Peter Wintonick’s Soapbox

The often outrageous, sometimes prophetic, always amusing ramblings and insights of Canadian documentary filmmaker Peter Wintonick at HotDoc’s Soapbox where each person was allowed to pontificate about the state of documentaries for five minutes.

Linear docs are dead and the infrastructure to support them is dead.

The first thing people ask is What is your film about? Let’s just try to ask the question without the word “about.” Films are more than what they’re about. They’re more than the content. We’re trying to make documentary cinema. It’s about form and aesthetics and art. It’s really about the communication of complex things rather than of the content. I’m interested in how you project what you see to the eyes of the people who are seeing it. For the last 80 years, documentary has positioned itself in the “about.” I instead ask What is the experience? 

We’ll banish the word documentary and call it doc media.

Don’t make any more sad documentaries. The number of funny documentaries playing at festivals is usually three out of 300. Sadness and earnestness have become the sins of documentary. Sadness sells. Or feeling guilty. Problemetizing the world, making everything an issue is so prevalent.

Critic Pauline Kale once said about Godard’s fiction films, that he was actually making documentaries of the future set in the present, because capturing a moment before it passed was more important to him than presenting a finished fictional work.

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And now for some speculations on where documentaries will be 20 years from now according to Peter Wintonick:

• Fiction will cease to exist. People will extract all the drama, character stories and pleasure from non-fiction doc media that they used to enjoy from fiction.

• Every doc citizen will have eye plants, this kind of third intuitive eye.

• Closed circuit cameras will become the next TV channels, the next theatres, the next opera houses.

• Documentaries will have saved the world. There will no longer be a need for documentaries. But we will make them anyway out of habit.

• Documocracy will replace ideology, religion and politics.

• Docutopian ideas.

• Happiness will rule and there will no longer be a need for sad documentaries.

• Everyone will become a documentary maker.

• Free will be the basis of the new economy. Although gossip may become the new currency.

• Documentary makers will not longer need to take the vow of poverty. We will be appreciated and well paid.

• Forget 3D. 4D holograms will replace it. Documations will come down off the screen to become people.

• HAL will direct all documentaries thus freeing us to rest.

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Peter Wintonick founded the production company Necessary Illusions and started DocAgora, a forum to connect and find out about funding and distributing documentary media.