AIDC and Screen Queensland, with the support of Sunshine Coast Council and in collaboration with Sunshine Coast Screen Collective, are pleased to reveal the full session program and speaker line-up for the first Regionality Sunshine Coast documentary and factual industry event, taking place at Maroochy RSL, Maroochydore on Friday 26 July 2024.
The packed one-day program provides exclusive insights into crafting award-winning character docs, the elusive art of pitching, factual formats and new discoveries, First Nations storytelling and engaging audiences with impact. It also includes opportunities for sector networking and curated 1:1 meetings with participating industry representatives – all designed with the needs of Queensland-based documentary and factual practitioners in mind.
Leading the program are Emmy and Sundance Award-winning US documentarians Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the creative duo behind Boys State. Heralded for their character-driven, provocative, and timely documentaries, Moss and McBaine will share insights into their creative practice, playing with form and how to balance independent artistic endeavors with commercial realities to turn their documentaries into major international hits.
As Regionality approaches, Nick L’Barrow spoke with Jesse and Amanda about their 25 year career together, the current state of documentary filmmaking, and how filmmakers know when they have a story worth pursuing.
Nick: I’d love to start at the beginning for you both, because you have collaborated together on documentaries and various projects for over 20 years now, so I am curious to know how that collaboration has evolved in that time for you both?
Jesse Moss: Yeah, that’s a lot of ground to cover!
Amanda McBaine: It is evolving, I would say. 25 years maybe?
Jesse Moss: Yeah, close to. We met in ’98 in the small documentary community in New York City. At that time, it wasn’t the big business that it is now. I think everybody in the documentary scene then was like one degree of separation from everybody else, and we were both starting out in documentary.
We love documentaries, and we were introduced by a great filmmaker, actually, who thought we would get along. The first film that we made together was with Amanda’s camera, and it was part of our courtship to go to a racetrack together and we made a film there.
And then, we ended up getting married and having kids together! But also, we made movies together. And it really has evolved. I mean there have been so many different chapters to that creative relationship.
Amanda McBaine: We don’t work on everything together, which I think is part of the evolution. There have been times where I haven’t been in the field as much as Jesse, that’s for sure. Partly because I think that’s where he is happiest. I am happiest in the edit room.
Then partly because had small children for a long time, so one of us definitely needed to be at home. And I liked that dynamic of watching what he’d go out and gather. I had a dispassionate view of it, in some ways, because I hadn’t met the people initially. But now, I like being in the field.
We’re in it because we both are sort of in love with and fascinated by humans and human behaviour. Going to places we’ve never been. And for that reason, I think that’s why a lot of documentarians do what they do.
Nick: I’ve always found Mark Twain’s quote interesting: “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.” I’d love to know, as documentarians, what your take on that quote is? Because I can imagine it’s tough balancing creating something that holds truth in it, but also on some levels can be entertaining for audiences.
Jesse Moss: I mean, that’s one of the things that makes documentaries so interesting. It’s full of slippery lines and boundaries there for you to define for yourself. No one tells you this is what a documentary is, or how you make a documentary, you know?
When you go work for a newspaper, or maybe a television station, they sort of tell you there are rules. You got to play by the rules. And documentary is a really interesting and flexible and ever-changing art form. It’s journalistic, it’s artistic, it’s political. It’s all of those things mixed up to varying degrees.
I think for every project we do together, it’s always changing how we find those lines. Where’s the story? Where is the truth? Where is the emotional truth? And is that sometimes different to that kind of factual truth? I guess I lean into the elasticity of those boundaries, because I think that’s really interesting and sometimes challenging for audiences. It’s challenging for audiences to say, “This makes me uncomfortable.”
Fundamentally, the work is not objective. It’s very subjective. You’re very close to people, and that’s okay. You have relationships with people. You get to know them. And I think the boundaries that, I don’t know, conventional journalists have to abide by are different.
Amanda McBaine: Yes, all that. But also, audiences, I’m pretty sure, can sense when something is off. When someone has directed someone to a place where they’re not being themselves. You’ve probably seen stuff on TV that makes you feel weird, or makes you feel like the person that is being filmed isn’t being respected. There’s just all these bad spaces that these things can go.
I think our life’s work really has been to make sure that we’re collaborating with, that their story is presented as authentically and accurately for them as it is for us and our experience of witnessing whatever they’re going through. And that means they’re standing with us onstage at the premiere, you know? Feeling as good as we are about what we’re about to show people.
But I really think it comes down to the audience. They can smell out the bad stuff. Whether it’s bad people or bad filmmaking. They can just feel it, and I don’t want to make bad stuff. So, we try our best.
Jesse Moss: We love complexity, and we love trusting our audience. But also finding stories and spaces that are sometimes uncomfortable. Not always black and not always white, but grey. And human behaviour—like we’re all mostly good and sometimes a little bad. Finding people who’s politics we don’t agree with, but we think are complex people.
Amanda McBaine: We do like to be uncomfortable. I’d say that’s kind of a hallmark. There’s nothing worse than not being surprised by people or situations, you know? You hope, in non-fiction, you get to a place where you couldn’t have scripted anything that’s happening in front of you.
