Screen Australia has unveiled nine distinctive documentaries that will share in $2.3 million in funding from Screen Australia’s Documentary Producer and Documentary Commissioned programs.

Five are feature-length documentaries; two are for the ABC, one is for SBS and one for Foxtel.

“These projects do not shy away from hard-hitting stories that show the realities of living in a complex world. These teams impressed us with their desire to tell compelling personal stories and explore important social issues of today,” said Liz Stevens, Senior Manager of Documentary at Screen Australia.

The successful Documentary Producer projects are:

 An intimate look at the life of iconic INXS singer/songwriter Michael Hutchence in Mystify. INXS music video director Richard Lowenstein will combine never-before-seen archival footage and interviews with those closest to Michael for this documentary from Ghost Pictures which has also received Film Victoria support.

 Social impact feature documentary Dying to Live follows Allan Turner’s campaign to make Australia an ‘opt out’ organ donation country – a journey borne out of the heartbreaking loss of his seven-year-old daughter, who became one of the nation’s youngest ever donors. This was one of the six titles selected to participate at Good Pitch 2016.

 The story of five-time Walkley Award-winning journalist Liz Jackson turning the camera on herself for the most challenging story of her career – about her Parkinson’s diagnosis – in A Sense of Self from Contact Films with Film Victoria support. This documentary will air Monday 21 November at 8.30pm on the ABC.

 Feature documentary Flight of the Rhino from Wildbear Entertainment – a uniquely Australian perspective on the plight of the endangered rhino, a victim of illegal poaching. It follows a team of conservationists who embark on a controversial mission to airlift a herd of breeding rhinos from South Africa to Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo in the hopes of protecting the species for future generations.

 Feature documentary From Under the Rubble, which takes a look at the devastating cost of war on the civilian victims of the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

Survivor Zeinat Samouni recounts the January 2007 attack on her Gaza neighbourhood that killed 48 members of her extended family; from Sensible Films.

 An untitled project from Oscar-winning director Eva Orner (Taxi to the Dark Side) and Hilla Medalia; more details to come.

The successful Documentary Commissioned projects are:

 Observational documentary series The Mosque from Southern Pictures for SBS, which will use unprecedented access to an Australian Mosque and the community it serves to explore firsthand what it means to be a Muslim in Australia today; with funding support from Screen Queensland.

 Foxtel commissioned four-part documentary series The Archibald from Mint Pictures, chronicling a year in the life of eight Australian artists as they choose subjects for a portrait that will ultimately compete in the nation’s most prestigious art prize, culminating in the announcement of the 2017 winner.

 A behind the scenes look at one of Australia’s most influential and successful indie rock bands in Right Here: The Go-Betweens from Essential Media and Entertainment. This documentary is the first recipient of Screen NSW and ABC TV Art’s Documentary Feature Fund, and will premiere at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival.

The Documentary Producer program is designed to give producers the foundational funding required to leverage their projects creatively and commercially, and must have a clear path to audience.

The Documentary Commissioned program is designed to support the production of a diverse range of quality projects for television broadcast that offer a compelling vision with a clear and enduring cultural value.

Go here to see further information about this round of successful projects:

www.screenaustralia.gov.au/funding-and-support/documentary/funding-
approvals/2016-2017-documentary-production

16 11 2016 – Media release

“One thing I’ve learned is that the person who wants to hurt you does not send you a note in advance,” says Michael Moore, as he gathers with five other outspoken top directors — Alex Gibney, Amy Berg, Kirby Dick, Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi — for THR’s Documentary Roundtable.

