Till now, as independent filmmakers (especially of non-fiction), there have always been gatekeepers between us and our audience. In the UK, they’ve been the primary broadcasting channels. For anything we made to have stood a chance of getting any decent kind of viewership – in essence, to have had any voice at all – a handful of commissioning editors and the whims of their tastes (or the format du jour of those channels) would have to have given their approval. Not only did they have veto over what gets seen, but ultimately – what gets made. And till now we’ve been left with the conundrum of making what they want us to make if we’re going to stand a chance of obtaining audience, or making what we want to make and resigning ourselves to the idea of relative obscurity.
Ultimately, this has made us ‘independent’ filmmakers passive, subservient. And what’s more, it’s totally dictated what audiences expect to see. The entire process has been mediated, and rather than being free to express ourselves, as filmmakers we have become a permission culture waiting for the acceptance of the powerful few.
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