Well, yes of course it does. But this is a sticky, tricky issue that the independent film community is going to have to grapple with as new sources of funding become available and new partnerships are sought. I just finished writing an article for MovieScope Magazine in the UK about the possibilities for outreach around documentaries, focusing on the productive partnerships that Third Sector funding(NGOs, charities, social enterprises, voluntary organizations etc.) can help foster. However a couple of recent Guardian articles (click here and here) have highlighted the ethical issues involved when financial support is given by organizations with a particular agenda. Who has editorial control if a film is funded by Amnesty or Oxfam? The Guardian quotes Chloe Baird-Murray, Amnesty’s director of creative relationships: “If the film-maker wants to tell both sides of the story, they can do that. We support … freedom of expression. Any storytelling is positive for us if it shines a light on what is happening in the world. We get involved to tell our side of the story correctly. Documentaries can be overwhelming if they do not contain a solution to the problems they highlight. NGOs can give that. Al Gore’s film ended with an example of what people can do. People are ripe for that kind of activism.”

The Good Pitch at BRITDOC opened many people’s eyes to the possibilities of Third Sector and commercial funding (see also the work that the Channel 4 Documentary Film Foundation did in bringing the non-profit world together with filmmakers last year at The Media Conference). Just take a look at the list of observers - many will not be folk you would consider “the usual suspects” when it comes to documentary funding:

Fledgling Fund
IMPACT PARTNERS
ITVS
C4BDFF
Sundance Institute
AOL True Stories
Participant
CBA-Dfid
Christian Aid
Oxfam
Avaaz
Amnesty
NCVO
RED
Gucci Fund
The Sunday Telegraph
Hartley Film Foundation
One World Broadcasting Trust
Vice Magazine
JRRT
Gulbenkian Foundation
Channel 4 (Corporate Affairs)
No2ID
Oak Foundation
Ecostorm
Greenpeace UK
British Beekeepers Association
Camfed
MySpace
World Development Movement

There is definitely a need for funding outside of television/government in the UK but filmmakers will have to be alert as they navigate this new landscape. There is a longer tradition of this kind of funding in the US (much of it necessitated by the profound lack of government/public service funding here) but the recent Nike/Beautiful Losers deal on this side of the pond has led to much debate about the ethics and politics of big corporations giving support to independent films. As Spout’s Karina Longworth put it: “Beyond the knee-jerk “corporate=bad” response, what should we think about indie documentaries looking to multinational giants for the kind of support that studios are no longer willing to give?”

Transparency is clearly key in all these instances. I’m inclined to agree with the Frontline Club’s Vaughan Smith who says: “I can’t think of subjective journalism that I have a problem with, if it is marked as subjective and clear. Most journalism is already subjective, even if it is labelled as objective. I am suspicious of all organisations, including news organisations. There always needs to be proper controls to protect editorial integrity.”

Thank you to Mark Rabinowitz/Docsider for the heads up about the Guardian articles.

The team behind Black Gold at The Media Conference in 2007

Scott Macaulay had some interesting things to say about how the way that we watch stuff affects our impression of it in the latest Filmmaker newsletter. He writes about a comment left in response to Noah Harlan’s post about new business models:

Rather than debate business models, this poster said, why don’t filmmakers just focus on making a good picture? He (or, perhaps another anonymous poster) wrote, “I don’t see distribution as the thorn in indie’s side. I see quality as its biggest shortcoming. Seriously. Where are the filmmakers with the ambition to makes sex, lies & videotape or She’s Gotta Have It or Reservoir Dogs or Clerks or Gas Food & Lodging or Blood Simple or Stranger Than Paradise or Pi or whatever else?
 Those movies weren’t just made for nothing (though the budgets and name actors varied), they were GREAT MOVIES made by directors who really had personality and style.”
My response was that if the above films came out today, half wouldn’t get theatrical distribution and of the ones that did, half of those would be IFC releases. And I also think that bringing the conversation down to a basic question of “good films versus bad films” is too simplistic. In fact, I think the one of the biggest challenges for the independent scene right now is to come up with new notions of “what’s good” that we can all agree on and share among ourselves. I think there’s a relationship between viewing platform and one’s impression of a film. Buying a ticket and seeing something in a theater places you in one kind of critical mindset while clicking on a website and sitting through three bumper ads while watching a streamed film places you in another. Is “what’s good” when discovered through one experience the same “what’s good” that’s discovered in another? And does the price leveling effect of the Internet, Chris Anderson’s dictum that everything wants to be free, apply to quality as well? Will the dog on the skateboard – or the Burger King employee in the sink – always trump the well-crafted narrative? Lots of people – everyone from Josh Whedon to struggling indies who are dicing up their unsold features into five-minute webisodes – are trying to figure this out.

