Doc Congress Keynote Address

A dynamic hub for influential conversations about non-fiction funding and the state of the industry, Doc Congress is an annual gathering that takes place during SFFILM’s Doc Stories. By bringing together documentary funders, filmmakers, and distributors to discuss the most prevailing topics of the non-fiction funding landscape, Doc Congress is one of the documentary showcase’s most vital events.

At the 10th Doc Stories, Bonni Cohen, co-founder of the Catapult Film Fund and of the San Francisco-based documentary production company Actual Films, served as Doc Congress’ keynote speaker. Join us as we revisit Cohen’s compelling address here.

In Waves And War: One Film’s Path To Being Made & Seen

In February of 2022, our film team arrived in Virginia Beach to interview retired Navy seal DJ Shipley for our latest film In Waves And War which we were producing in association with Participant Media RIP. It’s the story of three special OPS SEALs who returned from the 20-year war in Iraq and Afghanistan—broken both physically and mentally—and were setting an alternative and risky course for personal healing through an illegal psychedelic drug regimen.

We came to interview DJ but as I spent more time with his wife, Patsy, it became clear to me that her story was equally as important to the film we were making. The wives who ultimately saved the lives of their husbands and families—whose clarity, strength, and vision were the key to the success of the healing process for these guys. It wasn’t an easy story to tell as it was filled with pain, heartache, fear and, in Patsy’s case, betrayal.

Patsy had a number of reasons why she didn’t want to be on camera, not the least of which was that she and DJ have two little girls and she wanted to protect them, being well aware that our film could end up on a big streaming service and as they grew up, they would be surrounded by people who had seen the film and knew of their family trauma.

I could tell that Patsy and I had a connection and she was comfortable talking to me off camera. So, I made her an offer I had never made to a film participant before. I offered to do the interview and then check in with her later to see if she wanted to proceed. I would send her the interview transcript and she could get comfortable with what she revealed.

This kind of collaboration with a film subject is risky, as Patsy could decide to simply pull out and I would have no recourse. But, it was clear to me that a new approach was necessary here, given what this family had been through and I was willing to engage her in the process to the extent that she would feel comfortable enough to display her family’s trauma on screen. Her story is profound and was deeply moving to me.

As I sat through the interview, I realized again what a privilege we have as storytellers to speak to people about the most intimate and complicated aspects of their lives, often giving them an opportunity to realize something about their relationships that maybe they hadn’t hit on before. I was overcome with the reminder and feeling once again of my own passion to connect and help people through sharing stories.

Here I was, a San Francisco-based, and left-leaning, documentary filmmaker, and Patsy grew up in a military family in the heart of Navy SEAL country, widowed by her first husband who was also a SEAL and a stepfather who was part of NAVY SEAL leadership. We couldn’t be from more different backgrounds yet here we were coming together to share something about our common humanity.

We just premiered In Waves And War at the Telluride Film Festival this past month. Patsy and DJ were there. They experienced standing ovations from the audience even before the credits came on. There was a visible emotional response from the audiences that was more profound than anything we had experienced before. Tears were leaking from the eyes of a few streaming platform executives. For the filmmaker and subject, it was a home run.

Two months later, our sales agents are reporting back things like: although the film is beloved by all that have seen it, in today’s climate, streamers are looking for “content” that has been proven to generate millions of eyeballs. Insert your favorite celebrity here. It’s no secret that celebrity docs and true crime rule the day. We find ourselves in the awkward position of having made a powerful film that doesn’t have an easy way to foretell its success. We continue to work on the best distribution path for the film.

Bonni Cohen On Co-Founding The Catapult Film Fund

In 2010, I was set up on a blind lunch date with Lisa Kleiner Chanoff, who I knew through mutual friends. She was interested in the documentary field and wanted to know if there was a need to fill on the funding side that could be useful. In other words, rather than funding films one at a time, was there a hole to fill more globally?

Lisa had dipped a single toe into the field, having funded a few individual projects but was looking to make more of a difference. I told her that the most difficult moment, in my opinion, for a documentary, is the early stage when it’s just an idea and can easily, without any support, die on the vine. It’s no secret that this has led to a barrier to entry for artists with fewer connections and means. I could see in Lisa’s eyes that she was intrigued and a few weeks later, we set the blueprint for The Catapult Film Fund.

