Health, Care, and Work-Life Balance

• How do you balance an organizationally unstable activity like filmmaking with other aspects of your personal life?
• Which aspects of documentary filmmaking are most likely to destabilize your well-being and health, both physically and mentally?
• How do you prevent burnout from filmmaking: instability, long hours, team coordination?
• Can you share some strategies?
• Do you contribute to creating spaces for mutual care in your filmmaking work?
• How?
• When did you discover this need?
• Have you ever had to abandon or give up filmmaking for work-life balance reasons?
• Can filmmaking and work occasionally be a refuge from an overly saturated or even critical personal situation?

Economies: Making a Living from Documentary Filmmaking

• A simple question: what do you do for living?
• Have you been able to build a life/earn a living from your documentary filmmaking work?
• If you make a living from filmmaking: do you make a living from producing, directing, teaching, programming, all of these activities?
• Do you think there's little talk about money or how those of us who make documentaries make a living?
• If you're a producer or have your own production company: how do you organize the different productions to make the structure viable?
• We'd appreciate you sharing examples, past or present. If you're a director: do you balance this with other professional activities, in this or another sector?
• Do you work as a director on other productions or commissions, for documentaries or other film or audiovisual genres?
• How do you incorporate or evaluate this situation?
• If you're a screenwriter, director of photography, editor, sound engineer, composer, etc.: Do you turn down many offers or do you take on most of the shoots or projects proposed to you?
• Do you have a preference for practicing your discipline in documentary filmmaking?
• Does it influence the work you accept?
• How does joining and leaving different films influence your creative practice?

Attempts, abandonments, and learning experiences

• How many of the film projects you've started have been shelved?
• For what reasons: not knowing how to approach them, not getting funding, not finding the right crew or production company?
• What have you learned from these abandonments—about filmmaking, about your own abilities, about the industry?
• Have you ever revived a project you'd abandoned?
• Describe this specific example. How did you revive that film, and what had changed?