I recently sat down with Karla Murthy to talk about her moving and skillfully constructed documentary, The Gas Station Attendant, which draws on years of family archives. It premieres tomorrow, Monday, Aug. 3, on POV.

We talk about the public media ecosystem that trained her and how the categories of “personal” and “journalism” in documentary don’t need to be siloed. We also talk about how stories about immigrant families are more compelling when they push away from simple symbolism.

The broader context for the conversation is how the crisis facing public media is a rare opportunity to reimagine what a public media or a new civic media system can and should be.

Independent filmmakers need to be at the center of this conversation. We also have a history to draw from as we mobilize to build new public mechanisms to support production and distribution of independent film.

Thanks to DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in New York for hosting this conversation.

I had an excellent conversation with Tucson, AZ-based writer and journalist Melissa Del Bosque, who co-founded Border Chronicle along with her reporting partner Todd Miller.

You can watch the short and read the full interview on The Border Chronicle website.

For two decades, Bernardo Ruiz has crafted nuanced social documentaries for public media, focusing on people often overlooked in mainstream narratives, including Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers, migrants, human rights activists, and, in the case of today’s premiere documentary short, the U.S. forensic anthropologists who work to identify missing migrants in the borderlands.

Throughout his career, Ruiz, 53, has imbued his films with careful attention to detail, empathy, and investigative rigor. Today’s premiere is a seven-minute documentary from the footage Ruiz filmed for his award-winning 2023 documentary El Equipo on Dr. Clyde Snow, a pioneering forensic scientist from Texas, and the young Argentine anthropologists who together founded the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team in the 1980s to identify the disappeared in Argentina’s Dirty War. Since then, the team has worked to identify victims of some of the world’s toughest human rights atrocity cases, including the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador, and the disappearance of the 43 students in Mexico.

In the United States, the Argentine forensic team has played a vital role in assisting and training forensic anthropologists to identify missing migrants and work compassionately with families searching for their lost relatives. The following short focuses on the work of Dr. Kate Spradley and her team at Operation Identification at Texas State University, who have worked extensively to identify missing migrants in South Texas. The footage was never released in El Equipo because during editing, Ruiz couldn’t make it fit into the larger narrative. “Whether you’re kidnapped and disappeared or whether you’re dying as the result of a policy that is trying to disappear you, I was trying to make that connection,” he said of the U.S. footage. “There’s so many parallels between the contemporary work that happens on the U.S.-Mexico border and what the Argentine students were doing in the 1980s.”

In addition to debuting his documentary short, Ruiz spoke with The Border Chronicle about the state of public broadcast funding and documentary filmmaking in the Trump era, what motivates his work, and the rapidly changing landscape of Latinx and independent filmmaking.

Many of your documentaries have taken place at the U.S.-Mexico border. What keeps drawing you back here?

First and foremost, I think of the border as everywhere. I live in Queens, New York, and Roosevelt Avenue—a seven-mile corridor that runs through Queens—I think of it as its own borderlands. You have arrivals from Venezuela, from Haiti, certainly from Mexico, from China. It’s surveilled, it’s policed, and the communities ebb and flow and change.

In terms of filmmaking, part of it is personal. I was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, to a Mexican mestizo father and a white American mother, and spent my first six years in Mexico, and then grew up in the U.S. So any story that explores that love-hate relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, or Latin America more broadly, has always been compelling to me. But it’s also just an endless source of dramatic and compelling stories that reveal something bigger…

The full interview is available on The Border Chronicle website.

With Michael Premo’s harrowing Homegrown I was reminded of why long-form verité documentaries are able to pack a bigger punch, while offer something entirely different than much of bite-sized, algorithm-driven media.

Homegrown operates at the intersection of journalism and indie cinema, offering something both reportorial and human at the same time. I highly recommend watching the film—and supporting its independent distribution.

You can rent the film at this link starting today through President’s Day.

Below is a frank discussion with Michael about making the film and how he and collaborators are distributing it in this new era.

This past year, opponents of public media finally got what they wanted.

“Conservative presidents and Congresses have tried to get rid of public media since President Lyndon Johnson created it in the late 1960s,” wrote one of the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”—a 900-plus page policy agenda that included a section on defunding public media.

It cost a reported $22-million to put together—which is a good budget for a PDF. You could make somewhere between 20-40 independent documentaries for PBS with that money. Or you could cover half the cost of a Melania Trump documentary.

But for the backers of “Project 2025” it was money well spent. Along with getting other policy priorities through, the Trump administration and his allies in Congress “clawed back” previously approved funding of $1.1 billion for the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB).

In August, CPB announced an “orderly wind-down” of its operations. Everything downstream from CPB - PBS, NPR and the many public stations throughout the U.S.—in both urban and rural communities—were dealt devastating blows.

The Cato Institute called this “a hard-won victory…while the programs are not formally abolished, they have now been defunded for the next two years—a precedent-setting shift in public policy.”

And for the ecosystem that has historically supported independent documentaries, the defunding triggered an era of fragmentation. A veteran public media attorney I have worked with calls it the “balkanization” of public media.

Facing existential threats, ITVS, American Documentary/POV, the member organizations of the National Multicultural Media Alliance, and Firelight Media - have all responded in different ways.

The below is by no means a comprehensive list, but is rather a set of highlights that from my vantage point as a working independent filmmaker offer insights into where the organizations that support independent documentary within public media are headed:

• The Independent Television Service (ITVS) which was created in 1988 after a near decade of organizing of independent filmmakers and their allies has pivoted, in part, to vertical video—14 years after the launch of Snapchat in 2011.

  • This is part of the Independent Lens Creator Lab, “a six-month program for six standout vertical video makers, offering up to $36,000 in production funding, as well as mentorship and industry support, to develop bold new storytelling approaches.”

• POV/American Documentary which was created in the same year as ITVS, is pivoting to YouTube with support from former legacy station leadership. There are many reasons why YouTube is a favored audience-reaching method for documentaries (including more on that below.) It is certainly less regulated than broadcast television—but that can be a double-edged sword. We have seen how public interest journalism and documentary can be sidelined by tech billionaire owners. And with every new delivery/distribution method, you still need sustained audience engagement and marketing resources.

• In October, I moderated a panel with most of the leaders of the five organizations that make up the National Multicultural Media Alliance at the Hot Springs Doc Filmmakers Forum. On the panel, the organization leaders all spoke to the need of communicating more transparently to the makers and communities they serve.

  • Meeting the moment, the Center for Asian American Media launched the Building Bridges Documentary Fund, “which will award a total of $1 million and wraparound services to support 13 documentary film projects intended to represent a fuller spectrum of the U.S. Muslim experience.”

• Firelight Media launched the "inaugural Firelight Fund, “a rapid-response initiative that will deploy $580,000 in unrestricted grants to Black, Brown, and Indigenous documentary projects.”

  • Here’s Loira Limbal, President & CEO of Firelight Media on the fund: “the elimination of federal support for public media has created a manufactured crisis for documentary filmmakers, especially those from Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities who have historically relied on public media and CPB-funded initiatives.”

• Stations: At least one station has announced that they are dropping PBS programming. And even the big stations like ‘GBH’ (in 2020 they rebranded, dropping the “W”) have shed staffers and issued an announcement that they would “move away from original documentaries”.

  • One of the casualties of these cuts was World Channel, a documentary and public affairs series. Here’s filmmaker and independent producer James Rutenbeck on what this loss means:

    “WORLD was a rare example of public media living up to its original mission, welcoming emerging voices and filmmakers from underrepresented communities…the fact that [it] could be eliminated with such ease reveals how limited that commitment truly was.”

Where Do Independents Go From Here?

For good reason, many have pointed to the award-winning public affairs series Frontline as an example of success amidst the fragmentation. The series nabbed an Oscar last year and has skillfully met audiences where they are-specifically YouTube. I watch the series regularly (on YouTube, not the PBS app) and count friends and colleagues among the show’s producers.

But, there is a basic distinction between Frontline and the independent documentaries you see on POV, Independent Lens, along with other series that showcase independent work. In the latter, filmmakers largely control the editorial and creative decisions in their work, including copyrights to their films (this is the case in the majority of films I made that were distributed through these series.)

Much of this has to do with how these different public media series were created. Last year, I did an extensive interview with Marc Weiss, the innovative creator of POV, who explained it to me this way:

[In the late 1980s] “the relationship with independents [and public media] was a little complicated…[Former Frontline Executive Producer David] Fanning ultimately shaped each thing that went on in the air, and it had to meet his standards. Which, and his stands were very good, but it was much more in the tradition of the network documentaries, the CBS, ABC, NBC documentaries of the 50s and 60s.”

In 2026 and beyond, independent or even NonDé (although I think Ted Hope’s label has been less applied in documentary circles so far) filmmakers should take a page from the robust and successful organizing of the late 1980s independent film movement that created ITVS and POV.

A broken system can be remade or re-imagined by the the cooks who actually make the food. And making a system more relevant and exciting to audiences and communities will help to steer resources back into public media.

Here’s Kartemquin founder Gordon Quinn on how independents need to approach the system (both then and now):

“Somebody asked [me], ‘what is it that PBS really wants?’ And I said, that’s the wrong question. ‘How are you going to make PBS into what you want to do?’ We have leverage with public television — leverage that we don’t have with Netflix.”

