Environmental docs and access

The most interesting recent environmental documentaries have quietly changed the working relationship between filmmakers and the researchers whose work provides the films' subject matter. The old model — filmmakers as external observers, researchers as sources — has been giving way to a model closer to collaborative production, in which the researcher has significant editorial input and the filmmaker has significant field time. The results are documentaries that are both scientifically rigorous and emotionally resonant in ways the older model rarely produced.

The clearest example is a specific documentary released last year that spent three years embedded with a marine biology team studying reef ecosystems in the Indian Ocean. The film's access to the science was possible only because the biologists had significant editorial input, and the biologists agreed to the editorial input because the filmmakers were willing to spend the three years actually understanding the science. That reciprocal commitment produced a documentary that neither party could have made alone.

The pattern is not confined to marine biology. Recent documentaries on forest fire ecology, on Arctic ice loss, on migratory bird populations have all involved similar reciprocal working relationships, and the films have been noticeably stronger than the previous generation of environmental documentary as a result. The old model — the filmmaker parachutes in for a two-week shoot, the science is summarised by voiceover, the researchers are used as talking heads — is not dead, but it is producing weaker documentaries than the collaborative model.

The critique of the collaborative model is a fair one about editorial independence. When the researcher has editorial input, the film's ability to critically engage the science is reduced, and the potential for the film to become a promotional vehicle for the research is real. That is a legitimate concern, and the best examples of the collaborative model manage the concern by locking in editorial roles in writing before principal photography, with clear boundaries about what the researcher can and cannot influence.

What the collaborative model demonstrates, more broadly, is that documentary access is best treated as a relationship rather than as a transaction. That has always been true in principle. What is new is the willingness of both filmmakers and researchers to actually structure their working relationships that way, and the resulting documentaries are the most useful environmental journalism the medium has produced in decades. Expect the model to spread beyond environmental documentary within five years. The next generation of health-care documentaries, in particular, is likely to look similar.