Nick: That’s interesting because I’ve always been curious about where there is a sort of a “eureka” moment for documentary filmmakers? At what point do you know you have a story, or person, or people that are worth following?
Jesse Moss: Two things immediately come to mind. One is meeting people who you instantly find interesting, surprising, complicated. You don’t necessarily know at that point where they’re going to take you, but you know there’s something special about them that draws the camera in and draws you in.
Then I think it’s surrendering yourself to the unscripted of life. They take you on a journey. It could be within a week, like within Boys State. Or two years in other films we’ve made.
I think those “eureka” moments, where life is truly surprising. The transformation that people can through, and you can be witness to what makes non-fiction, to me, a truly great art form.
Nick: You mentioned Boys State, which is a fantastic documentary. I feel like that documentary was quite a cultural moment when it was released in 2020. Do you feel a like a communal reaction to a documentary says something about society at the time?
Jesse Moss: Oh, absolutely. I think because we have now have the case study of Boys State and Girls State, which are very related in their DNA, but made at different times about the same program, but in different places and with different political conditions.
And we asked ourselves, is the marketplace fundamentally different from when Boys State came out. Boys State release was perfect in ways we could never had planned for and anticipated. That movie met the marketplace at a time in which there was still a great appetite for that kind of film! Apple was a new platform willing to take a chance on the film. A24 came on board too. And so, it was really an amazing convergence of our interplanetary alignment for that.
But Girls State came out four years later. AppleTV+ is a different platform. The world is different politically. And I think for us to have the chance , in a very controlled way, to explore this question. Documentary sequels, or siblings as we call them, are unusual.
Amanda McBaine: I mean, any kind of story – a book, an album, a movie – if you happen to resonate with whatever is going on… And what’s so interesting about Boys State resonating with what was going on in the world is that the program itself is kind of a weather vane for what’s going on.
Like, the kids are sort of role playing democracy, and they’re going to be exhibiting what we’re seeing in the real world of American politics, and other countries too. You know, what does leadership mean at all costs versus compassion? Hope versus fear.
I’m not saying that every film doesn’t fit the zeitgeist on some level, but some kind of hit more deeply. They happen to come out at the moment that I guess it was needed.
Jesse Moss: It’s such a hazard, I think, as a filmmaker, to try and anticipate both the audience and the market, and really to kind of stay true to your compass. To make a film that felt fresh and exciting and funny, and also moving. We knew what the experience meant to us when we shot it. And we didn’t know quite how to put it all together. But we knew it made us feel a certain way, and if we could capture that in the film and make the audience feel those things, then we had done something right.
We’re making a film now, an independently financed film. I’m both excited, but also frightened, because I don’t know the moment that the film will meet the world, and if the world will be hungry for this film. And if we’ll find another partner to distribute it.
But also, we knew from the beginning when we started making films that a tolerance for risk is necessary. I think the biggest risk we’ve taken as filmmakers have generated the biggest rewards. We’ve been around for two decades, we have to remind ourselves to take risks, because it’s easy to go back to where we started. We have opportunities with big streamers to make more conservative choices, but we want to continue to stretch ourselves and take big risks. I think that’s where true creative rewards are.
Nick: As part of Regionality, some of the discussion will be around how streaming has changed the documentary landscape. How has the rise in accessibility for audiences to watch documentaries opened up the playing field for more filmmakers?
Amanda McBaine: I mean, it’s very exciting. I’ve never actually worked on anything that’s been on Netflix, but Jesse has. That’s an extraordinary moment to suddenly have something you’ve made be visible to that many people, all at the same time. There’s more people able now to make stories about many, many things.
However, the streamers are also big companies, and algorithms are part of those big companies. So, we’re in that sort of moment too. There’s two sides to anything that is that big of an operation right?
Jesse Moss: I think we have a vantage point having lived through so many phase of growth of documentary. From the rugged independent days of the late 90s, into the cable boom, and then the streaming boom. We’re in the second phase of this streaming era, I think, in which there is a growth of audience, but a contraction of the kinds of work and how they’re serving a global audience. And I get that. They’re absolutely reliant on data.
There’s both opportunity and some challenges to navigate there because we want to stay true to the work that feels meaningful to us. And hopefully that work, if we stay the course, will find an audience. Even if the documentary is not about people who are universally known, like a sports star, music star, it’s about an audience discovering people they have never met before, and see them as interesting as the people they already are.
I think that’s the challenge we’re in now. We do have these platforms with big budgets and big audiences, but how do we stay true to our vision and negotiate the very dynamic landscape of financing and of distribution? We’re obviously in a post-COVID era in the United States, but independent film is not really doing well theatrically. I sort of embrace it. We have enough perspective in our careers to, kind of, lean into some of the turbulence that we’re experiencing and to see opportunity.
Thank you so much to Amanda and Jesse for their time, and to ThinkTank Communications for organising the interview. Amanda and Jesse will be providing valuable industry insights at the upcoming and inaugural Regionality Sunshine Coast, a major gathering focused on documentary and factual filmmaking. You can find out more information about Regionality here.
