Since we are all here chasing the Muse and creative flow: it turns out, just watching art makes you more creative. The study indeed found that "experiencing art leads to greater creativity because art inspires people." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296317304058 Why that matters for us, documentarians? Because when you're stuck with your idea or a logline, read some poems. Go to the museum and get lost in the masters' work. Listen to some complex music. Heck, just browse Pinterest inspiration boards, or get yourself some epic art books for your home office. It all leads to enhanced problem solving and different creativity. 👉🏼 "The studies reported here provide clear evidence that appreciating art induces inspiration, which in turn facilitates performance on creative tasks. We found support for our theory using several different measures of creativity—idea-generation tasks, RAT, and endorsement of creative personality traits. Moreover, the effect of art appreciation was robust across various contexts." Do you use art to get unstuck in your creativity?

There have been a lot of industry conversations in HotDocs, and here's a great one about how to think about your documentary in the time of content creation / Youtube starting to dominate the conversation. https://realscreen.com/2025/05/05/cbc-orders-doc-project-on-controversial-femininity-trends-from-peacock-alley/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cbc-orders-doc-project-on-controversial-femininity-trends-from-peacock-alley&_u=dDQuNioHM6I%3d It's behind a paywall, so I copy/pasted it below: The themes dominating last week’s Hot Docs Industry Conference were, unsurprisingly, the ever-multiplying existential threats facing the contemporary independent documentary landscape. Most notable among these, naturally, are the continued draining of dollars from the doc market in the face of buyer contraction and conservatism, as well as fears (which were soon to be realized) of an unprecedented escalation of the long-running campaign against public media under the Trump administration. Streaming, once seen as a boon for the “Golden Age of Documentary,” is now another one of those commonly invoked threats, most often in regards to the economic impact that SVODs are having on the doc field. But a corresponding theme, which ran through several panel discussions across the Hot Docs conference, is what effects social media — including, it almost goes without saying, YouTube, the world’s most-watched video platform by orders of magnitude — is having on the very language of documentary filmmaking, and by that, on the vocation of “documentary filmmaker” itself. “There’s been a lot of talk [that] the creator economy is overcoming traditional media — that what people engage with [most] is quote-unquote ‘creator content,’ which is usually short-form content, not longform,” observed documentary filmmaker and consultant Jon Reiss, moderating a panel on doc marketing. “So, there’s this push that filmmakers should in a sense abandon longform content and become creators, or alternatively, become creators in addition to being filmmakers.”

Crazy times in the USA! Everybody is watching what is happening in the public media, as Trump really wants to cut funding to PBS/NPR, with a just announced document literally titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media". What I am hearing from the film industry is that other grants and funds are allocating their funding to save public media. Yes, it does mean less funding for other issues, and independent films. But also, supporting the survival of PBS/NPR is crucial. So we watch. More about the current situation here: https://realscreen.com/2025/05/02/trump-directs-cpb-to-cut-funding-to-pbs-npr-in-executive-order-paula-kerger-responds/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=trump-directs-cpb-to-cut-funding-to-pbs-npr-in-executive-order-paula-kerger-responds&_u=dDQuNioHM6I%3d Something to ponder from the article: "while only about 15% of PBS’ aggregate funding comes from the federal government — as per the public-private partnership model upon which U.S. public media was based, with the majority of funding coming from private contributions — “there are many stations in communities that, without the federal support, [would] not exist…. This is [a] resource that the communities treasure, and would not exist were there not federal dollars to help." What do you think?

If you’re looking for inspiration, meaning and story well told, here are 10 amazing nature documentaries, collected by Wire. Which ones have you already seen? Which one will you watch? https://www.wired.com/story/the-11-best-nature-documentaries-will-make-you-want-to-touch-grass/

April is already ending! How is your flow as we are headed into the new week and a new month? What are you working on, what are you struggling with, what are you excited about? I am juggling multiple projects in development as we are looking for funds and working on pitching materials, so it's "many balls in the air" kind of a week for me. You just have to keep on stirring all of those pots!