Doc Talk Podcast Hits Road For Hot Springs Doc Festival And Conversation With Executive Director Ken Jacobson, And A Side Trip To ‘Natchez’
Hoop skirts and parasols, mint juleps and columned mansions. For a stroll back in time, bucolic Natchez, MS offers tourists a comforting view of the antebellum South, glossing over such inconvenient realities as millions of people held in bondage.
That striking contrast between an idealized version of the Confederate era and a sterner reckoning with the truth is explored in the documentary Natchez, directed by Suzannah Herbert and produced by Darcy McKinnon. The film, winner of the top prize for documentary at the Tribeca Festival, just screened at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas.
The new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast comes to you from Hot Springs, where we spoke with the Natchez filmmakers. Herbert and McKinnon tell us how their background as Southerners – Herbert from Memphis and McKinnon from New Orleans – became essential to understand Natchez and its people, Black and white.
Herbert also shares her reaction when a white mansion owner openly waxed nostalgic for pre-Civil War days when he imagined being waited on hand and foot by enslaved servants.
At Hot Springs, we also spoke with Ken Jacobson, executive director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute, which puts on the festival. He shares his highlights from HSDFF and tells us about the festival’s third annual Filmmaker Forum, a vital gathering of documentary field stakeholders. The forum was well timed to confront what many would consider a time of crisis in documentary filmmaking. PBS, the longstanding home of many serious nonfiction directors, has come under assault from the Trump administration, which defunded the entity that financially supported PBS and NPR. Added to that, the Trump administration has also largely defunded the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, key supporters of documentary filmmaking and festivals.
Jacobson tells us what conclusions emerged from the forum about how to rebuild in the face of defunding and a contracting market in general for documentaries.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The show is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
