Documentaries Making a Difference: communication Effects of environmental film and Television

Documentaries bring to light stories illustrating philanthropic areas of focus. Documentaries raise public awareness, educate, entertain and aim to emotionally connect with audiences. Giving to documentaries increases the leverage of the philanthropic dollar by extending outreach and can significantly enhance the effectiveness of gift-giving programs. Media, and storytelling in particular, is recognised to be the most powerful tool for connecting audiences and communicating important messages.

There are many specific shared areas of interest between donors, grantmakers and filmmakers including education, arts, welfare issues, environment, indigenous stories, social justice, health and youth issues.

Thousands of foundations in the USA use the power of documentary to inspire social justice; donating every year to documentaries as part of a wider strategy for social change. Foundations in Australia have discovered that using documentary as a tool to broaden and sustain awareness of an issue adds value and leverage to their philanthropic initiatives.

Foundations provide essential support to areas of the community that receive little or no support from government. Many documentary filmmakers work in these areas, giving public attention to the overlooked and neglected.

Foundations ask: “What kind of society do we want to live in?” Their grantmaking strategies aim to find concrete and creative answers to this question. Documentary filmmakers ask the same questions as foundations. Their films tell stories from real life, promoting awareness, empathy and understanding, and inspire positive responses. Like foundations, filmmakers strive to make a difference.

Documentaries impact audiences in an emotional and personal way that the written word, reports and statistics cannot. Through storytelling, they have the capacity to communicate common experiences and encourage empathy amongst a wider audience than conventional analytical tools. A report or localised project on a particular issue may affect those already knowledgeable and working in the area. A documentary film about people affected by these issues shares a very human story that a broader audience understands.

Documentaries educate, raise awareness and change opinions on many different issues. Foundations work to transform various problems in our communities. The biggest barriers for change are people’s attitudes. Documentary films tell the stories of real people and common situations, not stereotypes. They educate by stimulating responses. These responses can be deep and long-lasting and may even initiate social change.

Documentaries are effective in visibly highlighting the impact a program is having on a community. Some long-term humanitarian aid projects are seeing the benefits of using documentary as a tool for assessing the impact of aid in targeted communities. The non-profit sector increasingly realises the advantages of using documentary-making in team-building initiatives as well as for creating visual records of funded projects.

Documentaries generate powerful audience responses furthering the objectives of foundations. As well as educating people and changing attitudes, a powerful documentary can lead to increased funding for research, specific programs and charitable organisations. Documentaries encourage people to lobby the government or business to reform laws, industry practices and communicate alternative solutions.

Documentaries empower people within the community. Many groups within our community often do not have the opportunity to tell their own stories. An inability to contribute to public debate can lead to a sense of worthlessness and exclusion. By funding documentary films, foundations can enable unheard stories to be told. As well as empowering the storytellers, documentaries allow other members of the community to recognise diversity and understand difference. The intimacy of a personal story is a powerful means to combat ignorance, create empathy and build understanding.

Media connects us to each other and breaks down isolation. Through documentary we share stories and enhance each other’s worlds. The current international popularity of documentary in the cinema has grown as a result of audience interest in films that touch real-world issues at a time when people are looking for stories that relate to their own experiences. People all over the world are grappling to understand poverty, the environment, world politics and racial divisions. They want to understand and connect with others and share their experiences. Documentaries help build global communities of interest amongst people managing social, cultural and political difficulties or just trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Documentaries are a significant contemporary art form. Documentaries play an important role in the development of a vibrant Australian culture. Like the more traditional creative arts, they help to enliven our artistic culture with new ideas and forms of expression. Documentary is an art form in itself.

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On the deck of a beautiful French ship, sailors are sitting completely still, watching a swallow resting on the planks.

This is the memorable closing shot from a short film called Le tombeau des épuisés (Tomb of the exhausted), surprise winner of the Audience Favourite at the Good Natured Film Festival. With its slow pace, hushed French narration and subtle music, it didn’t feel like a typical conservation film. However, its power lay in its ability to remind the audience of their own experiences; the connections we create with nature, no matter where we are.

When was the last time you were moved by a film or documentary? Can you think of any which have made you reconsider your beliefs, or change your behaviour? What about environment films- when you think of an impactful environment film, what do you think of? Why do you think it made an impact? What is impact?

So… what is impact?

One answer would be change- a beautiful, moving film is distributed to a wide and diverse audience who will duly be inspired and care enough about the cause to take action.

But impact is complicated to plan, predict and measure. A film’s purpose could be to bring an unknown issue to the global spotlight, in which case reach and public sympathy would count as effective impact (e.g. Virunga shedding light on the threats of war, poaching and oil exploration on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park). But if a film is re-addressing a well-known issue, the impact would be further along the chain: looking at creating systems change (e.g. Blue Planet II inspiring viewers to move away from single-use plastics).

