“There’s a hunger for documentaries online,” says Searching For Sugar Man Producer | NFTS

Simon Chinn, the double Academy Award winning producer of Searching For Sugar Man and Man on Wire has told up coming documentary-makers to look to the ‘small screen’ when making films in future.

Speaking in conversation with Dick Fontaine, NFTS Head of Documentaries at an NFTS Film Clinic event, hosted at Google UK HQ in London, Simon Chinn, said although documentary films could still be theatrically released, the landscape of distribution was changing. Chinn recently launched a new company, Lightbox, to create high quality non-fiction content for the international television and digital marketplaces.

He added: “There is a hunger for documentary content for the small screen, especially from American online companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Xbox. New opportunities are emerging online for a diversity of documentary makers and new audiences are opening up. The public wants more documentary content, partly driven by reality TV. But the bar has risen; documentary makers have to tell stories in an even more entertaining and emotionally engaging way than fiction.”

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