Trojan Horse Trend Running Strong at Sundance

I’m just back from the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where I adhered to a lean diet of one documentary per day and no narrative films, intent on meeting and mingling with as many world-class documentary filmmakers as possible. Of the sixteen documentaries in U.S. Competition, ten were character-driven stories, five were essay or theme-based films, and one was an interesting portrait.  And of the eleven documentary films that took home awards, ten were character-driven films! It seems that fifteen years after the theatrical success of Hoop Dreams (1994), the trend in character-driven documentaries is clearly still surging. 

When the documentary program director Cara Mertes introduced the panelists at Monday’s Cinema Cafe-two writers and a grants administrator-I was initially disappointed.   Grrr, grumbled my doc-hungry mind, I could be watching Sam Green’s new doc The World’s Largest Shopping Mall.

But my ears perked up when author Samantha Power, a Times magazine columnist who was featured in the documentary Sergio, likened a good story to a Trojan horse.  Whether in print or film, she said, you needed an appealing vehicle in which to cloak your message in order to penetrate past the guarded mindset of your audience.

IDEAL EDITORIAL STRATEGY

I focus most of my time as an editor helping directors adapt screenwriting techniques to structure documentary stories that are as fun to watch as narrative films.  Sometimes the first task is convincing directors why a character-driven structure can be an ideal editorial strategy.  Why is it so important to tell a story, anyway?  First, it will entertain your audience.  The adventures of a protagonist in search of a contemporary holy grail-whether it’s winning an election, climbing Mt. Everest or finding the right nursing home for one’s ailing mother-captivate us.  In particular, the pacing set by Aristotle’s classic three-act structure has an uncanny ability to evoke our emotional response and catalyze our capacity as humans to make meaning from a situation.   Bottom line: if you want to keep your viewers glued to the screen, telling a cohesive story is your best bet.

 

Second, let’s admit it, we filmmakers want to convey our vision.  The story is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.   Whether your medicine is an expose, a political solution or an environmental wake-up call, climbing onto a soapbox with your prescription for society’s ills won’t do–unless you conceal your soapbox within a Trojan horse. 

 

Third, and now we’re getting very practical, it’s important to tell a story because that’s what acquisition editors and funders want.  So if your goal is to get your project funded and broadcast, the best film synopsis describes a character in hot pursuit of a goal. 

— Karen Everett