I think that it is absolutely true that context changes our viewing experience in very important ways. If you are watching something at home or in the office (especially if you are watching it on your computer with other applications open) you will often be in a state of continuous partial attention. Kathy Sierra’s Twitter Curve gives us some idea of the contemporary assault on our attention:

I think one of the wonderful things about going to a movie theater is that it serves to remove us from the world of cell phones, IM and Twitter for a couple of hours - in theory at least (and hardly ever in press screenings!). All we need to do when we go to the cinema is sit in a dark room and watch the flickering screen - like an updated version of sitting around the campfire and listening to stories - and this experience fulfills a primordial need in us. Nicholas Carr’s recent Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? made me think about the parallels between deep reading and deep cinema experiences:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I’m not claiming that watching a movie will do what reading War and Peace does to our brains but there is something thoughtful and contemplative about the space of the cinema (although perhaps not The Dark Knight at 7pm on a Friday in Union Square!) that you simply cannot get when you’re at home surrounded by technology and other distractions.

I’m not a luddite. In fact, the older I get the more I love to delve into the possibilities of technology. I even have aspirations of geekdom. But I am becoming more and more aware of how much the space and context of a viewing experience affects my feelings about the film I am watching. This was one of the many things I really appreciated about the Flaherty Seminar that I attended back in June. It was simply a huge pleasure and privilege to watch films in such a highly-curated atmosphere, where we were introduced to the bodies of work of directors and given time to talk to the filmmakers and to debate and think about what we were watching. I feel a connection to all the films I saw at Flaherty as a result, even the films that I didn’t much like and I have a much deeper appreciation for filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Bahman Ghobadi, Oliver Hussain, Syliva Schedelbauer, Alison Kobayashi and Ursula Biemann, many of whom I wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been for Flaherty and the excellent curation of Chi-hui Yang.

So what is my argument here? I guess it is just to say that I absolutely agree that the way we live digitally now is opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities - and it is a given that new distribution models will have to be figured out because the technology is going to continue to change, and us along with it. But the medium is still the message and I still long to be thoroughly immersed in films. Long, difficult, beautiful films that I pay money to see in a dark room full of strangers. I don’t want everything to be reduced to “content” because this obfuscates the very different experiences we have when we watch work in different contexts. And I don’t think it is anti-progress, or anti-technology, to argue that spaces for deep-viewing, deep-thinking and deep-curation are perhaps more important now than ever.

Two fun events in Brooklyn tonight for New Yorkers wanting some Monday night doc-action. Me! Me! First, Sync or Swim is playing at McCarren Park Pool - fun starts at 6pm and the film starts at 8pm. This will be one of the last events held at the venue before construction begins to turn the pool back into a, um, pool!

Meanwhile across Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series, curated this week by Michael Tully, brings a screening of John Maringouin’s unsettling Running Stumbled to the lovely Barbes back room, preceded by 1983, a short by Jeff Peixoto. If you’re heading to Barbes the films start at 7pm.

Ooh, that’s way too much activity for a Monday night! I feel rather faint.

Belated congrats to my friend and Shooting People colleague, Jesse Epstein, for being one of the “25 new faces of independent film” in Filmmaker Magazine. In addition to getting to pose in a big red truck for Filmmaker, her film 34×25x36 is also playing in the YouTube screening room. Ms Epstein is awesome.

Still from 34×25x36

Sorry for protracted blogging silence. Like last year, I disappeared after BRITDOC into the rural wilderness of South Africa (with a little urban time in my birth city of Joburg too). It was strange how fast the chaos of my working life dropped away and felt so far away. I started to think I had made up Shooting People and BRITDOC and the world of docs and independent film in general. In a weird double-move it all felt very irrelevant while I was away but now that I’m back in NYC it feels more relevant than ever. I’m getting obsessed with ideas around storytelling and narrative and who tells what stories about whom. Not to mention who funds and distributes and sees these films!

Anyway, blah blah blah, I haven’t formulated these ideas very clearly yet but I am feeling very excited and inspired about plans for Shooting People and for my own work.

