On Character-Driven Docs and Our New Fund

Today the Tribeca Film Institute announced the three films that have been chosen for HBO fellowships as part of our inaugural TFI Documentary Fund. You can find the official press release here, but we took a few minutes to talk with TFI's Director of Documentary Programming Ryan Harrington to get more detail on the fund and the films picked for its first year:

Where the TFI Documentary Fund Began

The fund was born out of our recognizing that only certain types of films were being funded by nonprofit foundations over the past number of years, and that an enormous amount of subgenres of documentary film were being ignored. Most funding goes to films that deal with high-stakes social issues, for good reason -- people in organizations and companies and brands can get behind social issues in an easier way than behind normal subject matter. But our goal at TFI is to support as many types of filmmakers as we can, making a wide array of films.

Looking at the lay of the land it made us a little depressed that there were so many filmmakers we respected and so many topics that we were drawn to that seemed so impossible to fund via the traditional grant route. So we came up with the idea of the TFI Documentary Fund, which is for character-driven, story-driven feature docs. good movies that just happen to be documentaries. We took this idea to Sheila Nevins at HBO and she completely got behind it and has been amazingly supportive and generous and helped us select these three winners.

Our companies got together and found three different facets of character-driven films that we identified as having the most trouble getting support. Those are features from first-time filmmakers, for which we created the Documentary Screen Test Fellowship; first-person films about the filmmakers themselves, their family or their environment, for which we created the House I Live In Fellowship; and films that take us into a completely different world we never knew existed, for which we created the Outside Looking In Fellowship.

Very Semi-Serious

Very Semi-Serious is an inside look at the cartoonists who pitch to The New Yorker magazine, whose cartoons are a staple and a reason many people read the magazine. It also looks at the history of the cartoons in The New Yorker. The story is told in a whimsical way using animation, but it also looks deeper, following certain cartoonists and showing how difficult it is for them -- these iconic cartoonists still have to pitch their concepts at an open call to have their cartoons included in each issue of the magazine. The film really examines a dying breed as newspapers and magazines start to go away, and considers what the future of this world could be.

House I Live In Fellowship, $25,000: The Genius of Marian

In The Genius of Marian, the filmmaker, Banker White, is making a film about his mother, who is writing a book about her mother, the renowned artist Marian Williams Steele. While he's filming his mother creating this book about her mother's art, she develops early-onset Alzheimer's. The film is this beautiful, touching, sensitive portrait of a family dealing with their matriarch slowly fading and realizing she's fading. It's an examination of self. This is a really special work because the filmmaker doesn't insert himself into the film like a lot of other filmmakers often do when telling a story about something so close to them. The Genius of Marian is an homage to Banker's mother and his presence is felt behind the camera, something we felt that was a unique quality that a lot of first-person films do not have.

Outside Looking In Fellowship, $25,000: A Contemplation of a Serious Matter

A Contemplation of a Serious Matter is under wraps, so I can't talk too much about it yet. It deals with a clip that was found on YouTube, and two friends who embark on an adventure to locate the origins of the clip and find out if it's valid and real. The film is still being shot and deals with a very sensitive topic so details have to been kept secret, but we love this film because it does take us into a completely new world that we didn't know existed. Stylistically A Contemplation of a Serious Matter looks and feels like a narrative, and it questions the boundaries of what documentary filmmaking is, using a lot of narrative hybrid elements and incorporating them into the form. It's a fascinating story that I can't wait to actually be able to talk about. 

[Photo: Banker White's The Genius of Marian]