A Fond Farewell from Marcia Smith
Notes on 25 years of changing the story.
I write today with a mix of joy and melancholy, as this is my final week serving as president of Firelight Media. On June 1, Loira Limbal will take over as president & CEO of what has been a founder-led organization for the last 25 years. I am supremely confident in handing over the reins to Loira and Firelight’s talented and dedicated staff. And yet I know, as I’m sure you do, that times are tough for the documentary field and for the cause of freedom of expression, and so I want to offer some learnings from my two and a half decades in this chair.
When Stanley and I co-founded Firelight in 2000, it was primarily for two reasons. First, we had a young family and were looking to make a sustainable life in documentary filmmaking. Our project-to-project approach to filmmaking could not support a family, but founding and running an organization to support a growing network of documentary filmmakers just might, eventually. The second reason was that the network of documentary filmmakers in need of support was beginning to show up at our front door, literally. Soon after founding the organization, we regularly received home visits, phone calls, and emails from emerging filmmakers asking for our support — as producers, pathfinders, and fellow filmmakers — to help said filmmakers get to the next level, whether that meant filling a funding gap, finding their next project, or getting in touch with a distribution partner. Our desire to heed those calls while also making our own films is what led us to where we are 25 years later, doing all of that and more. Firelight Media now proudly counts more than 250 filmmakers among our fellows, grantees, and alumni community, and our sister production company, Firelight Films, continues to produce award-winning feature documentaries at a pace that would astound our younger selves.
Over the years, we have experienced challenges that are by now familiar to most of you. Occasionally, some politician or another would call for defunding public media, usually because of partisan ideas about who or what constitutes appropriate contributions to the national discourse. Every few years, a new distributor would come onto the scene to “disrupt” the distribution landscape; sometimes, this meant a windfall for well-known documentary filmmakers who already had broad industry support for their work, but those “boom and bust” distributors left untouched the structural challenges that most documentary filmmakers face. With the advent of streaming platforms, there was increasing demand for nonfiction content, but quickly the streamers learned that “content” was cheaper and easier to create than films, so independent producers — particularly those exploring history, social issues, or so-called “niche” personal stories of individuals and communities — were left by the wayside.
Now, as I transition out of my leadership role at Firelight Media, these long-standing challenges to documentary filmmaking are seemingly at an apex. Recent calls to defund public media seem more likely than ever to gain purchase in the halls of Congress. Major sources of funding for independent documentary filmmakers are disappearing before our eyes. And commercial streamers continue to favor cheaply produced “in-house” nonfiction content over independently produced films that offer a real point of view. It is easy to feel discouraged right now and to believe that the documentary industry as we know it will be reduced to a shadow of its former glory.
But the truth is that that “former glory” only ever existed for a precious few documentary filmmakers who gained the trust and confidence of gatekeepers who looked like them — white, able-bodied, and cisgender. For the rest of us, documentary filmmaking has always been a struggle, but we’ve always found a way. We founded nonprofit organizations and collectives to share the work of making the industry more hospitable to so-called “outsiders”; we rose through the ranks of festival and awards juries on our merits; we made sure that whenever we became “the first” of some milestone, we wouldn’t be the last; we passed on word of how to make a life in documentary filmmaking through increasingly strong and mutually-supportive networks of peers.
It is through this network of peers that we will survive these unprecedented attacks on our lives and our work. We know that our films — ones that represent the truth, the lived realities of our communities — resonate with audiences far more than the unscripted content that currently dominates streaming platforms. We know that our historical and investigative works can and do transform the lives of protagonists and audiences alike. We know that documentary films can and do move the arc of the moral universe toward justice, and that is precisely why documentary filmmaking is under attack right now.
As I transition out of my role as president of Firelight Media, I ask you to continue the work that has motivated me and the staff of Firelight Media for the past 25 years. If you’re a filmmaker, continue to make your films — even on a smaller budget than you’re accustomed to, even if a distribution partner isn’t yet assured. Your stories are vital, and you will find a receptive and grateful audience. If you’re a commissioner or funder, remember the films that inspired you to do this work in the first place; do yourself a favor and attend one of the many incredible BIPOC-led festivals coming up this year (my personal favorite is BlackStar) to discover for yourself an astonishing amount of underutilized talent.
And if you have the means to contribute directly to our cause, make a donation to Firelight Media. Your donation will directly benefit our community of filmmakers, whose visionary films are the antidote to this moment of fear and repression. Join us as we liberate our imaginations by remembering that another world is possible; through our filmmakers, we know that that world is already here, waiting to be seen.
With tremendous gratitude for your support,
Marcia Smith
Co-Founder & President
Firelight Media
