We undertook this public conversation as collaborators and friends who have these sorts of conversations informally all the time. Our goal was to take our frustrations and redirect them in redemptive ways—not simply to analyze and name the current tyranny of story, but also to explore ways to resist and redeem that tyranny. As active participants in the documentary industry we are criticizing, a conversation about story is also a conversation about capitalism and the pursuit of profit under the mantle of documentary. Our focus is largely on the United States because we believe that many of the motives and tendencies in the contemporary flattening of documentary form originated here. Ours is a conversation about filmmaker sustainability, about the current culture of distraction and the deluge of digital content, and about the question of industry ethics as a whole. As two filmmakers fighting to make and distribute our work in an industrial climate largely hostile to formally ambitious filmmaking, we share many of the same challenges. At the same time, we diverge in key ways. Samara’s perspective is shaped by her experiences as a Canadian-born programmer, mentor, and industry gatekeeper who has spent a great deal of time outside the US context yet also works within it. Cecilia brings to the conversation her vantage point as a diasporic Puerto Rican filmmaker and academic whose work has been simultaneously upheld and tokenized as a marker of industry diversity.

The piece is divided into three parts: 1) our diagnosis of the current problems with story, 2) our reflection on our own experiences as filmmakers swimming upstream in this moment, and 3) the inspiration we take from others’ filmmaking practices that we find exciting. Excerpts from some of those films are woven throughout. Along the way, we discuss the current vanguard of diversity initiatives, and connect the problems with story to the ethics with which filmmakers make their work and enter communities. This conversation attempts to candidly address the US industry’s chokehold on story in productive ways that will resonate beyond our own siloed intellectual and creative communities and into the wider US documentary landscape in the current moment.

Samara Chadwick

I woke up this morning with an image. Maybe because I just drove across the country, it struck me that the trope of the interstate might be useful for naming what I’ve come to see as distressing trends in current documentary. For an interstate to be built, bodies of water need to be filled in, mountains are exploded, ecosystems are vivisected. People are displaced, ancestral lands are bulldozed, territories resignified. In order to construct a clean and efficient line, complex landscapes are flattened.

I feel the dominant approach to story (especially in North America) is much like the interstate: a smooth, unswerving motion towards a clear and predetermined destination. I see this flattening tendency in films that are prescriptive. You know, the kind of film that sets out to tell a story a certain way, that assumes audiences begin at point A and the film will bring them to point B, something as simple as “this person is the protagonist”, or, “this film does XYZ” (raises awareness, creates empathy, offers the definitive account of this or that).

One question I’d love to unpack with you today is what is compromised by the ubiquity of these teleological, interstate stories.

Cecilia Aldarondo

The problem isn’t necessarily storytelling per se, or the impulse to tell a story. There is something incredibly rich about being with people and letting them narrate what they’ve experienced. It is a vital part of how we come together and care for one another. But I don’t believe that this form of storytelling—collective, varied, ethical, and transformative—is the kind of “interstate” storytelling that is cutting through our current landscape. “Interstate” films, as you call them, subscribe to a received narrative, in the ideological sense. They reify conventions, like the triumph of the human spirit or the individual hero fighting against all odds, instead of resisting them. To me, the most valuable forms of storytelling actually undermine those received narratives.

SC

Right! Story itself, as a human impulse, can be gorgeous! Our inherent ability to synthesize our lives into stories that implicate other people—and create tension, belonging, nostalgia, expectations—is fundamental to our capacity for community and for politics. But this is also why the mechanisms of story have been instrumentalized time and time again to consolidate the power of a few, and to obfuscate or deny the power of many.

In my mind, documentary is a prime medium for calling into question our allegiances to certain stories. And I agree with you that our current landscape is dominated by a narrative orthodoxy whose conventions often go unchecked. Of the hundreds of films I watch a year as a programmer, most seem to be quite content with the face value of the narratives they collect. It’s such a missed opportunity! The thing about these destination-driven stories is that they are engineered to override certain natural forces, to obliterate the unexpected. They have an unwavering idea of themselves that persists from the moment they are pitched to the moment they premiere, from the first frame until the last. This conviction is partially what makes them so successful: audiences and funders know exactly what they are getting themselves into.

