The Essentials:

• Platform: The New York Times Op-Docs

• Senior Commissioning Editor: Christine Kecher

• Content Type: long-standing short documentary strand part of The New York Times’ Opinion section

• Editorial themes: a diverse range including current affairs and social issues from all over the world

• Ideal Video Format: short-form documentaries

• Pitches/Submissions Considered? Near-completion and completed film submissions only

• Where to submit: here

• Op-Docs FAQ: here

For this installment of The Pitch, Video Consortium is taking you behind the scenes of Op-Docs, The New York Times’ premier platform for short documentaries. Op-Docs address contemporary issues through often overlooked narratives, showcasing an ambitious, creative, and diverse array of films made by independent filmmakers from all over the world. In this conversation with Senior Commissioning Editor Christine Kecher, we explore what they’re on the lookout for in submissions and at festivals, the common threads that unite their shorts, and contemplate the complex landscape of short documentaries today.

Kate Villevoye: Christine, let's start off at the very beginning of Op-Docs. When did it start, and how did this foray into short docs at The Times come about?

Christine Kecher: Op-Docs started in 2011 – it's always been part of the Opinion section, because it's showcasing specific perspectives from independent contributors. So it's like a video guest essay (formerly known as an op-ed), in a sense – though the opinion is not always delivered as directly as it would be in print. The series has really changed a lot over the years, but we’re also trying to keep the same spirit that we started with.

KV: What does your team look like these days, and how often are Op-Docs published?

CK: Alexandra Garcia is our Supervising Producer, I’m senior commissioning editor, and we have our Series Producer Yvonne Ashley Kouadjo. Lindsay Crouse recently rejoined Op-Docs as Senior Editor after a few years working on other desks at The Times, which we’re excited about. Alexandra and Lindsay have both worked at The Times for many years, and Yvonne and I come more from the documentary film space.

Right now we aim to release 25 films a year. If it's a little bit more or a little bit less, it's fine. We’re trying to publish every two weeks.

KV: I imagine that most are acquired, but I know that sometimes you also produce in-house – like your Almost Famous strand.

CK: Even when we say we produce in-house, it's more executive producing and creative producing. We're not in the field. With Almost Famous, for example, that series started as one film and then Lindsay Crouse and the director, Ben Proudfoot, asked, “what if we made a bunch of those?” Because it was such a repeatable format and also a way for us to do in-depth biographical or profile pieces with a specific frame — which was, essentially, “Here’s a person you should have heard of, but you probably haven’t.” They were especially interested in focusing on people whose obstacles to making history were at least partly structural. It was really a creative collaboration as opposed to a commission where we were telling the filmmaker what we wanted – and ultimately a really successful one, since one of the films, The Queen of Basketball, went on to win an Oscar.

KV: Do you most often collaborate with filmmakers on bringing their film from 80% to 100%, or is it a mixture of that and working with a completed film that's been seen at a film festival or similar?

CK: I would say it's a mix. And sometimes even when a film has gone to festivals, for whatever reason, we may need to make some edits, whether it's a length issue or a fact-checking issue. Obviously we try to minimize that when it's a finished film.

The reason we don't generally commission in really early stages is because we generally aren’t able to fund production. So the most common thing is either we're picking up a finished film at a festival, or we're seeing a rough cut and giving editorial notes, but not participating in early stage production. We're always happy to talk to people about their ideas and what we think might be interesting, but generally we can't come on board a film until it's at least a rough cut. We do sometimes help provide resources or find outside funding for finishing and post to bring a film over the finish line.

Ultimately, we're primarily an acquisition-based distribution strand.We love working with filmmakers on the editorial and the creative direction of a project, but we understand that it makes more sense for us to come in where the funding and the production has already been supported through some other grant or funder, so that we aren’t asking filmmakers to take on risk and make things for us “on spec” with no guarantee of publication at the end of the process.

KV: What makes a short documentary a fitting Op-Doc?

CK: I think every curator thinks, ‘I know it when I see it.’ And of course, every curator also has their own taste, and our team isn't always unanimous on whether we should publish a film. So it's always somewhat hard to pinpoint exactly why we take certain films and not others. I think that’s sometimes the most difficult thing to communicate to filmmakers.

We often hear from people, ‘How are all the films from different filmmakers, but they all feel so cohesive as a series?” And I think that's our job as curators, to maintain the character of the series so that people know when something “feels” like an Op-Doc — though if you go back and look at what we’ve published over time, you also see how we’ve evolved and changed.

