Up-Skill for Revolution: Making Documentaries That Matter
The work I do constantly brings me into contact with young people trying to figure out how to make the world less shitty. The next generation has sharp minds, big hearts, and no safety net…so they’re ready to fight.
The trouble is that traditional opportunities for their talents appear to be shrinking.
Outside of the warmaking industry, there is no obvious career ladder to climb, especially for those who want to make a difference. It’s this “What do I do with my life?” question that often compels them to reach out to me because, quite often, they long assumed that public service was their aspiration. Now, not only does that seem far less desirable than it once did; public service is increasingly not even possible because the administrative state is being radically downsized and retooled for fascism white Christian nationalism.
One of my generic bits of advice is, to put it crudely, up-skill for the revolution. This can take many forms:
Learn workplace organizing and become a salt, slowly increasing union density.
Learn community organizing by becoming part of grassroots coalitions against war, debt, or usurious rent.
Learn fundraising (“development”) for the intellectual combat of a think tank industry hostile to progressive policy ideas, in conjunction with cultivating specialized policy knowledge.
Learn canvassing by being part of political campaigns or running for office yourself (this, of course, assumes you can still do electoral democracy).
Learn magazine/digital publishing and marketing, to raise consciousness and spread the ideas that matter. Win back social media from the “manosphere.”
But there’s one skill that, for all its value, few people in my world ever consider: Filmmaking. Not only the art and mechanics of visual storytelling, but also getting your story seen and heard.
Film, as we often discuss on the Bang-Bang Podcast, can do the work of consciousness-raising in a way that’s becoming harder to do via books (because people just don’t read). Film can be part of electoral or issue-based campaigns, like the recent doc on organizing Amazon warehouses. Film is part of the terrain of culture, which is the lived-in container for politics.
And you don’t need to have the resources or clout of Adam McKay. Documentaries can often be done with micro budgets.
Anyway, I think documentary-making is an under appreciated skill for people who want to change the world, and there is a universe of cheap or free resources on YouTube (plus No Film School) to get started on the nuts and bolts.
But you need more than the nuts and bolts, because many docs never get seen.
In jiu jitsu we have a concept of “grey area” skills—concepts and practices that are not step-by-step moves, that do not involve fixed positions, but that do separate the successful fighter from the paint-by-numbers student. Having grey-area skills is like having a high IQ about the context of the moves that everyone learns. Funneling your opponent into your strongest positions is one grey-area skill. Another is imposing dilemmas on your opponent where you make them defend an attack but in so doing they make themselves more vulnerable to another kind of attack.
Documentaries, I’m led to believe, involve grey area skills too. And it’s those skills that Ted and Vanessa Hope—friends who are also masters of the form—are offering in partnership with
.1Ted and Vanessa have an impressive track record making films that matter, and getting them in front of people. They know how to work the film festival circuit,2 of course, but they also know how to navigate an industry where everyone is risk averse, streaming is cannibalizing the traditional business model of Hollywood, and buyers just aren’t buying like they once did.
So I guess this is a meandering plug, for those who can afford it, to take their online workshop next week:
Workshop Details
Date: Wednesday, 16th April 2025
Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST
Location: Zoom
Price: $97 ($47 for annual paid subscribers to The Industry newsletter).
Click here to secure your spot: https://theindustry.co/docs-that-matter-workshop/
This is not a paid advertisement! Just sharing an opportunity.
Last year, I wrote about my time with Ted and Vanessa at the Doc Edge Film Festival in Christchurch. Ted’s memoir was also one of the best books I read last year.