Documentary First

The craft and business of documentary filmmaking, from people who actually do it. Documentary First is a weekly podcast for working and aspiring documentary filmmakers who want honest, in-depth conversations about how documentaries get funded, made, and seen. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5 percent of all podcasts worldwide. Hosted by Christian Taylor, award-winning director of The Girl Who Wore Freedom (25+ international awards, distributed through Virgil Films, Swank, and Canal+), the show draws on 295+ conversations with documentary filmmakers, editors, producers, distributors, and composers across HBO, Netflix, PBS, and the independent doc world. Past guests include Ken Burns, PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning editor Charles Olivier (HBO's The Jinx, The Redeem Team), and Emmy-nominated director Nick Bruckman (Netflix's Minted). Every week, Documentary First delivers two formats in one feed. The main show is a long-form interview about how filmmakers approach their craft, handle distribution, and build a career that lasts. On alternating weeks, Documentary First: The Deep Dive takes a single insight from a recent guest conversation and goes further, drawing on psychology, philosophy, and hard-won experience to find the lesson underneath the work. Christian hosts from inside the work, not from the sidelines. She has films in production right now, so she asks the questions a working documentary filmmaker actually needs answered, because she needs them answered too. Topics include: documentary directing, documentary producing, documentary distribution, film festival strategy, fundraising for documentaries, storytelling craft, documentary cinematography, documentary editing, film music and scoring, sound design for film, entertainment law for filmmakers, archival footage and rights clearance, and building a sustainable career in nonfiction filmmaking. New episodes every week. Subscribe and leave a review. Instagram: @documentaryfirst | Facebook: @documentaryfirst | X: @Doc_First | TikTok: @documentaryfirst | YouTube: @DocumentaryFirst | LinkedIn: documentaryfirst | documentaryfirst.com

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Avsnitt(298)

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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 7min

Ep. 279 I She Was Here: Heather O'Rourke's Family Debunks the Poltergeist Curse

Was the Poltergeist curse real, or did the world get Heather O'Rourke's story wrong for 38 Years?On February 1, 1988, Heather O'Rourke died at twelve years old. For nearly four decades the world has f...

4 Juni 52min