by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
Cathy Henkel is a producer, director, academic and researcher. She brings all of those skills to bear on her documentary projects, and recently has been looking into what it takes to navigate an independent path as a filmmaker. In a session called Riding the Freedom Streams at this year`s Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), she invited documentary makers to brave the waters of a freer path.
Starting off with her nautical theme, Henkel said that you have to decide what kind of vessel you want your business to be.
One option is to wade into the main stream, the province of vessels she called the Good Ship Enterprise. The AIDC is primarily devoted to established and wannabe Enterprise ships. These businesses get their money from three main sources: broadcast pre-sales and distribution advances, government (grants or investments), and the Producer Offset. They are larger businesses with larger staff and larger overheads, and they have worked out how to get deals with the broadcasters and distributors, whose pre-sales and advances are needed to trigger government money.
