The Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) has launched a DocuMentality initiative in Canada with support from the Canada Media Fund to normalize conversations around health in the nation’s documentary sector.

DOC will invite filmmakers to take part in a series of focus groups, with the results culminating in a “report that will guide DOC’s work to normalize conversations around mental health in the Canadian documentary sector,” according to a news release.

The initiative was announced as part of the TIFF Perspectives industry discussion program during the recently wrapped Toronto International Film Festival in a panel titled “DocuMentality: The Growth of a Movement.”

Inney Prakash (pictured left) of the Maysles Documentary Center served as moderator for the panel, which included DocuMentality co-founder and former educator Malikkah Rollins (pictured second from left); Sarah Spring (pictured right), executive director of DOC; and filmmaker Rebeca Huntt (pictured second from right), whose feature documentary debut, Beba, premiered at TIFF in 2021.

The panel began with Rollins presenting a wealth of data gleaned from a series of focus-group discussions with documentary filmmakers about issues surrounding mental health. Rollins explained that, in many cases, the subjects of their projects alone are enough to take a toll on filmmakers.

“So often, topics of documentary films are very personal: they can often be about trauma, family trauma, ancestral trauma, climate trauma, etc.,” she explained. “And filmmakers are not trained — nor should they be necessarily — to help themselves process the trauma, and definitely not trained to help their crew process whatever trauma they may be ingesting. And they’re also not trained to help the people who the films are about to process their own trauma as well.”

Rollins added that trauma can also often affect those crew members who only come aboard a project in the post-production phase. “We had a lot of editors who talked about secondary trauma, when they sat with really traumatic footage for sometimes up to a year, eight, 12 hours a day, and how they ingest that secondary trauma and it becomes part of their lives,” she said.

Financial pressures are another common factor adversely affecting mental health in the documentary field, Rollins noted. “Some of the big themes that came up around finances were career instability, people not getting paid, not being able to pay their rent, to pay their crew members, etc., and just how humiliating that is,” she explained.

“Humiliation and shame were two of the very prominent feelings that people talked about in these focus groups… People are very much dependent on funding and grants for their own income as filmmakers, or they try to make their film on the side and then they have to have a full-time job to actually make ends meet. [There was a lot of talk about] just how stressful that is.”

Speaking to the Canadian industry specifically, Spring weighed in with the observation that, while more and more productions are building mental health supports in to their process, this remains more sporadic than systematic.

“What we’ve seen in Canada are individual situations in which, mostly on the fiction side, people [are] bringing therapists or Indigenous elders on to set to work with the actors and the crew, to make sure that everyone feels well and respected and seen,” she said. “[However], this is sort of a case-by-case basis — we don’t have a national structure for this. And we haven’t really been seeing it in the documentary sector, except, again, in some specific situations.”

Spring added that in a country like Canada, where many documentary projects have government funding, some of the onus should be on the government to provide assistance when it comes to mental health resources.

“We’re in a very privileged situation in Canada, where we are, by and large, nationally funded or provincially funded for our films and for our content,” she stated. “[And] if they’re going to fund a film, I do feel like there’s government responsibility — or [if] broadcasters [are] funding a film, they’re responsible to ensure the well-being of the crew. I think it needs to be part of the line items.

“Filmmakers shouldn’t have to advocate for their own well-being on top of struggling with being well.”

For her part, Huntt talked about some of the tools she developed while making Beba, an intensely personal film that touches on her experiences growing up in New York and addresses issues of race, class and family. Among these was a mental-health checklist that she referred to as a “mapped toolkit,” which included such items as “maintaining a belief in oneself,” “doing the work,” “relying on the filmmaking community” and meditation.

“Out of everything that keeps me sane, meditation is actually the most effective, but it’s the hardest for me to do on a daily basis,” said Huntt, adding that the strict daily meditation regimen she maintained during the production of Beba has since fallen off as she has been travelling around the world to present the film at festivals.

“I’ve started honing in on the meditation a little bit more [lately], but it really does help with self-awareness,” she continued. “And I think [that] in this field that is so collaborative, just having self-awareness as a director, with my collaborators, but also as a subject and working with my family, it was really important to be present as much as possible.”

With files from Kelly Townsend

A version of this story originally appeared in Realscreen

Photo courtesy of TIFF