Documentary UK: a study of the feature documentary film industry

This project aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the contemporary feature-length documentary film industry in the UK. It has three core objectives: 1) to map the industry and analyse its operation; 2) to historicise the industry's formation and the factors that have shaped its development; and 3) to investigate the criticisms and challenges the industry faces and explore how these might be addressed.

Documentary has formed a major part of British film culture ever since John Grierson, the figurehead of the British Documentary Movement (1926-46), coined the term in 1926. However, with so much British scholarship focusing on that period and its achievements, subsequent developments have been marginalised. One of those developments has been the emergence of a feature documentary industry comprised of organisations dedicated to the production of feature-length (70 minutes or more) films for broadcast or theatrical exhibition that is distinct from - albeit often related to - factual or specialist factual television production).

Since the beginning of the 21st century, feature-length documentaries have experienced a major upsurge in popularity and become a significant global box-office attraction. Although this is most obviously evidenced by US films such as Farenheit 9/11 (2004) or An Inconvenient Truth (2006), a range of UK feature documentaries have enjoyed significant (critical if not necessarily commercial) success, including Black Gold (2005), The End of the Line (2008), Selfmade (2010), Up in Smoke (2011), the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing (2012), and the Oscar-winning Citizen Four (2014). As a result, the UK feature documentary industry is now an established part of the broader film and television industries, with distinct subsectors dedicated to finance, production, distribution and exhibition. Yet despite its established presence, and the fact that UK documentary is widely acknowledged to be experiencing a 'golden age' (Sight & Sound, September 2014, p. 52), little scholarly attention has been paid to the industrial structures underpinning it. There is thus a timely and urgent need to study the UK documentary industry if its current economic and cultural success is to be understood, supported and sustained.

This project has been developed in association with three institutional partners - the British Film Institute (BFI), Creative England and The Grierson - as well as five partners from each of the industry's main subsectors (finance, production, distribution and exhibition): The BRITDOC Foundation is the leading broker of documentary film finance and distribution in the UK; Dartmouth Films is one of the UK's most influential documentary production companies; Dogwoof is the UK's leading documentary distributor; Sheffield Doc/Fest is the preeminent documentary film festival in the UK; and Yaddo, the UK's first documentary webcaster, was launched in 2016 by the former head of BBC Storyville, the UK's leading broadcast platform.

All partners will participate in the research via a series of semi-structured interviews, while the partners from the industry's subsectors will also take part in a period of Participant Observation. Combined with desk-based analyses of primary and secondary materials (academic literature, trade press, close analysis of the films themselves), this comprehensive methodology will best enable the three core objectives to be addressed.

The project will have a number of tangible applications and benefits to the industry in addition to the range of academic outputs it will generate. The policy proposals will provide the BFI and Creative England with evidence-based, practically-applicable recommendations. Together with the Doc/Fest workshops and project website, these will facilitate knowledge exchange between academia and industry that will expand understanding and work towards a more sustainable, innovative and culturally and economically successful documentary industry.

There are three principal pathways to impact in this project:

1) Policy proposals to transform the research findings into evidence-based, practically-applicable recommendations with tangible benefits for the industry. These will be discussed with scholars and industry stakeholders throughout the project, and drafted into a formal document that will be presented to representatives from the BFI, Creative England and The Grierson Trust at a seminar conducted by the PI and Co-I in year 3. The document will then be made available for print-on-demand from the project website.
2) Workshops on the research at Doc/Fest in years 1 and 2. These will consist of speakers from industry and academia in discussion with the audience and will raise awareness of the project among the international documentary community, explore the core research objectives and discuss potential policy interventions.
3) A project website (and associated social media accounts), which will host information about the project and its partners (each of which will link to the project website from their respective web pages). The website will include a blog with guest contributions from various industry stakeholders and project participants and will provide a means of regular engagement with both industry and academia. To ensure any unanticipated impacts can be documented, users will be asked to register (but will also be able to continue anonymously) to enable subsequent contact by the research team.

In addition, major beneficiaries of the project include the five industry subsector partners and the three institutional partners. The subsector partners will benefit from the project's research into their organisations, the operation of the industry today and the historical conditions that have shaped its development. All partners will benefit from the project's analysis of the challenges and criticisms the industry faces, with institutional partners especially benefiting from the focus on what policy interventions they could make to overcome those challenges. All partners' involvement in the project will help produce novel interactions between stakeholders and academics, which will nurture new research questions, policy interventions and cultural and commercial opportunities. These interactions will take place throughout the project but especially during the two Doc/Fest workshops, the symposium and the conference.

In addition to these specific pathways, the research will have a number of other impacts on the documentary industry. It will help create new and consolidate existing networks across and within the industry subsectors (finance, production, distribution, exhibition), and will help facilitate more critical, reflexive and long-term thinking between the project partners. This in turn will enable the development and exchange of practical, theoretically and historically-informed knowledge that will result in a documentary industry that is better understood, and which will therefore be able to address its weaknesses and play to its strengths, and identify future avenues for enquiry.

To ensure the impact of these multiple elements are thoroughly explored, an Impact Evaluation Officer (IEO) will work with the investigators in the final year. She/he will carry out follow-up work with the project partners, Doc/Fest workshop attendees and other stakeholders. The IEO will write-up her/his findings and submit these to the investigators prior to the end of the project. This will enable all evidence of the project's impact to be thoroughly collated and the full impact of the project to be properly accounted for.