Welcome back to Documentary Mixtape.

Last month, I shared 15-years worth of documentary films as part of a retrospective that included some great cultural hubs rooted in their communities, including the Museum of the Moving Image, DCTV’s Firehouse Theater and the Maysles Documentary Center.

To me, the retrospective made clear that there is a strong interest and desire for in-person events, discussions - a desire which spans many different communities and generations.

But it is labor-intensive work. In my case, that good labor came from Cinema Tropical and Color Congress, two innovative organizations, that carefully built connections between my films, then strategized different ways to connect to different communities throughout NYC. And it was fun.

One other unique aspect of the experience was being able to workshop a work-in-progress - The Low Season - with an audience at Union Docs Center for Documentary Art. This is not something that I have ever done before. It was like being a comic or a musician workshopping new material with a fresh audience. It forced me to sharpen my ideas, and kept me from being too precious about the work at a vulnerable phase as I seek support for the film.

Three Tables And Two Countertops

In October, I spoke at a panel at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival Filmmaker Forum in Arkansas. I was struck by how some executives insisted on speaking to the documentary filmmakers assembled in the room as if it were business as usual. Business as usual in terms of funding and distributing films, in this case via public media.

There was something eerie about it - like restaurant conglomerates telling you about the exciting future of dining during the mass layoffs of cooks and kitchen workers. It made me think of “ghost kitchens”. That is food prep and delivery businesses that are automated for maximum efficiency. If you live in NYC, you have likely seen car-long subway ads for an online food service that claims to have multiple “restaurants” under one roof. The brands all sort of look familiar, designed to look like other restaurant brands, but they are actually part of an e-commerce scheme, designed to harvest profit from busy consumers, while crushing mom-and-pops in the process.

Its hard not to see the parallels between small, owner-operator restaurants, like one of my favorites in Queens run by Oda Mistumine (pictured above) who works 6 days a week, opening and closing each day — and the work many of us do as scrappy, often under-budgeted and over-leveraged independents.

At a time when big media is getting bigger, and publicly funded media and the arts have been dealt death blows—in some cases without much of a public fight—there are a lot of ideas about how to “fix” independent film and media.

There are self-styled experts telling us that we need to be more like influencers or content creators. Maybe do a little shimmy for the Tik Tok...

I’m certainly excited by some of the clever or creative media I see on social media, but as some Gen-Z mediamakers at the Bronx Documentary Center told me this past weekend, there are limits to social media— like subsisting solely on junk food.

The makers I spoke to understand social media as an endless, sometimes exhausting and certainly distracting feed. In a session where they workshopped their own short films, they told me about deleting Instagram and Tik-Tok for stretches - not permanently - but to create some space for in-person hanging out and even watching movies.

There is lots of advice coming from many corners in this moment, much of it centered on adopting models set by big tech and conglomerates. But why would we mimic the strategies of ghost kitchens when mom and pops often make better food?

With good community partners, there are audiences and communities (diverse, multigenerational ones) to be engaged. There is even room for test kitchens where we can experiment, share and refine dishes that don’t taste like they’ve come out of a conveyer belt.

Recent Interviews

• I spoke on The Latino Vote Podcast about my retrospective, career as independent and documenting the Latino vote:

The Latino Vote Podcast

Documenting the Latino Story: A Conversation with Emmy-Nominated Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz

*Due to technical issues, the posting of this discussion was delayed. Unfortunately, the showcase of Bernardo Ruiz’s films has already passed. We urge you to check out his work via his website. Our apologies for this error…

Listen now

9 months ago · 4 likes · The Latino Vote Podcast and Mike Madrid

• And if you missed it, here’s a nice interview with IDA’s Documentary Magazine’s Manuel Betancourt about the retrospective:

  Documentary Mixtape

  Humblecore: Reflections on the NYC Retrospective while developing 'The Low Season'

  Read more

  9 months ago · 4 likes · Bernardo Ruiz

Welcome back to Documentary Mixtape.

Throughout November, as part of a mid-career retrospective, five of my documentary films were exhibited at 5 different venues throughout New York, including at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, DCTV’s Firehouse Theater in Chinatown and at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem.

The retrospective, presented by Color Congress through its Elev8Docs marketing was spearheaded by Cinema Tropical and programmed by Carlos A. Gutierrez, a champion of independent Latin American cinema.

To cap off the retrospective, writer Manuel Betancourt interviewed me for the International Documentary Association’s Documentary Magazine. I am sharing his full interview below, along with some updates and recommendations.

IDA: Bernardo Ruiz reflects on his decades-long career, “humblecore” independent filmmaking, and the first retrospective of his work

From Reportero (2012) and Kingdom of Shadows (2015) to Harvest Season (2018) and El Equipo (2023), Bernardo Ruiz’s films have been preoccupied with the way people and stories transcend the places that contain them. Whether tackling violent threats to a free press in Tijuana, migrant workers’ rights in Napa Valley, or the bloodied legacy of authoritarian governments in Argentina, the Mexican American filmmaker is interested in, as he puts it, “that kind of love-hate relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.” It’s fitting, then, that a retrospective of his work across different theaters in New York City, presented by Color Congress in partnership with Cinema Tropical, is titled “Between Borders & Voices.”

Ruiz is a consummate portraitist. He captures his subjects with warm candor, allowing their everyday lives (in the fields, in a crowded newsroom, in their homes) to illustrate broader sociopolitical concerns. The personal is inherently political in his films, with an empathetic social justice bent that allows issues of labor, immigration, and freedom of expression to emerge organically from his keen-eyed observational approach. Rather than merely sketching how institutions or governments affect people’s lives and livelihoods, Ruiz stresses instead the agency of those wishing to dismantle those very systems, not with outsized feats of heroism but with quiet moments of defiance and rebellion.

Taken together, these projects also establish Ruiz as a community-driven filmmaker. Ruiz’s ethos is not just reflected by the subjects he has tackled, but also in the way he has developed his films and sought to distribute them. Ruiz has not eschewed the whims of the market or the siren call of more commercial prospects (2020’s Infinite Race was part of ESPN’s storied 30 for 30 series; he directed the 2023 Marvel docuseries, Voices Rising: The Music of Wakanda Forever). However, he has long favored a scrappy, resourceful approach that allows him to produce docs with modest budgets and the creative freedom he prefers. It’s why he’s most at home in the public media space (broadcasting his work as part of POV and Independent Lens, among others) and why he currently finds himself wondering the best way to navigate a landscape where such spaces continue to be under attack.

Documentary chatted with Ruiz over Zoom to talk about what he discovered about his work when seeing it through the retrospective’s curatorial lens, why he’s a firm believer in the value of public media, and why he’s committed to his “humblecore” mode of filmmaking. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: Let’s start with the name of this retrospective: “Between Borders & Voices.” What does that mean to you as a way to define your career?

BERNARDO RUIZ: I’m an old timer now. I’ve been working in independent film and documentary for almost two decades, and Carlos [Gutiérrez from Cinema Tropical, the retrospective’s programmer] made some connections between my films that I had never had anyone so fully articulate. He touched on something that I am very interested in: that kind of love-hate relationship between the U.S. and Latin America. But doing so by making films done in a small way, that can still reach audiences and travel.

D: I want to hear more about making films in a “small way.” You’ve worked outside of legacy media, creating many of your projects as independent productions; where does that come from? Is it a philosophical orientation with regard to your work?

BR: My filmmaking, I’d say, is “humblecore.” Sometimes that is circumstantial. But it’s also an interest of mine to focus on stories or people or ideas that are not driven entirely by the commercial marketplace. Some of these films were made in spite of it, actually. The best metaphor for me is a family-run restaurant with three tables. I’m doing a little bit of everything: I’m doing the cooking, mopping the floors, and running the cash register. That means the food I make (with many collaborators) is not going to be for everybody’s taste. But for the people who like it, it’s like visiting a mom-and-pop shop they keep going to over and over again.

D: In a recent piece titled “Independents, PBS, and the Fight for Free Speech,” you connect this current moment in public media with those 1980s hearings about the future of public broadcasting. You end by writing, “As the general public, elected officials, and philanthropy step up to defend public media, the system itself must also evolve. It will benefit from fresh approaches and forward-thinking leadership.” How do you see that working?

BR: We’re in a very precarious time for media. You’re seeing the capitulation of these big media outlets to power and to this administration. At the same time, we’re also seeing resourcefulness and creativity. As difficult a time as this is, it is also an opportunity to work in different ways.

There’s a generational need that is unfulfilled. When it comes to the PBS history I highlighted, it was the history of independents, including Marlon Riggs, who got plenty of pushback, who drove the early innovations in series like POV and at ITVS. There was this real opening of independent film and independent media, and it wasn’t driven by market dictates. It was artist-driven.

There’s this idea on the part of some legacy makers that if they simply pivot—if they learn how to make TikToks—that somehow that will build audience and community. If you look at public media, it is an incredibly bureaucratic and slow-to-respond system. It is also very scared to do anything that’s controversial. The irony is that by playing it safe, it was still defunded. The question I have, and I think many others have, is: Was there an opportunity to be bold?

We have to hold these public media funders and foundations accountable. It’s our job as independent makers to do some advocacy work to ensure that there are resources to create independent art.

