Beyond the frame: Rethinking documentary practice

Across the documentary landscape, new dynamics are taking shape: filmmakers are establishing new ways of working to suit their contexts, centering community-based and collaborative models, rethinking the purpose of their practice, and navigating an industry shaped by intensifying political pressures. These reflections highlight practices that challenge the idea of a single authority and open space for more plural, situated approaches to storytelling. Together, they unsettle the dominance of existing systems and point toward more diverse futures for documentary practice.

"The first film I made back in 2005, Bullets and Butterflies (2007) was on a motorcycle journey into the mountains. My co- passenger—a double amputee who lived on the streets of Delhi—and I would tie a borrowed handycam to trees, bridges, and lampposts to document our journey. Not intended as a film, at best a visual diary, our footage was raw, shaky, even absurd. Yet the lens captured an unusual friendship unfolding and that was meaningful enough.

That first experiment seeded the question I’ve carried into every film since: who gets to frame, who gets to be seen, and how power shifts in the space between. Over fifteen years, my work has grown into complex, intimate portraits that hold India in all its contradictions, fragility, and fullness. These films have found recognition at home and abroad, but the question for me isn’t simply what's next. It’s imagining how we build spaces—beyond the language of scarcity and gatekeeping—where a new generation of filmmakers can root themselves. And thrive.

This has led to founding The Himalayan Story Lab in 2023, a ten-year experiment to give emerging indigenous filmmakers from India, Nepal, and Bhutan something almost absent in our region: a sustained space to develop their debut features. Structured as a year-long fellowship, it’s an incubation lab where participating filmmakers have a space to interact with practicing filmmakers, masterclasses, case studies, and a deep immersion into their artistic articulation, rooted in their own unique cosmologies and narrative traditions.

Crucially, the Story Lab is not a ‘program’; it’s an attempt to shift authorship. Its success can't be, shouldn't be, measured in fellowships or forums. In fact, I see it as a wager: that filmmakers can stay true to their voices and still enter the global conversation. Whether these voices can shift the conversation itself—that's the tension I’m interested in. For me, the task is building spaces where stories aren’t only made, but where they retain the power to unsettle what we think documentary is. That’s the journey that matters."

"I moved from ‘the flatties’ into immersive when I realized you could use tech innovation as a guise to smuggle in innovation elsewhere. I had just secured funding for my first feature but had doubts. At best docs felt formulaic; at worst, they recycled unpleasant stereotypes around culture, race, and identity.

Documentary comes from the Latin—documentum—meaning example. I felt this palpably once at a festival in Damascus. The post-film audience debate was voracious as if each film asked: ‘This is what they do there—and us?’ I remember the subtitle engineer Talal altering the translations in a doc about the Burmese monk uprising, choosing words that evoked Syrian class structures. Trying to draw it all home.

Imagination opens as the space between us collapses.

In immersive I found the power of making stories spatial. These are worlds you enter and, being there yourself, immediately are exposed and therefore vulnerable. Our first project, Door Into the Dark (2014), explored what people do when they feel lost. Participants walked blindfolded through a large physical space full of sensory installations—at first disorientating, but gradually twisting into a series of delights. You feel it.

Last IDFA we showed Impulse, about ADHD, using mixed reality to show how space transforms with the layers your mind adds. It’s an invitation to compassion—for yourself and for others whose actions are driven by the mechanics of an unquiet mind.

I like to think this approach enacts poet Rilke’s advice to “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

In practice there’s a lot of trial and error, and sometimes the tools are too blunt for the ideas.

Still, it feels important to keep at it. The flatties have been chopped up into content, distributed by cookies designed to validate identity rather than lead us into the unknown.

All the more necessary for stories to draw us out of our mindsets, our stasis, our worlds—into a flow that has echoes beyond the story and gives momentum to the question: and us?"

"I see this as an exciting time for documentary, and a perilous one.

On the positive side, I’m delighted to see nonfiction film free itself from serving as an information delivery system. Basically, a visual textbook, with all the plodding that implies. That’s the kind of documentary I grew up with (mercifully, with some exceptions—Harlan County U.S.A. and Paris Is Burning among them).

Now we’re seeing filmmakers explore the cinematic possibilities of the artform in dazzling ways, like Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, and Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent (the rare “documentary noir”). Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers thrilled me by displaying confidence in the audience’s desire to engage with complex and thoughtful work.

