Career Sustainability

Since our founding in 2016, the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA) has grown to include over 300 members from 53 cities, eight countries and counting. Originally founded to advocate for producers whose role was misunderstood and chronically underpaid, the DPA’s work allowed us to realize that the issues we were facing were not due to our professional failures but to systemic ones larger than ourselves. Our goal as an organization is to identify and advocate for best practices for a field that is largely unregulated.

Narrative justice demands that those closest to the problem define that problem. This necessarily means a rearrangement of who stands behind the camera, but also requires tools to advance responsible, accountable filmmaking no matter the filmmaker.

It may sound hyperbolic, but there has never been a worse time in the history of the world to be launching an independent documentary into the

In 2016 documentary filmmaker Senain Kheshgi was approached to make a series of short films in collaboration with Save The Children, Johnson &