Humanizing the Headlines

Opening with the story of Private Violence, an intimate documentary about domestic abuse, this chapter launches the book’s series of documentary film case studies and analyses positioned within specific titled themes. Each theme (as a chapter) spotlights documentary stories to illustrate a continuum of social change. Chapter 5 focuses on “humanizing the headlines,” showcasing social-issue documentaries that reveal—through creative interpretation and intimacy—the depth and complexity of human stories beneath hot-button, politically polarized social issues. The film teams profiled here are rooted in community, and several also facilitated community engagement efforts designed to help publics and decision makers see the issues in new ways. The documentaries include 13th, an indictment of American racial injustice from historical underpinnings to the present day; Heroine(e), the story of lifesavers and community members working to bring their neighborhoods back from the destruction of opioid addiction; and Charm City, a behind-the-scenes portrait of Baltimore coming together as a community after historic unrest.

Shaping Laws

Opening with The Invisible War, a majordocumentary that engaged the public and policymakers in the United States, this chapter argues that contemporary documentaries play a unique role in public policy due to their narrative approaches—human-centered narratives that expand beyond facts and statistics and ideological sides—and the collaborative, cultural nature of the policymaking process. Documentary films can also expose social problems relegated to obscurity, or new on the cultural horizon—documentary’s monitorial function. This chapter delves into the complexities of documentary films that successfully shaped US laws through filmmakers working with legislators, policy experts, and issue advocates, forming “policy subnetworks.” The film case studies here include Sin by Silence, which changed California state law focused on incarcerated survivors of domestic violence; Semper Fi, the environmental justice story that sparked a new federal law; and Playground, an investigation of child sex trafficking in the United States that helped to shape federal and state-based laws.

Interrogating Hidden Truths

Within a larger cultural exchange of information, investigative documentary makers balance creative artistry with journalistic practices while they navigate risk and security concerns in precarious times, and they play a vital role in democratic functioning by fostering public awareness and dialogue. These investigative documentarians are breaking new stories even as they face threats—legal, privacy, security, safety—that may be more profound given their location outside formal journalism institutions. Opening with the story of CitizenFour, Laura Poitras’s Academy Award–winning exposé of US National Security Agency spying through the story of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the film case studies here also include Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, the documentary investigation of four lesbians wrongfully convicted of a heinous crime; and The Feeling of Being Watched, a first-person verité journey into government spying on the filmmaker’s predominantly Arab-American community outside Chicago.

Mobilizing for Change

Chapter 5 presents an extended case analysis of the 2013 independent documentary film, Blackfish. Positioning Blackfish within the context of contemporary networked activism offers a lens to consider how a nonfiction story can capture public attention and fuel grassroots public engagement. As this chapter illuminates, social change is aided by documentary storytelling through a framework that includes key elements: narrative persuasion and the role of emotion, amplified community from online and offline activism, cultivated media narrative, strategic layered distribution, and a call to action embedded in the storytelling. While this schema is not the only way to contemplate social change with documentary storytelling at the fore, analysis of Blackfish as a cultural phenomenon illuminates a central concept: The emotional lens of an investigative documentary, combined with planned and organic public engagement and activism, sparked news coverage and shaped a consistent media narrative through every distribution stop in the film’s life cycle.

Opening a New Lens

Opening with The Murder of Emmett Till, which launched award-winning Firelight Media’s long-standing community engagement enterprise, Chapter 3 serves as the heart of the book—the theoretical and pragmatic backdrop to today’s participatory civic media culture, positioning documentaries and parallel public engagement work as forms of cultural resistance, civic imagination, and social critique. Documentaries play an active role in democratic practice through their functions as civic storytelling—as counternarratives, monitors, mobilizers, and artistic interpreters that can reveal the depth of a social issue and strengthen civil society through collaboration and partnerships. Simultaneously, grassroots activism has changed in the networked era. Examples and initiatives help bring documentary functions to life, including the international Good Pitch program, and films like Whose Streets?, When I Walk, An Inconvenient Truth, Minding the Gap, Newtown, Strong Island, Surviving R. Kelly, The Armor of Light, Unrest, and The Pushouts.

Revealing New Reality

The introduction chapter presents the lens of the book, providing the author’s unique vantage point as documentary producer, strategist, and scholar. It opens with a first-person narrative reflection from 2005, launching the book from her experience co-producing the advocacy documentary film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, with Brave New Films, which premiered alongside a national grassroots mobilization campaign. This chapter provides foundational definitions of documentary and an original articulation of shared characteristics of social-issue documentary storytelling in the networked era: editorial independence, commitment to truth, civic motivation, and entertainment value. This introductory chapter locates documentary within the contemporary networked media era, the backdrop of community-based activism and public engagement that happens in concert with many nonfiction stories. It culminates with a roadmap overview of the book, chapter by chapter.

Imagining the Future

Documentary finds itself at a curious cultural moment marked by paradoxical opportunity and challenge. On the one hand, the participatory media era has helped to democratize access for a broad swath of storytellers through evolving technology and platforms. The transformative media ecology has welcomed documentary audiences across an expanding list of media outlets and content distributors. Commercial networks are pouring money into nonfiction storytelling production, distribution, and promotion. As the future marches forward, structural conditions need focus and attention to ensure social-issue nonfiction storytelling progresses in a meaningful way, retaining characteristics of creative freedom, artistic innovation, and civic value. Within this context, particular themes are imperative to probe and advance: representation and diversity, the changing marketplace, and the central role of the professional nonfiction community equipped to uphold civic values and practices. These themes are critical to contemplating why documentary matters as an essential part of storytelling culture and democratic practice.

Activating Community

Opening with the documentary Bully and its movement campaign, The BULLY Project, which mobilized educators, parents, and young people to change norms around youth bullying, this chapter introduces the ecology, motivations, and practices of story-based movement builders—the individuals and organizations who empower and mobilize publics to come together in pursuit of dialogue and change, inspired by documentaries. At the center of this ecology are documentary filmmakers themselves—directors and producers who create the stories and bring them to the public eye. Beyond critical acclaim, the social influence of their stories is enabled by two central groups of professionals involved in social-issue documentary as a community of practice: the enabling civic connectors and enabling institutions that supply resources and community-building convenings, and the community and impact engagement strategists who work alongside filmmakers to transform their work into engines of community empowerment.

Evolving Documentaries and Social Change

Opening with Barbara Kopple’s groundbreaking 1976 film, Harlan County, U.S.A., this chapter provides historical highlights to reveal how shifting cultural backdrops provided the fertile ground for documentary filmmakers, philanthropists, and new organizations to shape the practices, forms, values, marketplace, and audiences for present-day documentary storytelling and the ecology of professionals who enable and produce them. The bedrock values and practices of the contemporary social-issue documentary tradition evolved through individual organizations and people who laid the groundwork during the analog age, spurred by tumultuous demands for equity and a climate of social consciousness. Chapter 2 provides historical highlights organized by four core themes: enabling infrastructure developed out of movement culture and tension, civic motivation in documentary practice, representation of diverse voices and experiences, and shifting media platforms and technology that have aided documentary’s marketplace expansion. As other chapters illustrate, these themes underlie present-day documentary practice and public engagement.