On March 18, CPH:DOX 2024 hosted the DISCO Network’s Independence Project presentation and workshop, which advocates for independent documentaries across culture, society, and democracy. The 90-minute event, titled “Our Declaration of Independence,” saw the participation of Beadie Finzi, Director of Doc Society, and Jad Abi-Khalil, Executive Director of Lebanon-based cultural association for Arab Cinema Aflamuna (formerly known as Beirut DC).
The session was opened by a reading of Jelaluddin Rumi’s poem “Come, Come Whoever You Are,” after which Finzi and Abi-Khalil touched on the role of DISCO, a network of film and cultural organisations based in 40 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, whose focus is on spreading the efforts of “decentralised, independent storytellers and cultural organisers,” and promoting independent doc film from the perspective of “the Global Majority, not just the Global North.” Through their initiatives, DISCO directly supports over 2000 independent filmmakers, hosting leading festivals and markets as well as dedicated training programmes.
Moreover, DISCO has been “exploring” new models for sustainable film careers, distribution of public interest media, decolonising documentary funding, safety and security for global filmmakers, among others.
Core to the brand-new ‘Independence Project’ is finding an equitable, shared definition of independence.
Finzi said that our global media ecosystem is in a desperate condition, and warned that “most important stories of our age are clips from unchecked, unregulated platforms” promoting regimes and other powerful interest groups, among others. “What we used to think as reliable media – film, TV, print, digital, radio – have been upended to devotion to relentless market logics,” she explained, adding how all of this produced “flattened, formulaic storytelling.”
Abi-Khalil said how unprecedented pressures on filmmakers is leading to decreases in terms of diversity on screen and behind the camera. “Audiences are losing access to diverse, complex narratives,” he warned, “This goes against what we need at this critical moment in history.”
In the age of algorithms and machine learning, Finzi and Abi-Khalil told the audience of makers how essential it is “to name and describe their craft” and to explain “how it matters,” in order to gain leverage.
“[We need] to imagine and design a new public interest infrastructure, allowing worldwide citizens to access this critical form of storytelling. This is the purpose of the Independence Project; to trigger conversations across every region, see ourselves anew, and understand us as connected with a common set of priorities,” Finzi and Abi-Khalil say, adding how it is more urgent than ever in today’s fragile society that is torn by wars, genocides, authoritarian regimes and new forms of colonialism.
“This project began over a year ago, with a series of longform interviews with 51 fellow docs from 34 countries, each describing the significance of independent documentary,” Finzi underscored, “We asked them: What does independence means to you, and why does it matter?”
Next, Finzi and Abi-Khalil passed to the audience a printed copy of the first Independence Project Manuscript, which contains all the filmmakers’ answers to these questions. Some of the attendees read out loud the filmmakers’ testimonies.
Their definitions boasted a plurality of points of view, sometimes contrasting with each other. For example, someone considered independence as a commitment “to fight corruption and amnesia.” Others – such as an anonymous Russian filmmaker – argued that the word ‘independence’ has gradually lost its value, forcing docmakers to find new ways and words to intercept and persuade the audience. Another filmmaker stated that Arab films ended up being non-independent, always providing a “one recipe, one point of view” up to the point whereby numerous films from the region are “practically similar to one another.”
Some interviewees touched on the role of broadcasters and platforms, adding how their support makes it impossible to produced truly independent works. Meanwhile, some focused on the power dynamics between filmmakers and protagonists, whilst others focused on independent filmmaking in which “the co-directing and co-producing teams have editorial autonomy.” Many more comments were read throughout the session, showcasing the panoply of voices, backgrounds and different levels of freedom, access and privilege.
The short debate that followed contested the ideas of the director’s vision over the role of protagonists, the fallacies of these definitions, the unfairness of resources and inequality and, more generally, highlighted how “the world is split, and in some places, we’ve got secret filmmakers who risk to be killed or arrested.”
Later, an audience member who qualified themselves as a former broadcast exec suggested to focus on the idea of “interdependence,” saying how networks shouldn’t be necessarily considered “enemies” when it comes to independence.
Finzi pointed out all of this discourse on labelling “independence” and “documentary” is needed owing to the terms’ continuing misuse and appropriation. “That careless use of language is allowing the community and practice of independent filmmaking to be erased,” she said, adding how colleagues working in journalism have established more defined boundaries to their benefit. She also called for more transparency and accountability with festivals, streamers and broadcasters in terms of their programming and commissioning choices, and she “uplifted the brilliant work” of honing the definition of “independence” done by the Documentary Accountability Working Group.
The need to frame the concept of “independence” was born out of conversations last summer in US and Europe, the audience was told. This delicate task was then brought to the network, and the definition was later reshaped to how it looks today.
The definition presented by Finzi and Abi-Khalil reads as follows:
- A documentary is independently produced if it meets this criterion: the filmmakers have ultimate creative and editorial control over their project.
- A documentary is independently distributed if it meets this criterion: the filmmakers have ultimate control over distribution decisions.”
A small footnote was also displayed: “Majority financing by a collection of distributors is acceptable. A pre-buy of a film already at fine cut by a distributor paying more than 50% of the budget costs is acceptable. Filmmakers refer to the creative team as the director and hands-on producer; ie the ones making the movie. Not financiers, even if they have a producing credit.”
Overall, the speakers seemed to agree more with the first part of the definition, which they found more solid, while expressing concerns about the feasibility of the second part, as they maintain that distribution is a process that may be too hard and demanding to follow.
The insights provided by the attendees in Copenhagen, Finzi explained, will be later shared with the Independence Project team, giving them new food for thought and aiming to improve their first draft.
Toward the end of the debate, the floor was given to FilmAid Director Gita Saedy Kiely. She announced that her team is working on the Trusting Doc Initiative: “We’d like to bring together industry leaders and community partners to talk about what kind of standards and practices are in place at global level.”
She described the endeavour as a project promoting film literacy, which can help communities to watch docs, to “understand where they’re coming from” and help “trust this form of non-fiction.”
“We spoke to many community partners and leaders. The feedback we’ve gotten so far is that there’s a real need for this. We aim to create an alliance not owned by any single entity, but led by the [aforementioned] ‘global majority.’ I hope the DISCO Network can be part of this effort.”
The event was rounded off by the reading of another poem, namely Palestinian writer and journalist Mahmoud Darwish’s “I Come from There.”
