"The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking"

A Workshop with Azad Azizyan and Natalie Bullock Brown

This workshop focuses on the Documentary Accountability Working Group’s core values for nonfiction filmmaking, especially integrating anti-oppression practices in one’s film and respecting the agency of the participants. Practicing such principles are especially important for Kurdish filmmakers since in many instances, similar to other oppressed people all around the world, outsiders have produced knowledge about us without including our voices and views in their research and documentary films. This workshop will explore the idea of “making documentaries about us, by us,” acknowledge the oppressive approaches in Kurdish documentary production, and discuss how to create an alternative space beyond the oppressors’ gaze.

Azad Azizyan is a Kurdish documentary filmmaker and an educator based in Santa Cruz, California, with a passion for using film as a tool for social change. He holds a bachelor’s degree in documentary production from the University of California Los Angeles. Currently, he is pursuing his MFA in Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Natalie Bullock Brown is an award-winning producer, a 2021 Rockwood Institute JustFilms Fellow, and the proud director of the Documentary Accountability Working Group, a collective she helped found in 2020. In 2022 the group released a values-informed framework for documentary filmmakers that emphasizes care, consent, and collaboration as a pathway to ethical storytelling. Natalie is director/producer of a documentary work-in-progress that explores the impact of messaging about beauty and aging on Black women. She is a producer on award-winning filmmaker Byron Hurt’s PBS documentary Hazing, as well as his upcoming NOVA film, Lee and Liza’s Family Tree. She served as producer for filmmaker Resita Cox’s demo for her upcoming film, Basketball Heaven.

Natalie is an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University, where she served as an assistant teaching professor in interdisciplinary studies for five years. She was the StoryShift Strategist for Working Films, where she guided the organization’s work in promoting accountable documentary storytelling. She was also a monthly guest and contributor for #BackChannel, a segment on North Carolina public radio’s The State of Things. And for nearly 12 years, Natalie was an assistant professor of film and broadcast media in the department of media and communications at Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh.

Natalie served for 12 years as co-host of Black Issues Forum, a public affairs program on UNC-TV, North Carolina’s statewide public television network. She was an associate producer on documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’s 10-part PBS series Jazz. She holds a master of fine arts in film production from Howard University, and a bachelor of arts in English from Northwestern University.