Documentary at Risk: Strategies for Ethics, Sustainability, and Innovation in a Time of Disruption

Read the report from the Documentary Film in the Public Interest initiative’s groundbreaking Documentary Ideas Symposium (April 2025). The report is a distillation of the vital conversations that took place amongst the many filmmakers, institutional leaders, scholars, thinkers, and industry professionals, as they grappled with ethical questions in the documentary field set against a backdrop of mounting public distrust in media institutions, a rapidly changing distribution ecosystem, and political attacks on PBS and journalistic independence. The aim of this report is to capture the debates, ideas, and energy shared amongst attendees and translate them into a set of observations and recommendations that could benefit the field at large in this moment of radical shift.

Highlighted recommendations from the report include:

• Sustaining impactful documentary work will require bold, systemic funding including renewed and increased public investment, local tax incentives, revenue sharing mechanisms like “solidarity taxes,” slate financing, and community-driven grassroots funding.
• Organized advocacy and lobbying will be necessary to secure political support and challenge profit-driven models.
• New and resilient distribution infrastructures, renewed use of educational settings, regional models, and deliberate strategic framing are needed to connect films with diverse publics, including building audience literacy and investing in long-term community partnerships.
• With AI’s rapid transformation of media ecosystems, the documentary field needs to meaningfully engage with the opportunities and serious risks to creative work, labor, consent, and factual integrity presented by its intervention.
• U.S. practitioners can take inspiration from international strategies for resisting authoritarianism and corporate domination in the creation and distribution of public interest documentary content.
• Documentary practitioners today hold conflicting views on best approaches to ethical documentary practice, often influenced by the complex and context-specific power dynamics between filmmakers and participants. Issues that require further, deeper exploration include ongoing consent, shared decision-making, fair compensation, and protection from harm, while directly addressing structural inequalities and adapting to each unique situation.

We invite you to read the report and let us know what resonates most for you.