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The Price of Passion: Addressing the Mental Health of Documentary Filmmakers
An image from "The Price of Passion" Sustainability and scarcity of opportunity have been predominant challenges of a documentary career since the early days of the form, but sustaining mental health has been a significant one as well. Launched in 2021 by a group of documentary filmmakers and mental-health professionals, DocuMentality evolved out of a series of revelatory presentations and conversations–first at IDA’s Getting Real conference in 2018, then a year later, over the course of a two-week online discussion entitled Mental Health and the Documentary Business, hosted by long-running global forum The D-Word. This past May, the DocuMentality team released its first report: The Price of Passion: How Our Love for Documentary Filmmaking Impacts Our Mental Health, the product of a year of research drawing upon the testimonials of participants in 21 focus groups across three countries: the US, the UK and Canada.
The report reveals a litany of all-too-familiar conditions affecting the documentary field, including problematic power dynamics between filmmaking teams and funders, distributors, exhibitors and commissioning editors; tension within filmmaking teams; duty of care for participants and audiences; family-work balance; isolation and loneliness; lack of resources to address mental health; and identity-specific experiences among marginalized constituencies.
The genesis of the report can be traced back to 2019, when American documentary filmmaker Andrew Berends (The Blood of my Brother, When Adnan Comes Home) died by suicide–a tragedy that spurred The D-Word community into action. D-Word co-hosts Doug Block, Marjan Safinia, Erica Ginsberg and Peter Gerrard reached out to Edinburgh, Scotland-based filmmaker-turned-psychotherapist Rebecca Day to moderate a two-week-long forum on mental health. A decade or so into her filmmaking career, having witnessed the psychological and emotional toll such a career path can take, Day launched a parallel career as a psychotherapist, and, following years of training, started Film in Mind in 2018 to serve as a psychotherapeutic infrastructure for the documentary community in the UK.
Early on in the session, one participant disclosed a suicide attempt. “We were all holding our breath for a minute,” Safinia recalls, “but what cascaded out of that was this space of honesty. There’s nothing radical or new about this topic. Anyone who’s been doing this work has been suffering from mental health challenges related to it for a very long time…What we were hoping to do was normalize this as an occupational hazard. If we can normalize talking about it, without it being a ding on your professional capacity, it would really help us move the ball forward.”
The D-Word team connected Day with Malikkah Rollins, DOC NYC’s director of industry and education, who has years of experience as a licensed social worker and mental health advocate, and in 2021 DocuMentality was born. Over the next couple of years, the DocuMentality team made presentations at festivals and documentary events around the world. (These were undertaken in partnership with Documentary Organization of Canada, Documentary Film Council and Scottish Documentary Institute, and with funding from American Documentary/POV, Screen Scotland, British Film Institute, Doc Society and Canada Media Fund.) Through this work, Day and Rollins developed the guidelines and research template in 2022 and 2023 that would lead to The Price of Passion.
Rollins recalls how struck she was, when she first entered the documentary field several years ago, by how “deeply systemic and dysfunctional so many issues are that impact documentary filmmakers when it comes to their mental health and well-being that are not addressed…Filmmakers have to carry tremendous responsibility…with zero training when it comes to mental-health issues.”
As lead facilitators, Day and Rollins worked with a mental-health researcher to craft the format and guidelines for the focus-group sessions that would serve as the foundation for the study. “We wanted to look internally at filmmakers’ mental health and well-being, but also, what were the external forces coming at them that made their lives really difficult?” Rollins explains. “That was really important for us, that we had someone guiding us,” Day adds, in a separate video call. “Despite our own mental-health training, we needed that independent voice.”
In imagining the focus groups, Day and Rollins were also intent on accommodating identity-specific experiences, and, accordingly, creating the opportunity for participants to align themselves with their respective identities. “That was about creating safe spaces,” Day explains. “So it was really intentional, just thinking about what would each group need to feel as comfortable as possible in sharing what we’re asking them to share with us.”
“We didn’t choose the groups for them,“ Rollins adds, “but they had the option to be in groups of BIPOC filmmakers, women-identified filmmakers, filmmakers who identified as having a disability, Indigenous filmmakers, French-speaking, etc. We also chose facilitators who reflected those identities.”
As Day and Rollins note, the dynamics with respect to identity were noticeably different among the UK, US and Canadian focus groups. “We [in the UK] have a deep colonial past to reckon with,” Day points out. “We are seeing changes, but a lot of people are saying that this industry still doesn’t feel like a safe place for filmmakers of color, filmmakers with disabilities and the queer filmmaking community. There’s a lot of work in different pockets happening that are trying to build these communities up, but that often happens on the fringes of the industry; it’s not happening so readily within the industry.”
Rollins noted a stark contrast in terms of systemic racism in the UK versus the US. “Some of the systems of oppression in the UK are quite different than I know of here,” she observes. “There seemed to be so few people of color who work in the documentary funding world in the UK who had any positions of power…So that was surprising, just to hear about their own system and how deeply oppressed they felt. Some of the racism was way more blatant than you tend to hear about in America.”