D: Rewatching some of your films, like Reportero and El Equipo, what struck me is how timely they feel. It’s like the world has caught up with them. Obviously, they were not made about the current moment, nor about the U.S., in particular. When you’re developing these projects and trying to get them off the ground, how much is “relevance” or that sense of “urgency” factored in when pitching them for funding or even later for distribution?

BR: Streamers, networks, and funders can sometimes have a short-term view and think, How does the story speak to this exact moment? I had that experience developing El Equipo. It took me ten years to raise enough funding to complete it and get it out into the world. Some funders and streamers questioned how it could connect to the present. When I’ve developed things, I’ve tried to take a longer-term view, sometimes probably to my own detriment.

I think about telling a very specific story. But what are the universal themes? And authoritarianism and fascism and crackdowns on the press that kind of never go out of style. Reportero, for example, is about the price you pay for being an independent journalist, and I think the press is very aware of that these days.

Many people have come up to me after El Equipo screenings, haunted by the eerie images of masked agents snatching people off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vehicles. All the credit is due to Cinema Tropical for the timing of this. These films took years to make, but the themes, unfortunately, are perennial.

D: Your upcoming project, Low Season, feels like a pivot. You describe it as a hybrid fiction-documentary about a woman from the future who possesses an uncanny ability to soothe people by listening to their stories. How did it come together? What prompted the decision to create a hybrid piece?

BR: I live in Queens, New York, just off of Roosevelt Avenue. For anyone who hasn’t spent time there, it’s a 24/7 avenue with immigrant vendors, sex workers, delivery app workers. And it’s become a target of anti-immigrant backlash. At the beginning of the year, I began developing what probably would have been a more straightforward vérité documentary about the avenue. But as time went on and I began speaking to people, just the practical reality of participants not wanting to be on camera because of their immigration status, or just for fear of being targeted politically, made me feel like there was no way to really get at a deeper story.

I began talking to potential participants and collaborators about designing a speculative fiction. I looked at two models for inspiration: The Brother from Another Planet [1984], the John Sayles film, and then Hombre mirando al sudeste [1986], the Argentine film. The filmmaker Eliseo Subiella has a great term for that type of filmmaking: “suspicious realism,” realismo sospechoso. I love that idea.

D: That does feel like an apt form for these times.

BR: It does. I have a draft. We’re collaborating with a Mexican actor, Iazua Larios. The idea is that she would play a woman from another planet, from some future world, who arrives in present-day Jackson Heights, Queens, and has a series of interactions with residents about the fear they’re experiencing in this moment of heightened crackdowns and raids, while also imagining other futures with them. It’s a playful film, getting at some of these deeper horrors unfolding right now.

Part of it is intuition. Part of it is also this reality that I don’t have finite time. If I’m going to do something, I want it to be more concentrated, like an espresso shot of a story. I’m also kind of exhausted by some of the conventions of old-fashioned legacy documentary and journalism, where there’s a kind of knee-jerk idea that you have to get the other side.

D: As you look back with this retrospective and examine the landscape we’ve been describing, what’s the role of the documentary filmmaker in 2025?

BR: That’s the million-dollar question. The exciting thing is that there’s such a wide variety of what documentary is. In the last few years, we’ve seen really strong commercial pressures. I don’t say that as a purist; I have done those projects, and I’ve done lots of uncredited work on these bigger, more commercial things. One of the reasons why I was excited to make films for public media is that there was an important way to reach a broad, diverse audience within the United States.

If there’s a role now, it’s to make the work. With the loss of this important distribution mechanism [Ed. note: this interview occurred after the defunding of CPB], many of us are thinking about how to take models like the Works Progress Administration and make documentary more broadly accessible.

One of the best models that I saw and experienced as a filmmaker was Ambulante in Mexico for Reportero, which screened in 12 cities throughout Mexico. It was this great project, which was a reinvention of an older idea to just take films to public spaces where people already are, and maybe eliminate some of that rarefied, arguably more elite, distribution channel. To open it up to the public and let the public react. Thinking about how to do that in the U.S. would be a kind of thrilling proposition.

‘The Low Season’ at Union Docs

In a first ever of its kind, for me, I shared a work-in-progress sketch and discussed the ideas behind THE LOW SEASON at Union Docs. In the presentation, I told the story of how VHS rentals of low-budget independent films from the late 1980s inspired me to make a film in 2026. After I presented, Lucila Moctezuma moderated a conversation with me and with journalist and documentarian Andrea Patiño Contreras, who is helping me develop the project by identifing community partners and participants. I will continue to share more on the process as things advance. And if you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation to the film, clicking the button below.

DONATE

One Bird After Another

The incredibly talented and committed journalist, Ryan Goldberg, who collaborated with me on the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, “The Infinite Race”, has a brand new book out called, “Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds”. You should pick up a copy - it will make a great holiday gift for cranky New Yorkers who want to out-bird one another with birding knowledge. Also check out his Substack.

Beginning tomorrow, the lovely folks at Cinema Tropical are kicking off a month-long retrospective of my documentary work, showing five films at multiple venues throughout NYC.

The retrospective has been programmed by Carlos A. Gutiérrez, presented by @colorcongress , through its Elev8Docs Marketing Initiative. Community partners include the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute, NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and the Bronx Documentary Center.

Dates and venues below:

• EL EQUIPO (2023). Saturday, November 1, 6:30pm at the MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

  BUY TICKETS FOR EL EQUIPO

• REPORTERO (2012). Wednesday, November 5, 7pm at DCTV’S FIREHOUSE CINEMA FOR DOCUMENTARY FILM

BUY TICKETS FOR REPORTERO

• THE INFINITE RACE (2020). Monday, November 10, 6:30pm at CUNY GRADUATE CENTER

FREE SCREENING - RESERVE SEATS HERE

• HARVEST SEASON (2018). Monday, November 21, 6:30pm at the MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER

TICKETS AVAILABLE SOON

• KINGDOM OF SHADOWS (2015). Monday, November 24, 6pm at NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S ESPACIO DE CULTURAS

RSVP FOR KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

• A Conversation With Director Bernardo Ruiz plus an Advance Look at THE LOW SEASON.” Saturday, November 22, 7pm at UNION DOCS

  EVENT INFO COMING SOON

Documentary Mixtape

As many of you know, I have been recording conversations with independent filmmakers for a project called Documentary Mixtape. More on that in future posts, but I wanted to highlight two projects that may not be on your radar, especially during award-season when so many of the big streamers have launched well funded campaigns.

The Gas Station Attendant by Karla Murthy

I recently spoke to Karla Murthy about her moving and carefully crafted film for Doc Mixtape. It screens Nov. 19th as part of DOC NYC.

A daughter reflects on her father’s life — weaving the story of his miraculous journey from the streets of India with the realities of life in America. Using recorded phone calls with her dad while he worked nights at a gas station along with home movies past and present, this deeply intimate film is a meditation on family, the immigrant experience, and the dreams we carry with us.

Kiss the Past Goodbye by Remy Weber (in development)

This archive-rich film which I have seen different cuts of delves into the hidden history of photographer & filmmaker Daniel Seymour—a singular, prolific, self destructive, and enigmatic bohemian who helped shape the trends and visual style of 1960s-1970s counter-culture, before mysteriously disappearing off the coast of Colombia.

As big tech monopolies continue to suck resources out of what was already a precarious media industry for independent filmmakers, supporting artists directly offers critical support.

Hope to see you at one of the upcoming screenings.

In November 2025, audiences in New York City will encounter the first-ever mid-career retrospective dedicated to Bernardo Ruiz, a pathbreaking three-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose documentaries have carved a space for complex and humane portrayals of the Latin American experience at home and in the U.S.

Presented by Color Congress through its Elev8Docs marketing initiative and co-presented by Cinema Tropical, this citywide 5-film retrospective — opening at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday, November 1 — comes at a moment when nonfiction cinema is an indispensable tool for reckoning with fractured public discourse, contested histories, and ongoing struggles for justice.

For almost two decades, Ruiz has pursued a clear, unflinching mission: to craft rigorous, socially engaged documentaries that amplify voices too often pushed to the margins. His films illuminate the lives of journalists, farmworkers, migrants, Indigenous runners, and human rights advocates — figures who rarely occupy the center of media narratives, yet whose stories reveal urgent truths about power, violence, and resilience. Across this body of work, Ruiz has developed a style that is at once investigative and lyrical, committed to accountability while attuned to the subtleties of daily life.

Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, Ruiz moved to the United States at the age of six and grew up in Brooklyn. His dual heritage shaped a sensibility alert to both the fractures and the bridges between cultures. He came of age in a city defined by migration and contradiction, where stories of displacement and survival coexisted with structures of exclusion. This vantage point — simultaneously inside and outside — became a cornerstone of his filmmaking practice.

Unlike many contemporaries who gravitated toward commercial outlets or the prestige of the festival circuit, Ruiz aligned himself with the often-precarious world of public television. Working against all odds, he embraced a space historically devoted to civic education and community dialogue. For Ruiz, public media represented more than a distribution platform: it was a political choice, a commitment to accessibility and plurality at a time when mainstream media increasingly abandoned nuanced reporting on Latin America and its diasporas.

At the heart of Ruiz’s work lies a conviction that documentary is not just about relaying facts, but about resisting erasure. His films consistently expose how certain communities — immigrants, workers, Indigenous peoples, dissidents — are demonized or rendered invisible. Yet they go beyond denunciation. Ruiz insists on showing how people resist, endure, and imagine new futures, even under oppressive conditions. His protagonists are never reduced to victims; they are agents, thinkers, and creators of meaning.