Why is it assumed that we as audiences (and filmmakers) prefer films that reflect a world back to us that reinforces—rather than challenges or expands—our preexisting stories? I don’t necessarily believe the devotion to received narratives is an act of laziness—either by audiences or filmmakers—but rather I see it as deliberate and systemic.

CA

It’s systemic and economic. Every art form is shaped by industrial forces, and documentary increasingly so. Every few months I come across another think-piece or industry report gleefully extolling the so-called “golden age of documentary” of our present; many of these articles tout the way that digital technology has enabled documentaries to “borrow” from fiction film, to combat what Morgan Neville has called the dull “spinach” of documentary.{1} The implication is that finally, documentaries have been liberated from their tedium.

I find this spinach metaphor infuriating. Documentary has never been dull to me—in fact, the word has always been capacious enough to include city symphonies, personal diaries, longitudinal epics, riveting institutional critiques, ecstatic montages, and much more. To be honest, I’m finding documentary duller every day. It is true that more documentaries are being made than ever—and yet, major documentary funders are not cultivating a formally vibrant ecosystem. Instead, the landscape is becoming increasingly dominated by cult-of-personality biodocs, prurient true crime stories, and soothing, triumph-of-the-human-spirit social issue films. Meanwhile, the supposed profits are ending up in the hands of precious few companies and even fewer filmmakers, while independent producers are finding it increasingly difficult to thrive without conforming to convention.

SC

What I lament is how interstate storytelling has become a type of currency, quite literally for trade. In a decade of programming, it seems to me that more and more films—and often the films that are the most loudly lauded—embody a logic so streamlined and calculated that it is in many ways other than human. They are films at the mercy of metrics and markets—and as a result they tend to flatten the messiness of reality.

It’s not unlike the interstate, which generates its own logic and is designed to cater to the most basic probabilities of consumer desire. Along the road, people have needs to fulfill: peeing, coffee, gas. The interstate follows a simple formula for the most efficient gratification. The same is true for films that anticipate their audiences’ needs: whether it be their need for title cards and heavy-handed scores to conduct their emotions, their need for heros, for conflict, and then for tensions to be tidily resolved, or the need to center whiteness and settler colonial worldviews. These are films that flatter the interests of the people who paid for them, even if those interests are framed by progressive language, like social justice.

The homogeneity of the interstate results in a certain sameness across the continent. I see the tyranny of story as a similar form of bulldozing—its priorities are efficiency, formula, destination, gratification.

CA

And it comes at a cost! To extend the analogy, while the building of an interstate creates efficiency on the surface, it also impoverishes the communities and environments it bisects. With these flat, predictable stories we’re impoverishing filmmaking. We’re impoverishing our audiences. We’re impoverishing ourselves. “Storytelling” in the industrial sense of the word is not a sign of creative richness—instead, it’s a fiscal lubricant that transforms our messy, unjust and endlessly complex world into a consumable product.

While none of these tendencies or trends are new, I see them accelerating. I think that part of the reason the industry is doubling down on reductive narratives is because there’s a fear that people will cease to pay attention and watch something else. We are all attention impoverished at the moment, in a way that has profound political implications. I’m really worried about what this push towards docu-tainment in the name of profit is doing to civil society and our ability to resist the hellscape of our present. There is a deep correlation between the distraction of screen culture and how difficult it is to pay deep attention to each other, foster community, and organize politically.

SC

I wonder where the attention deficiency is being generated. Industry is quick to name audiences, but I’ve been heartened to notice again and again how audiences get so totally turned on by films that ask them to actually pay attention. They’re so glad to pay attention!

I’d say your film Landfall is a beautiful rendition of this meandering, meaning-building, evocative without hitting-you-over-the-head-with-its-outrage type of film. I remember an early talk we had, as you were just back from an early shoot in post-María Puerto Rico. You were so clear about how you wanted to honor the complicated experience of Puerto Ricans, while also being very forthcoming about the particular nuances of your own voice as a diasporic Puerto Rican, as an artist, and as a director with great ambition to remain within the documentary industry. I felt then, and continue to feel, that you have an exceptional skill at navigating these interests, and in making films that are nimble enough to be lauded by the market forces, while also noble enough to have a deep integrity, a rich creative core.

Trailer for LANDFALL (Cecilia Aldarondo, 2020).

