FOUR YEARS ON from a game-changing global pandemic, members of the Ontario chapter of DOC, the organization’s oldest and largest, find themselves in a challenging place.
With inflation stinging, broadcasters downsizing, and distributors retrenching, the mood is bleak. And while one might say (if we’re being honest) that complaining about the state of the industry is perhaps a default setting for many documentarians, this, nevertheless, feels different.
The adjustment to a post-COVID “new normal” has left doc makers facing a fundamental threat to their survival, as highlighted in the DOC Institute’s recent “Breakthrough 20 Year Research Report.” In response to the question, “Are you able to sustain yourself financially in the business?” nearly three in 10 respondents (28.2%) identified themselves as “precariously holding on.” A further two in 10 (19.2%) noted they have resorted to “doing part-time work outside the business to survive.”
Such results paint a bleak picture, hinting at something most working in the industry know or feel intuitively, while simultaneously raising alarm bells: At least half of Canada’s documentarians cannot earn a living making documentaries.
“Take your pick on multiple issues,” says filmmaker and distributor Ron Mann, co-founder of Toronto-based Films We Like, “from publicly funded film festivals who do not pay screening fees to filmmakers, to the collapse of media reviewing non-Hollywood films. All contribute to an industry which is unsustainable and in crisis.
“As a film distributor,