This ethical stance is accompanied by a cinematic sensitivity. Ruiz’s films are marked by careful composition, attentive soundscapes, and an eye for quotidian detail: the rhythms of harvest, the quiet determination of a runner, the gestures of solidarity among journalists under siege. His documentaries engage both the mind and the heart, grounding structural critique in lived experience.

The retrospective assembles five major feature films that together chart Ruiz’s evolving vision.

Reportero (2012), his breakthrough, follows Mexican journalists who continue to publish stories in the face of relentless violence. More than an exposé, the film becomes a meditation on courage and the meaning of truth-telling when words themselves carry mortal risk.

Kingdom of Shadows (2015) extends this inquiry into the broader human toll of the drug war, weaving together the testimonies of a nun, a former trafficker, and a U.S. federal agent. By juxtaposing these disparate voices, Ruiz resists simplistic binaries and emphasizes the systemic entanglements that perpetuate violence.

With Harvest Season (2018), Ruiz turns to California’s wine country to foreground the Latinx farmworkers who sustain a multi-billion-dollar industry. Eschewing sensationalism, the film dwells on labor’s dignity, seasonal rhythms, and the bonds forged in shared toil. It is as much a portrait of community as it is an agricultural chronicle.

The Infinite Race (2020), part of ESPN’s celebrated “30 for 30” series, focuses on the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) runners of northern Mexico, renowned for their endurance. Yet Ruiz avoids exoticizing them. Instead, he situates running within broader histories of displacement, colonization, and resilience, underscoring the community’s agency in preserving its traditions amid external pressures.

El Equipo (2023) tells the remarkable story of an American forensic doctor and a group of Argentine students whose groundbreaking work in the 1980s transformed the pursuit of human rights. Through their pioneering forensic anthropology, they unearthed the crimes of state terror and gave voice to the disappeared. The film exemplifies Ruiz’s commitment to uncovering histories that resonate across borders, demonstrating how acts of memory and science can confront entrenched impunity.

Taken together, these works testify to Ruiz’s breadth — ranging from border politics to agrarian labor, from sports culture to transitional justice — yet unified by a consistent ethic of care and inquiry.

At mid-career, Ruiz has already shaped the contours of Latinx documentary practice in the U.S., influencing younger filmmakers and expanding the reach of public media. Along with Natalia Almada, Alex Rivera, and Cristina Ibarra, he belongs to a generation of Latinx filmmakers who paved the way for others in American independent film to find their voice. Ruiz’s Emmy nominations recognize professional excellence, but they only hint at the cultural significance of his work.

In a moment when misinformation circulates with unprecedented speed, when xenophobia resurges in public discourse, and when media conglomerates consolidate narratives for profit, Ruiz’s cinema stands as a countervailing force. His documentaries restore complexity to communities caricatured as threats or statistics. They remind audiences that journalism, labor, ritual, and science are not abstractions but lived practices tied to human dignity.

A retrospective is not merely a celebration of past achievements; it is a political act. By circulating and celebrating Ruiz’s films, the program challenges the cultural amnesia that so often shrouds Latinx histories in the U.S. It affirms the necessity of nonfiction storytelling that bridges North and South, English and Spanish, the personal and the geopolitical. And it signals to institutions — from broadcasters to funders — that this work matters and must continue.

Ruiz belongs to a generation that entered the field when public television still served as a reliable platform for independent voices. Today, that space is under siege — attacked by the federal government and squeezed by streaming platforms that prioritize global franchises over local accountability. Ruiz’s career thus embodies both the possibilities and the precarity of nonfiction filmmaking: the potential to reach wide audiences with socially urgent work, alongside the challenge of sustaining that work within fragile infrastructures.

In highlighting his films, the retrospective implicitly advocates for a broader ecosystem of support — one that values investigative rigor, artistic vision, and civic commitment. Ruiz’s example demonstrates that documentaries can be both elegant and consequential, both intimate and systemic.

Ruiz’s films are acts of witness, but also acts of imagination: they envision futures in which marginalized communities are not simply observed but heard, understood, and honored. The retrospective is therefore more than a look back. It is an invitation to engage with the present — to confront the forces that silence and to stand with those who speak. At mid-career, Ruiz’s achievements affirm the enduring power of documentary to unsettle, to illuminate, and to inspire.

Support Bernardo Ruiz's Latest Film

The screenings in the Retrospective are slated for the following dates and locations:

Saturday, November 1—Museum of the Moving Image (Queens)

Wednesday, November 5—DCTV’S Firehouse Cinema (Chinatown)

Week of November 17 —Lehman College (Bronx)

Friday, November 21—Maysles Cinema (Harlem)

TBD Date - CUNY Graduate Center (Manhattan )

Carlos A. Gutiérrez is co-founding executive director of Cinema Tropical, the New York-based media arts non-profit organization founded in 2001, which is the leading promoter of Latin American cinema in the U.S. As a guest curator, he has presented several series at numerous institutions such as MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum, BAM Film, and Anthology Film Archives. He co-curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2007 and 2025, currently serves as artistic director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Latin Wave film festival and as co-director of Cinema Tucsón. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), sits in Film Forum’s Board of Directors, and is founding member of the collective Distribution Advocates. He has served as a juror, nominator, and panelist for various international film festivals and funds including IDFA, Tribeca, Mar del Plata, DOC NYC, Doclisboa, New Orleans, Morelia, Seattle, Margaret Mead, SANFIC, the Sundance Documentary Fund and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

Color Congress is an ecosystem-builder that is committed to organizations led by people of color that serve nonfiction filmmakers, leaders, and audiences of color across the United States and US islands. We are a membership organization that includes film festivals, artist support and narrative change entities, micro cinemas, filmmaker collectives, and public media. We serve this ecosystem by supporting, resourcing, connecting and championing these organizations to build their collective power. Our vision is to actualize a reimagined documentary landscape toward one that strengthens people of color visibility, voice, and power, laying the groundwork for a future of the field that is a more powerful force for social change.

So, I made Jon Else laugh out loud before I hit record, but I swear he laughed a belly laugh when I said that that documentary filmmakers are the “cockroaches of cinema.”

Jon, now 81, is, a veteran documentary filmmaker. He is perhaps best known for the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (1980) but has made many, many other films, including a personal favorite, Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle (2000), which also served as a reference/inspiration for one of my own films, Harvest Season (2018) (inspiration in that it tells the story of the behind-the-scenes workers that don’t often get their due.)

Over 17 years, he trained up generations of filmmakers and journalists —including many of my friends and colleagues—as the director of the documentary program at the Graduate School Of Journalism at U. C. Berkeley. Recently, he was awarded a much-deserved Lifetime Achievement Emmy.

I met him for the first time in pre-9/11 New York, when he came in to Roja Productions, a Harlem-based production company started by filmmaker Orlando Bagwell that shone briefly but brightly.

Jon came in to advise us young and green production staffers as we got started on ambitious 4-part series on race in America (exactly the kind of project that today would trigger a dumb, blunt reactionary attack because it addressees race explicitly.)

Jon and Orlando had collaborated closely on a landmark piece of documentary television, Henry Hampton’s Eyes On The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1987). Jon was the series producer and cinematographer—an experience he chronicled and unpacked in True South: Henry Hampton and ‘Eyes On The Prize published by Viking in 2017.

What follows is a brief excerpt from a longer interview I conducted with Jon in June for an oral history project about independents, independence and the history of public media. As a note, I recorded this interview with Jon before the House of Representatives gave final approval to cut $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and before CPB’s own announcement that they would “begin an orderly wind-down of its operations.”

But the truth is, I also sat down with Jon because I was craving advice from someone who has walked the walk for five decades.

I have edited for length and clarity.

Jon Else: When I got out of film school, I was gonna be the new Ricky Leacock, I was going to be the new Barbara Kopple…the new Jean-Luc Godard. I was going to be this artsy filmmaker. [But] my first paying job was filming people snoring for early studies on sleep apnea at the Stanford Medical Center. So, there I was with my fancy master's degree, and I'd go in and show up at 10 o'clock at night and set up a very, very dim light with very fast film and spend the night with these people, filming them snoring. That was my first job…I've [now] spent, I don't know, 50 years making documentary films for a living, supplemented by commercials for junk food, which allowed me to make documentaries and put my kids through college. To be honest, I'm at an age now where making documentaries kind of ruined my body. Did a lot of handheld camera work. And it's a young person's game, you know, so I write books now, which you don't have to raise a million dollars to write a book and you can do it anywhere.

Bernardo Ruiz: Before we get into the book, I wanted to tell you that you actually gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given on story structure. You were an advisor at the Sundance Labs.

Jon Else: That's where I saw Reportero (2012) in rough cut.

Bernardo Ruiz: We were struggling with it. I was working with a very good editor, Carla Gutierrez, at the time, but we were struggling with the cut. And you said, you need to make a cut of the film that Frontline [the PBS series] would hire you to do. Just get it chronologically right, get it tight, get it factually right, but walk away for a bit. Then go back and make the version that Frontline would fire you [for being to ‘poetic’.]

Jon Else: That's great advice (laughs).