CA

It sounds so triumphant when you put it that way! To me, it feels like I have found a fleeting, precarious, yet sweet space to make work that resists some of these forces we’re diagnosing. For example, when I decided I wanted to make Landfall, I was extremely concerned about the pitfalls of conventional post-disaster narratives and their violent side effects. For example, you can make a hopeful, heroic, Puerto Rican pride-driven documentary, post-Hurricane María, that promotes a corporate model of recovery, perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Puerto Ricans, or ignores the unprocessed grief of many thousands of people. I did not want to make a conventional social issue film: e.g. finding one to four people to follow, and constructing a heroic narrative about these individuals. Post-Hurricane María, the story of Puerto Rican resistance is not about charismatic individuals. Instead, Landfall is a collective portrait of an entire people who have come together in the face of their disenfranchisement in unprecedented ways.

I also saw Landfall contend with disaster film conventions: ruin porn, the pitying gaze, the phoenix rising from the ashes. To me, it wasn’t ethical to recirculate the media’s traumatic imagery of Hurricane María, or to deploy a false sense of hope. Puerto Rico’s reality is far more complex than that. Instead, for Landfall I wanted to demonstrate an under-narrated, deep interpenetration of a whole series of forces that led Puerto Rico to its current crisis: a 500-year history of colonialism, environmental disaster powered by climate change, debt as the Trojan horse for libertarian dystopia, gentrification, migration, the legacy of US military violence.

I decided very early on that the only way I could achieve this holistic scope was to deploy a prismatic, non-linear structure. But when I presented the film to potential funders, there was this dreadful fear that viewers would not finish watching a film without three acts. A lot of people questioned whether it should be a film at all: “Have you thought of doing a web based interactive project instead?” “Why not an episodic series?” “Why is this a feature length film?” And I’d be thinking: Why can’t it be? Why are we so allergic to the idea of a feature length film that —

SC

That is complicated! That’s not immediately gratifying, but leaves things lingering.

CA

Right. That doesn’t tie things up neatly. In actuality, Landfall is not so wildly unconventional. But in today’s landscape it is! I’m actually shocked that I managed it, and I honestly don’t believe any US commissioner other than PBS would have given me major funding to do it.

I want to know if any of this resonates with you, having produced 1999 outside the US. You managed to make a subtle, compassionate film that resists all of the sensationalistic tendencies of films about teen suicide. How did you pull it off? Did you face any of the same industrial pressures?

SC

Thank you. It’s nice to talk about these two films together. Though they are so different, there are many points of sweet synergy. From the fact that we both worked with the same magical editor, Terra Jean Long, and the same brilliant cinematographer, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, to the fact that we both faced an upward battle to make the film we wanted to make, because from the outset people had a very clear idea of the film they thought we should be making.

1999 is my first feature, and when I came home to Canada to shoot, I hadn’t lived in North America for over ten years. So there was the immediate culture clash of, for the first time, seeing home as foreign. It was a godsend, in a way, because I could better see the mechanisms at work, within people, within myself: how we relate to place, to each other. Our way of being, our stories, if you will, no longer felt universal. I felt a bit like the fish in the parable David Foster Wallace refers to: “oh, this is water.” I felt like an outsider, which luckily, I think, invited an inherent resistance to the dogma that seemed to be blanketing the world I had returned to.

CA

Like what?

SC

I mean, formal issues aside (like making a film without lower thirds, without establishing shots, in my hometown’s obscure French dialect), more difficult were the questions of content. Because 1999 was a film about a deeply traumatic event (a wave of teen suicides in my high school), in every pitch meeting, I was asked the same question: “Why did they die? Who is to blame?” And I was very taken aback by how simplistically people were relating to a horrific series of events. In my mind, the personal circumstances of the deaths were inviolably private. I was interested in the wider social context, in details that were fascinating, revelatory, intricate, and impossible to pack into a snappy elevator pitch. I pitched at the IDFA Forum and a broadcaster accused me of not caring about the people in my film, because I wasn’t seeking to litigate their loss. I was surprised by the gratification that people sought—they immediately wanted to feel resolved about the story. First they wanted someone or something to blame—and then, maybe, they might want to talk about being able to finance it. It felt like there was an industry-wide convention which sought to turn off (or redirect) their curiosity. Instead of asking “What does grief feel like? Under which circumstances does suicide enter the imaginary of a child?” people were much more comfortable asking “How do we solve grief? How do we solve suicide?”

