Missoula News

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

Panelists: Marketing Should Follow Filmmaking

By Tad Sooter, 2-19-06

Filmmakers should focus on subject, balance and originality and worry about marketing and audience after the filming is done.

That was the consensus among the five directors in a panel discussion of Social Issue Documentaries in an Entertainment Driven Market Sunday at the Big Sky Documentary film festival. Marketing representatives in the discussion were tentative to agree.

"Are you pitching your film idea or are you making the film that you want to make?" said Brian Liu, director of "Disarm", a film about landmines. "We didn’t really think about audience, we just made the film."

Liu said he used unique cinematography like helmet cameras on de-miners and subtle alternative music to draw readers through the film, rather than a force-fed narrative and a star-studded soundtrack. He hoped the result would be more artistic and powerful because it was not crammed into a genre like advocacy or educational.

"Hand of God" director Joe Cultrera agreed that subject rather than tailoring a film for a preconceived audience should drive a project.
"Do what comes out of you, however it comes out of you, that’s always been my approach," said Cultrera.

Most of the panel agreed that once the project was wrapped up filmmakers should be creative in their presentation of the film and should measure success in impact not just the size of the audience. David Eckenrode, whose film "El Immigrante" focuses on the Mexican/American border crisis, said he hopes that the young Latinos who were a part of the film will be among his audience. Liu said that showing his film directly to the de-miners had inspired some to start shooting footage of their work.

Winifred Scherrer of Bullfrog, representing the marketing aspect of the documentary business cautioned that documentaries are a communicative media and that strong marketing is key to spreading their messages. Big Sky Festival judge and Bullfrog partner John Hoskyns-Abrahall added that taking emphasis off of the audience is difficult when patrons have invested big money into a film and want to know that it will have an impact.

The panel also discussed whether or not there is a market for balanced films, when recent agenda driven projects like "Fahrenheit 911" have been wildly successful in the box office. They wondered whether interest in documentary films would fade if there weren’t contentious issues like the war in Iraq.

"Clearcut" director Peter Richardson pointed out that while "Fahrenheit 911," is the number one highest grossing non-fiction film of all time, the second was "March of the Penguins," a warm-hearted National Geographic narrative, absolutely devoid of controversy.

Panelists also agreed Americans may be tiring of the barrage of slanted messages and unimaginative fiction films and that could drive up the market for documentaries.

"I think Americans are ready for substance in documentaries," Scherrer said.

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