SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Cara Mertes, Director of Sundance Documentary Film Program -- Photo By Brian Chase, Wireimage.com

POINT OF VIEW: Cara Mertes, Director of Sundance Documentary Film Program

The search for stories about the struggle for and meaning of freedom is what most inspires me about documentary today. There has always been a strain of documentary seeking to articulate oppositional or counter-cultural politics. Often it has been a marginalized practice, but at certain junctures, it has inspired a shift or transformation in the field – and mainstream culture has paid attention.

This happened in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with the work of Emile de Antonio, collectives like Newsreel (now known as Third World Newsreel) and documentaries like Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County. It happened again with the rise of personal essay film in the late 1980s, with work like Tongues Untied and Roger and Me.

Judith Helfand dir. Everything's Cool

“They’re untangling a morass of cloudy information that has been clouded by news reporting, so it’s almost like they’re trying to clear away the dust for us, to crystallize what the problem is.”

— Senior Programmer Caroline Libresco

I believe this is another such moment for documentary, only this moment has a far greater challenge in some ways. After 60 years of commercially- dominated media, audiences have largely been disengaged from understanding the cause and effect surrounding the conditions of their lives. They have been alienated from the political process and hammered by a constant message of consumerism.

Today’s independent documentarians face the task of bringing audiences back to the table to think about their world in a new way. They must create an audience that is willing to listen and give them ways of making sense of the information. The challenge of the new documentary moment is not just to raise awareness of important issues, it is not simply to entertain people with great storytelling. It is to create a culture of engagement, one where people feel that they can affect change on an individual level at least, and possibly more. It is to remind them that they have an investment in the global story, not just their family’s story.

I am optimistic. You have to be to work in documentary — despite the gravity of many of the stories, it is a language of hope. For the first time, I am seeing a confluence of styles resulting in inspired experimentation; an audience more eager to see documentaries on television, in theaters, at home, and online; and an expanding interest in contemporary-issue filmmaking. Non-fiction is being adapted by younger storytellers. Well-established fiction producers and directors are diversifying into documentary. Costs are going down. And in a very few but very important cases, tickets are selling, bringing a new industry focus to the documentary form. In short, documentary is on fire.

This is not a moment for passive storytelling. Increasingly, documentaries are fulfilling two great mandates. They are embedding the possibility of action in their storytelling, and they are filling some of the void left by the dying art of journalism as we have known it through our major media. But not every story is a ”good” story. Many are told with the purpose of narrowing our world view, defining our differences and cementing our fears. Others, much less common in our media-frenzied lives, seek to point to the horizon, invite possibility and suggest transformation towards a more equitable society; a society that encourages freedom of expression, freedom from oppression and a free exchange of ideas outside of the commercial marketplace. These are the stories I believe documentary is taking on at the start of the 21st century with great imagination and great commitment. Documentary is becoming the seminal storytelling form of the 21st century.

Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

True mainstream investigative journalism is dying under the weight of consolidation and marketplace demands for profit over content. That’s not news; what is news is that documentary is taking on some functions of in-depth coverage. The devastation in the public affairs landscape can be seen most clearly in the national news and public affairs coverage offered by networks and cable. Contrary to many people’s experience, for me, watching the news isn’t depressing for what’s in it; I crave what is not in it. I don’t begrudge the spin, the celebrities, the VNR’s, and even the outright lies , but they really aren’t the news to me. The big news for me is increasingly found in documentaries like Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Enemies of Happiness, Everything’s Cool, The Devil Came on Horseback, or the many other documentaries in this year’s Festival that speak to us about issues, beliefs, values, and experiences that circumscribe our lives.

These are my breaking stories; deeply considered, well-rendered and researched, catalyzing to watch and full of all the storytelling skill they can muster. They are not traditional journalism, but they function to give us news of the way people live, believe, and act globally. Journalist Bill Moyers said in a recent speech , “The moment freedom begins is the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story. Freedom begins when you take the pen. Tell the story.” That is the challenge I see being taken up by documentarians across the globe. It is not my optimistic evaluation, it is simply that there is no choice. The future of freedom is at stake.