The information final week that Participant Media could be shutting down shocked the leisure trade, but it surely hit the documentary group with explicit drive.
Going again 20 years, the manufacturing and distribution firm has supported premium nonfiction content material on a significant scale, backing documentaries that took on vital social and political points starting from local weather change to race in America, schooling, the nationwide safety state, the U.S.-Mexico drug struggle, and way more. Alongside the way in which, it earned Oscars for Citizenfour, An Inconvenient Fact and American Manufacturing facility, and Oscar nominations for a slew of others together with Flee, RBG, The Sq., and Meals, Inc.
On the most recent episode of Deadline’s Doc Discuss podcast, we talk about the developments at Participant and what they imply for a nonfiction discipline already been reeling from a sluggish acquisition market and slashed budgets at streamers. Our visitors are Oscar-nominated filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, administrators of two acclaimed Participant documentaries: RBG and My Identify Is Pauli Murray. Cohen says phrase of Participant closing left her Fb feed plagued by “little ‘broken-heart’ emojis.”
West and Cohen are uniquely certified to touch upon the state of documentary movie not solely due to their relationship with Participant, the success of their movies RBG, Julia, My Identify Is Pauli Murray, and Gabby Giffords Received’t Again Down, but additionally their connection to CNN Movies, dwelling to a number of of their movies. In 2022, CNN introduced it will cease shopping for documentaries and authentic sequence to save cash, a revelation that, on reflection, signaled the approaching contraction of what had been a thriving documentary discipline.
But it surely’s not all doom and gloom on this episode of Doc Discuss. Cohen and West inform us why they’re holding onto hope for the way forward for severe documentaries, and so they even counsel CNN Movies could return to one thing like its earlier mannequin of documentary manufacturing.
That’s on the most recent version of Doc Discuss, co-hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. Doc Discuss is a manufacturing of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, offered with assist from Nationwide Geographic Documentary Movies. Doc Discuss is a 2024 Webby Awards honoree.
Take heed to the episode above or on main podcast platforms together with Spotify, iHeart and Apple.