As it ramps up its eco activities yet further, non-profit powerhouse Doc Society is to bring its Climate Story Lab to the UK next spring.
The first Climate Story Lab UK will take place in London during the week of March 9 2020. This lab is the second in a series of interventions bringing together the creative and campaigning expertise of Exposure Labs and Doc Society with Good Pitch Impact Labs, and follows on from the inaugural event held in New York in the summer.
The idea behind the initiative is to bring together creative storytellers with climate experts including scientists, journalists, faith leaders and economists. An open call for participants has just been announced.
“We are looking for around nine (projects) which are either set in the UK or will resonate with UK audiences – and they’ve got to be ready for release in the next 12 months,” explained Sandra Whipham, director of Doc Society (formerly known as Britdoc). “The films can either be directly about climate or they can have climate running through them as a theme. We are at IDFA to look for those kind of projects.”
The Doc Society is currently raising funds to be able to offer impact and production money to the projects selected.
Meanwhile, the Society has launched an audience engagement programme to promote Rachel Lears’ Knock Down The House, her new documentary feature looking behind the scenes of the 2018 midterm elections in the USA and telling the stories of four inspirational women from non-traditional backgrounds: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”), Amy Vilela, Cori Bush and Paula Jean Swearengin, who ran for Congress in those elections.
Doc Society put money into Knock Down The House and has now organised a series of non-partisan screening events at locations across the UK, with post-film discussions hosted by local organisers, activists and journalists. It is also offering micro grants to community organisers to put on screenings in their communities. One of the goals is to explore potential pathways through which British women can follow the example of women like “AOC” and make their own runs for elected office.
As ever, Doc Society is involved in several films screening at IDFA, among them the AI-themed doc, iHuman and Prison Without Profit, the latest campaigning feature doc from sisters Ilse van Velzen and Femke van Velzen which examines the shady roles of British security firm G4S in running South Africa’s first privately funded prison. (This was backed by the Bertha Doc Society documentary journalism fund, which is now closed.)
Doc Society exec produced Prison For Profit and is also helping provide the directors with legal support.
Other IDFA films with Doc Society involvement either through funds or Good Pitch initiatives include Shalahuddin Siregar’s A Boarding School (a look inside a traditional Islamic boarding school in Indonesia); Madeleine Leroyer’s #387 (an investigative documentary about the passengers of a ship that sank off the Libyan coast during the 2015 refugee crisis); Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveller (about an Afghan family of filmmakers who attempts to travel to Europe illegally); Lanre Malaolu’s short doc The Circle (an intimate look at the lives of two tough teenage brothers from Hackney, East London), Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s The Letter, the story of how an elderly woman is accused of witchcraft; Yung Chang’s Robert Fisk documentary This Is Not A Movie and Tim Travers Hawkins’ Chelsea Manning doc XY Chelsea.
Doc Society has also boarded two projects in this year’s IDFA Forum: Milisuthando (backed through Doc Society Circle and about a black South African unaware of apartheid until it ended ) and Fashion Reimagined, supported by the BFI Doc Society Fund about Vogue fashion prize winner Amy Powney’s attempts to make the fashion industry sustainable.
