At their best, political documentaries make sense of complex issues. But getting them seen has become more challenging than ever given Hollywood’s preference for celebrity or true-crime nonfiction offerings over anything grappling with thorny, complicated issues or figures.
This hasn’t stopped top documentary filmmakers from tackling such topics. Errol Morris’ “Separated,” a look at Trump administration immigration policies on the U.S. border, will debut at the Venice film festival. Docs about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, gun control and antisemitism are also in the works and could end up at fall festivals. There is also chatter about a doc focusing on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
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It’s not at all clear who might distribute these films, which follow in the footsteps of political documentaries like Michael Moore’s record-breaking “Fahrenheit 9/11” and Amazon Prime Video’s 2020 offering “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” directed by Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés, given retrenchment on the part of buyers. In recent years, Apple TV+, Netflix, Disney and Amazon have all shied away from political, non-partisan fare in favor of more commercial, common-denominator docs tackling sports in addition to celebrities and true crime.
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Among the films left in the cold: Rory Kennedy’s “Adrift,” which premiered last year at the Mill Valley Film Festival to a warm response. The film about the global refugee crisis has yet to find a distributor.
“The screening was jam-packed, and the audience loved it and were really invested,” says Kennedy, who was Oscar-nominated for “Last Days in Vietnam” and comes from a storied political family. “We were like, ‘How do we get this out there? This is such an important film. People need to see this.’ We worked really hard, and we shot in many countries. It took a long time to edit, and now it’s very hard to get eyeballs on it, “It’s frustrating,” she admits. “We put all that time in and effort and energy.”
Alex Gibney, who has a long history of tackling challenging topics and last year sold domestic streaming rights for his upcoming Elon Musk documentary to HBO, pushes back on the notion that viewers aren’t interested in films about political topics.
“Audiences want this stuff, but for some reason we live in a moment when globe-girdling services don’t want to allow programming that would potentially inflame or offend people, but that’s part of public discourse,” he says. “It seems to me that there is a civic responsibility that these folks have, which is to engage in producing and distributing content that explores the human experience in the deepest possible way and allows us all to reckon with it, rather than just distracting us for a few moments.”
In March, “Frontline’s” Ukraine war film “20 Days in Mariupol” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. That win alone, one would think, should have convinced award-hungry streamers to get behind docs about political issues. Thus far, the film has 3.8 million views across all platforms, which includes YouTube viewers under PBS’s multiyear deal with the streaming giant. According to “Frontline,” there has been a threefold increase in views since the film was nominated in January 2024.
“Democracy on Trial,” a “Frontline” film that investigates the roots of the criminal cases against former President Trump stemming from his 2020 election loss, has received 11.5 million YouTube views with an average watch time of 28 minutes. The 144-minute doc began streaming on Jan. 30.
“People want to understand what is going on and what is happening around them,” says “Frontline” executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath. “So, I believe that for a healthy democracy, current affairs programming is critical. It’s really important to understand all sides to a story and these things are really critical to the health of our democracy. Perhaps these YouTube numbers are a message that more programming like this would only be good for Americans and also good for the people who watch and
stream globally.”
The most watched “Frontline” film is “Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos,” which premiered in early 2020. To date, the 114-minute film has garnered 39.6 million views. In contrast, “Union,” a Sundance 2024 doc that follows a group of current and former Amazon workers as they attempt to unionize Amazon employees working at a facility in Staten Island, N.Y., has also yet to find distribution.
Submarine Entertainment sales agent Josh Braun, who repped “Union” and is backing upcoming politically minded docs including “Separated,” says that his company is committed to finding distribution for films tackling such issues, no matter how difficult it is in the current economic climate.
“Filmmakers who have a powerful, internal drive to tell these stories are not going to stop telling them because Netflix or Amazon isn’t guaranteed to buy it,” says Braun. “We are signing films that may be difficult to sell but they are important and need to get out there. The way to counter this weird zone that the doc world is in is for everyone to work hard and be brave and keep going even though it’s hard.”
Upcoming “Frontline” docs will examine the presidential and vice presidential races, Americans’ experiences from the pandemic to the polls in 2020 to the eve of 2024 election, and the Israel-Gaza war. Tough topics do not scare leaders of the PBS-funded program, who have also encountered naysayers about the appeal of such work.
“I was once told there is no way that people are going to want to watch a longform documentary that is a serious, journalistically driven film on YouTube or our streaming platforms,” says Aronson-Rath. “But that’s conventional wisdom and it does not check out with our audience figures. It’s really important to look at the documentaries that do the best for ‘Frontline’ — they are the most serious, the most robust and the ones that actually ask these really tough questions at the heart of our democracy.”
Beyond “Frontline,” HBO, CNN Films and MSNBC Films are also programming nonfiction political content.
“The places that are making this content have to be louder about the fact that there needs to be more of us,” says Amanda Spain, MSNBC Films VP of longform acquisitions. “I also think there’s a false narrative out there that these films aren’t entertaining, but politics is captivating.”
Most recently, MSNBC Films aired “Admissions Granted,” about affirmative action, and “Battleground Georgia,” about Black voter participation. Among its notable efforts, CNN Films co-produced with HBO Max 2022’s “Navalny,” the Oscar-winning documentary about the Russian dissident.
Overall, however, the theatrical market is much more challenging for serious-minded documentaries. And major streamers avoid controversial topics altogether.
“Streamers don’t want to touch things that are too political for a mix of reasons that include true censorship from other governments, self-censorship from worrying about angering other governments, especially China and India and Russia, and the shift to advertising in their models, which is creating its own form of censorship because advertisers don’t want to be placed against more political content,” says Brian Newman, founder of Sub-Genre, a media strategy consultancy. “Charitably, you could say that they are looking for a much broader audience.”
Newman says the April removal of Matthew Heineman’s 2022 NatGeo doc “Retrograde” from all Disney’s platforms, following a Washington Post reporter’s inquiry about whether Afghan subjects in the doc were put in danger due to their participation in the film, didn’t help matters. “Now streamers will worry about getting sued,” Newman says.
Given all these market challenges, Oscar and Emmy-winning producer Dan Cogan believes that documentary filmmakers should take matters into their own hands. Cogan has been involved with Impact Partners, an advisory service for philanthropists looking to promote social change through film, since its formation in 2007, and is advisor to Jolt, a distribution platform launched by the same group earlier this year.
“The mainstreaming and popularity of documentaries has been a boon in many ways, but this is the big downside,” says Cogan, who produced “All In” and runs Story Syndicate with Garbus. “Those of use devoted to making these films need to pioneer other means of distribution. If we can’t find a model in which these films can be widely seen, we’re going to see their funding dry up, and that would be a huge loss for our culture and our politics.”
Jolt.film, dedicated to promoting worthy docs that have not received mass distribution, is funded by individual donations from viewers, who are encouraged to contribute to watch a film on the platform. The revenue for each doc is split between the filmmaker and Jolt, which uses profits to reinvest in the platform. To date, five films have been distributed on the platform.
Despite the tough climate, filmmakers remain committed to make docs about current affairs. In the last 12 months, Dawn Porter released two docs about politically oriented issues: “Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court,” a Showtime/Paramount+ film about the high court, and Amazon’s “Power of the Dream,” about the WNBA and how they helped get Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia elected. A year ago, Hulu distributed “The Lady Bird Diaries,” based on the writings of former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“I don’t think these stories are going anywhere,” says Porter. “The issue will be, ‘What’s the way in?’ That is what’s going to be interesting. And, of course, it will all be influenced by the election results. Are we talking about how we saved democracy or how to get it back?”
(Pictured: “20 Days in Mariupol”)
