The Documentary of the Imagination project will research and develop innovative ways of working with documentary film participants, enabling the production of new films and ground-breaking insights into the imaginative worlds of the participants and their societies. In a world where self-staging via social media is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, where documentary formats are in flux, and where documentaries are available on ever more diverse platforms, questions of how filmmakers select their participants, work with them in ethical ways to elicit meaningful performances for the camera and then transform these performances into insightful nonfiction films are more urgent than ever. Through a series of four intensive film shoots and an extended editing process, complemented by rigorous critical analysis, this practice-led project will examine how the working methods developed by Principal Investigator Joshua Oppenheimer while making his two feature documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), may be transferred and adapted to new cultural and political contexts. Those two films, part-funded by the AHRC, are among the most successful and critically-lauded documentaries of recent times, winning more than 140 awards between them, including a BAFTA, two Oscar nominations and the Puma Impact Award. Widely seen as game-changers, Werner Herzog described the films as 'a new form of cinematic surrealism', establishing a third space between fiction and non-fiction. This new project seeks to define, translate and advance those films' methodology of 'self-staging and recursive reflexivity', developed by Oppenheimer and partly inspired by the pioneering practices of ethnographer Jean Rouch. In this method, Oppenheimer invited potential participants to stage themselves on camera in whatever ways they wished, inviting them to dramatise their lives and ambitions for the future. Soon after, he screened footage from each shoot back to them, on the basis of which they devised new scenes. The current project will apply these filmmaking methods in three new geographical, cultural and political contexts - Europe, Africa and the USA - and will investigate and compare how they must be adapted to each location. It will explore the different forms a 'documentary of the imagination' might take, and what kinds of histories may be narrated in each place. The research journey will be extensively and critically documented through ethnographic observation techniques, interviews and a reflective diary, and will be shared through three key outputs: a monograph, an interactive documentary (i-doc) and a web portal. The project will also produce an edited volume of essays on this documentary method, as well as two public symposia. Together, these will provide a unique account of Oppenheimer's working processes in the early stages of producing new and innovative feature documentaries, as well as offering insights and tools for other filmmakers to engage with and build upon in their own films. The project will bring academics together with filmmakers and film industry leaders through a series of public lectures and workshops based on the project's findings, presented by Oppenheimer at leading film festivals across the UK and around the world (as well as through project partners BritDoc Foundation, CPH:DOX and Sundance). Given the high profile achieved by his two earlier films, extensive networks and media interest are already in place for dissemination of this project's outputs. In addition, once this project has ended, Oppenheimer will produce and direct new feature documentaries building directly upon the insights - and incorporating to some extent the film material - attained through this research. These films will be funded separately from this research project (and after it ends) but due credit will be given to the AHRC. The i-doc, monograph, essays and web portal will be marketed alongside the new films.

This application is to support impact and engagement activities resulting from Dr Steve Presence's AHRC ECR grant, 'UK Feature Docs: Studying the Feature Documentary Film Industry' (2018-2020, from here 'UKFD'). The application proposes the creation of a new national organisation for UK documentary - the Documentary Film Council (DFC) - that has been co-conceived by the research team in collaboration with the leading organisations in the industry. The DFC will consist of a range of working groups that address the different needs and represent the different sub-sectors in the documentary industry. The specific aim of this project is to target Follow-on Funding at key elements of this proposed organisational infrastructure: the core work required to establish the DFC, and the specific activities of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Mental Health working groups. This strategic use of funds will directly support the foundations of the DFC and address two of the most pressing industry-wide issues - diversity and mental health - while also animating the DFC's broader organisational infrastructure and stimulating activity across all the DFC's proposed working groups. The UKFD project was primarily a work of cultural history that explored the evolution of documentary as a cinematic form over the past two decades. However, the project also included a more future-facing research strand that aimed to investigate the challenges faced by those working in the sector today. This strand of the project expanded well beyond its original scope following high levels of stakeholder engagement and the formation of close relationships with leading industry bodies. As the research developed, it emerged that policymakers in the film and television industries alike had, for various reasons, largely overlooked the unique needs of the nonfiction sector. As a result, UK documentary was suffering from a range of problems that stemmed from a long-standing lack of tailored support. This