Earlier this year, we attended a documentary film conference hosted by the International Documentary Association (IDA) in Los Angeles. The IDA is a nonprofit organization that supports documentary filmmakers and offers fiscal sponsorship to projects like ours, since some grant funders only offer money to projects connected to formal entities.
The IDA also hosts large gatherings for networking and workshopping. We happened to be filming in LA at the time, so we decided to go. It was surreal – being in the company of funders, producers, and industry gatekeepers among countless other documentary filmmakers, each hunting for the chance encounter that could bankroll their underfunded project. Making movies isn’t cheap, and our approach is a little different than other independent filmmakers who generally work in or around the industry and rent higher-end gear for their shoots. We saved up for years so we could live out of our van full-time and own all of our semi-pro level gear. We have a unique freedom on one hand, but limited resources on the other.
This brief foray into the filmmaking industry has given us a lot to think about. It’s helped us flesh out the values we’re approaching this project with, which contrast with much of the industry’s approach. In our next post, we’ll dive into what our values and strategies have looked like as we’ve moved through a number of communities to make this docuseries happen.
The conference also challenged us to imagine what radical production and distribution alternatives to the industry could look like. Many of the panels at the conference presented ethical practices that should be incorporated into standard documentary production. Fully-informed consent, compensation for interviewees, collectivized production structures, and the importance of marginalized people telling their own stories were all themes that sparked interesting conversations. Unfortunately, much of this discussion only scratched the surface, and failed to present tangible solutions to tackling the power dynamics and corporate interests that dominate the field of documentary filmmaking.
Even for mainstream productions, funding and distribution is immensely difficult and competitive. Large film festivals, granters, and streaming platforms still benefit from and function through extractivism, competition, and hierarchy. Do we expect them to uplift stories that seriously challenge those systems? Do we expect them to radically change how they produce and monetize content to meaningfully align with our values? We don’t want to compete with other radical projects. Instead, we see a lot of potential for collaboration and mutual support. There are many options outside the formal industry.
Our friend and Puerto Rican filmmaker, Juan Carlos Davilla, was also at the conference. He’s been thinking about this for a while and advocates for working collaboratively with other filmmakers, sharing funding and footage across projects, and finding other ways to uplift each others’ work. The desire for collaboration over competition was echoed by a number of the sweet friends we met on the fringes of the conference too.
So what if non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist, and non-exploitative principles weren’t only brought to life on screen, but also guided how more of those stories get made and shared? How can we continue to evolve the way we finance, produce, and distribute these stories within our values? It’s quite the undertaking, but we think radical filmmakers actually have a lot of power and potential here.
We’re in good company with comrades who are already doing this work. Means.TV was recently formed as a worker-owned, anti-capitalist streaming platform. (This is one place we hope to distribute our final cut.) There are decentralized platforms in the federated internet like PeerTube or coalitions like the Radical Film Network that offer exciting ways to connect with people internationally on our own terms, while collectives like Free Filmers, SubMedia, It’s Going Down, Solidarity Cinema, and Cine Móvil NYC experiment with and iterate on these ideas. We also hope to see more anti-capitalist media collectives develop creative ways to secure and distribute funding.
In growing our storytelling capacity, we believe our biggest assets are the relationships we already have, as well as the extensive networks for sharing information and ideas that exist in the struggles for social and ecological justice. The audience of people interested in grassroots community structures is rapidly growing, particularly following the 2020 uprisings.
We need media that shows us tangible strategies to replace the crumbling disaster of empire. How are different communities meeting the challenges they face? What’s hard about this work? What ingredients make it fluid and sustainable? What are different models and cultures of decision making that are being experimented with? We want more media that delves into these questions. We’re tired of documentaries that showcase the impacts of colonization and capitalism without digging into real, grassroots solutions. We want complex stories that show the nuances of collective community efforts, and we’re bored of narratives that center charismatic figures or tout individual exceptionalism.
The craving for this content is the very byproduct of an industry that hasn’t found nuanced stories of community power valuable. Whenever they do try to film them, they often don’t have the access or understanding they need to tell them meaningfully because of their approach to content production. But when we make these stories ourselves, they don’t have to stand out among hundreds of other titles on corporate streaming services to be seen. We don’t need to compete with each other. We can build alternatives together.
This is what’s prompted us to make The Elements of Mutual Aid. We aren’t making this project to stream it on Netflix or HBO. Instead, we’re designing it to be shared digitally and physically across the diverse networks of people activated by the spirit of mutual aid. Through accessible streaming platforms and a screening tour we plan to embark on, we have faith that our series will attract the audiences it was meant for.
There’s a terrifying culture war happening through visual and digital media right now – from liberalism’s elite capture to the reactionary violence of conservatives. The alt-right in particular is highly effective at using media to sow doubt, individualism, and white supremacist values under the guise of “resisting” the woke mob. In tandem with community organizing, multimedium stories that stoke our collective imagination are crucial if we want to effectively challenge these forces.
Restrictive industry standards simply cannot produce the content we want to see – even if they appropriate our marginalized identities and revolutionary aesthetics. And they certainly shouldn’t limit our creativity or capacity for independent media creation.
We have a lot to learn in this field, and we’re very excited to mature these ideas alongside other radical filmmakers. If that’s you, please reach out!
Stay tuned for our next post delving into where the rubber of our values has hit the road as we’ve produced this project.