Documentary in the Age of COVID

Introduction

This chapter provides an account of an ongoing process of policy research and development in the UK’s independent documentary film sector, almost all of which has taken place in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The documentary film sector has grown significantly in the UK in the past two decades or so, and the sector now constitutes a significant and distinct part of the UK’s wider independent film culture and industry. Yet the expansion and evolution of independent documentary has not been matched by a corresponding development in policy support – an oversight that appears to be a problem overseas as well as in the UK.¹

←177 | 178→Consequently, when work began on the policy development strand of the UK Feature Docs research project (about which more below), there was a real sense of unearthing a crisis in the sector – a crisis regarding funding in particular, but also with regards to many other interrelated issues such as coordination, equality and diversity, data, training and transparency. One of the arguments I wish to make here, then, is that while the pandemic has wrought havoc in the documentary sector as it has elsewhere, the real source of the damage lies less with the pandemic than with the structural problems in the industry that rendered it so vulnerable to begin with. As the UN Secretary General has argued of the pandemic more broadly, COVID-19 has acted like an X-ray, exposing the fragilities and fractures already present in society and the dangers of leaving these unchecked (Guterres 2020). As the screen industries are rebuilt, there is an opportunity not just to undo the damage done by the pandemic but to develop policy frameworks that will address some of those more fundamental problems that pre-dated it.

This chapter presents an account of ongoing efforts to do that in the UK documentary sector, reflecting on a two-year period that begins in April 2019, with the development of a survey of documentary producers and directors, and ends in May 2021, following the first meeting of an emergent Documentary Film Council. The chapter presents original qualitative and quantitative findings on the challenging conditions that existed in the documentary sector prior to the advent of COVID-19 and reflects on the process of acting on those findings during the pandemic, working in innovative ways with stakeholders across the sector and beyond to address the industry’s many complex and intersecting problems. In doing so, the chapter also provides a potentially transferable model – albeit one developed under extraordinary conditions – of grassroots policy development in small but culturally vital sectors.

First, a brief note on terminology. I focus here on the independent documentary film sector but recognise that ‘independence’ is a highly contingent and complex concept (see, for example, Bennett and Strange 2018) and that ‘documentary film’ encompasses a wide range of forms and ←178 | 179→institutional contexts across film and television. There is no space here to explore the complex boundaries of this field, but it is useful to note some general or dominant characteristics. Here then, ‘independent documentary’ usually refers to the more creative and innovative end of the non-fiction spectrum. Most of the films in this sector tend not to be obviously commercial (but can be highly profitable) and are typically financed from a patchwork of sources rather than from a single studio, SVOD platform or broadcaster. Running times vary from short to feature length, but many projects developed in this sector are intended for release on the festival and theatrical circuits as well as for broadcast.

The UK Feature Docs (UKFD) project was a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2018–2021).² The project was primarily a cultural history initiative in that two of its three core objectives – ‘industry landscapes’ and ‘industry histories’ – were concerned with exploring the evolution of the independent documentary sector in the thirty-year period to 2020. It is during this period that many organisations dedicated to independent documentary were established – such as Sheffield Doc/Fest (1994–), BBC Storyville (1997–) and BRITDOC (2005–) – and when feature-length non-fiction films established themselves on the theatrical circuit, increasing from just four releases in 2001 to 117 in 2015, 110 in 2018 and 99 in 2019 (O’Sullivan 2017; Stoll 2021). Historicising the expansion and evolution of this sector and exploring its contemporary formation was thus the primary ←179 | 180→focus of the project’s first two years and drew on a range of methods from Media Industries Studies, Production Studies and Organisational Studies, including semi-structured interviews, archival research and analysis of trade press, grey literature, and scholarship (Paterson et al. 2016; Freeman 2016).