The Center for Social Media at American University has just released its latest report, Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in their Work, in which dozens of documentarians address workplace challenges to ethical standards, conflicting ethical values, and above all, a lack of open and shared standards and practices. The report discusses challenges ranging from subject payment to re-enactment to misrepresentation of archival material.  

As part of the just-opened Toronto International Film Festival's Doc Conference this Sunday, September 13, Center Director Patricia Aufderheide will present the report, which she co-authored with American University colleagues Peter Jasci and Mridu Chandra.

Perhaps more than any other art form, the documentary process is subject to a high degree of ethical scrutiny; the filmmaker is dealing with real lives and real events, while applying the tools of fictional narrative to tell an effective story. Filmmaker strive to create works of art, after all, but in their artistic ambition, they may run the risk of taking liberties with crucial elements in their documentary practice--trust of and access to subjects, fairness and accuracy, and the implicit covenant with the audience. The challenge for the documentary filmmaker is to maintain that constant balance between ethical considerations and creative drive.

This study certainly meets a need, given the passionate online debates about ethics on DocuLink and other forums. The advisory board to the report includes Bill Nichols, a professor of cinema and the director of the Graduate Program in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University, who wrote an article about calling for a code of ethics in documentary in the March-April 2006 issue of Documentary.; Sheila Curran Bernard, associate director of the Documentary Studies Program at the State University of New York at Albany, who, with writer/archivist Kenn Rabin, authored Archival Storytelling, an excerpt from which, about the ethical use of archival footage, was published in the September 2008 Documentary E-zine; and Jon Else, filmmaker and head of the Documentary Program at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The Center for Social Media invites documentary makers to read the report at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/ethics and share your experiences and concerns.