Brits best at documentary?

This week (5-9 Nov) Sheffield Doc/Fest celebrates the art and business of making documentary film.

There's a fab article about the festival in The Independent (who are sponsoring the event), which also explores the state of documentary filmmaking in Britain. 'The greatest docu-show on earth' argues that Brits lead the field in documentary filmmaking but that funding is tricky to come by. Nick Broomfield says 'Today, the UK Film Council doesn't seem to think documentary is its responsibility....'

Here at FLM we distribute lottery funds on behalf of UKFC to facilitate young people's filmmaking and roughly a third of projects we fund are documentaries. But even if young people are making documentaries are they watching them? 'The greatest docu-show on earth' notes that 'according to a survey carried out for the BritDoc festival, 60 per cent of TV documentary viewers are aged 55 to 64...'

Check out a FLM documentary below, 'Personal Demons' created by 32 young people aged 12-18 from Rotherham.


Personal Demons from First Light Movies on Vimeo.