Bernardo Ruiz: Well, since you mentioned books, why did you want to write True South? What kind of set that in motion and why did you think it was important to chronicle the history of Blackside Inc. [the company that Henry Hampton founded and which produced Eyes on the Prize]?

Jon Else: Very often, perhaps most of the time when you're in the middle of something important, you may not realize it. Obviously if you are at a demonstration with a million other people in front of the White House you're going to know that something's going on. But at Blackside making Eyes on the Prize, it started out to be simply a really interesting engaging documentary project with this fascinating man at the helm, this guy Henry Hampton. After it was all done, and it seemed to have made such a difference in television history and broadcast history, I began thinking about, well, maybe something unique was going on there that I wasn't really aware of…there were a couple of wires that crossed. And one was this really tipping point history in American, in the life of this nation in the 60s. Turns out now under Trump that it didn't tip quite as far as we thought it did.

Bernardo Ruiz: Do you think of Henry as an independent producer?

Jon Else: He was absolutely independent. He had witnessed the failure of the first Eyes on the Prize in a commercial setting. [Later]the funding that we got, the funders never meddled in Eyes on the Prize, which is interesting. And I think one of the lineages from Blackside to ITVS is that as far as I know, ITVs is the only funder that gives final cut to the filmmaker, the only one that I know of. I think many of the foundations default to that. They're not going to, you know, they're not gonna give you terrible notes that are mandates. But that's really what makes ITVS unique. And I've made some ITVS films and that's been the case. They give brilliant notes, but it's your movie. They don't have to broadcast it, but its your movie and I think- You own the copyright. ..So yeah, there was a constellation of outsider filmmakers at that time and Henry was the mainstream outsider in that he was really interested, he determined to make films that were not for a restricted audience. He was he was Afrocentric but he wanted…to communicate the Black experience to the [broader] American experience, which was no small task, especially back then. I mean, we're only 20 years out from the Civil Rights Movement at that point, only 20 years out from Selma.

Bernardo Ruiz: So to kind of just connect the dots… I find it fascinating that [production of Eyes on The Prize] was happening at the same time that organizing was happening to create [ITVS]. So, this is a pretty effervescent period.

Jon Else: Bingo…there's a similarity between Blackside and ITVS and that is the diaspora. Blackside was an incredible training ground for probably a hundred young filmmakers…if you were young, especially if you're a young Black filmmaker, you made your way to 486 Shawmut Avenue... And the same is true of ITVS. There's an ITVS diaspora. I mean, how many, probably thousand[s] of filmmakers, documentary makers have at some point gone through ITVS, either as producers or directors, not to mention all the crew people and editors.

Jon Else: One thing that people don't—well, one thing I forget—is that these documentaries, they worm their way into the culture for a long time. They have a long tail. And for, you know, for probably the next 10 years after Eyes on the Prize was released, if you were in high school in America, it was a really good chance you were required to watch at least part of Eyes on the Prize… It got to the point where we did a series of Blackside ten years later…and there's a great interview with a a young rapper who was complaining that his parents made him watch Eyes On The Prize, when he was a kid. So they have a really, really long life.

Bernardo Ruiz: We're in an obvious period of cultural backlash. But if you take a step back and you think about this more thoughtfully how can we come up with [a better system]?

Jon Else: I'm going to quote you on, “the cockroaches will prevail.” And I think there's actually some truth in that, that people who are in the documentary business, because they're interested simply in truth and not in making a lot of money, you know that's a gene, that's it's a piece of DNA that's not going to go away. I wish I had an answer to what to do in the present. And I don't. If anything, I'll go back to the Eyes on The Prize experience and my own experience in the civil rights movement in the south, which is that I don't want to waste my time on stuff that's not going to make a difference.

Coming Up Next:

• I had a conversation with Petra Costa for IDA’s Documentary Magazine about her latest, Apocalypse in the Tropics, which examines the outsize influence of evangelical leaders in Brazilian politics and the challenges to democratic institutions there.

• I am also moving forward on a low-budget hybrid fiction-documentary, The Low Season, which you can support at the button below. It is a wild time to make independent films, but when you are a cockroach, you are a cockroach.

Support My New Film: The Low Season

SUPPORT A NEW FILM: THE LOW SEASON

In the late 1970’s, my godfather in Guanajuato (Mexico) made Super 8mm films with sound. He would project them at our family home, and that is probably one of the first things that got me hooked–for better or for worse–on filmmaking.

When he projected films, I would imitate him, by taking a projector bag and mounting a cardboard toilet paper tube as a projecting lens in the front, and an empty take up reel in the back. We didn’t own a TV yet, so obviously the projected square on the wall was magical (still is, and always will be.)

I also loved—like so many kids of my generation—how you could reverse the reel, and watch everything move backwards in time. I also learned that if you hold on a frame for too long, you can burn a hole in your film. Of course, that has become a film cliché and there’s probably an AI version of it out there, but its wild if you are a 5-year old in the late 1970s watching a piece of Super8mm melt.

I’ve been lucky and stubborn enough to make—that is direct and produce—five feature-length documentaries. Three of them were made with the critical support of ITVS, which I have just written about, an organization which was born out of an independent film movement and good old-fashioned organizing.

Those films were also supported by Latino Public Broadcasting, which like every other piece of public media is under assault.

The other two films were made for an innovative studio and a sports series: Participant Media (where I worked with the late, singular and deeply missed Diane Weyermann) and the popular ESPN series, 30 for 30.

Recently, I started putting a new film together.

This new film is a hybrid documentary-fiction film. It is partly a response to the nation-wide raids where masked, agents, often without any visible insignia, are dragging people out of their homes, shackling them in front of their children, and pushing them into unmarked vehicles.

But the film is also about my resilient community in Queens, New York, which as the New York mayoral race heats up, will inevitably be scapegoated and demonized.

The film is called The Low Season or Temporada Baja (in Spanish) and you can read more about it at the link below:

SUPPORT A NEW FILM: THE LOW SEASON

I am not a newcomer, but I am trying out something completely different. Toward that end, I am sharing the process of making this new work with you and asking for support.

If you are able, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the project below. The film has been fiscally sponsored through Union Docs, an innovative center for documentary art based in Ridgewood, Queens.

Whether you can support or not, I’ll keep you posted on the progress as I push it forward with collaborators.

For now, here’s a quick timeline of my past work through five posters. I’m hoping you’ll join me on the trip to make a sixth…

SUPPORT A NEW FILM: THE LOW SEASON

Welcome back to the Documentary Mixtape newsletter.

As a quick note, the research for this piece has been supported by the Documentary Film in the Public Interest (DFPI) program at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where I was a fellow in the fall of ‘24.

The piece has also been republished on Current.org.

If you care about publicly funded media and free speech, now is the time to step up.

Urge Congress to Protect Public Media

The Trump administration’s assault on public media, including the plan to claw back previously approved $1.1 billion to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is part of a broader attack on basic press freedoms. Taken together with the lawsuits against for-profit news outlets and the attacks on educational and cultural institutions, this is cancel culture on steroids.

While most of the efforts to defend the PBS side of public media have focused on “Saving Elmo,” independent documentaries are central to PBS’s mission and have played a critical role in engaging a wide segment of the American public.

Nearly 40 years ago, a broad and diverse coalition of independent filmmakers successfully waged a fight to build a space for independent film that would use the public infrastructure to fund and distribute independent work.

In November of 1987, as Washington was gripped by an unexpected snowstorm, the independent filmmaker Loni Ding testified before a Congressional subcommittee on the future of public broadcasting. Ding’s films would later play a key role in the passage of legislation granting Japanese Americans reparations for their forcible relocation and incarceration during World War II. Along with many independent documentary filmmakers, my own career has been shaped by and supported by what Ding and her colleagues were able to achieve.

“I am myself an independent producer,” Ding testified at the time. “I’m here…speaking on behalf of approximately 10,000 such producers…. We are a microcosm of this country…. We simply are arguing against giving market forces complete free reign.”

The 1980s were a period of big and disruptive technological change in media, with cable and home video on the rise. “There were all these new delivery systems and technologies, and in past times they would have been regulated,” Lawrence Sapadin, a key organizer in the coalition of independent filmmakers and at the time, the head of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, told me in an interview. “There would have been a public interest element in all of them. Under Reagan, it was just wild west capitalism.”

The consensus among the independent filmmakers was clear. “We can’t rely on the marketplace for everything,” Lawrence Daressa, then co-director of California Newsreel, a media nonprofit, explained. Daressa and the other independents asserted that since the creation of public media in 1967, there had been an obligation to support independent producers in ways that had never materialized.

Then, as now, there were debates about who and what constituted an “independent” producer. Filmmaker Pamela Yates provided clarity at a public hearing. “Very simply stated,” she explained, “an independent producer is someone who has budgetary and content control over their program.” Filmmakers working for “an executive producer who has final cut over the programs, as well as budgetary control” couldn’t really be considered independents in that context.

Within a year of the 1987 hearings, and capping roughly a decade of organizing, independents won a key victory, establishing one of the most durable pieces of public media architecture for independent films—the Independent Television Service or ITVS. President Reagan signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1988, writing to a colleague afterwards, “the Nation’s public broadcast system provides an important service to Americans.”

Remarkably, in that same year, POV, one of television’s longest-running showcases for independent nonfiction films, was also created.