Liz Garbus, Alex Gibney, Kirby Dick, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Michael

What is truth? That question was at the center of a heated debate among some of the most admired documentary filmmakers of our times during a roundtable that took place Oct. 29 in New York City — and their answers weren’t always what you might expect. Truth and facts aren’t necessarily the same thing, one argued; and “staging” reality might be OK in the service of a deeper truth, said another. Oscar winners Alex Gibney, 62 (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine), and Michael Moore, 61 (Where to Invade Next, which looks at progressivism abroad), were joined by Amy Berg, 45 (Janis: Little Girl Blue, a Joplin biography, and Prophet’s Prey, an investigation into the Warren Jeffs cult), Kirby Dick, 63 (The Hunting Ground, about campus rape), Liz Garbus, 45 (What Happened, Miss Simone?, which traces Nina Simone’s career), and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 36 (Meru, a mountaineering thriller), in a conversation that ranged historically from Shakespeare’s Henry V to Margaret Thatcher and geographically from a Himalayan mountain range to the halls of the Pentagon.

What personal price have you paid to be documentary filmmakers?

DICK When you make a strong film, if you don’t get that reaction, perhaps you haven’t made the film strong enough. You’re going into a territory — sexual assault, for example — that people want to cover up. If I haven’t made that impact, where it’s causing people to respond and even to come at me, I really haven’t told the whole truth.

GIBNEY That’s very important we engage, even if there’s hostility — and I certainly have experienced a good bit.

MOORE I wish I just got hostility. (Laughs.)

GARBUS That’d be awesome.

BERG No death threats?

MOORE One thing I’ve learned is that the person who wants to hurt you does not send you a note in advance. The death threats are great; it’s the half a dozen assaults and attempts on my life [that aren’t], including a man who built a fertilizer bomb to plant under our home to blow it up — he went to prison — and the others who assaulted me with knives and billy clubs. [In Florida], a really nicely dressed man in a three-piece suit comes out of Starbucks and sees me, and he just turned purple and the vein started bulging. I call it the “Limbaugh Vein” — you know, it’s like after they’ve had three hours of listening to Rush. And he takes the lid off his hot, scalding coffee and throws it in my face. And only because I had this security guy with me [was I safe]. He put his face in front of mine and took the hit. Got second-degree burns. We had to take him to the hospital, but not before he took the guy down on the sidewalk and handcuffed him. After my Oscar speech [for Bowling for Columbine] and Fahrenheit 9/11, I’ve lived a number of years with this kind of horrible situation.

Are you afraid?

MOORE Well, yeah, I’m afraid. Yeah, of course. But I reached a certain point where I had to just stop being afraid, and I got rid of the security. I couldn’t live that way anymore. It was difficult on our family. People around me were afraid they were going be the collateral damage. And so finally I just decided: I’m in my 50s, I’ve lived a good life. Nobody will say I didn’t make a contribution. And if it’s going to happen today, it happens today, and you just live with it. And, actually, it was kind of liberating, that day when I decided to get rid of the security.

Continue reading Hollywood’s Most Dangerous Documentarians on Death Threats, Scientology and “Staging” Reality →

Kim Longinotto tells me several times during our interview that she has “very low self-esteem”, adding that “not being a very confident person” may have helped her 30-year career in documentary filmmaking.

It’s not the usual chitchat you’d expect from someone set to join the likes of Sir David Attenborough, John Pilger and Norma Percy in becoming the recipient of a Grierson Trustee Award for documentary film tonight. But then Longinotto has spent much of her career stuggling to get her work funded, let alone noticed.

Even her most recent film, Dreamcatcher, about the world of prostitution and sexual abuse of underage girls in Chicago, proved a tough sell. Her documentaries cost a modest £200,000 for 10 weeks of filming with minimal crew and swift editing, but when she asked the BBC for money to make Dreamcatcher she was turned down.

“I was honest, said I will do my best. It was risky. Everything is so insecure, they [the BBC commissioners] need reassurance as much as I do.” She eventually raised $175,000 from a commercial source and “paid them back almost immediately” when, after its premiere at the Sundance Festival in Utah, it was picked up by US cable network Showtime. Now the BBC have bought it, for more than she originally asked for and it will have its UK debut in BBC4’s Storyville slot on 11 November.

Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. She’s delved into female genital mutilation in Kenya (The Day I Will Never Forget), women standing up to rapists in India (Pink Saris), and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades. But unlike many modern documentary makers her presence is rarely felt on screen. She uses handheld cameras to get up close to ordinary people – disarming them. “I want you to forget me, so there is nothing between you and them, so it looks like a fiction film,” she says. “Everywhere I go, I have never had a film which people didn’t want to be in.”

The approach is evident in Dreamcatcher, which explores its subject through the story of an ex-prostitute, Brenda Myers-Powell, who has rebuilt her life and set up a foundation to help escapees. “It was the last thing I wanted to make, it’s going to be bleak, where is the hope, the rebelliousness in it?” Longinotto thought, when a producer proposed the idea. “Then she showed me a clip of Brenda, it was love at first sight.” It has a heartbreaking scene where, one by one, a class of vulnerable teenagers tutored by Brenda talk about being sexually assaulted and raped. One says she was nine and unable to protect her four-year-old sister. “I was crying for pride in them. They were absolutely thrilled to have their stories told. I think with a lot of the TV programmes what we get is the negative side … they are taking from people … somehow we are robbing people of their stories. Whereas I feel the opposite. Those girls had never been listened to. Never been heard. Or have been disbelieved, or told off for telling. Here at last was someone [saying] ‘I’m on your side. You can do it’.”

To get the young women and girls to open up, she had showed them another of her films, Sisters in Law, about two women in Cameroon who stand up to male abuse, and told them about her own experience of being gang-raped in her 20s while she studying at the National Film & TelevisionSchool in London.

“It is only in the last few years I’ve been able to say that in front of an audience,” Longinotto says. “I don’t care, it happens to us all. If people think it’s attention-seeking, weird, misplaced, I don’t care. Loads of people are abused as children, raped, why should we keep quiet? That’s what we want, people who speak out, not victims who are not embarrassed, not pathetic. That is what the media can do.

“I put my camera down, I said [to the women in Dreamcatcher], ‘it’s all right, you have got to let it go, learn to let things go’. We are survivors.”

The assault followed on from a sad start in life, a posh boarding school that sent her to Coventry, a cold family who pretended they were direct descendants of painter Edwin Landseer (her father was an Italian photographer), and a period of sleeping rough. She was in penury for seven years in the 1980s as she held out to make her sort of documentary, but her work has given her perspective on her own life. “You can’t watch Dreamcatcher and think you had it bad. I didn’t have a couple of kids at the age of 14.”

It was the arrival of Channel 4 that offered her a way into filmmaking via a workshop focused on making films in local communities. This led to a breakthrough commission, Divorce Iranian Style. She has never earned enough to buy a home, but says being able to buy “the best bike in the shop” means she is well-off, and “you don’t do this for the money” .

It does, though, take money to get her films made. She is used to making one film a year but that has dropped now it takes longer to get funding. She has used the BBC’s consultation on its next royal charter to argue the corporation should do more to help get documentaries made.

“There should be a fully-funded documentary strand on television,” she says. “I said fund Storyville properly. They get bloody good films, but they should be able to originate them. Have a budget. And the BBC should not be warring with ITV. They should be more public service. Strictly should not be against X Factor.”

However, she isn’t snooty about popular TV. “A lot of documentary makers tell me they don’t even have a TV, they look down on TV, only watch cinema films. Telly is my pleasure in life. I am addicted. I can’t imagine not living in England because of the telly. It is that bad.

“There are things that are wonderful, The Naked Choir, Gogglebox, The X Factor, these programmes really enrich our lives, the good ones feed into our culture and make our society more adventurous.” She credits Graham Norton, Grayson Perry and Eddie Izzard for making Britain “a more fun place to live”.

She now teaches at the National Film & Television School, “encouraging students to find how they want to do it, maybe film a little less. It is about very basic things, not art, things like how to create a scene.”

Longinotto says it is “wonderful” to be given the Grierson award, but her main priority is getting exposure for her work. “It feels like it’s not an award for me, but all the people in the films, these films are worth looking at. And it means more people will watch them.” Meanwhile she is waiting to hear whether the BBC will fund her next film, set in New York. Asked whether she is likely to succeed, her self-effacement resurfaces: “Who knows, they could easily say no. I probably messed it up.”

