A seminal figure of activist and 'engaged' cinema, British filmmaker John Akomfrah has been leading the charge for over 30 years. As one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, which sought to use documentary to explore questions of black identity in Britain, Akomfrah has continually pushed boundaries in both form and content. We are delighted to be featuring a retrospective of his work in this year’s Doc/Fest. In this session he will discuss his remarkable career with Francine Stock, the presenter of The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4.

With John Akomfrah and Francine Stock

Joshua Oppenheimer's films include the BAFTA award-winning and Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing (2012), and the companion piece The Look of Silence (2014) - winner of the Grand Jury prize at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. He is the artistic director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster and has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. In this in-depth masterclass, BBC1 Film Programme critic Danny Leigh, unpicks Joshua's methods and motivations and explore the meaning of his controversial and boundary-pushing films. 

Shorts are taking the world by storm. Find out how new funding and distribution opportunities are helping that success. We’ll screen some of the best shorts from around the web, hear about Channel 4’s latest ‘shorts’ strategy and meet some pioneers who are using shorts to make the world a better place. Whether you are making shorts to get your story out fast, as a stepping-stone to long form docs or because you prefer your content in bite-size chunks, this panel will prepare you for your next ‘shorts’ encounter.

How do documentary commissioners win our attention in a crowded marketplace? Are the days of worthiness dead, replaced by documentary as brand enforcer and marketing tool for a channel? To secure a place in the schedules does documentary subject matter have to be provocative - grabbing tabloid headlines? Are commissioners and producers bringing important issues to their audiences?