But almost immediately, both ITVS and POV faced backlash. And there are echoes in the present-day efforts to remove films and materials that are deemed controversial by outside critics, typically acting in bad faith, or worse from within public media.

For example, even before the 1991 POV broadcast of Marlon Riggs’s now legendary Tongues Untied, a number of public television stations refused to air the film. During the 1992 presidential campaign, the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, who was seeking the Republican nomination, used clips of the film to attack George H. Bush, on the grounds that public tax dollars were being spent on promoting pornography and immorality.

Riggs and supporters, including series POV creator, Marc Weiss, pushed back against these attacks, but some of the pushback came from within public media. “Sandwiched uncomfortably amidst this improbable collection of censorship co-conspirators,” Riggs later wrote, “was a dismaying number of U.S. public television executives. The broadcasters, most of whom had the sense not to object to homosexuality per se, nonetheless cited the ‘offensive language’ of Tongues Untied and its affront to ‘community standards’ as justification for banning the work or scheduling it in the wee hours of the night.”

Similarly, early into ITVS’s tenure, a series it produced, TV Families, came under fire for, among other things, programming an early short by filmmaker Todd Haynes “which provoked conservative ire for depicting queer desire.” The backlash even came from other public television producers. “The problem with ITVS,” a producer named Peter Rosen told The New York Times at the time, “is that the shows are so poorly made that they’re embarrassing for PBS to put on the air.”

Since then, ITVS has funded over 1,400 projects and racked up numerous industry recognitions, including Emmys, Peabodys, and Academy Award nominations. It has also functioned as a launching pad for new filmmakers.

“There’s an ITVS diaspora,” Jon Else, veteran documentary filmmaker and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 News & Documentary Emmy Awards recently explained. “There’s probably thousands of filmmakers, documentary makers that have at some point gone through ITVS, either as producers, directors, or editors.”

Along with key partners such as the member organizations of the National Multicultural Alliance, ITVS has served as a core driver of new voices in the public media system, even when the system has been slow to embrace change. Yet, despite the many challenges for independents working within the system we have understood that ceding ground on public media, for all its flaws, would be a form of capitulation and a blow to free speech.

“Saving public media means saving one of the largest and most consistent distributors of documentaries by and about people of color in the U.S.” Loira Limbal, President and CEO of Firelight Media, which is a complimentary engine for supporting new filmmaking and producing talent, explains in an open letter. “It means ensuring that all residents, regardless of income or geography, can access timely and trustworthy programming.”

As the general public, elected officials and philanthropy step up to defend public media, the system itself must also evolve. It will benefit from fresh approaches and forward-thinking leadership. To do this, independents will need to play a key role in shaping that future, as they did nearly 40 years ago.

Reflecting on the victory of independents, Loni Ding said it best:

“We had a claim upon the public money, we had a claim upon the public interest, so it was necessary to translate what our purposes and functions were into those terms and go do the political work.”

“Official rhetoric displays all of the traits we associate with authoritarian discourse: obsession with the enemy, triumphal oratory, exaggerated abstraction, and messianic slogans, all based on ‘absolute truth’ and ‘objective reality.’— Marguerite Feitlowitz, “A Lexicon of Terror”

Long after the cleaning crews have finished picking up after today’s military parade in the capital, we’ll be relying on behind-the-scenes work that tends to get less coverage.

I spent roughly a decade, working with collaborators, piecing together the documentary, “El Equipo” (Independent Lens, 2023) which is about the formation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team immediately following the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983). Under the dictatorship, an estimated 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared. The current president of Argentina, who earlier this year gifted Elon Musk a chainsaw on a CPAC stage, has disputed that number.

The film we made is also about the unique bond the members of that team (who just celebrated a 41st anniversary) had with U.S. forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow.

One piece of an interview, which we didn’t use in the film, came to mind recently. The interview was with the Argentine artist and sister of one of the team’s founders, Claudia Bernardi, about the experience of living through the early days of the Argentine military dictatorship.

“What I remember clearly is three months after [the coup], the concept of the disappeared started being part of our mindset.”

“The other side of that story,” Bernardi continues, “is that we proceeded with life as we knew it. You know, we went to work, we went to school…I did not understand until much later—and thanks to the work of the Argentine forensic team—to understand [the scale of] what happened.”

There is something familiar about the dissonance between living day to day, while people are being abducted, detained and in some cases rendered to detention sites. No one is suggesting there is something happening on the scale of what happened under the Argentine or Chilean regimes. But many of those who lived under dictatorships are drawing parallels.

Recently, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), hosted a panel discussion, including Mercedes “Mimi” Doretti, one of the founders of the Argentine Forensic team, about those very parallels.

"Over the past… months, U.S. immigration and law‑enforcement agencies have been detaining migrants and asylum seekers without promptly disclosing their whereabouts, permitting contact with counsel, or even keeping them on U.S. soil where they are clearly within the reach of the rule of U.S. law. Veteran rights advocates warn that these detentions mirror a practice that Latin American societies know all too well: enforced disappearance.—WOLA

Speaking as a forensic scientist, Mimi made the point that the disappearances, abductions must be carefully documented. Gathering evidence is crucial to future justice efforts.

Clearly, people are thinking along parallel lines. In Ohio, a data scientist started a disappearance tracker, culled from publicly available information and other sources,

Like the work of the forensic team members, this is unglamorous, labor-intensive but needed work.

In the past week, the country has seen law enforcement injure and, in some cases, arrest journalists and photographers documenting the protests against workplace immigration raids and mass deportation. A talented photographer I have worked with was arrested while working in his capacity as a member of the press and another journalist I know was hit with a “non-lethal” round while covering for a big outlet.

Just now, the House of Representatives voted to pass the President’s rescission package, which pulls $1.1 billion in funding for PBS and NPR. Here’s The Hollywood Reporter on the move:

The House passed the package by the slimmest of margins, 214-212, after one Republican switched their vote. The rescission package now heads to the U.S. Senate, which can pass it with a simple majority (or 50 votes, with the Vice President breaking a tie). Republicans hold a 53 to 47 seat majority, and while some moderates like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have expressed concerns about the package, it may not be enough to stop it from passing.

The attempt to dismantle public media can only be seen as part of a broader assault on basic press freedoms. It is also an attack on the ability of a wide range of communities—across the country—to access information.

“Public TV ensures that everyone, regardless of income, has access to knowledge and information, including people inside prisons,” journalist independent filmmaker JoeBill Muñoz explained recently. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend his Independent Lens (PBS) documentary, The Strike, co-directed with Lucas Guilkey, which artfully tells the story of how a small hunger strike against solitary confinement in California turned into a massive statewide protest. “We’ve heard from community members that their incarcerated loved ones gathered in prison dayrooms to watch The Strike broadcast on TV.”

Of course, that is just one example of many of how documentaries reach and serve a broad, diverse audience throughout this country. For the many challenges facing those producing films for PBS, it also remains a vital way to reach audiences beyond what for profit streamers can do. Loira Limbal, thew new President & CEO of Firelight Media, which develops new independent filmmakers, and an organization for which I have served as a mentor in the past, explains why this space for public media is so critical:

“At present, there are more than a dozen Firelight Media-supported films whose fate hangs in the balance. Those films include historical narratives that help viewers better understand our shared history, personal documentaries that invite empathy and courage, and cultural documentaries that help us sort through the complexity of the moment in which we’re living. I’m sure you know as well as I do that the distribution landscape is exceedingly difficult to navigate right now, and without PBS, it’s hard to know where these stories will find a home.”

If you haven’t already, you should contact your local representatives to let them know that a genuine free press requires keeping public media funded.

Independent filmmakers and producers will have to fight for public media again, and while the current threats are more dire than they have been in the past, I believe, it is important to remember that public media has always been a kind of media battleground.

Nearly four decades ago, Loni Ding, a prolific independent filmmaker, whose documentaries would play a key role in the passage of legislation granting Japanese Americans reparations for their forcible relocation and incarceration during World War II, explained why she and dozens of other independents organized to create the Independent Television Service or ITVS in 1988.

“We had a claim upon the public money, we had a claim upon the public interest, so it was necessary to translate what our purposes and functions were into those terms and go do the political work.”

As a bit of housekeeping, I will be publishing monthly, with some audio and video features coming next month.

If you are a new subscriber of any kind—welcome. I am Bernardo Ruiz, a longtime independent documentary producer and director based in New York. There’s a lot of valuable coverage on independent film, documentary and the overall media ecosystem out there and I have some recommended links below.

What I’ve got here are some insights from inside the kitchen, as it were. I’m not an executive or former longtime staffer at a big media company. I’ve been the equivalent of a line cook for two decades, hopping from kitchen to kitchen to survive. What I’ll offer are some on-the-ground takes from a flailing industry—hopefully with some analysis and context. Maybe it is useful to you. I will also occasionally post about projects I am working on (or those I am trying to work on.)

Today, I am sharing 5 tips on reporting under authoritarianism, from Venezuelan journalist Boris Muñoz. Boris was the founding Opinions Editor of the New York Times en Español and is a 2019 winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Journalism.

I caught up with him in California this weekend as the protests against workplace immigration raids and mass deportation were met with an immediate and escalating crackdown, including the deployment of National Guard troops.

