Public service broadcasting and creative documentary film: “natural” allies for coproduction and (trans)national distribution?: A comparative analysis of the Netherlands and Flanders

Since its advent, public broadcasting (PSB) has nourished an ambiguous relationship with creative documentary film. Although both share democratic and cultural ambitions, PSBs invested increasingly in formatted and human-interest reportages, whereas the commercialisation of broadcasting led to a rise in docutainment and reality TV. While producers state that PSBs don’t invest sufficiently in airplay and financing of creative documentaries, the precarious genre is seemingly booming when looking at the success of international documentary film festivals and the increase of theatrical releases. Nevertheless, producers say they have a hard time convincing non-national financers and distributors to invest in the project without a national PSB as shareholder.
At the same time, broadcasters are in a development process towards becoming public service media, making use of online strategies and platforms to distribute content. This further entangles the unbalanced relationship between PSBs and documentary producers, as the former tends to appropriate the online rights without a fair compensation and without respecting the transnational windowing strategies.
It is clear that in this context producers are more and more looking at new platforms and O.T.T. players to take up this abandoned role of the ally of creative documentary. This evolution is increasingly apparent, with Netflix e.g. that bought up all the rights of the Oscar nominated documentary Virunga (2014). The question remains to what extent documentary producers still need public TV to ensure the transnational distribution of their films.
This paper will examine and compare the current interplay of the documentary film sector and PSB in the Netherlands and Flanders and scrutinize the degree of importance of the involvement of PSB in domestic creative documentary productions for their transnational distribution in the digital era. Therefore, the study combines an extensive desk research and analyses of policy documents with expert interviews of both Flemish and Dutch stakeholders.