Challenging the limitations of documentary distribution was the main trick question at this year’s animated, passionate, at times both harsh and cheerful Town Hall forum, held in Malmö September 22.

As 2024 moves to an end and one looks for highlights in the Nordic year in film, the documentary department stands out proudly.

Norway’s national Amanda Award for best film went to a documentary. Sweden’s submission to the Oscars was not only a documentary, but also the documentary with the highest audience number in Swedish history. At this year’s Venice Film Festival, Sweden’s one film selected for the programme was a documentary, directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, one out of several names with “star” quality on the Nordic documentary arena.

Other current and recent luminaries are Mads Brügger, Joshua Oppenheimer and Jonas Poher Rasmussen, all operating out of Denmark, Miia Haavisto in Finland and Norway’s Benjamin Ree, winner of the 2024 Best Film Amanda – as well as the 2021 one before that. Ibelin (2024), The Painter and the Thief (Kunstneren og tyven, 2020), Nelly & Nadine (2022), Flee (Flugt, 2021), Lost Boys (2020), Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019) and The Look of Silence (2014) have been widely seen, celebrated and debated, even at times making it to Oscar night. Which is indeed what Sweden’s The Last Journey (Den sista resan, 2024) and its director duo of Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson aim for right now. There’s plenty of reason to be cheerful, right?

Wrong. And rarely more so than according to the fourth edition of the highly opinionated Town Hall Forum, held at the Nordisk Panorama days in Malmö and organised in collaboration with Nordisk Film & TV Fond. Taking place September 22, this well-attended event gathered the main Nordic as well as outer-Nordic players in the documentary field; producers, broadcasters, film institutes commissioners, funders, sales agents and creators alike, all seated at the table with an equal and welcome voice. This year’s theme focused on the distribution issue, and the headline read “Confronting the Echo Chambers – how do we challenge limitations and reach audiences in the 2020s?”, and especially addressed “The fortification of echo chambers, confirming our own biases and increasingly only giving us what we already want, is not only impeding the free flow of information and narratives challenging our preconceived notions, but maybe also limiting the documentary community’s own ability to envision possibilities beyond like-minded audiences”.

“And what is success anyway?” the introduction questioned. “Festival awards? A primetime TV slot? Debate sparked in the media? Or a room full of engaged and inquisitive 7th-graders?”

Rather than falling prey to such pretty pictures, a more dire scenario is the preference of this forum. Within these walls, the corporate age of documentary has taken reign, the struggles for artistic freedom and innovation demands its fair toll of energy and exhaustion, funding goes down, as does festival revenues. Streaming isn’t the golden ticket into things after all, the pandemic certainly messed up a lot of things, things that aren’t the same since then and will never be again. “Pain-points” like these, unwelcome as they may be, were raised by the first speaker of the session, the versatile Liselot Verbrugge of the Netherlands, with a solid background as producer, festival programmer, sales agent, and currently as the head of Film Harbour, a Dutch distribution company she launched this spring, working exclusively with documentaries. In her refreshing talk, named “Embracing the Not Knowing” – the phrase “Not Knowing” could easily have been interchanged with “Not Comfortable” – Verbrugge did not shy away from some of the flaws within the documentary industry itself, indeed undressing the emperor at times.

Having spent the last decade in sales, primarily at Autlook in Austria and later Deckert Distribution in Germany, Verbrugge shared both sides of the increasingly shrinking coin of an operation that demands conflicting personalities; the outward optimist that willingly subscribes to the above-mentioned “happy picture” – “because how can you sell if you don’t sell something positive?” – and the pragmatic realist, well aware of some inconvenient truths. “And they’re not always welcome to address”, as the client may rather go to the agent who always thinks positive. A clear discrepancy exists between the reality of the market and “the image of what we like the market to be” or just forgetting that “yes, this is art, but it’s also an industry”. A regular working year for Verbrugge means screening 2,000 films (hopefully with the aid of colleagues), out of which she chooses to work with about ten, per year. Of those ten, perhaps two will fly out across the world, like the Macedonian Oscar-nominee Honeyland (Medena zemja, 2019), a golden acquisition she now has in her catalogue.

As for the definition of success, a concept Liselot Verbrugge still today likes to understand, about 90% of her acquisition meetings contain more or less the following proposal from the filmmaker’s side: “I want to go to Sundance and after that some other festivals and then a regular theatrical release, and after that I’d like to go on Netflix, please.” Matching expectations like these with what the market can actually offer is, to put it mildly, a tricky question. “But then how can it be that all these people sitting in front of me say that this is what they want? This means that we as an industry are missing some vital information to put out there. Perhaps the workshop era, which made us all believe that we can all get there, went a little too far?” Verbrugge rounded off her richly rewarding presentation with an appeal for honest conversations, perhaps in think tank form, rather than, as is too often the case, turning inwards and taking to a survival strategy, and only seeing to one’s own interest rather than the greater good of things – the proper echo chamber, as it were. “I think we need to sit down with different aspects of our industry and say ‘Hey, I think our chains are broken’ – the chain of distribution is not reaching its end, if we go from funding to audience there are several kinks in the system, and we need to talk about solving this.” A massive rebuilding rather than a small shuffle is imminent, she cautioned, but ended with a “pleasure point” of honest optimism. “When the IDFA forum started in its day, and this industry as we know it was formed, it was a new concept of rejuvenation. We now have the possibility to think about where we actually want to go and what we can build. I still think there’s an audience, and I still believe in the documentary, created with passion, and needed and wanted in people ‘s lives out there – even if they don’t know it yet.”