There were a few organizations dabbling in development funding at that time, but we envisioned a fund dedicated to getting filmmakers over the line from just an idea to a sample piece that reflected the film they wanted to make for presentation to production funders. The idea for the fund was specifically about taking big risks.

[Now,] Catapult has funded 290 films in the last 15 years. In our first round, we invited 20 filmmakers to submit applications and this past round we received nearly 900 applications for 15 slots.

These projects take years to become All that Breathes and Crip Camp—and may have struggled longer to find those films without the support of Catapult.

Since Catapult was born there are now a whole slew of organizations out there that see the importance of development funding and have also made a big difference for the field including Sundance, Points North, Chicken & Egg Films, and Impact Partners, to name a few. We know that, as a field, we are capable of responding to the needs of filmmakers as those needs present themselves.

It is frustrating to sit here in 2024 and consternate about the state of documentary distribution, particularly at a time when truth is under attack and we know, as a community, how valuable our films are to righting the ship. But, let’s remember a few things:

In my lifetime, public television was born, cable TV was born, and streaming platforms came into view. Distribution is not a solid state. As Brian Newman writes in his Sub-Genre newsletter:

“I think that’s been the trouble we’re having in the film business as things have become stuck. People are looking at the old map for a way out of this mess, and it also doesn’t align with our new reality.”

We all need to be looking in new directions. The problem, however, is that much of our industry leadership is focused on putting out the fires, and on reading the old maps. We’re waiting for someone to come along with the new map. Luckily, I’ve been seeing a lot of such rumblings from both newer/upcoming leaders, and some who’ve been in the field for quite a while, but who have stayed nimble. I can’t report on all of those developments yet, because many remain behind the scenes as works-in-progress, but the next era’s winners are clearly going to be those who chart the new maps.

The State Of Documentary Filmmaking In 2024 & Beyond

I am looking for a miracle. And I am not pessimistic about finding one. I have seen this community step and solve seemingly insurmountable problems before.

There are clearly impressive and innovative experiments going on as we speak—inroads into self-distribution through a grant from FilmAid and the new platform for documentaries called Jolt, that Geralyn Dreyfous and Jim Swartz from Impact Partners are spear-heading. [There] are new experts in the field, like Mia Bruno, who are taking on indie theatrical distribution, and there are [tireless] filmmakers, like Brett Story with her incredible Sundance Award-winning film, Union, who have worked… to self distribute her film around the country to audiences who need to see it most.

So, I get the irony here: I stand before you passionate but humble. I have not one, but two films that Actual Films has finished this year—In Waves and War and The White House Effect—…and neither of them have a distributor on board yet.

In the film, you see Patsy Shipley help save the life of her husband and play the central character in a great on-screen love story. Patsy ultimately [agrees] to participate in the film. We took a risk on Patsy, spending valuable production time on an interview that we might never have gotten permission to put in the film but, ultimately, Patsy told us how much she appreciated the interview and gave us permission to use her story.

Being open to a new way of working paid off for us and, part of what we do as artists and storytellers is to figure out new pathways we don’t have an ending for. Industry wide, we are now in such a moment. I continue to be optimistic about what we can innovate as a field to get these critical films out in the world.

I came out to the Bay area to attend the Stanford Documentary Graduate Program in the early ‘90s. Being there, not only did I meet my life partner in life and film, I was privileged to sit at the foot of the documentary masters—Jon Else, Kris Samuelson, Debbie Hoffman, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman to name just a few. I began to realize that there was something special here in San Francisco, [something] unique to the independent documentary voice, and I harnessed it.

There has always been excitement and fear for me as a documentary filmmaker. Excitement for the stories we are allowed to tell and fear that those stories might never get seen.

But, if we examine the waves of history in our field and how we have exhibited documentary film here and around the globe, there have been trends of distribution that have not supported massive audiences and there have been times when our documentaries have had the experience of being viewed by millions around the world.

Why are we making these films? Who are they for? What is the measure of success in audiences and exhibition?

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