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Documentary Funding in the Age of the Streamers

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This chapter explores the role of funders and funding in documentary film production in the UK and the US today. The chapter situates documentary making in the context of the decline of public funding in Europe and the rise of transnational streamers and VoDs as important funders, producers, and distributors of documentary film. Taking as its starting point documentary as a distinct genre and documentary making as a distinctive practice and industry, the chapter offers a typology of the models and sources of funding and finance available to documentary makers as well as an overview over the institutions, organisations and mechanisms that typically fund documentary films. It argues that these changes to national and international funders and funding models accelerate a polarisation of budgets and redefine production practices of documentary film, with important implications for documentary content, the diversity of documentary makers and the composition of the documentary industry.

Keywords: Documentary funding ; documentary industry ; Documentary making ; film finance ; funders and funding ; screen industry ; Streamers & VoDs

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References

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References

  1. Balcon, Michael and Grierson, John (1933), ‘The function of the producer’, Cinema Quarterly, 2:1, pp. 59, https://archive.org/details/cinema02gdro/page/n9/mode/2up?q=principles. Accessed 9 January 2024.
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  8. Caldwell, John T. (2008), Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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  9. Caldwell, John T. (2009), ‘Production cultures: How to study deep texts, reflexive rituals and managed self-discourses’, in H. Jennifer and A. Perren (eds), Media Industries: History, Theory and Method, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 199212.
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  10. Caldwell, John T. (2011), ‘Worker blowback: User-generated, worker-generated and producer-generated content within collapsing production workflows’, in J. Bennett and N. Strange (eds), Television as Digital Media, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 283310.
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  22. Doyle, Gillian, Schlesinger, Philip, Boyle, Raymond and Kelly, Lisa (2015), The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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  38. Mingant, Nolwenn and Tirtaine, Cecilia (2018), Introduction, in N. Mingant and C. Tirtaine (eds) Reconceptualising Film Policies, New York and London: Routledge, pp 112.422
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  42. Nash, Kate (2012), ‘Modes of interactivity: Analysing the webdoc’, Media, Culture and Society, 34:2, pp. 195210.
    [Google Scholar]
  43. Nash, Kate (2022), Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  44. Nash, Kate, Hight, Craig and Summerhayes, Catherine (eds) (2014), New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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  46. O'Hagan, John (2011), ‘Tax concessions’, in R. Towse (ed.), A Handbook of Cultural Economics, 2nd ed., Cheltenham: Edward Edgar, pp. 40812.
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    [Google Scholar]
  48. Pokorny, Michael and Sedgwisk, John (2012), ‘The financial and economic risk of film production’, in M. Hjort (ed.) Film and Risk, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 18196.
    [Google Scholar]
  49. Presence, Steve, Spicer, Andrew, Quigley, Alice and Green, Lizzie (2020), Keeping it Real: Towards a Film Policy for the UK, Bristol: University of the West of England, https://ukfd.org.uk/policy-reports/. Accessed 12 November 2023.
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  50. Redvall, Eva Novrup (2023), ‘Failure studies’, in S. Udelhofen, D. Göttel and A. Riffi (eds), Produktionskulturen audiovisueller Medien, Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH.
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    [Google Scholar]
  52. Sørensen, Inge E. (2012), ‘Crowdsourcing and outsourcing: The impact of online funding and distribution on the documentary film industry in the UK’, Media, Culture and Society, 34:6, pp. 72643.
    [Google Scholar]
  53. Sørensen, Inge E. (2015), ‘Go crowdfund yourself’, in G. Lovink, N. Tkacz and P. de Vries (eds), The Moneylab Reader: An Intervention in the Digital Economy, Amsterdam: Institute for Networked Cultures, pp. 26880.
    [Google Scholar]
  54. Sørensen, Inge E. (2018), ‘Content in context: The impact of mobile media and technology on the British TV industry’, Convergence, 24:6, pp. 50722.
    [Google Scholar]
  55. Sørensen, Inge E. and Redvall, Eva (2020), ‘Does automatic funding suck? The value of automatic and selective funding in smaller screen economies in Northern Europe’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 27:3, pp. 298311.
    [Google Scholar]
  56. Szczepanik, Petr and Vonderau, Patrick (2013), Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
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