One of the panels at this year's CPH:CONFERENCE was entitled “What’s Next? Future Perspectives on the Shifting Eco-System of the Creative Documentary”, featuring director-producer Andreas Dalsgaard, of Denmark’s Elk Film; Dutch producer Barbara Truyen, of EPIC Docs, who previously worked as commissioning editor at VPRO and is the chairwoman of the EBU’s TV Documentary Experts Group; and Jon-Sesrie Goff, in charge of the JustFilms initiative at the Ford Foundation. The talk was moderated by Chris White, producer at American Documentary POV.

White started the discussion by zeroing in on the dire situation for US public broadcasters since Congress shut down funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which served nearly 360 television stations and 1,200 radio stations. Goff said that this change is not only budgetary, but also structural, and can’t be replaced by philanthropy such as that which his foundation provides.

“Lots of us have orientated our careers and our practices around a model that no longer exist,” Goff said. “We have to envision a new way of thinking about media and the public interest that is no longer dependent on the previous model.”

In Europe, there are big cuts afoot, too. In the Netherlands, broadcaster funding for documentaries has decreased by 20%. “This is huge, and it is happening everywhere,” Truyen said. But she sees an opportunity in it: “What a public broadcaster needs to do is to nurture young talent and creativity, and experiment.”

She also highlighted the need to join forces between different stakeholders, citing how Nordic public funds and broadcasters have announced a joint call for documentaries (which Cineuropa will report on imminently).

“That's a big sign, and we need to do that everywhere in Europe,” she said, mentioning how Creative Europe – MEDIA, Eurimages and the EBU have pooled their resources to develop fiction series. “Why wouldn’t we do that for documentaries, too?” she wondered.

Dalsgaard, whose recent productions include the Sundance-selected series The Oligarch and the Art Dealer, said that it has still not been sold in the USA, and in Europe, territorial rights limit it. “If we sell rights to ARTE, they now also cover Spain, Poland and Italy, so it is hard to sell it there,” he said. “It can be financially very difficult because the way we finance things is entirely connected to territories.”

This will become even harder with the introduction of Euro Plus, ARTE’s planned pan-European streaming service, which would cover all EU territories. “If they want to be a big European streamer, then they want to own the rights, and you need to share the rights. That's a different model: maybe it could be something like pay per view,” Truyen suggested.

She also argued that at events such as CPH:FORUM, the roles should be reversed – instead of paying broadcasters to come and provide feedback to project teams, it’s the projects that should get more support and really be workshopped by all sides.

There are clearly many and various models of financing, but they often exclude each other owing to regulations. Dalsgaard asked: “How are we going to make all of these different financing things work together, such as private equity, public broadcasters and film funds?”

Truyen said: “We really need to make it the responsibility of all of us together: not financers, filmmakers and producers on different sides of the table. Instead, it's one, documentary, table, and we need to get that documentary table going.”

White asked if a trans-Atlantic collaboration could contribute to a better system, to which Goff said, “There are opportunities from conception to distribution. Collective funding models are being explored, both in the USA and collaboratively across the pond. I think documentary has always been about conversation, and we haven’t done a great job with that. We really need to start having a ‘public square’ in this digital space.”

Dalsgaard concluded with a recollection of his first outing at IDFA 25 years ago, when commissioning editors were complaining about how the business was worse than it used to be. “We have to remember that it's constantly changing, and it's constantly challenging,” he said.