Ep. 284 I How to Fund a Documentary Without the Industry
How do you fund a documentary when the whole industry says no?How do you fund a documentary without film funds, grants, or a commissioning broadcaster, and still reach a huge audience? Dutch filmmaker...
6 Aug 51min
Who Believed in You First? I Deep Dive on Ep. 238
Who believed in you before you could believe in yourself? In this Deep Dive, documentary filmmaker Christian Taylor makes a quiet case that we rarely overcome self-doubt on our own. Almost no one fini...
30 Jul 13min
Ep. 283 I 7 Filmmaking Tips From the Distributor Who Directed "Cold War in Philly"
What does it really take to make a documentary that finds an audience and earns its money back?“You have to have the passion for the story and the passion to do the work, because it will not be easy.”...
23 Jul 54min
Ep. 282 I Finding the Heartbeat of Your Story | A Lesson From Normandy
How do you make people care about your documentary?Facts alone rarely make an audience care. The emotional core of a documentary lives somewhere else. In this episode of Documentary First, filmmaker C...
16 Jul 12min
Ep. 281 I 13 Letters That Saved a Dying WWII Documentary - on Heroes of Carentan Pt 1
Can thirteen letters from an 88-year-old stranger bring a dead film back to life?For two years, Heroes of Carentan, Christian Taylor's documentary about the 101st Airborne Division and the June 1944 l...
2 Jul 11min
The Disappointment You Didn't Choose I Deep Dive on Ep. 280
What if the disappointment you didn't choose was the only door to the life you were meant to live?Three generations of one family chased professional baseball, and all three lost it to a career-ending...
25 Jun 8min
Ep. 280 I Danny Gans, the Man of Many Voices, Lost His Own. His Son Set Out to Find It.
He Could Become Anyone on Stage. What Was He Hiding Offstage?Danny Gans was the Man of Many Voices, the highest-paid headliner on the Las Vegas Strip, and the first performer to sell a $100 ticket on ...
18 Jun 55min
When Is Silence Wisdom and When Is It Complicity? I Deep Dive on Ep. 279
When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it?The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When a false story is already loose i...
11 Jun 7min
