How to Get Creative Documentaries to the Widest Audience

variety.com:

Lise Pedersen Cannes Docs, the Cannes Film Market event dedicated to documentary film, brought together an expert industry panel to discuss the place of creative documentary in the fast-changing audiovisual market, where words like “content” and “format” are increasingly replacing “film” and “language.” Joining DAE co-founder Brigid O’Shea on stage for the May 21 talk were Emilie Bujès, artistic director of Swiss international doc film fest Visions du Réel (VdR); Edo Choi, associate curator of film at the NYC Museum of the Moving Image; and Ryan Krivoshey, president and founder of distribution company Grasshopper Film.

Kicking off the conversation, the question of what defines a creative doc was thrown up by O’Shea, who joked about the “dirty reputation” of experimental films.

Choi pointed out that while notions such as experimental, avant-garde, cinéma vérité or underground have a particular historic meaning that stems from generic forms born in the 1960s, which are now criticized for being outmoded and failing to address current political questions, there is still “a great yearning for them, for what they represent in the context of cinema’s continued relevance and ability to speak to the times.” Bujès noted that she avoids using the word “experimental.” Instead, she explained, she “packages films in a way that’s not scary [for the audience].” “We have the chance to program 160 films at VdR.

So, we can create a diverse offer, [which] allows us to get people to enter through one door and we try to push them in a direction they might not necessarily go. “That’s our main role: to fight for people to be aware that those films exist, because there are not so many ways to watch them,” says Bujès, who created an attractive