Producing Day (Nov. 11)

Trust is a key ingredient in all relationships. How do you use trust to ensure meaningful engagement from your doc participants? How do you create and sustain relationships with doc participants that facilitate the intimacy important to your film? And how do you navigate family relationships in a personal documentary that result in family cohesion not fracture? In this discussion with producers and directors Margaret Brown (Descendant), David Siev (Bad Axe), Ondi Timoner (Last Flight Home) and producer Essie Chambers (Descendant), Rahdi Taylor (Concordia Studio) leads a deep dive into best practices for participant engagement through trust as you produce and distribute your project. 

As independent filmmakers navigate career growth in the nonfiction industry, many tensions can exist between creative desires and commercial demands. How do you make bigger, premium nonfiction films and series, and still stay true to your body of work and your own voice? Moderator and Concordia Fellowship Director Rahdi Taylor leads Paula Eiselt (Aftershock), Omar Mullick (Flight/Risk) and Christine Turner (Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business) as they navigate these questions through the Concordia Fellowship, a new kind of creative and career accelerator for BIPOC and other diverse voices. 

Should participants be compensated for their time? Should they be given credit as paid co-producers? How about editorial influence? There is no documentary rule book for navigating the ethical dilemmas filmmakers consistently face and often in isolation and without a guiding framework. This session led by Louise Rosen (International Documentary Association) includes ethics thought leaders Sarah Rachael Wainio (The Documentary Producers Alliance), Natalie Bullock Brown (Documentary Accountability Working Group) and Camilla Hall (Subject). Learn when and how to approach potential ethical issues in your documentaries, how to remain accountable and what to do when you run into unanticipated predicaments. You will leave equipped with new structures to help make sense of ethical dilemmas.

New York Times v. Sullivan, a landmark case on defamation, has set the precedent for free speech in the press since 1964. In 2022, this case is being reviewed by the Supreme Court, which could change the parameters for what constitutes defamation vs. free speech in the media. Entertainment lawyers Nicole Page and Daniel Ain from Reavis Page Jump LLP examine the legal aspects of defamation law and offer advice on how to avoid defamation claims. They’re joined by filmmakers Jessica Devaney (Multitude Films) and Phil Bertelsen (Who Killed Malcolm X?) who discuss how changes in the legal landscape around free speech are impacting how they make their films.