2024 DOC NYC Reveals Difficulties and Future of Documentary Filmmaking

It’s hard to maintain an upbeat mood during the dire state of nonfiction and the recent U.S. presidential election result at this year’s DOC NYC, its 15th edition, which ran from November 13-December 1.

Streamers and studios are acquiring documentaries – especially those that aren’t in the chasms of sports, true crime, or celebrity – at a lower frequency than they did at the start of the decade. While the fest promotes itself as “America’s Largest Documentary Film Festival (this year contains 240 short and feature-length selections), DOC NYC’s placement in November and award season cycle with its “Visionaries Tribute” to nonfiction leaders and award-focused “Shorts List” and “Winners Circle” sections overshadow its lesser-known films (including 32 world premieres) and its PRO Conference sidebar where its panels and case studies expound on the artistic and business sides of documentary filmmaking. This year’s grand jury prize winners included Daniel Kaufman’s Stone Mountain in the U.S. Competition, Areeb Zuaiter’s Yalla Parkour in the International Competition, and Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse; a stunning ode to one of America’s innovative illustrators in the NYC-centric Metropolis Competition. While it is overwhelming to schedule your time at the fest and each facet not necessarily complementing the other, I caught up with contenders for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars and a few PRO Conference panels that express my hope and dissatisfaction with the way documentaries are being made at all stages of production. 

Netflix had the most documentaries in this year’s Short List with four with Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters, Lucy Walker’s Mountain Queen: The Limits of Lhakpa Sherpa, Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and Josh Greenbaum’s Will & Harper. While each of their acquired documentaries (Netflix bought the rights to all these films, except the 2023 TIFF-premiered Mountain Queen out of 2024 Sundance) demonstrate the strength of solidifying communal and familial bonds following tragedies and systemic discrimination, the former two examines those effects on parenthood and childhood.

In Mountain Queen, decorated Nepali climber Lhakpa Sherpa attempts to extend her world record on the most successful mounts by a woman on Mount Everest with ten. Lhakpa brings her American-raised daughters Shiny and Sunny along to convey the adventurous lifestyle she misses in Nepal in her nine-to-five work life in Connecticut and the gender bias in education and employment in her home country. Walker pauses Lhakpa and her crew’s life-or-death expedition by showing excerpts of Lhakpa’s past. Though these anecdotes signify the climber, mother, and human Lhakpa is, editors Yaniv Elani, Tyler Temple Higgins, and Davon Ramos don’t find breathing room to relax from the hazardous feat. For example, when the group arrives at Camp 4 (also known as “The Death Zone”) to form base camp, editors cut to the time Lhakpa was at a safe house following George’s violence. Although this rushed transition to the past loses the audience’s interest in the possibility of the characters surviving the weather, there’s still vibrancy and risk at the task. “Mountain Queen” reminds us to be grateful for the privileges we obtained. There’s so much more that many haven’t experienced, and Lhakpa signals us not to waste our time. 

Time and togetherness become precious in Daughters. Patton and Rae’s sobbing tendered scattershot surveys the effects of incarceration and how the program “Date with Dad,” developed by Girls for a Change (where Patton is its CEO), reconciles incarcerated fathers and their daughters over a father-daughter dance. The first-time feature directors primarily put the camera on four families, exploring the social and economic injustices their loved ones go through when they want to communicate with the patriarch (e.g., several prisons forbidding the in-person “touch visits,” and purchasing video visits) and fathers improving their leadership skills with life coach Chad in the lead-up and aftermath of the dance. Patton and Rae made a life-affirming decision to not only have the central dance as the bridge between both halves but also lensing it on 16mm to reflect the ever-growing ebbs and flows embedded in these bittersweet reunions and intimate vulnerability that comes with this analog footage. When the dads have their first physical connection with their daughters in a long while, it is impossible not to shed a tear during their hugs and entrances. While acknowledging that the dance’s length is finite, Daughters encapsulates the need for initiatives like “Date With Dad” to circumvent the traumas within and outside of the prison-industrial complex. While I’m glad Netflix acquired this reshaping of Black masculinity and girlhood, I wonder how documentaries will be acquired after Donald Trump becomes the 47th U.S. president and plans to cut funding for public media. Historically speaking, America is anticipated to witness bold, politically charged docs to be released during a Republican U.S. president like Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1991) and Michael Moore’s spine-tingling Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).

