Being away from home allows room for perspective, and for a group of U.S.-based documentary experts who made the trip to Cannes, the glass remains half full, despite the headwinds.
The closure of Participant, Showtime Docs, CNN Films scaling back and belt-tightening across the board have led many to posit that a Golden Age of documentary films has ended.
A discussion in the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival begged the question: If the Golden Age is over, what comes next?
For the assembled speakers, there was an acceptance of the challenges, but also a desire to take a long view and to look to the future. “With the market retracting and some distribution outlets not being replaced by others, we’re forced to be creative again about how we get these films out to market, how we find audiences,” said Cinetic Media’s Jason Ishikawa during the Deadline-hosted panel.
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