UWE Bristol Film Studies academic helps launch Documentary Film Council

Author Anna Jones | Posted on
A man in an art installation

Image: Even When I Jump (dir. Jerry Rothwell, 2021)

The Documentary Film Council (DFC) is a new national trade body for the UK’s documentary film industry. Co-designed by filmmakers and executives from across the industry working in partnership with lecturers in the Film Studies team at UWE Bristol, the DFC will represent the UK’s documentary film community, facilitate transparent communication within the sector and take effective, coordinated action to address the key issues it faces. The first national trade body in the UK screen industries to incorporate as a co-operative, the DFC will be democratically run by and for its members in the interests of the wider community. It launches at Sheffield DocFest on Saturday 17 June.

The concept of the DFC stems from the UK Feature Docs research project, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2018-2021 and which evidenced many of the challenges facing the independent documentary film industry.

Led by Dr Steve Presence, Associate Professor of Film Studies at UWE Bristol, the research team worked with freelancers and organisations across the industry as part of the ‘Industry Futures’ strand of the project. This developed into a major process of policy research and development, the findings of which were published in two reports: Keeping it Real (2020), based on a survey of independent producers and directors; and Making it Real (2021), a detailed policy programme co-created with stakeholders across the industry following an extensive consultation process. In 2022, the AHRC approved Dr Presence’s Follow-On Funding grant to seed-fund the development of the DFC.

Dr Presence commented:

Documentary films captivate, inspire, educate and entertain audiences all over the world, but the industrial infrastructures that support these films are under threat. Many of the challenges facing the screen industries – excessive workloads, precarious employment, poor mental health and so on – are mirrored in academia, so it’s been gratifying to build structures in the documentary sector to help address these issues.

We’re working with everyone from senior executives and commissioners to established and emerging filmmakers, distributors and exhibitors, so the DFC is a genuine example of stakeholder-centric, evidence-based policy-making. It’s an exciting time because if it succeeds, the DFC could have a transformative impact on the documentary film industry for years to come.

DFC Board Member, Sandra Whipham (BFI Doc Society), said:

The DFC is so exciting because it brings together all voices of the UK independent documentary sector for the first time around shared challenges and opportunities. The unique importance of independent documentary to culture, society and democracy has never been more needed yet the sector faces external barriers that stop it reaching its full potential, getting films to audiences and maximising impact. The DFC is the first step to addressing sector needs in an inclusive, joined up way and we can’t wait to get started.

Two of the DFC’s first committees have already started work on two urgent priorities. To mitigate the impact of word-of-mouth recruitment on workforce diversity, the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee (led by producers and executives at FWD-Doc and Doc Society) is building the UK’s first directory for documentary talent and crew. The Mental Health committee (led by Film in Mind) is training therapists to work with nonfiction filmmakers as part of ongoing efforts to address the well-documented mental health crisis in the screen industries. This crisis is especially pronounced among documentarians because of the unique ethical and emotional challenges of the artform, which often also involves working with vulnerable people and/or in traumatic or dangerous situations.

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