The Documentary Has A Diversity Problem - A New Movie Theater Is Trying To Fix It

For 50 years, non-profit documentary production company DCTV has been at the forefront of producing socially responsible non-fiction films locally. That goal expanded last week to fulfill a long-standing goal with the opening of the Firehouse Cinema, a single-screen cinema exclusively dedicated to showing documentary films located at DCTV's headquarters in Lower Manhattan. , in the same old fire station that co-founders Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno have owned and lived in for decades.

Alpert leaned into the building's history, outfitting the concession stand with the front end of an old fire truck, working with firefighters to make films for an upcoming firefighter film festival , and even filling in descriptions of his goals during an interview with firefighter puns.

"We wanted a place where documentaries wouldn't hang around in the caboose," he told IndieWire. "They were in the motor car." Later he added, "We're six rungs above the ladder of any place we've been before."

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Beyond the kitsch, however, there is an opportunity to facilitate real change. The theater is showcasing a promising new rental space for Oscar-nominated documentaries in need of qualifying tours and taste-building events, which the owners hope will provide a source of revenue sufficient to cover filming costs. exploitation as well as the underlying goal: to inject a range of diverse voices into the documentary realm, while cultivating an audience for this work.

"We've been trying to figure out how to go direct to the consumer since we started," Alpert said as he settled into the 68-seat theater and stared at the blank screen a few days before opening. "DCTV's first screening room was an old postal service truck that we bought for five bucks."

Alpert has recited this tradition many times over the years, and for good reason: in those early days, Alpert - who was nominated for short documentary Oscars in 2009 and 2012 - and Tsuno hosted screenings of educational videos around Chinatown and the Lower East Side. By engaging the immigrant community through film, they have helped locals recognize the value of documenting their own lives for archival and representational purposes.

In doing so, they anticipated conversations about the need for broader representation and marginalized voices in the film community decades before "diversity" became an industry buzzword. "It was a good bubbling melting pot back then," Alpert said. “I think it was quite diverse in the beginning. There was a collective representing every possible grouping of people. It ticked off some of the collectives that emerged from the DCTV ecosystem during its early chapters. "There was the Black Documentary, Third World Newsreel, Asians and Latinos making documentary films," Alpert said. "Documentarians need to think more about the stories they tell."

Now, this mentality has extended to the curatorial agenda of new theatre, as it aims to respond to a growing concern of the documentary community. "I'll say it," Alpert said. "Too many Ken Burns movies. Not enough others."

Burns' prolific work for PBS came under public judgment last year when an open letter signed by more than 130 BIPOC filmmakers called on the network to commission projects from the same personality at the over the years instead of bringing new voices into the fold. "How many other 'independent' filmmakers have a decades-long exclusive relationship with a publicly funded entity?" the letter asked. "Public television supporting this level of privilege without investigation is troubling not only to us as filmmakers, but also to American taxpayers."

Alpert was not surprised by the outcry. "Sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same," he said. “There's a very thin upper layer of established documentarians who get their projects funded, get the resources they need, and might, if they're lucky, get into a theater. There's a very, very exciting proliferation of people making documentaries who want to see documentaries, and nothing has been done to serve that, especially in a theatrical sense."