Three documentary toppers shared their points of view on the non-fiction landscape at Fipadoc in Biarritz 30 January 2025. Hanka Kastelicova of HBO Max, Mark Edwards, former Director of Documentaries for Netflix (Europe), and Renaud Allilaire from France Télévisions, formed the panel which was chaired by Fipadoc’s Head of Co-production Forum, Ove Rishøj Jensen.
Each panelist chose a trailer to spark debate across subjects ranging from AI to navigating the debate around social issues and care of protagonists, to the ever-diminishing timespans allowed to filmmakers – does the lack of time we can take to follow protagonists and their transformation change the kinds of subjects we choose? And who gets to tell what stories?
First up was Hanka Kastelicova, VP and Executive Producer of Documentaries for HBO Europe. Kastelicova chose Kix (Cinephage, directed by Hungarian Dávid Mikulán).
As Kastelicova elucidated, “Kix is a production of twelve years. It’s really a challenge because it’s a story about a friendship between two young filmmakers and, at the beginning, a 6-year-old boy from a very poor neighbourhood in Budapest. As they follow him, we feel how the country basically is failing in delivering for this young soul. And of course, at the end comes a tragic event.”
“Because they were very young, they were able to get very close contact. I think you can see this even from the trailer, there is very strong contact with the children. There was great access and so we were impressed and started working with the team,” she added.
Whilst all the panelists agreed that such a long period of time following protagonists is invaluable in understanding character transformation, and such insights are almost unique to documentary, current pressures render these long-term projects almost impossible.
“Time is disappearing, right?” Ove Rishøj Jensen suggests to the panel. “No-one has time in newspapers to write in-depth articles anymore…a lot of broadcasting is increasingly short and condensed. In many ways, documentary has time as a resource. So I think there is also the risk that if we lose that window, we lose some of the uniqueness that documentary can still bring to the media landscape.”
Jensen also asked if that means that there is a subsequent push towards reflecting more current situations, rather than looking at more long-term issues or stories?
Kastelicova tells us, “We are more and more pushed to have big numbers…we are pressed to have a quick turnaround.”
However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an appetite for it, Kastelicova added. “I would say that because I have a level of high-quality documentary, I don’t want to fully let go of that part. I am pushed into what the audience wants because we have a lot of data, but I try to create a slate that has both.”
Renaud Allilaire struck a positive note, saying that there is still room for these bigger endeavours in France Télévisions, and that they’re currently working on two long-term projects. “It’s a key issue, and a good thing if you want to see the transformation of a character.” Though he also admits it’s increasingly challenging to make these commissions.
Allilaire sparked a conversation about how a public service broadcaster deals with social issues with his choice of trailer of GEN_, a documentary by Gianluca Mataresse about medical transition and discrimination, which follows the work processes of Dr Maurizio Bini, an Italian hormone and fertility expert.
Allilaire comments, “Dr Bini is a very special character because he manages both fertility questions and also gender change therapies. And he does it in a very clever and human way. He says both questions are linked, because on one hand it’s giving life, and on the other hand it’s basically changing life. Both therapies involve taking hormones and having treatments that are very hard and he doesn’t exclude the suffering part.”
“He’s basically questioning each and every patient on whether they have family, they have friends they can talk to, the consequences of their choices, never judging. I found it a very clever way to address these questions that are hard actually to deal with for us as public service [broadcaster]. The questions that were asked to us as a public service is whether we promote gender change and maybe you over-promote sometimes.“
“But on the other side, when you tend to have a certain position where you ask whether gender change should be accessible to minors. and the consequences on health such as hormones, blocking therapies, there are a lot of questions that sometimes you do hesitate to address because you have a lot of ‘watchdog’ associations from all sides. If you ask these questions, you are immediately categorised as a conservative and very much far right, so it’s a tough subject to deal with.”
Jensen suggests that the role of documentary commissioner and publisher has changed over the last 10 years. “Do you feel there’s a difference in how you position these documentaries and how you position yourself as a public service broadcaster?” he asked.
“I guess one big change that I’ve been noticing is the way our public debates are more and more polarized, and polarized by, of course, social networks. You can feel that on these particular subjects that deal with identity and gender, it’s very obvious. It’s something that is very much more explosive. So you have to engage politically still. Traditionally, we mostly had history or discovery pieces and now we have social issues, which are tougher in terms of ratings. As well as prime- time, we also have late night slots such as 25 Shades of Docs that enables us to deal with different kinds of films and on different political stances,” replied Allilaire.
With his film choice, Mark Edwards asked, who gets to tell what stories? Intercepted (Les Films Cosmos, directed by Oksana Karpovych) overlays images of a devastated Ukraine with telephone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families, intercepted by Kyiv, contrasting ordinary Russians’ views of the war and the dehumanisation engendered by conflict.
Mark Edwards argues that, “One of the roles of public media is also to give voice and empower filmmakers from the places where the stories are coming from… we learned a lot when I was at ARTE from Generation Africa about how many things you could get done and how many great original stories could come out of that. So I think the reflex was, oh, it worked there, we need to respond to the war in Ukraine, let’s empower filmmakers to do things. And it turns out there were many filmmakers out there who were already at work and thinking and having ideas. And so Intercepted was one of the early ideas that was actually fairly quick in the turnaround. And I’m not saying that it’s the filmmaker’s or the broadcaster’s job to do quick turnaround during war. The question is, how do you represent war in a deeper, more impactful, more meaningful way for the public understanding and experience of the reality of war? And then how do you find a cinematic language to represent it while also getting closer to the truth of what people are living and representing the other side?”
This is where documentary has the time and skills to spend on the grey areas, the panel agreed. “I think we are coming down to something essential about documentary. What we see in news coverage and other types of media is a lot of communication in black and white. And in many ways the essence of documentaries is to tell the stories in the grey areas, the in-between, the more human side of stories…and point of view is becoming more and more important,” Jensen summarised.
Perhaps inevitably, the discussion turned to the subject of AI and how it may impact documentary filmmaking. The consensus was that documentary provides a much-needed counterpoint to the world of AI.
Kastelicova commented, ‘I hope that the AI thing might help again bring documentary or something real more into the spotlight, and that the audience will need it more (documentary) than ever. At least I feel that in the last year we had very good [doc viewing] numbers, so I don’t know if it’s some magic, but I’m very, very happy.”
Or maybe it has been down to good curation on Kastelicova’s part, Jensen suggests.
“Maybe,” responded Kastelicova, “But I think it’s also about the audience – they want to see something real in all the big slate of fiction, fantasy and dragons. I remember when I joined HBO and we were having a EURODOC meeting. It was 2012 and the discussion was, is it about to be end of documentary making? It was a really critical time after the financial crisis, and everything was going down. But now sometimes when we doubt, I look back to that moment, and we are still here, and we are still a big industry.”
