Why I Do What I Do
My introduction to film was joining the punk rock documentary collective Target Video in the early 80s. I fell in love with how a group of outsiders were taking media – music and film – into their own hands. As a neo-Marxist/anarchist economics student at UC Berkeley, I saw how the structure of media within late stage capitalism was, if not suppressing voices, certainly blocking a wide and diverse range of opinions and artforms – and the birth of DIY showed a path where artists could reach audiences directly.
That ethos still drives me today and I feel that it is more possible now than before for filmmakers and other artists to reach audiences. However, as we have seen over the past several years, there are economic forces/structures/conglomerates that have successfully created a flattened media landscape and monopolized audience attention thus thwarting distribution and as a result creation of content expressing diverse/challenging viewpoints. Even though the intrepid artist can still reach audiences, they are increasingly coming up against an economic system that is working against them. Don’t despair – there is action we can take!
Fight the Power, Part 1
(Part 2 will be a whole other post)
Over the past years, we have seen how technology companies are extraordinarily problematic for democracy – and now we are seeing how the streaming platforms are adding to this problem. These past two weeks the Trump administration has been taking an axe to arts funding and threatening one of the mainstays of documentary film – PBS.
It is essential that we mobilize as a community to preserve our artform not only to promote dynamic, energizing, diverse content, but because it is this very content that helps an exchange of ideas that is at the very core of a democratic society. This is the reason I helped found The Future Film Coalition with Keri Putnam, Jeffrey Kusama Hinte, Abby Sun, Brian Newman, AJ Christian, Sanjay Sharma and Barbara Twist with an early assist from Ted Hope to advocate for the economic future of independent film. If you are interested in possible solutions to what ails our indie/”NonDē” ecosystem and how you can take action, I highly recommend joining our community.
The FFC Newsletter that dropped last week was spurred by the devastating actions over the past week and how you can get involved:
Since last Wednesday, here’s what’s been terminated: funding to all 50 state humanities councils and 1,434 NEH grants supporting culture and humanities programs across the country, including the only federal grant program funding the development and production of feature-length documentaries.
The terminations affect our field, from museums, film festivals and arts nonprofits that rely on state humanities funding, to filmmakers in the middle of production. A coalition of seven nonprofits, from the International Documentary Association to the Center for Independent Documentary, issued a statement explaining: “The blanket termination of active grants, including those awarded under a previous Presidential administration, is a blatant attempt to impose ideological control over artistic production and will continue to devastate the affected productions.”
Our intention was to spend our first year coalition building (we intend to engage our entire sector) and researching what policy actions we could advocate for in our second year. But circumstances have changed and we are already becoming involved in the fight for public media and arts funding as well as advocating for an independent carve out in the potential increased California tax incentive.
Could Policy Be The Answer
Abby Sun who is one of the most knowledgeable people about policy as it relates to independent film and who is one of our board members and is also one of the heads or FFC research wrote an extensive piece for IDA magazine Could Policy Be the Answer which I highly recommend. Abby completed a Shorenstein Documentary Film Fellowship studying how other various governmental agencies within the US but more importantly throughout the world support independent film. This article is a primer to her research and an excellent introduction to the issues. Here’s her intro to the piece:
Over the past several years, when discussing the audience exodus to large platform streamers, I’ve encountered exhaustion from filmmakers, arts workers, funders, broadcasters, distributors, and exhibitors. Everyone wants to help fix the problem, but no one knows where to start. That’s because there are real issues that stack the deck against documentary filmmakers and our audiences. They can be classified into three main categories: funding, discoverability, and unequal market power.https://jonreiss.substack.com/p/i-fell-in-love-with-how-a-group-of