The Thousand Roads Podcast

June Cross is a documentary filmmaker who has Emmy, Peabody, and DuPont-Columbia Journalism awards under her belt. She also founded and directs the doc program at the Columbia University Journalism School. So you could say she's helped bring not only documentary films into the world but also a lot of documentary filmmakers. We talk about her own films, which include the autobiographical Secret Daughter, a film with many twists about her upbringing as the daughter of a white mother and a Black...

Caty Borum heads the Center for Media and Social Impact at the American University School of Communication, and she's the author of Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change. She studies “creative, independent investigative documentary,” her term for docs that are as thoroughly artistic as they are journalistic. We chat about the techniques and challenges that make these stories and their storytellers unique. More about Caty here.Films mentioned in this episo...

Brian Newman is one of the more trenchant observers on the documentary scene. He’s worn many hats in the industry: as an indie film producer, as the CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, as a programmer for the Atlanta Film Festival, and much more. He currently leads a consultancy called Sub-Genre, doing content, strategy, development, distribution and marketing, for which he writes the Sub-Genre newsletter that a lot of media folks read. He has, as you'll hear in this conversation, some hope fo...

Carrie Lozano has played a lot of important roles in the documentary field. Until not long ago she headed the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film and Artist Programs. Before that, she designed and directed the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Fund. Her gig right now is heading up ITVS, the Independent Television Service, which, among other things, funds and distributes public TV docs, and brings us the long-running, much-decorated PBS series Independent Lens. All her exper...

Tia Lessin and Carl Deal are filmmaking partners whose careers have run the gamut from directing their Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning Trouble The Water about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, to producing several of Michael Moore’s films, and more. Tia also directed, with Emma Pildes, 2022’s Emmy Award-winning The Janes, about women providing abortion care in pre-Roe v. Wade Chicago. Tia started out as a labor organizer and an activist. And while Carl has an activist background as well,...

David Siev, a first-time feature filmmaker, made a splash in 2022 with his film Bad Axe, which began with his documenting the mundane proceedings of his family’s restaurant in the small town of Bad Axe, Michigan, and wound up a stunning, personal portrait of America in the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020. The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award for its portrayal of the events of 2020. We talk about what it was like to come out of seemingly nowhere to earn that honor, what it meant to ...

Byron Hurt wears a lot of hats: filmmaker, journalist, activist, mentor and more. He’s also brave, if his 2022 film Hazing is any indication. Hazing takes on the subculture of humiliation and often violence that people endure when they wish to join certain organizations, including college fraternities and sororities. It’s taboo to talk about hazing if you’ve taken part in it, but Byron, a fraternity member who’s seen it from both sides, does just that. We talk about the challenges he encounte...

The Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG) is making quite an impact in the documentary film world, promoting a framework for values-based documentary ethics and practices. Natalie Bullock Brown is its director, and she’s my guest this time around. We talk about DAWG’s suggestions as to how people agreeing to appear in documentaries ought to be treated, with regard to compensation, psychological services, community outreach and more. There’s some great overlap between this conversati...

Robert Greene is a professor at the University of Missouri's Journalism School, where he runs the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism. But he's better known as a filmmaker whose documentaries are anything but “traditional” journalism. These include two that we talk about in this podcast, Procession, about the pedophilia scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, which was shortlisted for the documentary Oscar in 2021, and the award-winning Bisbee ‘17, about a mass deportation of immigrants th...

I think it’s safe to say Jennifer Tieixiera and Camilla Hall have created a documentary unlike any other. It's called Subject, and it profiles people whose stories have appeared in some of the most acclaimed documentaries of the last three decades or so, including Hoop Dreams, The Square, The Wolfpack, and The Staircase. But what makes Subject different is that it focuses on what happened to these folks after their participation in documentaries made them famous. It’s a film that asks filmmak...