10 Documakers to Watch

Now marking its third year, Variety’s annual 10 Documakers to Watch list has already seen two of its previous honorees go on to win Oscars, while another two have won Emmys. As much as we’d love to take credit for our foresight, the fact of the matter is that the nonfiction world has become a fount of exciting and remarkable new voices, and this year presented us with so many worthy names that selecting a list of 10 was a steep challenge — but these filmmakers stood out for their boldness, uniqueness, and promise.

For the first time this year, five of Variety’s Documaker honorees will be present for a panel at Independent Filmmaker Project’s IFP Week, with Variety’s Senior Film and Media Editor Brent Lang moderating a discussion, “Making Documentaries in the Current Political Landscape,” on Tuesday, Sept. 19 at IFP Week in New York.

“Film Week in general is an amazing co-production market for projects; not just docs and narrative features, but also web series and interactive projects,” says IFP executive director Joana Vicente. “And almost half of the projects are nonfiction, so it’s always been a priority for us to focus on documentary filmmaking.”

The panel will be held at 5:00 pm at the IFP Media Center in Brooklyn. For full details, please visit IFP.

Erika Cohn

“The Judge”

It was back in 2012, during filming for her documentary debut “In Football We Trust,” that Cohn first met Kholoud Al-Faqih while studying Islamic feminism and teaching film in Israel and Palestine. The result? A vérité legal drama about Judge Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari’a court in the Middle East.

“It’s hard to know as a documentary filmmaker which project is going to take off and which one is going to find funding,” says Cohn about working on two projects simultaneously. “For the first four years of making “The Judge” I can’t count the number of times we heard no [to financing] and grants, which was so discouraging, but I knew [the film] was important and I had to stay true to my vision.”

ITVS eventually came on board and Cohn took her 300 hours of footage and made it into a 90-minute film, which premiered at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival. “I’m really hoping that this movie leaves viewers with a strong imagery of powerful Muslim women,” she says.

“Often times in the media landscape we are exposed to Muslim women as people who need saving and I think this film shows a very different narrative where you are seeing a very strong, powerful Muslim woman advocating on her own for change within her community.”

– Addie Morfoot

Damon Davis and Sabaah Folayan

“Whose Streets”

In September 2014 artist and activist Folayan went with cinematographer Lucas Alvarado-Farrar to learn the truth behind the dramatic scenes playing out on the news during the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo.

Hearing stories from the community inspired her to embark on her directorial debut with Davis, a fellow artist and a St. Louis resident. The result is an on-the ground, impressionistic look at the Ferguson uprising via original footage, tweets, Instagram, cellphone video and interviews.

“It was not an ordered experience,” Folayan says. “So we wanted the film to reflect that and that it was, and is, a situation bigger than any one of us.” She credits Davis for consistently encouraging her to push away from telling a linear story and aiming toward the abstract. “We wanted to make an artistic expression as well as a historical document.”

While “Whose Streets” is perhaps more relevant than when it debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival, Davis isn’t exactly aiming to preach to anybody but the choir. “It would be great for Trump supporters to see this movie, but this film isn’t really herespecifically to change the minds of people who are adamantly and definitively OK with hating other people,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, I definitely want as many people to see this film as possible, but personally with this film, I wanted to produce a kind of mirror where black people can see themselves and be proud and also know that they are not crazy because they are constantly told that they are wrong.”

– Addie Morfoot

Sara Driver

“Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat”

Driver has long been a staple of New York’s independent film community, as a director of two narrative features and as the longtime collaborator (and partner) of Jim Jarmusch. But it wasn’t until a chance meeting with a friend after Hurricane Sandy that she found inspiration to shoot her first documentary, the Toronto entry “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

“I went to see my friend Alexis Adler,” Driver says of her pal who had lived with the now storied artist when he was a young man in the late 1970s, “and we had a cup of tea, and from clearing out her storage before the storm, she said, ‘I’d forgotten about all the work I’d put away that Jean-Michel left me.’ It was about 60 drawings, pieces of his writing, his old notebooks, and then about 75 photographs she had taken of him when he was 17 or 18 years old.”

Seeing these old, previously unseen materials sparked Driver’s imagination, and she initially planned to use them for a 20-minute short. The idea kept growing, however, and when Driver became frustrated trying to pin down funding for a narrative feature, she went all in: “I just bought a camera and started shooting, then spent the last four years putting it together.”
“Boom” was facilitated by the fact that Driver herself had been a part of Basquiat’s close-knit scene. “We all knew each other, it wasn’t that big of a community,” Driver says.

