Everybody is under pressure to find ways of funding documentaries and one of the new ideas for alternatives to the broadcasters is to look at not-for-profit organisations and the social responsibility arms of big corporations. However, I have a concern that there is an implicit and sometimes an explicit distortion of the agenda of documentaries funded in this way.
The matching up of a documentary film-maker with organisations that by their nature often have a fairly one-sided view of the world can point a documentary in a certain direction. So for example, Nestlé funding a documentary about milk for babies in Africa (where Nestlé sells a lot of its powdered milk formula) would be a case where people would say, "Oh we're not having that", but people might be less nervous about it if the funder was Christian Aid or Action Aid because you might think, "Oh, these are the good guys". But regardless of what your opinion is about these charities, they are nonetheless organisations with an agenda.
Documentary film-makers are having to pitch their ideas as something that will change the world to get a decent level of funding. I think that's a very difficult place for documentaries to be because sometimes the campaign is more important than the film. Even if you want social change to come from your documentary, you have to give the audience the space to work it out for themselves, otherwise it's propaganda.
I think we need to tread carefully and people need to be critically minded about what is going on.
Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas. She is chairing a session at Sheffield Doc/Fest: Documentary Foundations – the new quangocracy? on 6 November