“He’s coming after us,” artist Edel Rodriguez warns us about Trump at the Q&A of his short Edel Rodriguez: Freedom is a Verb at the fest. Rodriguez famously did semi-comic illustrations of the egg-shaped Agent Orange for The New Yorker. He specified that the “us” includes artists and documentarians, among other Trump opposers, in the In the Making Season 3 special presentation on 11/19. His message elicited producer Trevite Willis’s remarks on the “sad place” in documentary funding a few days earlier at the Pro Conference’s Pitch Day. In her feedback to a filmmaking team, Willis notices that funders “are adding a variety of languages” to prevent financial support on films that focus on “controversial” topics like Israel and Palestine relations, Ukraine, and voting. 

All of the Pro Conference Days are composed of four panels at a Village East Angelika theater, with breakfast and a summoning happy hour at the nearby Bar Veloce. Despite three breaks (two of them are 15 minutes long and the lone exception is an hour-long DIY lunch break at the halfway mark) in between the panels, the theater’s agonizing seats with little legroom and unmovable armrest and the symposium’s elliptical arrangement gradually decreased my stamina. Besides the heavy resourceful “Real Talk: Funding in the Current Documentary Landscape” panel in the Funding Day, where the panelists gave specific examples (and offered the slides to the audience) on how to raise money from local communities, upper-class donors, and community organizations ahead of Giving Tuesday like specific direct (e-)mail campaigns and fundraising parties, the sequential “Film Financing Unveiled” and “Crossing Borders to Help Fund Your Film” panels reveal the taxing entrepreneurial mind artists acquired when speaking with equity investors and international co-producers. The conversations between artists and financiers, as stated verbally by the latter two sessions’ panelists without any fundraising tools or methods that lead to a beneficial negotiation, drained the creativity in making films. You could feel the exhaustive hustling filmmakers must do to get their works made during these “Funding Day” panels. They displayed the grueling process of getting the necessities outside the actual production (LLC filings, festival attendance costs, archival licensing, etc.) for a successful release. Though it is compelling to look into this behind-the-scenes discussion, the day felt like homework rather than a creative exercise for the most part. 

However, the Pro Conference accelerated with enthusiasm on the Ethical Storytelling and Mental Health Day as ITVS’ Grace Anglin and Sherry Dean unveiled a large-scale study that shows improvements in the relationship between filmmakers and participants. While 89% of participants would like to be in another doc, there is still damage in the productions, such as filmmakers not taking legal action to protect their characters and communities and not fulfilling their oaths. In a medium that has a history of predominantly European filmmakers extracting people from historically excluded communities, 74% of early career filmmakers, predominantly from BIPOC communities, are calling for a safer, ethical practice. For example, Standing Above the Clouds director Jalena Keane-Lee and Stephanie Palumbo, the director of Film Impact and Innovation at Peace Is Loud, shared resources and approaches in collaborating with participants in the panel “Participant-Centric Filmmaking Strategies.” Though there is the concern that paying participants will not maintain the story’s authenticity, Keane-Leane and Palumbo stressed that compensation for participants could simply be contributing to their mental health, use of their location and archival materials, media training, and a salary for the production. Relationships in nonfiction filmmaking are a marriage, and hopefully, more filmmakers will use these tools to make more satisfactory and open communicative means of artmaking. 

DOC NYC Industry director Malikkah Rollins observed the fatigue in the attendees’ short attention span during the conference and took a moment later in the conference to remodel the conference with the backing from filmmaking and industry people. Her proposal includes having some half days and hands-on workshops. When she asked the crowd to proceed with the new PRO Conference model, half of the audience supported a reboot, while others liked to keep it. Only time will tell what DOC NYC (the fest and the PRO Conference) will be like next year.