DOK Industry Podcast

In this two-part conversation, American Documentary Executive Director and Executive Producer of POV and America ReFramed, Erika Dilday, sits down with four storytellers to discuss the power of creating documentaries by and for BIPOC communities.

In our first conversation, Erika Dilday joins artist and filmmaker Chloe Abrahams to dive into the creation of her first feature documentary, The Taste of Mango. Together the two discuss Chloe’s deeply personal portrait of her own family and the Sri Lankan British community.

In the second conversation, Erika Dilday sits down with director Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough, producer Dawne Langford and activist/doc participant Erricka Bridgeford, to discuss their film, The Body Politic.

Length: 48:21

Moderator: Erika Dilday

The DOK Industry Podcast 2024 is realised in partnership with POC2 Programmers of Colour Collective and What’s Up With Docs Podcast, and supported by Docs-in-Orbit and film.macht.kritisch - Der Podcast über das andere Kino.

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

In today's documentary* landscape, issues of race, gender, and other under-represented groups are rightly under scrutiny, yet ‘neoliberalism’ remains largely unexamined in documentary production. Also, the major streaming platforms have increased documentary output but narrowed platformed works to largely align with market-driven interests, favouring 'spectacle' – like celebrity culture and true crime – and conformity to Western storytelling tropes. As these platforms expand their global reach, the spread of neoliberal values has intensified, further entrenching a homogenised cultural landscape.

They discuss their “oppositional” film practices—in creating works and spaces that challenge the global dominance of Western neoliberalism – and share their histories, highlighting that these practices are more critical now than ever before to counter neoliberalism's influence in shrinking political, aesthetic and cultural imaginaries worldwide.

*Please note that documentary also refers to non-fiction in this text

Length: 76:15

Moderator: Meena Nanji

The DOK Industry Podcast 2024 is realised in partnership with POC2 Programmers of Colour Collective and What’s Up With Docs Podcast, and supported by Docs-in-Orbit and film.macht.kritisch - Der Podcast über das andere Kino.

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

In this 2-part episode, we talk about two documentary projects from India – the documentary series The Hunt for Veerappan and the feature documentary WOMB: Women of My Billion.

In a conversation with the documentaries’ producer, Apoorva Bakshi, director Selvamani Selvaraj and social impact pioneer, Srishti Bakshi, we delve deeper into these very relevant and prevalent topics that are such a big part of India’s social, political and economic structures.

Part 2: The feature documentary WOMB: Women of My Billion follows the experience of a young woman, Srishti, and her 3800km journey from Kanyakumari (South India) to Kashmir (North India) over 240 days. The film highlights the crisis and shows the plight, dreams, rights and fight against all forms of violence. Through Srishti's lens, we gain the privilege of discovering and understanding the WOMB, which deserves to be respected, empowered and protected.

Length: 42:34

Moderator: Sunil Sadarangani

The DOK Industry Podcast 2024 is realised in partnership with POC2 Programmers of Colour Collective and What’s Up With Docs Podcast, and supported by Docs-in-Orbit and film.macht.kritisch - Der Podcast über das andere Kino.

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

In this 2-part episode, we talk about two documentary projects from India – the documentary series The Hunt for Veerappan and the feature documentary WOMB: Women of My Billion.

In a conversation with the documentaries’ producer, Apoorva Bakshi, director Selvamani Selvaraj and social impact pioneer, Srishti Bakshi, we delve deeper into these very relevant and prevalent topics that are such a big part of India’s social, political and economic structures.

Part 1: The critically acclaimed documentary limited series, The Hunt for Veerappan, directed by Selvamani Selvaraj puts a spotlight on the life of India's forest king "Veerappan" who was involved in many brutal crimes from the 1990s until the early 2000s.

Through important testimonies of his wife, some of his gang members, and several officers who worked in the Special Task Force to capture him, the film unveils the intricate dynamics at play among law enforcement tactics, societal tensions, and the delicate balance between criminal activity and the quest for justice.

Hear Part 1 of the episode with Selvamani Selvaraj and Apoorva Bakshi on The Hunt for Veerappan today. Part 2 with Srishti and Apoorva Bakshi, will be coming soon.

Length: 40:03

The DOK Industry Podcast 2024 is realised in partnership with POC2 Programmers of Colour Collective and What’s Up With Docs Podcast, and supported by Docs-in-Orbit and film.macht.kritisch - Der Podcast über das andere Kino.

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

CREDITS

This conversation is a celebration. It’s also a follow up on a 2020 DOK Leipzig podcast collaboration called Who is Missing from the Coming-of-Age Narrative (Season 1).