Basquiat, who died in 1988 at age 27, has been the subject of several docs already, but Driver saw particular value in focusing entirely on him before fame and recognition came his way. “I thought of it more of an essay film. Jean had already created his whole university of who he was going to be influenced by.”

– Andrew Barker

Bryan Fogel

“Icarus”

Fogel set out to make a documentary investigating performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and in the process, he unintentionally stumbled upon and uncovered corruption in the highest levels of Russia.

The eventual exposure began with Fogel enlisting Russian doctor Grigory Rodchenkov to help him with a study to prove loopholes in anti-doping tests for his documentary, “Icarus.” After fostering a year and a half-long relationship, Fogel discovered Rodchenkov was the mastermind behind Russia’s state-sanctioned Olympic doping program.

As the news came out and the story unfolded, allegations were being traced back to Russian President Vladimir Putin. When Rodchenkov decided to come forward with his story, he began to fear for his life, and Fogel says the project quickly turned from filmmaking into “navigating how to keep somebody alive.”

“This was a series of crisis after crisis after crisis,” Fogel says. “It was not about filmmaking, it was about real life and death.” Though the initial narrative changed, backing out of bringing this story forward was never an option, Fogel says. “I had a man’s life in my hands, and I was going to do everything that I could to help him.”

“Icarus” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Netflix bought it for a princely $5 million, and Fogel says he raced to complete the film in time. “We had literally delivered the print that we were going to show at 8 that morning for an 11 a.m. screening.” Once it was acquired by Netflix, Fogel spent four months refining the film before it began streaming. “I was not done making the movie and I saw a thousand things I wanted to make better.”

– Rebecca Rubin

Yance Ford

“Strong Island”

For the past several years Ford’s “Strong Island” has been considered a shoo-in for the Sundance Film Festival. Finally, 10 years after announcing the commencement of the project, the doc arrived in Park City last January. In March, Netflix acquired the film about the senseless 1992 killing of Ford’s brother William and how the murder wreaked havoc on the family. While it may sound like a typical true-crime doc, it’s not.

“When I started making the film, I thought that the question was going to be, ‘What happened?’,” Ford says. “But the answer to that question is easily arrived at.” So instead of investigating his brother’s known murderer, who was set free by an all-white grand jury, Ford artistically and seamlessly explores grief, race, the justice system and never-ending agony.
It would be considered an achievement for any filmmaker, but for Ford — a first-time helmer — it’s a triumph.

In addition to giving himself 10 years to get the film “right,” he also credits part of the film’s success to his tenure at PBS’ documentary series POV where he served as a series producer and helped garner more than 16 Emmy nominations. “I had a story that I wanted to tell and I felt like, ‘God damn it! If the hundreds of filmmakers that I’m helping figured out how to take the risk they needed to make their work, what the hell am I still doing in my office? I’ve gotta go and make my movie!’”

– Addie Morfoot

Karam Gill

“G Funk”

Growing up in Los Angeles in the early aughts, “G Funk” writer and director Gill enjoyed “shooting some things, reading, and storytelling in general,” but didn’t know the kinds of films he wanted to make until he got to know iconic West Coast rapper and producer Warren G.
After working with Warren in a “creative director” role, Gill decided he wanted to write his fellow artist’s autobiography. “I was hanging out with Warren and Snoop and they started playing the Isley Brothers and ‘70s soul music,” Gill says. “I felt like I got a history lesson in African-American music, and that’s when I realized that the era of music was so much deeper and there was a generational evolution.”

Gill spent about a year and a half fleshing out his idea for the “visual essay” that became “G Funk,” which celebrates both early-’90s Southern California hip-hop and the evolution of African-American culture.

He pitched the idea to Warren over a 30-minute presentation that included 20 written pages including which artists he wanted to profile, from Warren himself, to Snoop, Dr. Dre and Nate Dogg. Gill says Warren told him immediately that he was into it and attached himself to help bring in other producers.

“G Funk” went into production while Gill was still enrolled in an undergraduate program at Chapman University. Being so young and having so much time ahead to still shape his career is exciting because there are a “wide range of stories” he wants to tell. “I think that as a filmmaker, you should naturally gravitate towards stories,” Gill says. “But you should also have an open mind. There’s something incredible about developing your own stuff, but there’s something beautiful about being able to listen to something someone else is passionate about and being able to add your voice to that.”

– Danielle Turchiano

Kitty Green

“Casting JonBenet”

Australian filmmaker Green had only a few directing credits to her name when her latest feature film “Casting JonBenet” was picked up by Netflix before its world premiere at Sundance. The film continued the audition tape framework laid out by her 2015 short, “The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul,” which won a jury prize at Sundance and combined narrative and documentary filmmaking.