Boris and fellow Venezuelan journalist Tamoa Calzadilla, recently editor in chief of Factchequeado, a collaborative initiative to fight misinformation and disinformation in Latino and Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. and who I interviewed for Latino Vote 2024 (PBS), both explained that during a non-traditional presidency, it doesn’t make sense to respond in traditional ways.

They also explained that in the country they both had to leave, there were a series of escalations against the press and the media.

In retrospect, they both wish that media outlets and journalists had banded together sooner.

Here are Boris’s 5 tips:

1. Don’t normalize the abnormal.
   Treating chaos as routine makes it harder to resist.

2. Facts need stories to survive — but also need explanations and a message.
   And stories must be marketed aggressively. If truth doesn’t reach people, it loses power.

3. Solidarity is not optional.
   [Hugo] Chávez picked us off one by one. We only survived when we stood together.

4. Be truthful and fair — not just “impartial.”
   Balance doesn’t mean pretending both sides are equal when one is attacking democracy or dehumanizing immigrants.

5. Protect your vital energy.
   Authoritarians don’t just wear down institutions. They wear down people. You’ll need endurance.

Re Tip # 3 - in the last few months, veteran and emerging documentary makers have been gathering to discuss how to build networks of support on a variety of fronts, including how to defend public media. I’ll have some more on that in future posts.

For now, here is a quick recommendation and a call to action:

• Direct Distribution - if you don’t already subscribe to Jon Reiss, I recommend his podcast/newsletter. In particular, this discussion with the heads of the new crop of direct distribution services was really valuable:

8 Above with Jon Reiss

New Platforms, New Potential: Meet the CEOs Behind Direct Distribution

Included in this paid subscriber post…

Listen now

a year ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Jon Reiss-8Above

• Defend Public Media - PBS has never had an easy relationship with independent filmmakers. If you dig into the history, you know that editorial tensions are part and parcel of the public media experience for independents. PBS also represents an opportunity for filmmakers to reach a broad-cross section of the American public. Of course, it would be an enormous mistake for filmmakers to abandon this critical, publicly funded infrastructure. If you haven’t you should sign on to Protect My Public Media.

Late last night, May 1st, the White House issued an Executive Order instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cease funding to PBS and NPR.

“Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” the EO states.

As others have reported, this EO follows this administration’s attempts to fire three CPB board members earlier this week. In response, CPB is suing the administration.

“The President’s blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night, threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years,” Paula Kerger, the President and CEO of PBS wrote in a statement.

The attempt to dismantle public media can only be seen as part of a broader assault on basic press freedoms. It is also an attack on the ability of a wide range of communities—across the country—to access information.

Whether you love public media or not, it has played a key role in informing the American public since Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act and created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man's spirit. That is the purpose of this act,” he said.

Six decades later, in a highly polarized environment, those words sound lofty. I can tell you that as a working filmmaker who has repeatedly confronted the many challenges and limitations of public media, it is an imperfect system. But it is one that we must defend nonetheless.

The arguments for dismantling it ring hollow. In an unhinged press release at the end of March, Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed that “PBS is one of the founders of the trans child abuse industry.” A highly-paid think tank fellow, who has not worked a proper media job in nearly two decades, claims that public media epitomizes the “liberal elite”.

The fact is that 90% of parents believe PBS Kids content is a safe and trusted source for children. If you are looking for examples of small business entrepreneurship and hustle, then look no further than the independent producers cobbling together limited budgets to films and programming for public media. It is laughable to think about billionaire-backed critics with fat salaries calling the gig workers of media, “elites”.

Again, public media is imperfect, and it should be doing more to defend its programming that has had a target painted on it by culture war extremists. But if we allow it to be dismantled, we will be losing precious space, and further limiting a free press and a space for creative expression.

We as independent filmmakers, journalists need to join the communities we serve in order to defend public media. We can simultaneously push it to be more responsive to the communities it serves. After all, public media is ours. We pay for it.

As many of you know, I have been working on an oral history project about the organizing efforts of independent filmmakers and their allies in the 1980s that led to an expansion of resources for independent documentary within public media. This is work that has been supported by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center’s Documentary Film in the Public Interest initiative.

From that work, here is a piece of relevant wisdom from Loni Ding, a prolific independent filmmaker, whose documentaries played a key role in the passage of legislation granting Japanese Americans reparations for their forcible relocation and incarceration during World War II.

“We had a claim upon the public money, we had a claim upon the public interest, so it was necessary to… go do the political work.” (From an interview with the scholar Barbara Abrash)

Note: As a working independent, I have produced projects for public media in the recent past, alongside projects and programming for for-profit streamers.

It is no secret that public media is under attack. Some have said the response so far amounts to bringing a tote bag to a knife fight.

For now, Protect My Public Media, is a good resource. However, across the country, communities that rely on and work within public media are girding for the bad faith attacks that are coming down the pike. And to be clear, no one entity can—or should—claim to represent all of it. In fact, that is the point of public media. It should be big enough and diverse enough to reflect the country it was designed to serve.

Like many of you, my first exposure to public television was through shows like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. In my first year of college, I watched Eyes on the Prize, a groundbreaking series about the Civil Rights Movement, produced by the legendary Blackside, Inc., which taught me a history I never fully grasped through textbooks.

After college, my first real documentary job was on a 4-part series for PBS called “Matters of Race”, working for the venerable Orlando Bagwell, one of the filmmakers responsible for Eyes who had come up through Blackside and started his own company in Harlem.

That first job, twenty-five years ago, was in many ways, my film school, and a glimpse into the possibilities and challenges of making documentaries for PBS.

Then, as now, the “public” part of PBS was a battleground. In fact, out of the gate, PBS was in the crosshairs of powerful politicians and their backers. In 1970, for example, after the New York public television station aired “Banks and the Poor”, which examined how the credit policies of banks discriminated against the poor (and which focused on one of Richard Nixon’s campaign funders), “Nixon told the Office of Management and Budget to find out how to defund public TV,” scholar Patricia Aufderheide, who I recently interviewed, writes. Nixon wasn’t able to pull it off.

By the end of the 1970s, public broadcasting was awash in criticisms, many of which sound familiar today:

"Public broadcasting has been accused of programming only for the elite; of being inefficient and wasteful in its operations; of being bland and running scared from controversy, particularly in its news and public affairs programs; of relying too heavily on imported programs from Britain and on funding from oil companies; of being leaderless, directionless; of being obsessed with its own bureaucratic infighting; of stifling creativity and freedom of expression by artists and journalists; of being obsessed more with fundraising and politics than in producing programs; and on and on it goes --”

That was the straight-laced Jim Lehrer in 1979 speaking on the predecessor to today’s PBS NewsHour.

The 1980s saw fresh challenges. “When President Reagan was elected, he campaigned and argued that we should do away with government funding of a lot of important programs,” Henry Waxman, who represented California’s 33rd congressional district in the US House of Representatives from 1975 to 2015, recently told me. “I was particularly involved in saving the Medicaid program, which has been the lifeline for health care services for a lot of low income people. But he also wanted to do away with public television. And he felt that we didn't we didn't need the public to fund it.”

Though the Reagan administration did make changes to public media funding that reverberate today, he actually signed the Telecommunications Act of 1988, which was the birth of the largest funder of independent public television documentaries, the Independent Television Service or ITVS. “The Nation's public broadcast system provides an important service to Americans,” wrote Reagan in a letter after signing the act.

Of course, the former president only signed the act after a highly creative and motivated group of independents and their allies mobilized their communities and lobbied their representatives in Congress. “There's an endless campaign that needs to be run to protect public TV,” Larry Sapadin, a labor lawyer by training one of the architects of the strategy told me in interview last year.

“I am myself an independent producer,” the prolific Loni Ding testified in 1987 during public hearing about the future of public television on the 20th anniversary of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. I'm here really speaking on behalf of approximately 10,000 such producers throughout this country. We are a microcosm of this country…We simply are arguing against giving market forces complete free reign.”

Then, as now, it was independents offering transformative solutions. One year later, capping nearly a decade of organizing, the Independent Television Service came into being, co-producing documentaries that have been nominated for Oscars, won Emmy’s and racked up other industry validations. But their biggest value is how they have served the diverse American public, not just a narrow view favored by the “broligarchy”.

As a director and producer I also do work for commercial outlets and the for-profit streamers, but I frequently return to public media because of the “P” in public media. The work is about engaging with a broad section of the public, above a and beyond narrow market imperatives. I have made films for POV, Independent Lens, American Experience as well as children’s programming and stand alone specials, including last year’s Latino Vote ‘24, which delved into the complex dynamics that drove Latino turnout in 2024 and impacted the presidential election.

“In a democracy,” explains Gordon Quinn, the co-founder of Kartemquin Films, “it's incredibly important that you have some part of things that is public. Public schools are important. Public media is important.”

Independents and our allies will need to fight for that “P”. But, we will also need to do so while offering transformative solutions that look towards the future.

In this clip from our PBS documentary project, Latino Vote ‘24 (a one-hour film and six digital shorts) a popular Allentown, Pennsylvania radio host, Victor Martinez, shares his anger. Produced by Marcia Robiou, this clip was filmed on 5/31, the day the former former president was found guilty of 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.

Yes, we are all swimming in election coverage, propaganda, podcast-bro chatter, and algorithm-driven video, but I think this clip offers some insight into the long-standing anger among many Latino voters in battleground states. Taken as part of a bigger reporting & documentary project (started in 2020 with Latino Vote Dispatches From the Battleground) Latino Vote ‘24 delves into this anger as well as highlights the range of politics in what we call the Latino vote, which has never been homogeneous.

