By John Roebuck
“I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a family fight,” author, radio and TV presenter, and emcee, Virginia Trioli, joked. The panel consisted of Screen NSW Chief Executive, Courtney Gibson, Film Victoria CEO, Jenna Tosi, ABC TV Head of Factual, Steve Bibb, and SBS Television Head of Documentaries, John Godfrey, but not, as one of many vocal audience members pointed out, a single documentary practitioner. The panelists quoted statistics, but stats don’t foster discussion, and the ones that they had to offer only pertained to a small percentage of the Australian documentary arena. Are statistics becoming more important than quality? “That’s a really good spread,” Tosi mentioned of the roster of Film Victoria-supported documentaries this year. But she’d just reeled off figures without mentioning a single film by name.
Delegates from screen bodies in Western Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, and The Northern Territory all bemoaned the lack of interest that both SBS and the ABC had in creating content in their states. Bibb and Godfrey didn’t have an answer to their qualms. Godfrey seemed to resent the qualms. The ScreenWest delegate from WA yelled out that his organisation wasn’t important enough to be on the panel. His compatriots from the less eminent state screen bodies nodded eagerly in assent.
“Everything has to play like an event,” Gibson suggested as an answer to the difficulty in generating local documentary content. Whether it is a sports event, a film, a political event, or a documentary, everything on television has to be portrayed as a significant occurrence in order to attract interest. “It’s difficult to have hard and fast rules,” Tosi mentioned. The audience is fickle. They may tune in one week and not the next.”
The session began to feel more like a bunch of funding executives conveying vague regulations regarding how their companies engage in documentary production than a discussion concerning the state of Australian documentary. The auditorium noticed. “Can you address the topic of this session?” an audience member yelled out. “Are Australian documentaries an endangered species?” Trioli replied that they were getting to that, but it didn’t feel like it.
Gibson mentioned that she’d been at the AIDC Opening Night drinks and hadn’t seen any young filmmakers. A young filmmaker stood up and informed Gibson of the price of AIDC tickets. Gibson then suggested that disorganisation on the part of documentarians is the reason for lack of exposure, citing a recent increase in drama funding being the result of drama filmmakers taking the issue to parliament. An audience member informed her that every filmmaking guild in the country had been trying to meet with the appropriate cabinet minister for years, without success.
“Why don’t you have a dedicated timeslot for documentaries from emerging young filmmakers?” an audience member asked. The response from both Bibb and Godfrey was that it wasn’t up to them. Filmmakers are emerging from film school and there’s no room for the industry to accommodate them. A re-evaluation of the industry might be in order. The people with the power to re-evaluate might not be so willing.
For more on The Australian International Documentary Conference, head to www.aidc.com.au.
