ESODOC
EUROPEAN SOCIAL
DOCUMENTARY

ESoDoc has been an incredible experience, both personally and professionally. A very practical and intense training, which allows your work to advance with firm steps. All the feedback received during these 8 months is a gift for any project. And on a personal level, I have been able to meet many good people with incredible projects. ESoDoc allows you to expand your network with professionals who are dedicated to the same thing as you. Gracias ESoDoc!

ESoDoc creates fantastic opportunities for dialogue between tutors, documentary filmmakers and the professional industry such as commissioning editors. Both my film plan and myself made huge progress during this workshop. I really appreciated the critical and constructive feedback on the projects from the tutors and my fellow participants, which was always done in a respectful and empathic way. That’s why ESoDoc felt like a close family to me.

ESoDoc has been an incredibly enriching, challenging and motivating experience. It has helped me progress my project much further than I thought possible, in a supportive, encouraging and fun environment of fellow filmmakers and expert trainers. The skills, tools and network I have built will benefit me no end with my future projects and career.

ESoDoc is a great opportunity to meet filmmakers and industry professionals with great values and will to create better cinema and a better world. And they do it from a small scale, taking care of everybody in the group, making everyone feel loved and respected, and believing in your project, trying to help you develop it in the best way.

ESoDoc gave a huge boost to the development of our animadoc for children “Bread with Nails.” We greatly appreciate the attitude of EsoDoc to include the documentary for children in the program alongside the documentaries for adults, so that they can benefit equally from this inspiring professionalization process. Incredibly enriching creative process! Great experience with fantastic people!

Making independent documentaries can feel like a solitary journey, and even more so when you're working in a country that isn't your own. Success demands understanding local production dynamics and connecting with people who share your vision for creating brave documentaries that empower communities. ESoDoc provides this crucial space where meaningful connections form and projects flourish, bringing together all the vital elements needed for impactful documentary filmmaking.

EsoDoc is an exceptional structure run by strong believers in collective research and mutual support. It is a place to gain confidence in our places as directors and to make sure that our films are going into the right and impactful direction we wish for. Ultimately, I think that all directors making meaningful social documentaries today should go through the process so that they can affirm their position and avoid being swayed later in the making.

If you need to shake your project, be upside down and rethink it, Esodoc is your place! You may consider options you never thought before. And, be ready, you may embrace them!

ESoDoc provides a thought-provoking programme for documentary filmmakers when we need it the most: development. The training has taken me and my project to a new level; I wouldn't have advanced this far without being pushed by the mentors and their activities. This growth was done kindly and in a safe environment, where I felt that my ideas were valued. I wish I could come to ESoDoc with every project I work on in the future. And I'm sure I'll be able to apply what I've learned from now on.

EsoDoc was a perfect mix of brilliant brainstorming, eye-opening development sessions, and late-night debates over coffee, and wine, I learned how to give my storytelling a social impact upgrade. Plus, I met an incredible bunch of people who are just as determined to change the world, one documentary at a time.

An experience that adds another meaningful piece to professional growth.

ESoDoc creates fantastic opportunities for dialogue between tutors, documentary filmmakers and the professional industry such as commissioning editors. Both my film plan and myself made huge progress during this workshop. I really appreciated the critical and constructive feedback on the projects from the tutors and my fellow participants, which was always done in a respectful and empathic way. That’s why ESoDoc felt like a close family to me.

ESoDoc was an amazing opportunity to develop myself as a filmmaker in the company of wonderful colleagues and trainers. The course makes you rethink your project in the context of new approaches to storytelling, financing and distribution. Best of all is becoming a part of an incredibly supportive and inspiring professional community!

ESoDoc was mind-opening and life-transforming for me and my project. I had no idea I would go through so much personal and professional changes! ESoDoc helped me face my fears and transcend them, find out “what I really wanted to say” in my project and express “who I am”. It was a challenging, inspiring and therapeutic training. We received not only exceptional tools and practice for our documentary projects development, but also loving kindness, respect and support along the way.