The field is becoming far more international, resulting in cross-pollination that has lifted the standard of filmmaking everywhere. I was fascinated to discover that Yance Ford, for instance, achieved a creative breakthrough on Strong Island—a story rooted in the experience of American racism—by working with Danish collaborators.

But I see documentary’s future as ominous, particularly in the U.S. President Trump, bent on crushing anything outside MAGA conformity, largely defunded the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported many archival-driven documentaries. Then he took it further, pressuring the Republican-controlled Congress to rescind more than a billion dollars in funding for public media. In response, PBS—for decades, the primary distribution platform for documentaries in the U.S.—cut its budget more than 20 percent.

Many U.S.-based media companies have shown a disturbing willingness to cave to Trump’s ideological demands, a threat to the independent-minded doc community. And that’s not my only worry. The U.S.-based streaming platforms have mostly constricted their interests to true crime and celebrity docs, pressing nonfiction filmmakers into a narrow chute. Not so long ago we were calling this a golden age of documentary. Now, I fear, it has turned to pewter."

"In November 2011, I came to IDFA to understand how documentary film funds, festivals and markets worked. My business card boldly introduced me as founder of "The East African Documentary Film Fund"—though I tried hiding the word "initiative" printed below in tiny font. Here, I discovered how films got co-financed by commissioners from multiple countries, foundations and broadcasters who, to my bewilderment, all seemed to know each other. Despite the sheer volume of brilliant films from around the world, I noted the absence of my country and continent in the program.

Thirteen years later, the transformation is striking. In 2025, Docubox proudly had two films competing at Sundance. African documentary filmmakers are no longer outsiders looking in; they are integral voices in global cinema conversations.

Supporting independent filmmakers sits at the center of everything we do. We began with a fund offering mentorship but built far more: a thriving ecosystem where African voices can emerge, develop, and find their audience. Our approach has always been community-first. As a filmmaker myself, I believed that if we encouraged filmmakers to gather and support each other, we could build an industry despite lacking government and broadcaster support.

Other than our traditional open call grants, we've sought new ways to resource filmmakers in recent times, pairing independent filmmakers with organizations rich in human stories. Within 18 months, eight new short films were made—festival-worthy works that proved how innovative partnerships can create space for authentic voices.

The numbers speak for themselves. African films now regularly grace international festival circuits. But despite acclaim, you won’t find many of our films on major streaming platforms. The distribution gap remains stubbornly wide, reflecting systemic inequities in global media.

Our community in Kenya is responding creatively: YouTube distribution, school and community screenings, grassroots networks, social media audiences are all on the table, we’re creating new pathways; finding our voices and building audiences. We prioritized community and embraced new models of collaboration. The transformation speaks for itself: African documentary film is here to stay—and increasingly on our own terms."

"How do we talk about the state of the art of documentary in the time of Palestinian genocide? And how do we talk about the state of the art of documentary when my phone is filled with the devastating real-time images of it? Today is 25 August, another devastation, freelance journalist Maryam Abu Daqqa assassinated by air strike in Nasser Hospital. This brings the current number of journalists killed in Gaza to 273. I wonder what this number will be by November.

I also spent the last two years building festival strategies for the collection Generation Ukraine. I am proud of this work; the films are travelling across the world. We had glamorous parties at A-List festivals and pitched and presented at every important platform. Less than two weeks ago, and just days after spending time with the filmmakers of Special Operation, I see another fallen Ukrainian artist: David Chichkan. I watch many friends on my phone as they attend his funeral. I watch and I work; I watch and I work.

I now see my primary vocation as a community builder for documentary and non-fiction film professionals. I have come to understand this means making a place where, as the space shrinks, people come to express themselves and find joy. Our familiar territory has changed so much; meeting places such as film festivals can be transformed into places of hurt and misunderstanding. I want my contribution to the art of documentary to be making a place where people can feel good while the stakes are so high. The world is a dangerous place for those with principles and a vision for something else.

We don’t talk enough about the economic, emotional, and security burden on those taking the most risk: something the old filmmaking model and plenty of us in Europe, where I live, have and continue to quietly profit from. I don’t desire to hold on to its familiarity. I am optimistic and feel lucky to be included in and see so much beauty in real life, while I am watching and working, even on my phone."

This editorial was published in the IDFA 2025 Program Guide.
See the full Program Guide here.