The information final week that Participant Media could be shutting down shocked the leisure trade, however it hit the documentary group with explicit drive.
Going again 20 years, the manufacturing and distribution firm has supported premium nonfiction content material on a significant scale, backing documentaries that took on essential social and political points starting from local weather change to race in America, training, the nationwide safety state, the U.S.-Mexico drug battle, and rather more. Along the way in which, it earned Oscars for Citizenfour, An Inconvenient Truth and American Factory, and Oscar nominations for a slew of others together with Flee, RBG, The Square, and Food, Inc.
On the most recent episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we focus on the developments at Participant and what they imply for a nonfiction area already been reeling from a sluggish acquisition market and slashed budgets at streamers. Our friends are Oscar-nominated filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, administrators of two acclaimed Participant documentaries: RBG and My Name Is Pauli Murray. Cohen says phrase of Participant closing left her Facebook feed plagued by “little ‘broken-heart’ emojis.”
West and Cohen are uniquely certified to touch upon the state of documentary movie not solely due to their relationship with Participant, the success of their movies RBG, Julia, My Name Is Pauli Murray, and Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, but additionally their connection to CNN Films, dwelling to a number of of their movies. In 2022, CNN introduced it could cease shopping for documentaries and unique collection to save cash, a revelation that, looking back, signaled the approaching contraction of what had been a thriving documentary area.
But it’s not all doom and gloom on this episode of Doc Talk. Cohen and West inform us why they’re holding onto hope for the way forward for critical documentaries, they usually even counsel CNN Films might return to one thing like its earlier mannequin of documentary manufacturing.
That’s on the most recent version of Doc Talk, co-hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. Doc Talk is a manufacturing of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, offered with assist from National Geographic Documentary Films. Doc Talk is a 2024 Webby Awards honoree.
Listen to the episode above or on main podcast platforms together with Spotify, iHeart and Apple.