I see now, having both attended and organized many pitch-training workshops, networking events, and pitch forums, how difficult and performative these settings can be, for both funders and filmmakers. So little space can be made for complexity and attentiveness in situations of extreme pressure, exhaustion, and distraction. And as a programmer, I also see how an overload of these pitch situations can compromise films. Even filmmakers with the most profound intentions can be worn down by the language and expectations of the market. When you have seven to fifteen minutes to explain why a series of fascinations is a story, it’s easy to lose sight of your initial openness to, and passion for, the film you are trying to make. It takes huge strength not to simply abide, and to instead make a film that answers the pre-scripted questions—especially if these are the terms by which your film will either “live or die.”

CA

It’s like these pitch forums flatten us out. We are all so anxious to secure a yes from a potential funder that we end up recycling tropes rather than sticking to our guns. We all start talking about “character arcs” and “third acts” and how the story ends, when we haven’t even finished production!

SC

Yeah, it feels like a big factor of interstate filmmaking are the systems of language through which a film must pass in order to be made. It certainly felt that way when I was pitching 1999. I think that’s how we, culturally, tend to relate to violence and to social justice. There’s a litigious aspect: we want to assign blame. We are drawn to the metrics, to the visuals of how people died or were harmed. And as a mass culture, we favor films with verdicts, films that are closed objects so that we can go on with our lives. And perhaps because I cared so deeply for the people who had died and also the people who had grieved them, I had the sense that to do so would be utter violence. To provide closure when in fact there was none was to enforce another kind of violence, more insidious.

CA

So are you saying that the lack of narrative and your refusal to deliver that narrative expectation meant that you were able to create a film about something deeper about suicide, adolescence?

Excerpt from 1999 (Samara Chadwick, 2018).

SC

I hope so. The act of making a film should be an act of generosity towards the people who will be sitting in your film. It was useful for me to think of these people, especially the people of my hometown, when I was tangled in the mires of pitching. Ultimately 1999 is not a film about suicide—and it’s such a shame that this is how we are asked to talk about films, with this qualifier of about. I find that it’s also a distinctly North American way of relating to films, and perhaps it’s another after effect of the market, especially in the US, where public funding is so scarce. Films risk becoming distinctly teleological when they are seen as “films about,” as definitive gestures, instead of as open-ended experiences, explorations, as moments of transcendence, of creativity, of community.

Films can’t be generous if they are entirely predetermined. There’s often no interrogation of the way audiences’ needs are met; the need to have questions answered, tensions resolved, etc. And yet that interrogation is super vital, and interesting! It’s something Terra Long taught me. As we were editing, she was thinking of 1999 as a thriller. A thriller is built on tension that is loaded with possibility—anything could happen, everything is information. Because you don’t exactly know what you’re looking for, you’re super alert.

The antithesis to that alertness is pacification. When things are exactly what they are, when the arc is exactly within the template, when people’s questions are immediately resolved, it leaves audiences completely passive in their seats. It can actually atrophy our ability to relate to each other. The attention deficit you mentioned earlier plays out on many levels.

When a film doesn’t talk down to its audience, it creates a space that gives back agency to the viewer’s intelligence, and can summon a lasting and expansive capacity for attention, compassion, and engagement.

CA

I have two goals when it comes to audience. One is trusting my audience and, as you describe, creating a space where people can enter. And another goal, at least for a project like Landfall, is to challenge audience expectations about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. One of the oldest and most toxic narratives about Puerto Rico is that it is full of helpless victims waiting for government aid, who are to be pitied, ignored, or despised. Landfall springs from a far less narrated story: that Hurricane María precipitated a moment of incredible autonomy, with people literally saving each other without anybody else’s help. This principle of mutual aid is the bedrock of this current political moment, Puerto Rico’s greatest anti-colonial reawakening since the US quashed the independence movement in the mid-twentieth century. Landfall refuses the victim narrative, and instead seeks to encounter people in the film as experts in their own lives. I wanted to make a film for Puerto Ricans first and foremost, while respecting our differences from one another—living in the colony, in diaspora, urban and rural, differently gendered and racialized. I hope I’ve been successful in making a film that witnesses, respects and honors Puerto Rican trauma in all its forms.

