Truth Tellers: Our Fellows Spill on Their Doc Producing Lab Journey
The role of a film producer involves a lot more than raising money and making calls and speadsheets, as ourDocumentary Producing Lab Fellows will tell you. According to 2024 Fellow Rajal Pitroda, you’re just as much of a therapist for your team as you are a producer. Tight budgets, small crews, and long lead-times can make doc feel a little like you’re stuck on Hitch’s Lifeboat.
Keeping the ship afloat isn’t easy, and we think that the doc producers of the world deserve a life raft. That’s why we are bringing back the Film Independent Documentary Producing Lab for its second year.
Applications for the 2025 cohort are now open, and with a non-Member deadline of May 5th (Film Independent Members have until May 19th).
To give some insight into what goes down in the Lab, we spoke with last year’s Fellows about the challenges as well as the joys of documentary producing, and how the Documentary Producing Lab has helped them on their journey.
What does a documentary producer do?
Rajal Pitroda: A documentary producer does anything and everything that’s needed to get a film done. It’s everything from raising money, to figuring out distribution strategy, to working in partnership with the director on a film’s creative.
Glib Lukianets: I would say that it is something in between journalism and art, with the best that we can take from fiction cinema.
Nicole Tsien: A documentary producer is somebody who wears many hats and does many things all at once.
We are keeping the lights on, we’re keeping films moving, we’re providing emotional and physical support to all creative collaborators. We’re doing finance, we’re doing HR. We’re also trying to be creative.
Annie Marr: We sort of do everything. We’re the creative, financial, logistical glue that holds a project together.
Chelsea Moore: I would say that we’re like the animal wranglers and kindergarten teachers of the production, making sure everyone’s fed, making sure everyone shows up on time, making sure everyone has the things that they need for the day, thinking about the planning for the whole journey of the film, checking in, make sure people are feeling good, the whole process. We kind of wrangle it all.
What is something that you learned in the Lab that would change the way you approach your filmmaking?
Annie Marr: I loved learning about equity financing and how that can be a tool for us. I think before, I was nervous about engaging with investors in that way, and I feel like the Lab sort of empowered me to look at how equity financing might make more sense for some of my projects down the line.
Chelsea Moore: I think the thing that I came away with the most is how many options are available and strategies. Everyone is in the same boat, which is a great thing about documentary filmmaking, depending on your access versus someone else’s access. It can be less about how connected or how much money you have. It’s really about just the unrelenting, theorizing, planning, attacking something from all angles to make your project culminate, to make it come to life.
Rajal Pitroda: The Lab is a great overview for doc producers on the producing field in general. It’s an amazing community of other producers, and it’s great support both for your project and yourself as a producer.
Kat Nguyen: Thinking of the budget in such a precise way, thinking about developing the story, different exercises to do with your director to move the creative forward. I got a lot out of this Lab, and I will apply it all.
What is something that you think people don’t realize that a documentary producer does?
Annie Marr: My friends who aren’t in the film industry seem to be surprised that I’m actually on set a lot of the time. I think a lot of people not in the industry think of us as sort of purely behind the scenes, and I like to get my hands dirty and really be on set the majority of the time.
Chelsea Moore: Often people don’t realize how involved we are in both the creative and the logistics of the project and how long we can be a part of something. It can be, like, over a decade of work for one film to be released, and we’re really hands-on in the creative process, the origination of the idea, and then also just on every single day-to-day, the trucks, the gear, the premiere.
Glib Lukianets: They don’t realize that it takes time, and that it is not kind of a reportage that could be made very quickly and very cheap, as it’s made for television. It needs a lot of artistic effort from the crew, from the authors, and a lot of management to make it real, to be in the shape that people want to consume.
Kat Nguyen: People may not know that a doc producer needs to have a lot of emotional intelligence and people skills. It is managing different personalities, figuring out how to get everyone to work together, and how to meet the end goal while also protecting everyone’s needs in the project.
Nicole Tsien: I think it’s a bit of the emotional labor, not just between a producer and a director, but kind of even managing between. You have a lot of creatives in the room, I guess because also a lot of people hold multiple roles, and I think you’re trying to keep everything together, and so you’re massaging a lot of relationships. It’s a lot of communication
Rajal Pitroda: People don’t realize that a documentary producer is also a therapist.
Why did you decide to apply to this Lab?
Kat Nguyen: I knew this Lab would be a great resource for me to get a holistic view of all the different things that a producer does. And my project is in early development, so I really value the resource, which will give me sort of a path toward how it might look to finish it.
Annie Marr: I applied to this Lab for a couple of different reasons. First, I just love building my filmmaking community. I love meeting other producers and getting to know more veteran producers and just sort of really building out my community of creatives that I feel like I can go to with questions and just sort of bounce creative ideas off of one another.
And then the second reason is I feel like I have so much still to learn about the industry and how to have a long career as a doc producer.
Nicole Tsien: I applied to this Lab because I was really looking for somewhere for more structured mentorship opportunities. I learn by being in community with other filmmakers, and so I think I was looking forward to being in a space with other producers. We’re all in different stages, we all are working on different films, but I think being in a collective and learning collectively with other producers was something that I was looking for.
Why should the filmmaker apply to this Lab?
Nicole Tsien: I think Film Independent has brought a stellar all-star roster of mentors and other producers. It’s a great opportunity to really learn from people who have done this before and who are still figuring out how to do this. I think the community, sharing and being in space with other producers is really valuable, so definitely recommend people to apply.
Glib Lukianets: Not to be stuck in your local market, in your local film community. If you go out of the box and see the same people working with documentaries, but in different surroundings, that helps you to understand, okay, here I have some advantages in my own market, or here I have some disadvantages that I can somehow compensate using the possibilities that other markets can provide easily. So you can be more competitive in the end.
Chelsea Moore: I think applying to this Lab and being able to participate is so instrumental to be able to focus, in a condensed amount of time, on your project, which we rarely get to do outside the Labs. Also to be able to have meetings with people that I wouldn’t have been able to have meetings with, that I’m connected with and have their contact information now, and can follow up not just about this project, but about any other slate of films that I develop.
Annie Marr: I learned so much in the week that I was here. It was sort of a crash course in producing in a lot of ways, but sort of built for producers who know what they’re doing but really want to build out their career.
Kat Nguyen: Filmmakers should apply to this Lab because not only does it give them resources and tools to apply to their films, but it’s such a great gathering of other people that you definitely want in your circle, supporters. Your network just becomes so much more enriched after going through this Lab, as well as the relationship with Film Independent, who really are champions of filmmakers.
Applications for the 2025 Documentary Producing Lab are now open, with a non-Member deadline of May 5th (Film Independent Members have until May 19th).
Header image by Alana Waksman
For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision. To support our mission with a donation, click here.
Keep up with Film Independent…