Whether it is Latino evangelical leaders in Florida pushing for immigration reform, grassroots organizers in Arizona fighting for reproductive rights, or a Mexican-born congressional candidate from Texas calling for mass deportations, this electorate has always defied superficial categorization.

One of the gripes you hear from critics of independent documentary on PBS—in particular those who have never schlepped a cart of gear through an airport—is that what we do is somehow only “preaching to the choir.” Setting aside the laziness of this argument, the truth is that public media—between legacy infrastructure and the digital platforms—offers a potentially powerful national reach. Hopefully this and other projects like it offer viewers and voters insights and information beyond the crash & burn of social media.

“Is this about politics? I’m tired of it.” 

In a majority-Latino neighborhood on Las Vegas, Nevada's east side, a man, looking worn out from a day’s work, stepped out of his pickup and pleaded, “Please get out of here.” 

It was hard to tell if he was speaking to the group of organizers standing in his driveway from Make the Road Action, which seeks to build long-term political power in working-class Latino communities in five states, including Nevada, or to our documentary crew, which was trailing them with cameras and a boom pole. The organizers, who were door-knocking for Democratic candidates, moved on to another house, and we followed.

This was months before President Joe Biden made way for Kamala Harris, and the mood among the group was grim. “Folks were just not excited to vote for Joe Biden,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who was an architect of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and who co-hosts a podcast on the Latino vote, explained. 

It was a far cry from the palpable excitement that our documentary crew captured four years earlier, when Sanders won the Nevada caucuses, propelled by record turnout among Latino voters in the state. “It was the biggest mobilization that I had ever been a part of in an election year,” LaLo Montoya, civic engagement director for Make the Road Action Nevada, explained. “It was citizenship for all, and it was health care for all. … We had already lived through what a Trump presidency was like and how we could not afford another term.”

This spring, when we documented Make the Road Action Nevada and other organizers around the region working to mobilize voters ahead of the Democratic primaries, we saw the enthusiasm gap among younger Latino voters. That changed dramatically on July 21, when Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for the presidency. “The moment that Kamala Harris went on the ticket,” María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, a national organization that seeks to register young Latino voters, explained during the Democratic National Convention, “we went from registering 60 to 100 voters a day to, that first week, registering 8,000 voters a day.”

This November, a projected 17.5 million Latino voters are expected to cast a ballot in the presidential election, according to one estimate. In Nevada, a battleground state, Latinos are 1 in 5 registered voters, making them a much sought-after commodity. In early August, the powerful Culinary Union, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas and Reno, more than half of them Latino, endorsed Harris. And in its first-ever general election presidential endorsement, Make the Road Action endorsed Harris for president. 

For many of the organizers we interviewed, though, the endorsement is complicated. Latinos make up nearly a third of residents in swing states like Nevada and Arizona and have the potential to wield tremendous power, but organizers say both parties’ policies often fall short of meeting the community’s needs. While former President Donald Trump's pledge to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history” strikes fear among many, actions such as Biden’s executive order restricting asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border have prompted feelings of betrayal. But, Montoya said, “we are in the long game here.” Organizers and community members are committed to going out and talking to people, to making sure that they know how much their vote matters. “There is no shortcut to building power in our state.”

“Latino Vote 2024” airs nationally on PBS on Oct. 22nd.

For this project, I got to collaborate with Emmy®-winning filmmaker Andrés Cediel, who I met nearly a decade ago at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, and with filmmaker and investigative reporter Marcia Robiou, who has worked on a number of films for Frontline, and who is now directing and producing her own independent work. We teamed up with two outstanding editors, Fabian Caballero and Pedro Urguiles, both of whom worked with me on on El Equipo, which has been nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy®.

Just today, The Buenos Aires Herald wrote, “El Equipo [is] a film that transcends the issue of forensic anthropology into a thorough depiction of the passing of time and a family-like group of people who evolved from young, inexperienced students into distinguished veteran scientists who helped uncover some of the world’s worst crimes of the last 40 years.”

We deeply appreciate the continued recognition of this film. That said, it is worth noting that every other film nominated in our Emmy® category was financed by a big streamer or network, whereas our film was pieced together thanks to support of foundations and public media dollars. In other words, there was no commercial incentive to make El Equipo.

But going back to this upcoming election and our new film, Latino Vote 2024. We know there is a ton of media coverage about the election, much of it hyperbolic. For this project, we filmed in 8 states, documented the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention—but more importantly - began filming people-centered stories early in the year. We explored how a community is organizing against gun violence in Allentown, PA and delved into the tensions between Latino evangelical leaders in Orlando, FL and Sacramento, CA over immigration policy. What we humbly offer here is a more in-depth and nuanced view of Latino voters, in particular in key battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In addition to the hour-long broadcast, we have created 10 digital shorts, produced in collaboration with the California Local News Fellowship and administered by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Many of the shorts have been made in partnership with nonprofit newsrooms, such as High Country News or with participating local news outlets such as The Fresno Bee.

The very first short in the series, just under 4 minutes, was posted on Youtube last night. It was produced by our Associate Producer, Nisha Balaram, and tells the story of how a future voter in Nevada doesn’t want to be confined by partisan boxes, while simultaneously caring deeply about issues like climate change and immigration.

LATINO VOTE 2024. USA, 2024, 60 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles. Director/Producer: Bernardo Ruiz; Producers: Andrés Cediel and Marcia Robiou; Coordinating Producer: Jennifer Solorio; Associate Producer: Nisha Balaram; Ediors: Fabián Caballero and Pedro Urgiles. Produced by Quiet Pictures, LLC in association with PBS SoCal, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB), with funding provided by the Ford Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and PBS.

When this happens, it is easy to blame the cook. But there is a context for how they have to work. Private equity groups buy up smaller restaurants. Corners are cut. The cheap ingredients replace the good ones. Things can even seem to be ok for awhile…until customers stop showing up. The next thing you know the restaurant is having a going-out-of-business sale.

At this very moment, executives, philanthropists, consultants, and decision-makers of all stripes are all wrestling with how to support or even re-make the space for independent documentaries. There’s lots of handwringing about it. Most of it, I believe, is coming from a good faith position. But some of it is opportunistic. And some of it willfully neglects the drivers of the industry or the ecosystem—the rank and file.

My go to restaurant in Queens, NY sits just below the 7 train. If you are sitting outside, the rumble is so loud, people know to pause a conversation until the train has passed. It is not a fancy place by any stretch (it is hard to be fancy on Roosevelt Ave.) But it has a devoted Tik-Tok fanbase. Part of what makes it so special is that the owner Mitsumine Oda is fanatical about everything being just right.

Mr. Oda was born just east of Tokyo and worked as a bicycle delivery person for the the famous fish market there. He came to the U.S. later in life, working in pre-pandemic Manhattan, before settling on a nondescript corner in Queens. Despite the humble trappings, Mr. Oda makes special food, in particular onigiriazu- basically a rice and seaweed sandwich with either fish, pork, fried oysters, or chicken.

When you think about Oda’s restaurant, it would be an enormous mistake to look at his one-person operation and to ask, “how come he doesn’t sell as many chicken sandwiches as Wendy’s or Chick-fil-A?” “Shouldn’t he be doing McDonald’s numbers?”

As our documentary field grapples with challenges around production financing and distribution, we are going to hear a lot about ‘metrics’ and audience numbers. These are valuable discussions. One key question to ask, however, is how these performance models match the realities on the ground. And how to measure impact that is less easily quantifiable? After all, if you are only measuring views, you would be highlighting “Baby Shark Dance” (over 15 billion views on Youtube and counting) as the ideal model. Ask yourself this, would you want to watch that on repeat all day?

This past week, I had the great fortune to spend time at the Shorenstien Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School where I will be a fellow through the fall. While I’m there, I’ll be working, with some much needed support, on an oral history of independents and public media.

While it is still too early to make firm conclusions, I think it is clear that change and innovation have historically come from the rank and file, along with their allies.

There will always be consultants, efficiency experts, tech wizards and others trying to dictate terms and either wittingly or unwittingly forcing commercial or franchise models on us.

But when you want something delicious that you can’t get from a franchise, you go to a mom-and-pop…even if they aren’t doing ‘golden arches’ numbers.

Other News

• El Equipo: The Story of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team was recently nominated for aNews & Documentary Emmy® Award in the “Outstanding Crime and Justice Documentary” category and is streaming for free at this link tthrough November 1st, thanks to our partners at Independent Lens . Upcoming screenings include a public screening in collaboration with Doc Films at UChicago on November 19. El Equipo was produced by Gabriela Alcalde and edited and co-produced by Fabian Caballero.

• Latino Vote 2024 - which chronicles the high-stakes battle to turn out the politically diverse Latino electorate in the 2024 presidential election begins streaming on pbs.org on October 2^nd, followed by a national PBS broadcast on October 22^nd. It is a Quiet Pictures co-production with Latino Public Broadcasting and ITVS in association with PBS SoCal and with JustFilms | Ford Foundation. A VOCES Special Presentation. Produced by Andres Cediel, Marcia Robiou and Bernardo Ruiz. Edited by Fabian Caballero and Pedro Urguiles.