SC

It all comes back to this question: Who is the story serving ultimately? What are the inherent expectations? Whether a film is set in a foreign country, or embedded within a specific community, nonfiction works are inevitably operating in a preestablished landscape of assumptions about who these people are, what this place means. And many films ensure that they will have traction on the market by latching onto the momentum of these preexisting narratives—gratuitous montages of the paradise beaches of Puerto Rico, say, or the staging of the addict in a dark alley.

I spoke with an Egyptian filmmaker at a conference many years ago. She was making a film after the uprising in Tahrir Square and had come to realize she and her collaborators were inadvertently making a film that was perpetuating European assumptions about Egypt, and gratifying their projections about what the revolution meant. She had realised that because they were aspiring to make a film that would screen internationally, her team had disassociated themselves from the complexity of their own stories, in order to pacify this outsider perspective.

This compromise is very much a stake whether you’re making a film with your own community, or arriving from elsewhere with a shot list, a shooting schedule, and are essentially “looking for stories” to confirm and buttress preexisting assumptions.

Excerpt from 1999 (Samara Chadwick, 2018).

CA

When making Landfall a second toxic narrative I had to contend with is perpetuated by tourism. In the global imaginary, if Puerto Rico exists at all, it offers itself as a paradise on display, for the pleasure of the visitor. I wanted to connect—and disrupt—this neo colonial tourist gaze with the reductive ways conventional documentaries cater to primarily white, middle class audiences. For a North American audience that may have visited Puerto Rico on vacation and thinks that they know it, I wish for Landfall to provoke a shift in them such that they ask: “Where do I fit in?” “To what extent am I complicit in ignoring Puerto Rico and its relationship to the United States?” “Have I been curious enough?” “Have I listened?”

At the same time, I deliberately decentered that white, middle class American audience and made a film that gives first priority to Puerto Rican viewers. There is a great deal of cultural, historical, and political context that the film does not provide. For example, when protestors sing “En Mi Viejo San Juan” together—in the middle of Viejo San Juan—at the end of the film, we do not translate the lyrics, or explain that this song triggers a collective pang of loss generated by over a century of forced migration. The film works on a different, ideally more profound, level for Puerto Ricans. And if this limits the circulation of the film in the long run, I’m okay with that. Because the widest audience is not necessarily the ideal audience.

SC

There is a clear analogy between documentary and tourism. The tourism whose flows of money ask in return that local people conform to the outsider’s image of what they should be, in a way that ultimately disables a community’s agency. This performance for the market, for the viewer, is a real thing to consider.

There is a potent line in Gambling, Gods and LSD (2016), when Peter Mettler says: “there’s a difference between looking for something, and just looking—when you’re a part of what you’re looking at.” I love that thought.

Excerpt from GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD (Peter Mettler, 2002).

CA

Say I’m a filmmaker going to a place that I don’t know. Industry convention dictates that I’m going to hire somebody local—

SC

—who is literally being paid to give you what you have asked them to give you, because you have a mandate to extract something sellable!

CA

Right. Exactly. That person is there to serve me, make allowances for my ignorance, and cater to my expectations and desires. It’s a deeply hierarchical relationship. I refuse to participate in this kind of extractive filmmaking. I couldn’t live with myself if I made a film about a US colony using neo-colonial methods! Part of thinking critically about story and pushing back against received narratives has to do with the mechanisms of production, and whether we are willing to empower our collaborators to push us ethically behind the scenes.

With Landfall I was extremely self-conscious about the gaps in my understanding of Puerto Rican political reality. Despite the fact that I had deeply personal ties to Puerto Rico—my grandmother died after the hurricane—I am a diasporic Puerto Rican who has never lived there, and a byproduct of my family’s colonial migration is ignorance. I was scared of the pitfalls of my blindspots. But this is where peer-to-peer collaboration radically transformed the film. Throughout every stage I worked closely with Lale Namerrow Pastor, an island-based activist, DJ, and artist. We talked for many hours—weeks in fact—about everything from her personal trauma after María, to the everyday violence of debt, to the extraordinary power of crisis intimacy. These conversations transformed me personally, but they also changed the film completely. During the edit, Terra and I realized that the film as a whole should be framed by Lale’s voice. Her memories, political rage, and conviction became the sonic backbone of the film. Without explicitly stating it, we quietly posited Landfall as a political possibility—solidarity forged between diasporic and island-based Puerto Ricans through the act of listening.

