Creating New American Stories of Us: The Transformative Promise of Documentary Storytelling

Join us for this dynamic virtual event featuring celebrated filmmakers, producers, and industry leaders as we explore the unique potential of documentary storytelling to help Americans better understand and engage with each other across our political and social divides. Some of the questions to be explored include:

• What’s the “secret sauce” to documentary content that reaches beyond the choir and engages diverse audiences?
• How do we build greater distribution pipelines for documentary content aimed at bridging divides? What can we do to ensure that transformative content not only gets made, but actually gets seen?
• What new types of storytelling infrastructure and content creation models hold particular promise?

This event is part of BEL’s Creating New American Stories of Us series. See below for a description of the series and visit our webpage for more details.

Storytellers can be the heroes America needs right now, dismantling the destructive “us versus them” dynamics that are fueling our current political crisis and isolating Americans from one another. Storytellers can act as societal norm-shifters for how we engage across our differences, helping us imagine a shared democracy for an ideologically diverse, multiracial America.

Creating New American Stories of Us is an event series that explores entertainment’s potential to strengthen America’s social fabric and create a shared sense of “us” as Americans.