Content Tabs
Most documentary training teaches you how to get the story. This course asks whether it was ever yours to take.
This is a one-day intensive in treating the person in front of the camera as a collaborator and co-author, not as material. Designed for documentary filmmakers, factual producers, journalists, researchers, commissioners and development executives at all career stages, the course examines how power, positionality and authorship shape documentary storytelling and how the craft can match the ethics, particularly when working across cultural difference.
The course is led by Dr Tawia Abbam, who comes to documentary from outside the industry: two decades in human rights, development and anti-racism work across Latin America, Europe and Asia, sitting with communities whose stories, and much else, get taken from them. A guest session is led by multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Sonido Sewornu.
Participants will complete a short pre-course submission analysing a documentary or filmed interview involving storytelling across cultural difference, which forms part of the day’s working material and discussion.
Across six modules you work through relationship-first interviewing, co-ownership models, consent-based production and approaches rooted in decolonial and human-rights frameworks. You leave able to do it, not just describe it.
The course is designed for documentary filmmakers, factual producers, journalists, researchers, commissioners and development executives at all career stages.
Please complete the application form via the button at the top of the page.