Throughout this collaboration I tried to be open to shifting the parameters of the project. That’s what Peter Mettler is saying to me: looking, in his sense of the word, requires listening. If we listen rather than extract, the story reveals itself. The film becomes this organism that is—

SC

—that is alive.

CA

It is alive, right?

SC

This way of operating—open-ended, attentive, with shifting parameters— is really hard for the industry to latch on to. It’s slippery and unclear. The question for filmmakers is how to transact a film idea successfully on the market, while keeping the mechanisms and language of the pitch quarantined from the actual creative process in the field.

When pitching, I feel it’s essential to understand which narratives flatter the powers that be. What is going to check their boxes? Within that understanding, there is a possibility of creating what I’ve taken to calling a “drag personality” for your film: a glittering and confident facade that offers up all the points of vanity that are sexy and enticing, while also, underneath, continuing to imbue the work with curiosity, humility, fragility, care.

Excerpt from LANDFALL (Cecilia Aldarondo, 2020).

CA

I think one redemptive move in this tyrannical moment is to exploit convention for our own aesthetic, political and professional aims. But I don’t want masquerade to be my only recourse as an artist.

SC

I do think that there is something to be gained from having candid conversations about the realities of the industry, outside of the easy talking points that are constantly being transacted at markets and pitch forums. It’s important to consider what is at stake for the people who are in positions of power, the people who are deciding which works will have lives and audiences, and which ones won’t. They can be allies, they can be deeply moved by projects, and they too can be overworked, and suffer from the crazed constraints of the pitch formats. The whole process can be so dehumanizing, so flattening, on all sides.

As filmmakers, we have to remember that a funder or programmer’s response to, say, your film, is about so much more than your film. Though we want to believe films are assessed primarily for their creative merits, so many other unspoken forces are at play: the names who have vetted the film, as producers, key creatives or funders, and their (existing or sought) relationships with the festival, the constellation of other films being considered, the expectations of the local audiences, of board members, the festival’s own aspirations for growth, the ways in which that “growth” is being measured: butts in seats? Ticket sales? World Premieres? It’s important to consider these mechanisms—as an act of diligence, but also in order to understand what is actually happening here, what is actually being traded, what is actually at stake. And to, maybe, alleviate the pain of so many rejections.

CA

It’s a little dispiriting, because I don’t think we have an answer to this. I know that filmmakers get tired; many cease to make work and fade into obscurity. Others become work-for-hire directors and lose their independence.

I think that we should be fighting even harder to cultivate our viewership—and I don’t mean “cultivate our viewership” in a patronizing way. This isn’t about some vanguard intelligentsia teaching normal viewers how to watch films. That’s not what I’m saying. I believe anyone can watch a film and be challenged by it, and in my own work I try to make engaging films. I’m thinking as an educator: when I’m in a classroom and I’m asking my students to encounter a style of filmmaking that maybe they’re not familiar with, they’re initially resistant. But as they begin to question their assumptions about how to view something, they come alive, in a different way. They become hungry. They don’t want to make work that just reflects what whatever it is that they’re used to consuming. They begin to create images and sounds that resist the tsunami. That to me is incredibly exciting.

SC

The films we are talking about do not require a certain level of education or fluency, all they require is curiosity. I often feel that the average audience member has heaps more curiosity (and capacity for attention) than the people in positions of power to decide whether a film is made/funded/screened. It’s a sad, crippling paradox that accompanies this so-called golden age, in which thousands of really good films are being made every year and they are all bottlenecking in the inboxes of a select few.

But we may be in an interesting moment. For the next few years the industry is actively seeking filmmakers completely outside their regular pools of cultural producers: Indigenous creators, filmmakers of color, women, gender non-conforming people. There is an unspoken but palpable quota. Funders, programmers, distributors are now mandated to program films that have conventionally been overlooked. It’s a moment of invitation, potentially, for non-male, non-white filmmakers to unapologetically make films on their own terms, with their own references and cadences, and to refuse the homogeny and prescriptive thrust of the interstate.