While the anecdotal findings of The Price of Passion didn’t yield stunning revelations about the state of the field in terms of mental wellness, the report can serve as a touchstone for deeper inquiry and further action.
Filmmakers who participated in the project offered a robust litany of positive pathways for creating a more accommodating ecosystem. Many of these recommendations centered around the power dynamics between gatekeepers–funders, commissioners, distributors–and filmmakers. Funding scarcity exacerbates this imbalance, and even those projects that manage to secure funding face issues of creative control amid the preeminence of market-driven economics. The participants called for transparency and accountability on the funding side and a greater say-so on the creator side in the DEI composition of the gatekeeping apparatus.
Participants also recommended line items for mental health support in production budgets. This support could take the form of on-call therapists, trauma experts, or conflict-resolution managers; mental health training sessions for filmmakers; and scheduled time for check-ins, debriefs and decompression.
Safinia attests, “People are reaching out, saying, ‘How do we build the findings and recommendation from this report into our fellowship?’ We don’t have all the answers for that, but the very fact that organizations are now reaching out to us to collaboratively figure out ways that it can fit into their work means that the work has had the success that we wanted, which is to make this something that is not taboo. We’re trying to create the conditions in which we can support people to come up with solutions that make sense in their individual spaces.”
“A big part of what we’re trying to do,” Block adds, ”aside from destigmatizing the whole conversation around mental health and well-being, is to get it on the radar of the industry and make organizations understand this is really important and needs to be considered.”
In the months since it was published, The Price of Passion has caught the attention of not only the documentary ecosystem, but the mental-wellness community as well. Rollins and Day have both fielded calls from many mental-health professionals expressing interest in getting more involved. “I think the impact is incredible gratitude,” Rollins asserts. “It’s now part of the general culture to talk much more about mental health and well-being, and to use our report hopefully as a launching point. But a report is part one, like a 30,000 foot view. Part two to part 100 is how to actually take the education and the learning and deepen it [for] filmmakers so they’re living it every day of their lives.”
Two months after The Price of Passion was released, Day developed a Film Supervision initiative at Film in Mind As part of this initiative, a corps of therapeutic practitioners (including Rollins)–all of whom have some background in documentary–will work with filmmaking teams to process the emotional, ethical and creative quandaries inherent in their projects. According to Rollins, “We are getting many more requests for information about trauma-informed filmmaking: what that means, what goes into it, how they can be more cognizant, more aware. They really want help and guidance. And I think this is a beginning. There’s much, much more to do. What’s important now, after the report, is to put specific practices into place to make the learning real for filmmakers.”
“Film supervision is based on a support model that exists in the therapeutic world,” Day explains. “It’s really looking at a filmmaker’s duty of care and responsibilities to their participants and to audiences, and we’re working with them on ethical dilemmas, accountability, their awareness as a filmmaker—what they bring, the power dynamics, all of those things that come into the filmmaking conversation. It’s a collaborative and guided relationship with the filmmaker, and very film-focused and career-focused.”
The DocuMentality team has also spotlighted ethics as a key component in addressing mental health. “I think there’s a real overlap between ethics and mental health and well-being,” Rollins asserts. “So many filmmakers struggle with ethical dilemmas that cause them tremendous fear and grief and isolation and confusion. I really am excited about digging deep into those ethical dilemmas, and bringing that hopefully to industry funders and other institutions that can really provide training to not just filmmakers, but also people who fund films, people who purchase films. It is such a thorny area, and one where true harm can be done.”
The conversations around ethics and documentary filmmaking have most acutely centered around filmmaker-participant relationships. Questions of compensation, boundary-setting, and duty of care once the film has been released have come to the forefront in recent years, thanks to initiatives like the Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG), Peace Is Loud (with whom Rollins and Day have also worked), and Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance, which evolved from Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s 2022 documentary Subject. One director in the report shared, “I feel I am opening the gates to criticism for a vulnerable person, making public the most salacious private aspects of their lives. We’re not supported to help them think through what that will mean. In fact, the industry as a whole actually wants to disregard that because it’s kind of directly threatening to an unencumbered release of a film.”
Other next steps—contingent on funding, of course—that the DocuMentality team hopes to pursue include building bridges with The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia Journalism School, with whom DocuMentality has had initial conversations; compiling and posting a list of therapists; and testing out partnerships with film schools. Day has noticed a growing trend of filmmakers exploring psychotherapy as a parallel profession. “I get approached by filmmakers-turned-therapists at least once a month,” she maintains. “There are a lot of people who are in their training right now. I think in five years to come, we could probably have a database of therapists in the hundreds, who all have filmmaking experience.”
“A lot of it is about raising awareness,” Day notes. “It’s about really validating experiences for filmmakers, so they can use that also as support, as guidance, as motivation for how to do things differently, how to advocate for themselves and ask for things. It’s a catalyst for the next steps, which is opening that up to the wider industry and doing more research, but also bringing people together.”
Tom White is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor.
