Reflections on the Advancing Impact Workshop in Perth, Western Australia

After years of working across Australia’s documentary landscape, it feels especially meaningful to return to Western Australia. I lived in Fremantle for several years in the early 1990s, teaching media production at Murdoch University and serving on the board of the Film and Television Institute in Fremantle. They were very formative years for me.  

This visit was not only about reconnecting with filmmakers and industry colleagues, it was also about strengthening our national network of storytellers. As we look ahead to the next chapter of our work at Documentary Australia, we’re focused on ensuring that our impact initiatives and partnerships reach every corner of the country, and that begins with being back in WA. 

Over the 17 years since Documentary Australia launched, we have supported thousands of films. Some of Australia’s finest documentary filmmakers come from WA. 1378 donors from WA have supported a range of documentaries over this time.  

We strive to work with all states and have built solid collaborations with SAFC and Screen Territory in our Indigenous program, Centralised (a 3-year fellowship program), and Queensland with SheDoc. Victoria and NSW regularly support our impact programs and capacity building in the sector. We have done less with the philanthropic community of WA in our programs and organisational support, although Minderoo Pictures has been a core supporter of our Impact Producer Program over the last three years, and is increasingly supporting documentaries.  

We are coming to the end of three years of the Environmental Accelerator and the Impact Producer Program. In recognition that impact skills are still needed, we plan to scale and broaden our impact resources to be nationally accessible, in person where possible and online. We were delighted to be invited by Screenwest to kick off the first in-person Advancing Impact workshop in WA. 

It was a joy to meet 30 emerging to established WA practitioners and to share our experience with them to catalyse their social impact work. We look forward to seeing what emerges.

Our work is exciting and rewarding. Documentary practitioners are passionate and socially engaged, and documentary as an art form is so vital to truth-telling. We champion documentary and journalistic integrity and, as we are a small and independently funded organisation, we are nimble and innovative in our approach to developing programs that address where the needs are – stories of the environment, human rights, youth and mental health, women and girls, First Nations storytelling and the importance of the arts to our national culture.  

Over the years, we have raised over $54M in philanthropic support for documentaries and programs. At least 85% of that funding has gone straight back out to the industry. We have certainly helped films be made. We now recognise that we need to prioritise new ways to help these films be seen. The broadcast and distribution models in this country are very fragmented and broken. Our new program DocAccess assists communities to find and screen documentaries, to partner with local organisations, bring audiences together, unite and activate people in social change initiatives.  

Our revised strategic priorities over the coming years will be a focus on voices from youth, voices from women, continued focus on sharing impact strategies with a broad range of filmmakers, and documentaries that tackle issues across our other focus areas of Environment, Indigenous, Human Rights & Social Justice, Health & Wellbeing and The Arts.

The Advancing Impact workshop was supported by Screenwest and the Western Australian Government through the Workshops and Masterclasses Fund.