So, when creating their story and impact plan, filmmakers need to truly understand what what change would look like, who would implement it, and how, in order to make a film that will really make a difference.

The right audience

An important part of this is audience. Is the film aiming for widespread behaviour change (a larger, more diverse audience) or specific actions such as policy change or changing the practices of an industry? Will the film reach the right people, or is the film asking the audience to put pressure on decision-makers?

After the release of The Cove, a controversial 2009 documentary on Taiji dolphin drive hunting, international outrage put pressure on Japanese aquariums to stop acquiring dolphins caught in Taiji’s annual hunts. However, the Hollywood caper/spy thriller feel of the documentary which made it so appealing to Western audiences alienated the Japanese audience and distribution plans in Japan were repeatedly met by protesters.

An example of a far more targeted and bottom-up approach is the campaign surrounding the 2012 documentary about climate change Chasing Ice. Their strategy was to take the film to one community (Ohio’s 12th congressional district, United States) and use it as a tool to engage the public to change the mind of their Congressman, known climate change denier Pat Tiberi, who consequently made a statement about the global importance of climate action.

It is all very well to shed light on an issue, but a million views in the United States for a film about an issue happening on the other side of the world is perhaps not the best way to direct local change and can alienate the subjects of the film.

Emotional connection

Even though many of the factors which determine impact happen after the film is made (distribution, media coverage, lobbying etc.), the film itself has to stir the audience. For this, the film needs to create an emotional connection between the audience and the subject/s, and often this requires focussing on the story of one, or a select few, individuals.

Thank You For The Rain is an example of a film which used the story of one man, Kenyan smallholder farmer and environmentalist Kisilu Musya, to humanise the climate crisis. The film had a very ambitious impact strategy. It delivered extraordinary results, both on a local scale with Musya’s fellow Kenyans and on a global scale, closing the gap between Musya and international influencers, policymakers, funders, and institutional leaders to facilitate global systems change and support local climate action in Kenya.

But how did it manage to engage the emotions of such different audiences? The founder of the project, Norwegian filmmaker Julia Dahr, decided to make Musya a co-director and therefore have creative control. He was empowered to tell his own story, and so each viewer of their diverse target audience experienced the crippling drought and following violent storm which tore his home apart through his eyes.

Creating such a connection with a previously unknown individual is an incredible feat. Many high-budget environmental films use well-known faces to establish a personal connection with their audience, such as An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore), Before the flood (Leonardo di Caprio), and Our Planet (Sir David Attenborough). In addition to giving the film credibility, it also gives them an edge on distribution, as the well-known name can attract a much larger audience.

Nothing stands alone

There are many beautiful and emotive films about social and environmental issues which have come and gone without creating much of a ripple, or the desired impact. Even if a film is widely watched, nothing stands alone. When examining the films which have created the biggest impact, almost all of them are supported by campaign/s that may have been going on for years before release (e.g. Blue Planet II), and/or drive action after (e.g. Blackfish).

Blue Planet II is widely hailed for creating a tidal shift in behaviour and policy change on single-use plastics. After the final episode was aired in December 2017 which, after six episodes of building up audience wonder for ocean wildlife, showed the impact of microplastics and pollution on ocean wildlife, including an albatross chick killed by a plastic toothpick. Following this, there has been a huge shift in public conversation around plastic, leading to increased attendance for beach-clean-ups, an explosion in the use of reusable products like water bottles and coffee cups, and legislative change (including a UK ban on plastic straws, cotton buds and stirrers and an EU ban on selected single-use plastic items for which non-plastic alternatives exist).

But even though the last episode of Blue Planet II catalysed this change, years of research and campaigning about the issue and how to tackle had gone before, and these were suddenly thrown to the fore by the media explosion following its release. Another good example is BlackFish, a film about how the treatment of captive killer whales in Sea World had caused the death of a senior trainer, which was followed up by a campaign to stop Sea World breeding and showing captive killer whales (which was successful by March 2016).

Ones to watch

Climate change has moved up the global agenda, with media and protests putting pressure on decision-makers to reduce emissions and divest from fossil fuels. However, at Synchronicity Earth we don’t want to see the sister issue, biodiversity loss, falling by the wayside.

This is why we’re excited to see what new media platforms like Waterbear, Uproar and Key Conservation will bring in terms of inspiring and empowering people to take action for conservation. We are also interested to see the impact of bigger platforms such as Netflix, Disney and Apple, who are investing in more wildlife programmes. This year will see Netflix release Attenborough’s next impact documentary A Life On Our Planet in April, and we can also look forward to a collaboration between the Discovery Channel and the BBC Natural History Unit, following the stories of Channel’s Wildlife Warriors (previously announced as The Red List).

Film can be a powerful tool to change narratives around nature and biodiversity loss. Understanding more about audience and impact can help to drive support for the urgent and effective conservation work going on around the globe.