A New Congress Forms
By Sonya Childress
On Tuesday, April 26, sixty-three people dialed into a Zoom room from cities across the country and territories for the inaugural meetup of the Color Congress. As the Zoom populated, old colleagues greeted one another in the chat while new faces looked on, taking in the sight of so many film industry leaders of color, all gathered together in one virtual space. Even for me, after twenty years in the documentary field, it was a sight to behold.
That moment was punctuated when Cheryl L. Bedford, founder of Women of Color Unite, an LA-based social action organization that focuses on remedying the inequities that face women of color in the entertainment and media industries, spotted her cousin in the Zoom. Bedford shouted out in gleeful surprise to Nia Malika Dixon, founder of #BlackMuslimGirlFly. “It was so wonderful to see my cousin, and for her to be recognized for her contributions towards Black Muslim storytelling,” said Bedford of the chance encounter. That moment speaks to the auspicious nature of the inaugural gathering — a meeting of people who share a passion for nonfiction storytelling and whose paths were destined to cross.
The Color Congress, which began open enrollment in April, currently boasts 71 member organizations. Each month, representatives of those people of color-led and serving organizations will gather online to connect, with the goal of identifying common experiences and solutions to challenges facing people of color in the documentary industry.
The oldest running/run organization in the Congress is Third World Newsreel, founded as a multiracial activist filmmaker collective in 1967 and later became people of color-led and serving in 1973. It remains the oldest media arts organization in the U.S. devoted to cultural workers of color and their global constituencies. Newsreel is stewarded by JT Takagi, an award winning independent filmmaker and sound recordist, and beloved veteran in the documentary field. JT’s profile mirrors that of so many in the Congress- artists who build or lead organizations that nurture and uplift artists of color like themselves.
Organizations such as Third World Newsreel, along with Visual Communications, Asian CineVision and Black Public Media, hold a critical role within the Congress as venerated institutions that have withstood decades of culture wars, destabilized arts funding, and the convulsions wrought by the current market-driven industry. The Congress can serve as a container for the oldest organizations in our ecosystem to share lessons with the newest organizations among us. The pandemic and reckoning across the film industry, tumultuous as they have been, also produced a crop of bold new collectives and organizations, the most recent of which include BIPOC Doc Editors, Bitchitra Collective, Urban Scholar Film Academy, Liberating Cinema, and Restoring the Future. These new organizations are emerging from their own fraught political climate, and the potential for an intergenerational dialogue across organizations within the Congress holds great promise.
The work of Congress members represents the range of interventions in the ever-expanding nonfiction industry. The majority of members are artist support organizations. Their programming includes leadership development, talent showcasing, and pitch forums. Many offer fellowships and formal mentorship programs for filmmakers of color. Others offer production or project incubation support, including providing filmmakers with equipment or serving them through residency programs. Not surprisingly, a good deal of member organizations are also committed to cultivating audiences for documentary filmmakers of color. Among our members, 21% host film festivals, 14% distribute nonfiction films while 8% focus on film criticism. Across these organizations, we find a deep commitment to shifting narratives about communities of color; 52% indicated a reason for their work is to shift culture or educate the public. Narrative change may not be the sole motivation for their work, but collectively, it is certainly the outcome.
The majority, 67% of Congress members, work nationally. That includes collectives like Brown Girls Doc Mafia, which supports 4,500 women and non-binary people of color working in the documentary film industry around the world. For those with a regional focus, not surprisingly, most of the members serve the Northeast and the West. Yet, as we set out to build the Congress, we hoped to address the historic disinvestment of organizations based in regions outside of the coastal media hubs. While leaders of color experience similar challenges in the industry, differences do exist based on access (or lack thereof) to resources, networking and training. For the 16 organizations based in the Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and island nations, we are committed to ensuring their needs are collectively understood and met.
And though we are building a Congress of organizations grounded in communities of color, the communities served span a range of identities that include gender, sexual orientation, ability and nationality. The majority of Congress members (55%) work across racial/ethnic identities, while the other 45% provide programming for discrete racialized communities. Of those groups, 20 serve Black or African American communities, 11 serve Latinx communities, 7 serve Indigenous communities, 6 serve Asian American communities, 4 serve Pacific Islander communities, and 2 serve Arab and Middle Eastern communities. We expect these numbers to shift as enrollment continues and as our outreach expands to communities that are less represented in the Congress.
We look into the kaleidoscope of organizations in the Congress and see an ecosystem that reflects the evolving definitions of nonfiction film and of our intersectional identities. We see the task of seeking common ground, while not flattening differences among us, as the core work of the Congress. Ultimately, we believe that what binds us is a commitment to strengthening the authorship and artistry of documentary storytellers of color, to bring beautiful work to communities of color, to create pathways for agency and leadership of people of color in the field, and to leverage the healing, transformative power of documentary to reflect our reality and imagine a new one. And we hope that as the Congress evolves, we have more moments like the one we saw when two cousins, leaders and storytellers in their own right, caught each other’s faces across the room and immediately knew they were in the right place.
