Doc workers

For most of them it's a labor of love.  They know they won't get the audiences or the media coverage of feature films, or even be shown in many theaters. Many times documentary filmmakers don't even recoup the costs of production. They are not part of the Hollywood dream machine, letting us escape into the happy endings of romantic comedies or the cathartic adventures of fictional adventure and the supernatural.

Instead, they ask us to look at reality -- or at least the reality of the filmmaker -- and they're not popular with theater managers, who schedule films they think will attract young audiences looking for great special effects and lots of explosions.  In my community, we've had to lobby for theater showings of Michael Moore films, and we've had some success with that. The chain that runs the single multiplex in the county didn't think there was an audience for Moore's political films, but the manager responded to numerous requests and got respectable audiences.

The finalists in documentary features for this year's Academy Awards are Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, The Cove, Food, Inc., The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, and Which Way Home.

We've seen some of them at an underground venue, a monthly series run by a local woman who starts her fourth year of showings this month. She has tried showing a couple of feature films, but "they're just not wanted."  Her biggest audiences, 80-plus people, were for a locally made film by and about the Native Americans of the area and for Moore's Sicko. 

The opportunity to discuss films is as big a draw as the chance to see them, she says.  You don't get that in your living room unless you've invited a bunch of friends over for potluck and a DVD.  It makes me yearn for the big city art-house theaters with their lobby tables and espresso bars to encourage conversation.

The Cove, about a Japanese village where dolphins are ruthlessly captured for the tourist industry and killed for their meat, didn't do so well in the local showings, with an audience of only 12.  Perhaps that's because it's available on Netflix.

So is Food, Inc., which compares the pastoral image of farms promoted by the food industry with the reality of the industrial factories which dominate food production. 

The wider availability is reportedly affecting film festivals, a primary venue for the docs. A worldwide economic slump is certainly part of the reason for lower attendance, but another factor is the Internet.  Time- and cash-strapped distributors can find enough information on YouTube and other sites to make decisions without trekking to the festivals.

Which leaves the rest of us in small and rural communities to our own resources and their sometimes questionable legality. There are filmmakers who urge us to show their work to as many people as possible -- and others warn us that Interpol and the FBI are watching and we could be liable for steep fines. Maybe we should be lobbying for nominal distribution fees when our venues are the local senior center or a church.