Maggie Brown – The Guardian – Monday 2 November 2015

Curriculum vitae

Age 63 Education Hampden House school, Buckinghamshire, Essex University (English and European literature)

Career

1974 National Film & Television School

1976 first film, Pride of Place,shown at London Film Festival

1995 Shinjuku Boys judged outstanding documentary at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

1998 Divorce Iranian Style

2002 The Day I Will Never Forget

2005 Sisters in Law

2007 Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go

2008 Rough Aunties

2010 Pink Saris

2013 Salma

2015 Dreamcatcher

This week, Northern reprises one of its more notable successes with the second series of Changing Minds: The Inside Story airing through the week during the ABC’s “Mental As” series supporting Mental Health Week: Tuesday 6 October 2015, 8:32pm

When David Haslingden decided to return home to Australia a few years ago, he didn’t have a home.

After leaving his role as the president and chief operating officer of the US Fox Networks Group, the home to FX, National Geographic, Fox Sports and others, he emerged with a production company with operations in China, New Zealand and Singapore yet “nowhere to sit” in Sydney.

In three years, Haslingden has established more than just a seat at the Australian television table. After a friend suggested he meet factual producer Sue Clothier, who had recently established Northern Pictures and was in the midst of producing the natural history series Kakadu, Northern joined his RACAT Group of companies. And then Haslingden was appointed chairman of Nine Entertainment Co.

“It was very fast and Northern Pictures has continued on the evolution and expanded into other areas but really it was an absolutely perfect fit for me,” Haslingden says.

Haslingden laughs that his socially progressive documentary choices aren’t a reaction to the more tabloid programming on Fox’s US cable networks but rather moves into areas “I was most passionate about”. “I loved National Geographic, so when I had the opportunity to make a change I wanted to explore that,” he says.” I am very passionate about nature and social issues that impact many people that aren’t understood. Media is an incredibly powerful tool to assist in informing social change and awareness of things.”

Changing Minds did that, anchoring the ABC’s “Mental As” initiative last year.

Clothier admits “nobody knew how well it was going to go last year and going into production, we had no idea the sort of content we could actually expect as well” given the series follows mental health patients at Sydney’s Liverpool ­Hospital.

As the local production sector consolidates, Northern (Clothier is managing director and Haslingden chief executive) has struck a balance where it can deliver global series of great scale, such as Life on the Reef, as well as targeted, high-risk series such as Changing Minds.

He appears enthused and comfortable with his production stable, particularly NP, but also including NHNZ, Beach House Productions, Keshet Australia and ZooMoo.

Rumours of his possible move to become chief executive of Nine appear exaggerated, although he is equally bullish about television’s future, and consequently for Northern and Nine. If television can be described as an audiovisual experience that evokes emotion, he says, “that is a golden product that is getting more and more valuable every day”.

Michael Bodey – The Australian – October 05, 2015

More Here:

www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media

Breaking news from Adelaide! The Australian International Documentary Conference has found a new home – in Melbourne, Victoria.

Film Victoria and ACMI will jointly sponsor next year’s AIDC. And as Katrina Sedgwick told us at this year’s event, she brought the Documentary Conference to Adelaide when she was running the Adelaide Film Festival around 12 years ago. Katrina and Richard Sowada were present at the announcement and are obviously keen to hit the ground running and provide a terrific, reimagined conference next year.

Lucky Melbourne!

After the SA government withdrew substantial amount of funding for this year’s Conference, it was morphed into a no frills version this year by outgoing Joost Den Hartog, who looked as though he really didn’t want to be there. The Conference, named Net-Work-Play, focussed on online delivery mechanisms and digital content as the way of the future.

Film Victoria’s Jenni Tosi also welcomed the arrival of AIDC to Victoria and is clearly a strong supporter of the move along with FV’s Jeni McMahon who was also there.