And I am going to learn Xhosa! I said it last year and did bugger all about it but I really want to do it.

And you know how I love my photos so here are a few random pics from my trip - mainly taken in the Kruger Park and the Eastern Cape - and many taken by my marvelous sister and her marvelous new digital camera.

Elephant by the side of the road in Kruger

Impala Lilies in Letaba Camp

Giraffe munching

We saw lion three times this trip which was very exciting

Handsome old Baobab tree

Giraffe sculptures in Olifants Camp

Zebedee!

Me running down a dune in the Eastern Cape (running up and down sand dunes is one of my very favorite things in life)

Naboom - these plants cover the hillsides and I think they’re very poisonous but they’re so beautiful

Weird mushrooms on Hogsback Mountain - where everything is Tolkien-related and the liquor store is called The Ring!

Donkey cart (I love this picture because of the beautiful trees)

Maxyne Franklin with SXSW’s Janet Pierson

Teddy Leifer, Jeremy Chilnick and Paul Taylor

SnagFilm’s Andrew Mer with Jess Search

Beadie Finzi introduces Larry Charles

Jamie Campbell deep in conversation with Larry Charles

AJ Schnack announces that Man On Wire has won the Best British Film prize at Britdoc

The Britdoc gals and Larry: Katie Bradford, Jess Search, Larry Charles, Maxyne Franklin, Beadie Finzi

Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Beadie Finzi rocking out to Heavy Load

Jess Search and Beadie Finzi get wigged out at the end of the festival

And then it all got very, very surreal…

Maxyne Franklin (Britdoc), Daniella Eversby (CPH:DOX) and Louise Platel (Channel 4) soak up the sun before a screening

Jess Search gives Peter Dale a few pointers before the DocFest Debate: “The house believes docs should be more serious”

Kurt Engfehr has his say at the debate

Britdoc’s Charlotte Dale rocking her blue eyelashes at the Handlebar Moustache Disco

Shooting People’s Tamsin Wright looking very glam

Danielle DiGiacomo (IndiePix) and Sandra Whipham (More4)

Current TV’s Emily Renshaw-Smith draped in Mardi Gras beads

The Disco Gang: Ryan Harrington (Gucci Tribeca Fund, IndiePix), Matt Dentler (Cinetic), John Dower (Thriller in Manila) Maxyne Franklin, and Joel Wilson

Maxyne “I thought this was Burning Man” Franklin and Ryan Harrington

Me and Daniella Eversby looking terribly fetching with facial hair!

The sun came out yesterday afternoon for gin and tonics on the Quad while The Bollywood Brass Band marched around the college playing famous songs from Bollywood movies. Today it’s The Big Pitch in the Oxford Playhouse and screenings including Up the Yangtze, Thriller in Manila, At the Death House Door and Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

Croquet on the Quad

The Bollywood Brass Band

Heather Croall, James Mullighan, Charlie Phillips and other peeps sipping G&Ts on the lawn

Ryan Harrington and Debra Zimmerman

Blurry distribution: Matt Dentler (Cinetic), Tim Sparke (Joining the Dots TV), Jess Search (moderator), Jamie King (Steal This Film) and Matt Elek (Vice)

I was up with the birds this morning to prepare for Britdoc which starts today. It’s so great to be back at Keble and there are so many really fantastic people attending this year. My Surgeries (nothing medical, just one-to-one meetings with industry experts) start with aplomb at noon today with Cara Mertes from Sundance. Followed my some of my favorite doc folk: Julie Goldman, Ryan Harrington, Matt Dentler, Danielle DiGiacomo, Debra Zimmerman, Judith Helfand and Robert West. . . it’s a long and distinguished list.

Here are some photos I took this morning as I wandered around the college.

Bootiful Keble College

Bootiful Keble College Quad

Our volunteers are mighty strong

Delegate bags awaiting delegates

Extremely helpful signage

Magazines in the Surgery waiting room - awaiting doc patients!

Big indie film news this morning as SnagFilms launches a Beta site with free streaming features including Super Size Me, Run Granny Run and Dig! - films that you can also embed as a widget which I am very excited about (I’m a big fan of widgets). I’m desperate to have a play with SnagFilms but am so snowed with work in London that I only have time to write this very brief blog post. So check out all the news on indieWIRE and explore SnagFilms on my behalf.