In light of the panel I’m speaking on at Camden/Points North, I thought I’d link back to two posts I made on docs awhile back. In the first, I begged for people to stop making feature docs. Yes, really.
To summarize, this is what I said people should do instead: “Make me a really interesting website, that happens to have maybe 20 minutes total of video. In 3 minute segments. Let me trade it, use it, share it, on my phone. Let it actually have an impact instead of just stroking your and your funder’s egos. Let it be interesting and aware of today’s realities. Let it be useful. Let it never play a film festival. Ever.”
Obviously, I was going a bit overboard, but hey, it would be an interesting new route, and no one is doing it yet. Second, and more to the point of our panel on short docs, here’s what I had to say on Etsy back in 2010: “It’s a crime that none of the major documentary festivals have bothered to show the Etsy short docs.”…and I continued:
“Guess what? There’s a few changes afoot in the world: Shorter content; the web; commercially supported films (this is a huge phenomenon barely acknowledged in the fest panel world); an interest in the DIY/Maker community; a slowly changing of forms due to technology…and a few other things. All of them are perfectly encapsulated in the Etsy docs. They raise ethical and other issues for the field – no more so than some other practices, but a good conversation could be had, for example, on the ethics of selling the products of the artisan you are documenting – and this alone makes it worthy of inclusion in a doc line-up. Plus, they work. Short, sweet…and money making. They may fail with this experiment, but mark my words, some version of this is the future of the doc, and we should be part of the conversation – instead of excluding them from the party, they should be welcomed.”
I agree with myself. Glad to see we can have this conversation with Etsy and others this weekend. I’m looking forward to the dialogue.