The films are very cinematic. It's not really about covering specific subjects, it's about finding voices we've never heard, approaches we've never seen before. Amazing access has potential to have great impact, but ultimately the creativity and the storytelling is super important. We like the filmmakers to have freedom to choose the form that story takes, and I think we've probably done every format you could name over the years at some point (observational/vérité, animated, personal essay, single- or multi-voice interview, archival/historical, political/topical, experimental, hybrid, etc.).

We've had many submissions over the years that are pitched as, ‘I want to make a doc about this New York Times article.’ And the issue there is it's already been covered probably pretty thoroughly in an article, so why should it be a film? What's going to be cinematic about it? What's your vision for what we'll be actually watching on screen?

KV: There absolutely is a coherent style across Op-Docs, which is interesting considering you span all these different formats. For example, the animation style of How To Be Alone is quite specific but somehow really fitted. I wonder if there are collaborations that were particularly surprising, with filmmakers who might be in far flung places but made a film that really felt like an Op-Doc?

CK: That's a good question. It's funny, sometimes we’ll see when our audiences are a little surprised seeing some of the things we publish on The New York Times. So if we do something a little more experimental, we see where we start to test people's boundaries or expectations – which I think is a good thing.

There's always things that you aren’t sure are going to hit that hit really big. We did a film last year called The Ambassador's Wife. It was a couple of years old already when we saw it, but the team loved it. The filmmaker Theresa Traore Dahlberg spends her time in Sweden and Burkina Faso, and she somehow got connected with the (now former) French ambassador's wife in Burkina Faso and made this very artful profile of her that's just really well done. And I think when we originally shared it with people on the team, it was like, ‘Wow, this is not our usual style.’ She's a visual artist, and I think that really comes through. And what you see in the frame feels like it could easily live in a museum, but it also felt like, maybe this could work for us. And it just went crazy. It was one of our most popular films of the year.

So it teaches you if you like it, someone else will probably like it. You have to trust that other people like you might be out there.

KV: It must be a fun challenge to continue to figure out what documentary on a long-standing publication like the NYT means. And documentary as a format has evolved so much over the last few decades, too…

CK: I think wider media and cinema trends affect documentary, and then documentary also has its own ecosystem. It's a shifting landscape. And I think everybody, in all parts of documentary, is dealing with that. I also think it's hard in the sense that the industry is still very geared towards making everything a feature to the point where I've heard people say they just decided to make something into a feature because that's where all the resources are directed in the industry. Yet we have so many platforms for shorts right now and features are really struggling to find buyers. So I hope that some of the soft money and grants will go towards shorts.

And in this time when media is in a little bit of a crisis, I'm very curious whether we'll get more shorts because people are turning their attention in a different direction and trying new things, or if there will be fewer because shorts are generally not a moneymaker. It may be that we really do need some other funders to step in and support shorts.

So for me, that's the big question mark right now. I'm curious to see what happens over the next few years because it does feel like a little bit of a turning point.

There's no system in place. Everyone is figuring it out, and I think in very different ways. It's sort of the artist's life. You make your art and you hope that someone wants to pay you for it, but you're not going to stop making it because no one wants to pay for it.

KV: Do you think it’s a format that allows filmmakers to have lots of creative freedom?

CK: There's probably the most freedom in documentary shorts. You're dedicating hopefully less resources and time than for a feature, and it also feels less scary to people. You can experiment and if it doesn't go the way you think, you can start over. I feel like that's the appeal and that's what I love about working in shorts. It's just so creative. I'm always surprised what people are doing and what people are able to accomplish in 25 or 15 or five minutes.

KV: Coming back to the curatorial side of things, I was curious if you feel there is a red thread that runs through each Op-Doc.

CK: This might sound kind of vague, but I would say it's adding a human element to stories that people think they're familiar with. For example, we did a film about Ukrainian refugees called Away [by Ruslan Fedotov]. It's a super powerful, beautiful film. One of the YouTube commenters said, to paraphrase, ‘I read every story that is published about this, but I didn't fully understand it until I watched this.’ It’s about seeing this new side of a story in a way that forces you to slow down and sit with it and not just consume it.

Of course we know people can't slow down too much, so we’re aiming for our films to be 20 minutes or shorter. I think that's about what people are expecting to see when they come to The Times website or mobile app.

KV: And are there particular themes that you're finding are most relevant to your audience, or particular regions that they seem interested in?