work thus exposed an urgent and unforeseen need for widespread policy intervention across the documentary industry. Responding to this need, the UKFD research team scaled-up their originally modest plans to explore challenges in the sector. In partnership with Doc Society - the lead body for documentary in England - and with additional 0.4 RA support, funded by UWE in recognition of this expanded remit, in April 2019 the UKFD team launched what became the largest survey ever conducted of UK documentary producers and directors. The results were published by the UKFD team in June, which in turn became the basis for an extensive sector-wide consultation in summer and autumn 2020, the results of which were published in a second major UKFD report in January 2021. This Follow-On Funding bid is the product of this unanticipated and unforeseeable research trajectory. The proposed project builds on the original UKFD research and takes it in a significant, innovative and exciting new direction. The proposed structure and reach of the DFC is without precedent in the UK screen sector. It will generate a range of creative, innovative and evidence-based interventions across the documentary industry, and will attract national and international attention, engaging a genuinely diverse range of new audiences and user communities. As evidenced by the UKFD project research, many of the issues and challenges facing the documentary industry can only be addressed via sustained and collective commitment to the problems at hand. A secure and sustainable cross-sector infrastructure is a precondition to building and maintaining such commitment. With support from the AHRC at this crucial stage, this project will provide that infrastructure to the UK documentary sector, delivering significant cultural, economic and social benefits to the sector and its audiences and ensuring the impact of AHRC-funded research is felt across the UK screen sector and beyond for years to come.

This project aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the contemporary feature-length documentary film industry in the UK. It has three core objectives: 1) to map the industry and analyse its operation; 2) to historicise the industry's formation and the factors that have shaped its development; and 3) to investigate the criticisms and challenges the industry faces and explore how these might be addressed. Documentary has formed a major part of British film culture ever since John Grierson, the figurehead of the British Documentary Movement (1926-46), coined the term in 1926. However, with so much British scholarship focusing on that period and its achievements, subsequent developments have been marginalised. One of those developments has been the emergence of a feature documentary industry comprised of organisations dedicated to the production of feature-length (70 minutes or more) films for broadcast or theatrical exhibition that is distinct from - albeit often related to - factual or specialist factual television production). Since the beginning of the 21st century, feature-length documentaries have experienced a major upsurge in popularity and become a significant global box-office attraction. Although this is most obviously evidenced by US films such as Farenheit 9/11 (2004) or An Inconvenient Truth (2006), a range of UK feature documentaries have enjoyed significant (critical if not necessarily commercial) success, including Black Gold (2005), The End of the Line (2008), Selfmade (2010), Up in Smoke (2011), the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing (2012), and the Oscar-winning Citizen Four (2014). As a result, the UK feature documentary industry is now an established part of the broader film and television industries, with distinct subsectors dedicated to finance, production, distribution and exhibition. Yet despite its established presence, and the fact that UK documentary is widely acknowledged to be experiencing a 'golden age' (Sight & Sound, September 2014, p. 52), little scholarly attention has been paid to the industrial structures underpinning it. There is thus a timely and urgent need to study the UK documentary industry if its current economic and cultural success is to be understood, supported and sustained. This project has been developed in association with three institutional partners - the British Film Institute (BFI), Creative England and The Grierson - as well as five partners from each of the industry's main subsectors (finance, production, distribution and exhibition): The BRITDOC Foundation is the leading broker of documentary film finance and distribution in the UK; Dartmouth Films is one of the UK's most influential documentary production companies; Dogwoof is the UK's leading documentary distributor; Sheffield Doc/Fest is the preeminent documentary film festival in the UK; and Yaddo, the UK's first documentary webcaster, was launched in 2016 by the former head of BBC Storyville, the UK's leading broadcast platform. All partners will participate in the research via a series of semi-structured interviews, while the partners from the industry's subsectors will also take part in a period of Participant Observation. Combined with desk-based analyses of primary and secondary materials (academic literature, trade press, close analysis of the films themselves), this comprehensive methodology will best enable the three core objectives to be addressed. The project will have a number of tangible applications and benefits to the industry in addition to the range of academic outputs it will generate. The policy proposals will provide the BFI and Creative England with evidence-based, practically-applicable recommendations. Together with the Doc/Fest workshops and project website, these will facilitate knowledge exchange between academia and industry that will expand understanding and work towards a more sustainable, innovative and culturally and economically successful documentary industry.