“Distribution is the biggest challenge” says the DFI’s Documentary commissioner, in our last round of interviews with doc specialists post-Nordisk Panorama Town Hall.

Trained as a director at the National Film School of Denmark, Piasecki Poulsen has always been committed to cultural, political and social issues. Before joining the Danish Film Institute in 2019 as Documentary Commissioner, he gained wide acclaim for his films Guerilla Girl and Blood in the Mobile.

In this interview, Piasecki Poulsen says that beyond embracing the digital shift to improve the distribution of documentary works, the industry needs to be better at promoting diversity as a solution, rather than a challenge and at lobbying public-funded filmmaking to defend and promote our democratic values.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing today, and concretely what are you doing to promote documentary filmmaking as an industry and an art form?
Frank Piasecki Poulsen: Financing has always been the main problem for documentarists and there is no signs that this is going to be any easier any time soon. But the way that the media landscape is changing at the moment, I feel that distribution is the biggest challenge.

It’s a paradox that technology has made distribution easier than ever, but this same technology is making it harder for us.

The report published last year by Nordisk Film & TV Fond about the distribution of documentaries (CLICK HERE) showed that the broadcasters are still by far the most important channels for us. And as the audiences on linear TV are radically decreasing, broadcasters stand with a serious problem. They know that for the most part their audiences only go to their sites and look for stuff they already know. So no matter how public service-minded the commissioning editors are, they are not able to reach the audience the same way as the could earlier. Simply because the habits of the viewers have changed. And it seems like no one really knows how to deal with this issue.

Engagement with diverse audience - wherever they are - is more important than ever. What are your recipes to be better in that field?
FPP: We talk a lot about diversity these years as well as representation. And we should. We have for too long been telling stories about other people very different than ourselves, without being critical enough about our role and responsibility as storytellers.

In order to engage with a diverse audience, we need to be diverse. We need to start thinking diversity as a solution, more than a challenge. When we meet as a community for e.g. at Nordic Panorama Forum, we are still a pretty homogenous group of people, despite all our good intentions of inclusion and so on. If we see real diversity as an opportunity, and I mean not only in context of gender and race but as well when it comes to class, sexuality, geography, age and so on, I believe that it can be a solution.

Changing our documentary community to actually being diverse, will surely result in much more diverse and innovative films. This change of our business is everybody’s responsibility but particularly the decision-makers.

Have you embraced the shift towards streaming and if so how? if not, why?
FPP: Netflix and TikTok can seem scary and as a threat to the classical documentary as we know it. But I would like to point at two tendencies that I find reassuring.

Social media seems to make every one’s attention span shorter and shorter. This might be true but it’s not the whole truth. We are also watching more and more series with hour long episodes and several seasons. So audiences are clearly willing to spend many hours on a story if it is appealing enough.

Many people also thrown upon a social media such as TikTok. And my guess is that the majority of people in our community has never visited the platform, despite the fact that our children spend loads of time there. There are many bad things to say about it for sure, but if you look closer, the TikTok culture also holds a lot of traits that are familiar to the tradition of good documentaries. To me, it’s clear that Generation Z - the ones primarily using Tiktok - really like content that comes from real people, from a personal view on the world and has real nerve and sincerity. All virtues that we, as documentarists, master and allows us to compete with the big streamers.

There are many challenges in the media development. I’m not denying that, but as the Chinese proverb says: “When the wind of change is blowing, there are those that built shelters and those that built windmills.” We should definitely be in the windmill building business.

What do you feel are the priorities in the Nordics to improve documentary filmmaking towards 2032?
FPP: When the Nordic Council of Ministers takes away the support for Nordic Panorama, it is a clear sign to me that they don’t see the full potential of our role in our democracies. The argument for the cut was an increased focus on sustainability, as I understood it. This is ironic in my opinion as I think that documentary films can and should be key in strengthening our democracies so that we are able as societies to deal with the huge challenges that we are facing such as climate change.

I truly believe in our genre’s potential to play an important part in the democratic conversation. I think most of us making documentaries do. But we are somewhat alone in this belief.

DR has just gone through a huge cut down by nearly half a billion Danish kroner and they were supposed to be cut down by an additional DKK 250 million. The present government cancelled the second cut down but the right-wing parties in Denmark just said that if they win the upcoming election [November 1], they will go through with the cut down.

We need to work together and be much better at convincing the rest of our societies and in particular our politicians, from right to left, that we hold a great potential. That public service is a crucial cornerstone in democracy.

Ideally where would you like to be in 2032?
FPP: I attended the Venice Film Festival for the first time this summer. Being there, I realised how the red carpet is a stage where the filmmakers perform, as part of the promotion of their films. It made me think. Why aren’t we doing the same? Why can’t documentary filmmakers be famous and glamorous? There are probably many reasons why, but my point is that we have something that is much more valuable than we are able to communicate at the moment. We need to make a lot more noise in the future in order to get the audience’s attention.

At a time [where there is] so much superficiality, fake news and “one size fits none” content, we can offer something that, if we play our cards right, can play a major role in the next decades.

My hope is that we in the coming years will be much better at lobbying for public service and be part of creating a culture where authenticity, the personal artistic expression, plays a central role in the democratic conversation. In order to do so, we need to work together, rise above our individual petty problems, and claim the status that fits the value of our work.”