Firelight Media President Marcia Smith on What Comes Next
Below is the text from Firelight Media Co-Founder and President Marcia Smith’s acceptance speech for her Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by DOC NYC at their Visionaries Tribute event on November 13, 2024, at Gotham Hall.
Thank you, Maori [Karmael Holmes], for that lovely introduction, and for the inspiration of your work. And good afternoon, everyone.
First, let me thank Thom Powers, Raphaela Neihausen, Jaie Laplante, and the entire DOC NYC team for this tremendous and humbling honor.
DOC NYC has been a longtime collaborator and supporter of Firelight Media. In fact, at this year’s festival, we’ll premiere a new series of eight documentary shorts called In the Making, produced in partnership with PBS’ American Masters, that traces the emergence of artists destined to become cultural icons. And I’m proud to say that eight new projects directed by Firelight Media-supported filmmakers, including series, features, and short films, will be screened throughout this year’s festival.
I stand before you with tremendous gratitude for this recognition for me and for the work of our organization. But I also have to say — the timing of this important annual gathering feels a little heavy.
The last couple of years have been challenging ones in our field. For some of us, the challenges feel fresh and burning; while for others, they are on repeat. As I’m fond of saying, documentary filmmakers of color, the constituency Firelight has supported for nearly a quarter century, are the miner’s canary. For most of us, there was no “golden age of documentaries.” So if you want to see what an ecosystem under stress looks like, look to our experience. We struggle to secure reasonable project budgets. The stories we know to be essential are often viewed as marginal, and we ourselves are seen as risky almost by definition. That’s where filmmakers of color have been, but that’s where the whole field is now.
In the last few years, many of us have spent many hours talking and worrying about the crisis in distribution that has taken hold in the industry. Filmmakers and our allies in the industry have faced uncertainty and the pain of a changing economy that feels far from our control. Friends have been laid off; whole doc divisions eliminated or consolidated; budgets have shrunk and juicy festival sales have been few and far between.
Most importantly, the range of subject matter that is seen as deserving of support has narrowed. You know the old saying in broadcast news, “if it bleeds, it leads”? Well, today, the doc equivalent might be, “if it’s true crime, scandal, or celebrity, it just might sell.” These are the things we talked about over the last few years. These were the worries of 2023 and early 2024. And that was before the election.
Now, this week, when we think about the future of the field, things seem much more stark. There’s the prospect of continued contraction and even further narrowing of priorities on the commercial side of the sector. But now, public television, which, quiet as it’s kept, has long been the biggest single distributor of independent documentaries, will face the greatest threat since its founding in 1967.
Even more, our fears now are more visceral. They are less about job security or career survival, and more about actual, literal survival. We fear for ourselves, our friends, and our neighbors. We wonder who of us will be targeted first. And we wonder if our allies will be there when our time comes.
This is, of course, a moment of challenge for the entire country. For those of us in the field of documentary, the moment presents an acute challenge — but also an opportunity and an obligation. After all, we are the ones who wield images and sound to tell real stories that enlighten and inspire, stories that powerfully influence how and whether we see humanity in one another. We are the ones who believe that documentaries can truly change the world.
The great Toni Morrison wrote of her despair following the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. She confided to a friend that she found herself depressed, paralyzed, and unable to work. Her friend’s response pulled her up short. He shouted, “No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”
Jolted, Morrison built on that idea of the imperative for artists at times of crisis. “There is no time for despair,” she wrote, “no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language,” and to add my words to Morrison’s, we make films. “That,” Morrison wrote, “is how civilizations heal.”
None of us knows exactly how this next period of American history will play out. But I’m certain that regardless of position in the field, we will all have moments when we will have to be clear on our values and understand what it is our job to do.
Some of you have power over what stories get funded, commissioned, exhibited, or distributed; which get marked as important or worthy of investment. Your job is to be courageous when it feels risky. Fight for the stories and storytellers we need to hear. Fight for filmmakers with bold visions and the stories we’ve never seen, rather than stories we believe an audience will watch because they’ve watched ten others like it. Take stock of whose voices you hear the loudest, and whose perspectives are left out. Your position will become less comfortable. We’re going to need you to withstand that discomfort.
To the filmmakers in the room: do your job. As Morrison says, this is precisely the time when artists go to work. Fight to tell the stories you know to be essential, even when you are told they are not marketable; that they are too “niche,” or too inflammatory, or too risky. Fight to continue to make work however you need to do that. More than ever, we need your stories to illuminate the truth and inspire us; to contextualize this moment in the long arc of history.
I’m proud to share with you that Firelight Media will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2025. In that time, we have had the privilege of supporting over 250 filmmakers. If leading Firelight Media has taught me anything, it’s that there is an abundance of underestimated and under-resourced talent in this field. Creators with both vision and capacity to harness critical narratives in service to us all, if they have the resources they need to execute that vision.
As I step aside from my leadership role in the new year when a new president for Firelight Media is identified, I am confident that the makers who are at the heart of this industry — all the makers but particularly filmmakers of color — will persevere — because we always have.
I know that because I as an individual, and Firelight as an organization, stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. We don’t often talk about them as documentary pioneers. But we stand on the shoulders of Zora Neale Hurston, who documented Black cultural practices on film; Thurgood Marshall, who documented disparate conditions between Black and white schools on film to build the case for desegregation; and Solomon Sir Jones, who documented life in towns incorporated by Black people in Oklahoma in the 1920s on film. We stand on the shoulders of Bill Greaves, Henry Hampton, Lourdes Portillo, Loni Ding, and Marlon Riggs, who forged professional paths where none existed; on the shoulders of pioneering film organizations founded by people of color: Third World Newsreel, founded here in New York 1968; and on the west coast, Visual Communications, founded 1970; Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, founded 1983; all still around, all still doing vital work.
In closing, I want to thank my family, without whom I would not be here today: my partner in life and all things, Stanley Nelson. And our children, Kai and Nola are here; our oldest Olivia, who could not make it but is here in spirit. And my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Pamela.
To my Firelight family — our board and staff members who join us today, I share this honor with each of you, and also with the many people in this room who have been a part of Firelight programs over the years. If you’re one of the more than 250 filmmakers we have had the privilege to support, or you’ve been a mentor, or a speaker, or a panelist, or all three, if you’ve been a funder or supporter, please stand.
If you are part of or a supporter of one of the many newer organizations and collectives, please stand. And if you don’t know the names of these groups, you should: Brown Girls Doc Mafia; A-Doc, the Asian American Documentary Network; the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective; AXS Film Fund; Sisters in Cinema; Color Congress; the Black Documentary Collective; Muslim Filmmakers; Third Horizon; Borderlands Studios; Rada Studio. And know that there are many, many more outside of this room today.
I’ll end on another note from Toni Morrison that applies to all of us in this room, regardless of where we sit in this field: “Just remember,” she wrote, “that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
Let us all struggle to do our real jobs. Thank you.
Firelight Media celebrates 25 years of changing the story in 2025. Donate now in support of our work and our community of filmmakers.