The think tank idea was embraced throughout the session, and the concept is already being investigated at the Swedish Film Institute, reported SFI production controller Jenny Örnborn, while Ulla Simonen, director of Finland’s Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK), hoped to return next year with an invitation to further talks on the subject, if nothing else, then virtually.

Before Liselot Verbrugge left the stage, she made the kind but firm reminder that “we can’t use the boomer model to reach the Gen Zs”. Fittingly, session number 2 was called “Thinking Outside the Broadcast Box”, a presentation made by Elina Pohjola, Marika Kecskemeti and Sari Volanen of one of the true Nordic television institutions, the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation Yle, specifically Yle Teema, the arts and culture channel. Here, some new initiatives have recently been taken in order to gain audiences, some of them quite playful, while the mission as such is serious enough. “When a film is screened on TV, it has already been in the theatre and has been seen,” reasoned Pohjola, who is a film commissioner at Yle Drama. “That’s why we started to think of creating an event or phenomena around this, in order to get better resources and attention.” The concept “A Week of New Finnish Films” was launched in October last year. “We empty the schedule of the broadcast TV of foreign films and older national films, and programme these new titles on best prime time,” explained head of Yle Teema Kecskemeti. “Because we want to treat them as real premieres. Why? Because we really think that this is the real premiere for the Finnish people.” Elina Pohjola, who had a vast career as a producer before entering her current position, added some interesting perspectives. “In my producer days, I always thought of TV as the end of the line, and there was no more money to get out of it. But I invite the room to look at it from another perspective. When films, especially documentaries, are in theatres, the numbers are in the hundreds or, if it’s a success, they’re in the thousands. On TV, they’re in the hundreds of thousands. So that is the place and time when the audience actually gets to see your film.”

Initiatives like, by their own admission, “a bit silly” quiz games with themes like “What film are you?” took off, even among the filmmakers themselves (who at times became not their own but a colleague’s film), media coverage started to grow, and social media started to take notice. Short film commissioner Sari Volanen introduced a popular late night fairy tale short, which ran every night during a full week, and a special “indie film” week was also launched, with the filmmakers joining in to give introductions and host audience chats, again to great acclaim. Collaborations with film festivals have been reoccurring, with a simultaneous premiere taking place on TV. “This way, we get a common experience,” said Marika Kecskemeti. “We watch together, we laugh together, and we sing together – sing-alongs are quite a big thing.”

Challenges for the future within this quite cheerful scenario remain. “With documentaries we have the problem that the older generation, who like them and watch them a lot, really don’t know that we have a big catalogue on our streaming service Yle Areena,” said Pohjola, who has initiated a trailer campaign for this purpose. The importance of longer rights periods and how to create an interesting catalogue of titles, especially for shorts and documentaries, are also on the agenda.

The Yle constellation also raised the importance of more Nordic interchange, and a Nordisk Film & TV Fond’s recent commissioner’s meeting in Copenhagen was by all accounts fruitful and inspiring. “We talked a lot about collaborations,” said Pohjola. “Nobody has more resources, rather even less, so what can we do with the industry and for the industry, for the films? Axel Arnö, head of the documentary department at SVT, put it quite beautifully when he said that all we need is a stronger collaboration, and that sharing is caring.

The third and final session was hosted by the three-time, triple-country (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) documentary film commissioner Klara Nilsson-Grunning, who filled the room with positive energy. She also spoke in warm favour of more Nordic collaboration. “There’s still a lot to learn from each other, like the sharing culture in Norway, where the producers get together and fight for things when we at the Film Institute come up with some silly idea, and then they stand up immediately. I think that’s really important. They come up with suggestions, they don’t just complain. In short, there are differences, and there’s learning to be done across the borders.”

Liselott Forsman, CEO of Nordisk Film & TV Fond, co-organiser of the Town Hall initiative, also belongs to the optimists: “We helped bringing back the Town Hall meetings to Nordisk Panorama in 2021, and it’s fantastic that they’ve continued since then, offering vital and outspoken debates. This year, so many delegates expressed a need for more Nordic collaboration. These thoughts correlate well with the agenda of our commissioners’ meeting in Copenhagen in September, where our partners planned new collaboration models for films, series, documentaries and kids’ content. The documentary think tank group led by Axel Arnö concluded, among other things, that these new collaboration forms need to be year-round and build a common space for doing bigger collaborations without sacrificing artistic values,” she said, warmly concurring with the sentiments of Elina Pohjola.

Animated and passionate and at times harsh audience voices were heard throughout the session. There were warning calls of the documentary film basically having outlived public funding, and a whole new generation of filmmakers would be locked out if the system “doesn’t get its sh*t together”. The lack of interest from “Gen Z” was hotly challenged: “They are hungry for culture and want to watch your films, but if you post a trailer in a vertical shape, it is not the language; social media is.” A Swedish director requested the return of a cinema programme on television – such a show hasn’t aired since 2008 – in order to receive information and inspiration through its reports and reviews.

Moderating the event with zesty energy and unfaltering ability in getting the right voice in for the right topic was NFTVF’s Documentary Senior Advisor Karolina Lidin, who, among a long line of astute reflections on the state of things throughout the forum, offered this inevitable truth:

“It’s the best of times and the worst of times. And the ultimate irony or the most tragic paradox: never has an audience been so accessible. No limitations with film rolls, cinema capacity or bad weather or television time slots. Yet, never has it been so difficult to reach that audience.“