The new Director of the Sundance Institute Documentar Program, Cara Mertes brings to Sundance a distinguished background in the production and exhibition of independent non-fiction film and video. She was previously the Executive Director of American Documentary, Inc. and Executive Producer of P.O.V., PBS’s acclaimed documentary showcase where she was involved with the co-production of such films as Farmingville, Lost Boys of Sudan, Street Fight and Boys of Baraka. She is a three-time Emmy, two-time Peabody and two-time duPont-Columbia Award-winner for her work as Executive Producer at P.O.V. Filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) spoke to Mertes about her plans in her new position at Sundance.

The new Director of the Sundance Institute Documentar Program, Cara Mertes brings to Sundance a distinguished background in the production and exhibition of independent non-fiction film and video. She was previously the Executive Director of American Documentary, Inc. and Executive Producer of P.O.V., PBS’s acclaimed documentary showcase where she was involved with the co-production of such films as Farmingville, Lost Boys of Sudan, Street Fight and Boys of Baraka. She is a three-time Emmy, two-time Peabody and two-time duPont-Columbia Award-winner for her work as Executive Producer at P.O.V. Filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) spoke to Mertes about her plans in her new position at Sundance.

This is a new position for you. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ll be doing at Sundance? I have been hired as the Director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, which provides year-round creative and financial support for nonfiction filmmakers making contemporary issue documentaries. The DFP includes the Sundance Documentary Fund, and we have approximately $1 million to give away each year to filmmakers form around the world. We also have two labs at Sundance, Utah in the summer; the Documentary Edit and Story Lab, and then the Composer’s Lab, to which we invite projects that can sustain a kind of in-depth feedback and advisorial support. These labs are kind of “behind-the-scenes”; they haven’t been highlighted in quite the same way that the film festival has been.

How do you view the state of documentary filmmaking at the moment? I think we’re seeing an emerging marketplace in documentary, the shape of which is undefined. It’s not a moment that existed five years ago. I mean, great long-form documentaries like Hoop Dreams, everybody’s first example, have been happening for a long time. But at the time, it really felt like an anomaly, a once in a lifetime thing. It wasn’t the beginning of a trend. It’s taken 15 or 20 years to actually see a trend, to see documentary after documentary come out — Spellbound, Winged Migration, An Inconvenient Truth, March of the Penguins — and mini-major releases and do well in the marketplace.

What do you attribute that to? I think it has a lot to do with Sundance’s commitment to documentary — through the Sundance Film Festival and more recently the Documentary Program. Robert Redford has been committed to documentary since the ’70s. From the beginning, the festival has platformed documentary equally with feature film, and that consistency is having an effect. I think it also has a lot to do with the cultural trends at the moment. We’re in a really dire situation internationally and domestically. There are huge challenges facing the country about which we’re not getting particularly good information. So not only are audiences seeking that information, I’m seeing documentary makers who feel a certain motivation to tell the real story, to get out information that’s not being reported to us by our news entities. And so, in a way, documentary filmmakers are sort of acting like journalists. But documentary filmmakers are also maturing and their artistry is maturing with them. They are fantastic storytellers. Plus, there are the personality-driven documentaries, the Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock type of documentary. So these things are very popular and they’re all happening fairly simultaneously, which to me just speaks of a field that is really expanding in possibility.

Do you have any concerns that the commercial success of documentaries ultimately may not be in the best interest of the art form? For example, in the ‘90s through the early 2000s, American independent film was very vibrant. Then it kind of exhausted itself; it was trying too hard to be commercial. Do you have any concerns that documentary films could become a victim of their own success?I think that’s the question of commerce versus artistry, and where you fall on that spectrum is a constant question when you’re an artist. Do you “sell out?” Do you compromise your vision because you have to sell to a distributor? As the stakes get higher, more people are tempted to compromise. That’s certainly a reality in any form of cultural production that has some commercial success attached to it. I think with documentary though, there’s a countervailing trend. People are seeing documentary as their first form of self-expression, so there are teams of people entering documentary at the same time as there is an increased opportunity in documentary. There’s going to be wave after wave of emerging documentary makers who are going to be working on different platforms and using non-fiction storytelling in different ways. And I think that’s going to be very exciting. I don’t think you can say, “Oh, documentary is going to go down the tubes as a field.” It’s not. It’s going to get bigger as there is more and more interest in the kinds of stories that people want to tell within the documentary form.

I was encouraged to see the Documentary Edit and Story Lab added to the Institute, because I think that editing is one of the most underappreciated parts of the documentary filmmaking experience. There’s a tendency to view documentary filmmaking as purely about content and not about the art of filmmaking itself. In fiction, you write the script, you shoot the script, and then you edit the film and make a lot of creative changes and choices. In documentary, much of the storytelling is actually happening in the editing room because the filmmakers go out and collect hundreds and sometimes even over a thousand hours of material and pull together a story from that material. The editing really becomes a big part of the storytelling process. In a way, it’s the equivalent of the scripting process for feature films, and that was the thinking behind [the creation of these labs]. About three years ago, Diane Weyermann [and the staff here started to think how to have the biggest impact in the documentary field. And the two places that weren’t, it seemed, being addressed anywhere else systematically were documentary structure and editing and then music. So those were the two labs that were developed first of all. But I want to think about other points of intervention. For instance, I see a lot more documentary filmmakers writing. They have to narrate, they have to write their own voiceover, they have to write somebody else’s voiceover, or they have reenactments. So, should we build in a writing concentration or focus? And the second area: documentary filmmakers often are their own producers. How do you get a documentary produced, how do you raise the money, and how does the money impact the creative vision? How do you distribute, how do you do the festival circuit, how do you get the best broadcast deal? Marketplace questions. There’s also no real place for documentary filmmakers to explore in a concentrated fashion those marketplaces. So those are two areas I’ll be thinking about over the next few years.

And is there a way in which the Institute will pursue getting filmmakers’ work out there so it has shelf life? I think that is the missing link: a focus on audience. I mean, obviously the Sundance Film Festival is the best launching mechanism right now within [the U.S. festival environment]. But for documentary over time, thinking strategically about how to both build audiences for documentary more generally but then to more specifically connect core audiences that you might have around the theme or topic of your film — those are two things that I think we want to be concentrating on more. And I’m not sure how that’s going to play out. I’m using the fall to assess where we are with the program and what we could be doing, to set our goals and then we’ll be on our way.