CA

I wish it were the case, but I’m not sure I entirely agree. As one of those filmmakers who has had my work supported as a consequence of diversity initiatives, I’ve also found decision-makers perplexed by the style in which I make my films. I’ve had to fight to make formally unusual works. I feel somewhat free to take these risks because I come from a class position that enabled me to get advanced degrees and get a day job in academia. My day job relieves me of that economic pressure, whereas many of the BIPOC filmmakers I know have to prioritize getting hired on the next gig. And while there are some rare pockets of advocacy—Firelight Media and POV have been vital ports in a storm for me as an artist—for the most part, the industry’s model of inclusion is one of stylistic, political, and aesthetic assimilation.

If I’m honest, I don’t believe that the profit-driven powerful in our field— specifically buyers, investors, and commissioners—are particularly interested in challenging story in the way we’re discussing. Perhaps more alarmingly, I’m not sure they see their roles as decision-makers as having any kind of ethical or moral obligation. As stodgy as PBS can be sometimes—a sad fact that may result in its extinction—the reality is that, because they are tax-payer funded they are accountable to the American public in a way that Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are not. There is an inherent ethical bind in using public money to fund films. Paradoxically, I’ve found that this covenant gives me more freedom, not less. Instead of valuing this model of public funding, we are moving ever farther into a hyper-capitalist landscape that is above accountability.

I’m very eager, desperate in fact, for an industry-wide reckoning about all of this. You and I are doing our bit right now. But while we are frequently trotted out as the “conscience” or the “soul” of the documentary industry, we filmmakers actually do not have the power to change it. I crave allies who will actively push back at the epicenter of documentary power. It cannot just happen in academia, or at a dinner party, or in a small little room on the side at a film festival. I personally want to see people more powerful than I taking responsibility publicly, making risky funding decisions, pushing back against the tidal wave of content and profit, not just behind the scenes but in print, in programming, at keynotes, loudly and openly.

SC

Yes! This conversation needs to happen. I anticipate a great relief from certain communities, and a huge resistance from others. We have to be honest about who is really benefiting from this golden age. Is it a similar extractive model as the gold mining reference itself?

And how can we be lucid and dissenting, while still making the generous, open, and attentive works we’ve been praising this whole time? A mistake I made when making 1999 was to be totally entangled in my overt refusal of certain conventional tropes. I was belligerent about what I was not doing, which meant I was ultimately still using the language of what I was resisting, I was still confined by its parameters. I’d suggest that part of what I’d like to see emerge is a conversation that is about potentiality instead of just reactivity.

It’s important too within this conversation to acknowledge how suffocatingly insular the American market can be. In the moments when I feel the most oppressed, it gives me great relief to remember the universes outside this one, like entirely different worlds with entirely different laws of physics. There are terrific festivals outside the US, there are accessible funding models that are not as flattening and fellatio-intensive, and there are worlds in which vibrant and colorful creators are making formidable and uncompromised works of nonfiction.

CA

I want to believe that there is a space to fight for this formal risk-taking outside the industry and within it—and not to simply retreat. I don’t want to retreat. This goes beyond our individual sustainability. I fear that if we don’t intervene collectively, we will all be buried under a pile of content masquerading as documentary. (Or go blind bingeing it!)

SC

This idea that political rigor and creative filmmaking are mutually exclusive is such bullshit!

CA

It’s so elitist.

SC

It is so elitist! It’s almost worse than than this despicable but pervasive notion that audiences are dumb. Actually it’s the same paradigm! Of course we make films that are creative, generative, generous—for all kinds of audiences. To flatten story into a few formulas that have been proven to work in the past is like flavoring your food only with salt and fat.

You know, I love the fun fact we heard the other day about how complicated flavors help build neural networks, literally! The brain has to work to decode the complexity of Sichuan peppercorns, and by doing so actually expands its neural pathways, which supposedly has an antidepressant effect. It’s such a nice analogy for films, I feel: food should be accessible, rich in the flavors of a place, it should be transformative, opening neural pathways. Smash the well-trodden interstate of neural pathways!

This is political.

CA

It’s deeply political.

SC

Should we make a drink?

CA

Let’s make a drink.

This conversation was held in Brooklyn, NY, on November 10, 2019.