“Because I studied narrative filmmaking, I like having a certain amount of control over the frame and production design,” Green says. “I like those sort of elements that you get control over in fiction, and I want to continue to somehow incorporate those elements into my films if I can.”

“Casting JonBenet” took a little under two years to complete. “We had the original treatment, and the final film is remarkably similar to that,” she says. “It was quite well-structured and it was about slotting in the human story from the authentic material to a preconceived structure.”

Although Green remembers being fascinated by JonBenet Ramsey’s 1996 murder case as a child, she chose the story to fit the casting conceit, since she felt that for the framework to function, the film would need a central mystery. “Casting JonBenet” is not so much about the case itself, however, as the community of Boulder, Colo., and why people continue to obsess over Ramsey’s case. “My interest in JonBenet stemmed out of the way that Patsy Ramsey, her mother, was treated by the media and how the public viewed her and almost made a villain out of her straight away,” Green says.

– Erin Nyren

Amanda Lipitz

“Step”

A crowd-pleasing, upbeat, well-made docu with a relevant story is not easy to come by. This year, Lipitz’s “Step” is that film.

Fox Searchlight reportedly paid a mid seven-figure sum for the doc about an all girls’ public charter school’s step dance team in inner-city Baltimore. Each student is attempting to become the first in her family to attend college while also striving to win a step competition.
A Tony-winning producer, Lipitz initially conceived “Step” as a short doc to raise awareness for the school. She had made more than 30 shorts for nonprofit organizations and as a Baltimore native, wanted to give back to her hometown. But that plan changed when she saw two girls stepping.

“They said to me, ‘You have to see us step … and bring your camera.’” That was back in 2009 when the girls of “Step” were just 11. “When they started stepping it’s exactly what happens in any great musical on Broadway,” Lipitz says. “The feelings are so overwhelming that instead of speaking, the characters show you all their fears, their hopes and their dreams through music and movement.”

While she always intended for the docu to be more than just a story about a dance competition, in 2015 when 25-year-old Baltimore resident Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained in police custody the film’s trajectory changed. “People were calling me saying, ‘Baltimore is so dangerous. It’s the most dangerous city in America.’ I began to feel a kind of protective instinct for my hometown. There is so much good that is happening here.

– Addie Morfoot

Ceyda Torun

“Kedi”

Everyone loves a good cat video, and most people love their hometown. Torun was able to harness both of those loves with her film “Kedi,” which profiles seven street cats living in her hometown of Istanbul.

“There are overlapping aspects of both [narrative and documentary] and I approached ‘Kedi’ as if it were a hybrid of both a documentary and a narrative, I guess because I didn’t have previous knowledge of making documentary film,” she says. “So we approached this as if it were a narrative film”

Working on “Kedi” taught her a lot about the unpredictability and flexibility inherent with working in the genre, but the public reception to the film was what surprised her the most. Initially, Torun thought that the European market would be “Kedi’s” best bet. But many festivals turned her down, and it was the U.S. that provided the first break and biggest fan base.

“It is astonishing, especially because it’s a foreign-language documentary. It takes place in a part of the world that people don’t immediately have an affinity for, it’s not like Paris. In the U.S. the very first festival we screened at was a tiny festival in Massachusetts called the Salem Film Festival. It opened to a packed house and people went crazy for the film. It was the proof that I needed to keep holding on and say we didn’t make a complete mistake making the film the way we did.”

— Matthew Fernandez

Nanfu Wang

“I Am Another You”

In 2012 Wang was in her first year at New York University’s graduate documentary program when she met Dylan Olsen, a charismatic young drifter who left a comfortable home and loving family for a life of intentional homelessness. He would eventually become the subject of her second doc, “I Am Another You.”

“I didn’t think the story would ever become a feature,” says Wang, who moved to the U.S. from China in 2011. “I had never made a documentary, so I wasn’t so ambitious to think that the first thing I shot would become a feature. I was just obsessed with documenting things.”

So Wang put “I Am Another You” on the backburner and embarked on another project in 2013 about Chinese dissident. The result was “Hooligan Sparrow,” which premiered at Sundance in 2016 and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. The movie not only put Wang on the documentary map as one of nonfiction’s most intrepid, but also allowed her the directors opportunity to return to “I Am Another You.”

“I got the chance to go to Utah with ‘Hooligan’ for a Sundance Labs,” Wang says. “That’s where Dylan’s family lives, so every time I’d go out there I’d do shoots.”

Despite recently becoming a mother, Wang, has two docus in production. One focuses on human rights in Cuba while the other is about China, a country she hasn’t returned to since the release of “Hooligan Sparrow.”

“It’s still uncertain what would happen if I went back, but hopefully soon I will be able to.”

– Addie Morfoot