Mohamed Jabaly’s Life is Beautiful won the Best Documentary Award at Nordisk Panorama a few weeks ago, a prize that is sponsored by the five Nordic public broadcasters.
It’s a human, accessible, personal and very relevant documentary and, as the director says, you’re also allowed to laugh… It tells both of Mohamed’s exile in Norway as well as the (then) normal life of his family in Gaza. The film has had incredible audience reactions at the many dozens of screenings that were organized around the world. Al Jazeera will show it and it has a substantial theatrical US release with Watermelon Pictures.
So why were none of the five public Nordic broadcasters that gave the Nordisk award to Life is Beautiful interested in either co-producing or, at least, broadcasting it?
And by the same token, why has not one public broadcaster in Europe bought it until now?
There are too many films, they say. Or it’s difficult to program a film about exile from Gaza today. Or there are no slots. Or that budgets are low.
The broadcasters seem so scared and powerless and unaware that their self-censorship has gone too far. Too few of our partners in these institutions are still passionate and fight for real stories. No wonder the echo chambers are winning everywhere.
I want to call for a readjustment, for a change of heart, for hope, and courage. I want us to not only travel to our pitching sessions and festivals but to invite our audiences to travel with us to Nepal, to Kyrgistan, to Gaza, from Mexico to France and from Poland to Italy, to see and feel and learn about people in other cultures and situations, so they can see how, at the end of the day, we’re not so different from each other, after all.
How much we have learned, and laughed, and fallen in love with our protagonists! How much of the world we have understood from smart storytellers! How much we have had our minds broadened, opened and enlightened.
Dramas, rom-coms and thrillers can produce these emotions – but non-fiction does it better. It’s the real stuff. We should be proud of it! We are!
It’s the season again and we’re all traveling – and it’s wonderful to meet friends and colleagues on the road and to catch up. We are privileged to work in a field that cares about content. While we can enjoy red carpets, it’s great content that makes people and organizations tick in the documentary industry.
I am a fervent believer in public service, in media literacy and in education – and in entertaining audiences. For more than twenty years, public broadcasters were our main clients, covering over 80% of my company’s turnover. In 2023, that changed dramatically. Now, we mostly earn the money for our filmmakers online, and it’s a different kind of business – challenging in other ways, technically, financially, and mostly leaving choice to the audience.
And we, as the creative crowd, are struggling to connect with these audiences’ demands and expectations, let alone exceed them – which was always the biggest fun and satisfaction.
Our broadcast partners seem to have stopped trying. Not the editors, who are as committed as we are, but the general systems in which they operate. Unfortunately, these systems just don’t work anymore.
We need to learn how to beat this crisis together, because if we don’t, then democracies disappear. If we don’t listen to different voices, learn new narratives, observe other stories, we fall for lies and bluster, for shiny shit and empty promises, and we shouldn’t.
We’re better than that, and so are our audiences.
Esther van Messel, talking to Business Doc Europe
