs, documentary features are often left behind.

“Documentaries operate on a much, much, much, much longer relationship with audiences. So we'll have audiences watching a documentary over a period of 10 years rather than measuring it as how many people are watching it tomorrow on a streaming platform,” she says.

And with streamers now prioritizing profits—laying off employees, introducing more advertising and shying away from political content—what was once a boon for documentary filmmakers has gone bust. Spring says a survey conducted at this year’s Hot Docs Festival asked feature filmmakers where they got their funding. They received 20 responses. “And none of them had streamer money.”

The Hot Docs situation

Speaking of Hot Docs, the organization is facing its own crisis, with possible repercussions for the sector at large. Amid financial woes and mass resignations stemming from allegations of a toxic workplace, the organization is shuttering the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema and temporarily laying off some staff for approximately three months this summer to “conduct an extensive review of the Cinema—its mission, programming and operations—to determine a path back to profitability,” according to its press release.

Spring says she can’t overstate Hot Docs’ importance to the community, recalling that the organization was founded by DOC in 1993 so documentarians would have a place to show their films.

“DOC is going to do everything possible to ensure that Hot Docs makes it through,” she says. “We were very public about the fact that we believe there's some real reflection, internal reflection, that has to happen in order for Hot Docs to emerge from this stronger and more responsive to the community.

“You know, these things don't happen overnight,” she adds. “It takes many years for an institution to get to this level of crisis. But working together we can get through it. I don't believe we're at risk of this institution going away, but it's going to take a lot of hard work to get it back to a place where it’s thriving but also in alignment with its core values.”

Positive news from the funders

Spring believes supporting documentary features via cultural policy is how we protect a genre many see as Canada’s national art form.

She points to permanent funding announced this year for both the Indigenous Screen Office and the CMF’s Program for Racialized Communities as major gains, along with the Rogers-supported Canadian Independent Screen Fund for BPOC Creators. “A lot of our documentary community are from Indigenous, Black and racialized communities and so when there are funds that are specifically targeted for these communities, documentaries are very well represented,” Spring says.

And she was heartened when Valerie Creighton, President and CEO of the Canada Media Fund (CMF), announced at January’s Prime Time conference that documentaries would be a major strategic focus this year. “Not series, but features,” emphasizes Spring.

The CMF also added an obligation within their guidelines that broadcasters must support documentary features. “So when they're getting their envelope of money from the CMF they can't just put it all into series,” explains Spring. “They do have to put part of it into one-off or feature docs.”

Telefilm has also stepped up by increasing their funding cap. “A couple of years ago they switched their model to fund 35% of a doc up to $500,000,” says Spring. “Before it was $125,000.”   

More good news came when the CRTC announced streamers operating in Canada will be required to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues to support Canadian productions.

Spring says she hopes streamers put the maximum amount possible towards Canadian content via the CMF, rather than acquisitions and commissions that aren’t owned by Canadian companies.

“The CRTC ruling was also a huge win for the Indigenous Screen Office and we are thrilled to see that carve-out which is so important for DOC’s Indigenous members,” she says. “Our Francophone members, OLMC [Official Language Minority Community], and Black and racialized creators are all prioritized and this is a key step towards an equitable, accessible industry.”

“A bumper year for Canadian docs” 

Spring is hopeful about the future of documentary features in Canada in large part because of the quality of films she’s seen on the festival circuit this year.

“I was talking to Alex Rogalski, who's the senior Canadian programmer at Hot Docs,” she says. “In January, he told me it was a bumper year for Canadian docs — really high-level, high production value, incredible films being made and some of these have been percolating throughout the pandemic.”

She mentions Pablo Alvarez-Mesa’s The Soldier’s Lagoon and Lisa Jackson’s Wilfred Buck. Then she points to writer/director Nisha Pahuja’s documentary To Kill a Tiger, about a farmer in India who seeks justice after his 13-year-old daughter is raped.

Premiering at TIFF in 2022, To Kill a Tiger toured the festival circuit before a limited U.S. release this past fall. Earlier this year it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards. 

“Absolutely breathtaking. It's beautiful. It's powerful. It's important,” says Spring. “She went all the way to the Oscars. This is it. Is it a Canadian documentary film? I would argue that it very much exemplifies a Canadian cinematic language. You know, no matter where it's filmed, this is a Canadian's perspective and creative approach developed over 20 years of making films supported by our public system here. So yeah, that was huge.” 

“We went to Ottawa and did a documentary day on the Hill and met with [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and [NDP Leader] Jagmeet Singh and everyone was so excited to meet with Nisha…. They were so happy that a Canadian documentary had made it all the way to the Oscars. This genre has an enormous amount of success in Canada and internationally every year.”

The post DOC on Docs: Canada’s National Art Form appeared first on Canada Media Fund.