Documenting the Nation: A Personal Evaluation of Australia's Documentary Regime

The brief I was given for this paper was to comment on the accords the Australian Film Finance Corporation has entered into for documentary productions. I have something to say about these accords but my primary intent is not to comment on the ins and outs of documentary filmmaking under this regime of accords but to attempt to place it – the process of documenting a nation or culture, or whatever generic description is applied to the work – in the context of its wider social and economic value, and to draw from this positioning statement some conclusions about how we should structure and fund the process of documentary-making in the future.