CK: We actually did probably 85% international films last year. We just had a year where we got a lot of international films. I can't say that people are more interested if it's set in the U.S. It's really topic dependent and not region dependent. That was surprising to me actually, because I came from the TV world where the outlook is very much that people want domestic stories and they don't want to read subtitles. And that does not seem to be the case at all for our audience.

I think there are certain topics like elections, prison reform – anything having to do with the prison system – that usually will get a lot of interest. Environmental and animal stories, depending on the framing, are super popular. I do think topical films will always be interesting to people, so it may be that you see that in the views and it may be that you see that in the number of comments. We just did a film called Contractions, directed by Lynne Sachs and it's about abortion care in the U.S. post-Dobbs – in this case Tennessee. There were close to four times more comments than our next highest film this year.

We're also definitely looking for stories on Gaza and other more topical issues. But it's a tricky thing right now because it's hard when you're making a documentary that takes time and that takes space for people to be able to make. We're always very happy to look at stuff that's tied to big news stories and that will always be interesting to our audience, but we also understand that it may take time for those stories to come to us.

Also, I should mention that The Times is not allowed to work with outside contributors on spec on stories that are in conflict zones, because ultimately we don't want people just independently putting themselves in unsafe situations because we lead them to believe their work would end up on The Times. We're not allowed to pursue anything like that. So you generally won't see reporting on Op-Docs from inside a conflict zone. That would be done by Times staff that's protected by our support network and all the protections that The Times has in place for people in those zones versus us telling an independent filmmaker like, ‘Sure, go do that and we'll see what you get.’

KV: I wonder whether there's a metric for success that you've created, even just for yourself, over time.

CK: From my perspective, if someone wanted to work with us again that tells me that we did something right. But from the Op-Docs as a department perspective, I don't think there's a single metric. We know how many views things get and that's part of it. It's also like, ‘How long did people stay engaged? How many comments are there? Where else did the film go? What other impacts did it have?’

Awards are part of it. I think it's a smaller part of it, but as a department, it's a nice seal of approval that people understand and recognize the work that you're doing. But for me personally, a lot of it is about the relationships we develop with the filmmakers and the fact that they would say they're glad they released on Op-Docs because the audience reaction was amazing. Or they got so much outreach about the film, because directors do tend to get a lot of direct outreach and that can be really meaningful.

There's so much competition for people's time. So we're just trying to make sure that the people who are interested in our audience are given access, and we're making the film as visible to them as possible, to give the broadest possible audience a chance to watch something they otherwise probably wouldn't have seen.

V: The power of film to connect one stranger to another on the internet…

CK: Yeah, and I mean, our commenters are also the best commenters on the internet, in my opinion. They're so supportive. They often will call the filmmaker by name in the comment, and it's just really lovely. To me that's a very special part. Publishing on a site like The Times means being able to see those comments not just from a couple of people, but from hundreds of people.

KV: Are there projects you’re particularly proud of commissioning or championing at the NYT?

CK: We’ve done a few special projects. We recently announced a partnership with Sandbox to fund science-related shorts, related to the periodic table of elements. Heidi Fleisher and Mike Paterson initiated this project. They previously produced four films with Sandbox, one of which we ended up publishing (“A Robust Heart”), and then for this next round, we came on board as a third partner during the development and production process. I'm very excited to see where that goes.

Along those lines, we did a special project that I launched when I started, restoring short films from different archives. The idea was to go find films that didn't have distribution or had been lost to time and restore and publish them. We published those starting in February this year and they became an amazing series called Encore. They've been some of our best-performing shorts of the year and it was really an experiment, and I had no idea how people would react to seeing older films on a news site, so that was a very personally satisfying project for me. We had an amazing archival producer, Stephanie Jenkins, and she was fantastic to work with.

KV: Is there any takeaway you would give a filmmaker with a brilliant story to tell?

CK: This is probably very obvious, but work with kind people who are going to be really supportive, because filmmaking is really hard. It's a really long journey, even after the film is done, and you don't want to go on that journey with people that aren't going to be supportive. Over the years that's become more and more obvious to me – that I can absolutely love a film, but if it's going to be a bad experience for everyone to work on it, then it's just not a path you should take yourself down.

Along the same lines, as much as possible I would encourage people that way and also to take chances on people that you think are promising.

Finally, don't be afraid to go to your extended network to ask for support or money or whatever it might be. You just never know who's going to step up or is secretly rooting for you, or just cares about what you're making.

Have an idea for The Pitch? Send Kate a note directly! Rough Cut Mag is edited by Monica Gokey.

Rough Cut Magazine is VC's digital mag for and by industry thought leaders, doc filmmakers, and video journalists across the world.