If Hot Docs is dying, what does that say about documentaries themselves? Filmmakers are worried | CBC News
A misunderstood and mistreated killer whale. An investigation into the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and American gun culture at large. An inconvenient truth about the future of planet Earth in the face of devastating climate change.
If you go by overwhelmingly successful films like Blackfish, Bowling for Columbine and An Inconvenient Truth, it might seem like documentaries are everywhere we look, affecting and influencing how we perceive society and the world at large. But even as audiences clamour for true stories on their screens, the documentarians that make them are sounding alarm bells about the future of documentary filmmaking.
“I think in every respect, it’s really more difficult. Streamers, broadcasters — there’s an attrition that is happening,” said Jennifer Holness, a documentary filmmaker and producer who’s worked in the industry for over 20 years.
“That’s just dollars and cents — you know, less money — and that less money translates to less commissioning, which translates to smaller budgets, which translates to upheaval.”
The result is clear, she says: a contracting industry that increasingly struggles to support documentarians.
While that contraction will most affect marginalized voices, she says it will eventually impact all creators, leaving only those wealthy enough to do it — undermining the purpose, and benefit, of documentaries.
“It becomes something for those who can afford it or a part-time gig that you can’t sustain,” she said. “This is not healthy. It’s not a healthy space for people to be operating out of.”
It’s a trend that’s been observed by more than just filmmakers themselves.
Metro Morning7:44Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, is facing extreme financial pressures
Hot Docs chaos a symptom of wider uncertainty
Alongside a general suffering and shuttering of arts institutions across the country, Canada’s largest documentary film festival sent a dizzying number of emails ahead of its 31st annual showing this year.
Alongside emailed entreaties as blunt as “I’ll be completely honest with you: we’re struggling,” written by Hot Docs president Marie Nelson, a profile in the Globe and Mail hammered home the precarious situation faced by the festival.
“We really meant it when we said that we were fearful that this year’s festival is going to be our last,” said Nelson when asked about the festival’s request for emergency financial support from Ottawa.
Hot Docs representatives declined to speak to CBC for this article, but the struggling industry is far from the festival’s only concern.
In a recent interview with CBC, Nelson said the festival was still feeling the effects of COVID-19 pandemic. As well, 10 festival employees recently resigned, blaming an “unprofessional and discriminatory environment” after a new artistic director was hired, resulting in a curtailed number of films over prior years. That director, Hussain Currimbhoy, stepped down in March.
And after the government neglected to provide emergency funding for Hot Docs, two high-profile Hot Docs board members resigned just days before the festival began in late April. That reduced its total number of board members from 24 last year to 13 now.
Pat Mullen, the publisher of Canadian documentary arts outlet POV Magazine, said that chaos is just a symptom of wider uncertainty and a quiet but growing panic in the feature-length documentary world.
“The things that we heard from Doc’s report last fall are being echoed in the U.S.A. and the U.K.,” he said, noting both the closure of production powerhouse Participant Media and dismal documentary box office numbers in England and Ireland, despite critically acclaimed releases.
“That landscape has totally shifted in the past 20 years, and really — even in the past maybe five — I think the streamers have totally taken over.”
Numerous Canadian arts festivals are struggling to stay afloat with some having to cancel or pause events this year. Organizers point to post-pandemic inflation as a major cause, combined with government funding that isn’t keeping pace with rising costs.
Streaming edutainment
The incursion of streaming services is among the biggest drivers of the change in the industry, according to Mullen.
Because though unscripted series like Tiger King, Making a Murderer and Don’t F**k With Cats found mammoth success — especially since the pandemic drove audiences away from theatres and toward longform series that can be watched at home — he says they’ve done so at the expense of feature-length documentaries.
And while streamers like Netflix do acquire critically acclaimed feature-length documentaries, Mullen says the overwhelming focus is on “edutainment” — true crime or celebrity series that “are maybe not as artistically sophisticated.”
A primary example would be the shuttering of Participant, the company behind innumerable socially motivated documentaries and dramas such as An Inconvenient Truth, Citizenfour, The Cove, Moonlight, Spotlight and others.
In a reaction piece in The Hollywood Reporter, prominent documentarians called the company’s closure a “devastating” loss of one of the few avenues for getting serious documentaries funded.
“If they’re sort of throwing their hands up and saying, ‘There’s no future in this business,’ then I think that will have a ripple effect,” Mullen said.
“Shaking the confidence of other people — and funding [for] documentaries that are being political, that are being active, that are sort of shaking up the status quo and really doing what the art form was built to do.”
Drop in feature documentary production
The ripple caused by Participant’s closure could force Hot Docs to fold. And that, in turn, could mean dire consequences for the documentary industry as a whole.
If the festival were to disappear, one of the most important routes for documentaries —