Shakira Refos, host of this episode, always wanted to investigate the power of pipeline programs, different types of mentorship models, artist in residencies, fellowships etc. In this conversation, we explore the power of the pipeline while chatting with a filmmaker who is in the beginning of her career and an established filmmaker in the middle of her breakout success.

Length: 52:06

Moderator: Shakira Refos

The DOK Industry Podcast 2024 is realised in partnership with POC2 Programmers of Colour Collective and What’s Up With Docs Podcast, and supported by Docs-in-Orbit and film.macht.kritisch - Der Podcast über das andere Kino.

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

In this conversation, we’ll start with the Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen, with a historical perspective and overview, of how some specific aesthetics and narrations have been dominant in documentary and fiction over past decades.

In the second part of the conversation with filmmaker Naziha Arebi and curator and critic Samia Labadi, we will address these issues affecting our cinema from the angle that the need to promote aesthetics other than the dominant one seems to be far more exhaustive and relevant than the strictly decolonial question.

Indeed, by placing at the heart of our work the notion of the existence of aesthetics other than those of the Western world, our questioning goes beyond the simple dialectic of the colonized versus the colonizer, to include a philosophical approach to our ‘imaginary’ representations of the human being, both as an individual and as a collective, while placing them in a much greater historical context than that of cinema itself.

Implicitly, this prompts us to ask: is it relevant to describe our current cinema as universal, given that the global South – the majority - is marginalized by the minority – the global North?

Recorded on 16 September and 19 September 2023

Moderator: Rama Thiaw

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

Join us for this conversation on the AI-driven creative revolution. Following one of the main themes of DOK Exchange XR Programme: AI and its impact on the art of storytelling – we delve into a conversation about the opportunities and challenges of generative tools for creation. Hosted by Weronika Lewandowska, this podcast takes a look at AI from the perspective and practice of our guest and DOK Exchange XR Conference speaker – Mads Damsbo – the Head of European Creators Lab, the producer and creative technologist of the first feature-length AI co-developed film: “About a Hero”. This production led him to the development of a new tool for filmmakers – Kaspar AI. It also serves for our interlocutors as a lens to broader reflection on Human-AI cooperation and helps to redefine creativity and storytelling art.

Check out the entire DOK Exchange XR programme online. Join us in Leipzig!

Length: 46’23’’

Moderator: Weronika M Lewandowska

In collaboration with The European Creators’ Lab – Prototyping Lab.

Join us for this conversation and deep dive into the richness of animated documentary, the ways it can open up subjects, connect audiences to meaningful stories with empathy and imagination, and innovatively rethink how to represent a diversity of truths in resonant ways.

Filmmakers Carlos Hagerman & Jorge Villalobos discuss their animated feature documentary “Home Is Somewhere Else”, centring three stories of the U.S./Mexico border and the experiences of undocumented families through the lens of youth;

This episode is brought to you in cooperation with MUBI. As a DOK Industry Podcast listener, you can now try MUBI, including MUBI GO, for 7 days free of charge at MUBI.com and MUBI.com/go until the 31st of December 2023.

Length: 77’00’’

Moderator: Maria-Christina Villaseñor

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

Filmmaker, activist and co-founder of Re-Present Media Jennifer Crystal Chien joins host Toni Bell in examining the need to generate new and more authentic representations and portrayals of BIPOC communities and expand those stories to other ways of storytelling.

This discussion engages the vital question of who is determining what is of interest and to whom. The question of an audience is an important one because it is often asked from the white dominant perspective, which influences the filmmaking process and limits topics and story arcs deemed acceptable for mainstream storytelling, thus barring some BIPOC filmmakers from accessing funding structures if they do not follow a specific type of mainstream narrative.

Jennifer’s theory of change for the field is rooted in liberation and the spirit of the song she picked for this episode by the late great Curtis Mayfield, “Keep On Keeping On”.

Length: 82’48’’

Moderator: Toni Bell

You can find out more about our collaborators here.

The usual documentary filmmaking is no longer applicable in Hong Kong since the new national security law. Filmmakers who still believe in the power of documentary need to be creative to overcome all newly added obstacles — funding, subjects’ consent and distribution.

In this episode, three experienced documentary filmmakers Tze Woon CHAN, Kanas LIU and Dr Anson MAK will share with the audience their experiences and insights into their journey of overcoming this huge mountain.

Length: 53’27’’

Moderator: Karen Cheung

You can find out more about our collaborators here.