ESoDoc has been an amazing training and life experience; the skill of the trainers and the content of the lectures pushed me to dig deep down into the core of my project as well as explore my motivation as a filmmaker. Moreover, the incredible atmosphere during all the three intense sessions, encouraged the birth of some friendships and collaborations that will last for many years to come.

Participation in ESoDoc made me realize even stronger that working on a transmedia documentary project is not about the idea in my head but more about how do I communicate it to the world and how do I want to create an impact. This conclusion was backed by wonderful ESoDoc community: organizers, tutors and participants which was enriching as professional and deeply human experience.

The ESoDoc experience gave so many useful inputs for my career and the project. The course, the people and the places were all so inspiring. If given a chance, I would do it again and again!

ESoDoc gave me a powerful and supportive network of colleagues and friends which have opened up doors beyond what I could consider possible prior to it. The ESoDoc community continues to grow and I am often finding new and inspiring creative partnerships both in it and through it.

Since participating in ESoDoc I have worked with hundreds of people through community filmmaking projects and have been able to share the knowledge I gained about filming with integrity in a Human rights context.

ESoDoc was a fantastic way to build working relationships with filmmakers and documentary lovers from all over Europe. 4 years on and I am still in regular contact with former participants and teachers and have worked on many projects that have come through connections made during ESoDoc.

ESoDoc was a wonderful place to start making relationships with broadcasters, distributors and fellow producers and directors, all finding ways to tell the best social documentary stories across multi platforms.

This cutting-edge workshop features people on the front-lines of the exciting new developments of the documentary field. The great trainers, networking possibilities, friendships and co-productions that ESoDoc provided has forever changed the course of my work.

ESoDoc was a unique opportunity to learn from very experienced and well-known professionals in the field as well as to create links with fellow filmmakers from all over Europe. It was truly inspiring and a great opportunity to transform ideas into real projects!'

Where else do you get to the meet the "living legends" and leading trailblazers of the documentary world, develop your projects with them, attend their invaluable masterclasses - and all in the company of the ever supportive and ever inspiring ESoDoc Family.

ESoDoc? Probably the best what happened to me, after I discover my interest in documentary filmmaking. Knowledge, practice, creative spirit and great people. Good way to find out how your ideas suits to market. Lots of re-thinking, questioning, networking and killing stereotypes.

ESoDoc has been a unique experience that allowed me to go further with my documentary project, to share doubts and difficulties of making documentaries with wonderful and talented people, and to learn about new ways of telling stories and financing them.

Lifechanging! And hopefully, not just for me, but for the people and communities I work with, too.

ESoDoc inspired me to start a participatory videoproject with young refugees and immigrants that came to my hometown Utrecht. Filming and screening their impressive stories was emotional and wonderful.

ESoDoc not only helped me to develop my documentary project further, but opened a whole new world of cross-media possibilities and aspects for documentaries to me, which I will put in use for all my future film projects. Meeting documentary filmmakers from all around Europe and working together was a fantastic experience!

Changing the world to better by documentaries? I`m still not shure wether this really works - but the people at EsoDoc gave me the inspiration and the boldness to give it a try: That`s one of the reasons why I am doing Participatory Video Workshops with young people and that`s why I am working since four years on my documentary "Flowers of Freedom" - which follows four women and their struggle for freedom and democracy in the vastness of Kyrgyzstan.

It was a great opportunity to get in touch with established documentary filmmakers and producers and to share the experience with emerging filmmakers from all over Europe.

ESoDoc inspired me to want to be a better filmmaker and a better person during the time I did the program in 2006 and still now five years later

I have taught for the last 10 years around the world on many different courses and institutions. ESoDoc is still the only course that truly prepares its participants for the evolving multiskill new media world we all face as filmmakers today.

Within three workshops, ESoDoc successfully opens the essence of the world of documentary to more than 20 participants year after year - it is an amazing achievement!

ESoDoc is one of those rare occasions where I have been feeling part of a trans cultural community, worried about the responsibility of images and projects in the fight for the endorsement of social values and a better world.

Where else can you access 3 weeks of world-class lectures as well as one-on-one mentoring with leading professionals in documentary film, NGOs, cross-media? Perhaps most important of all, you join a dedicated and generous peer group of participants who make up the growing ESoDoc family, and that network becomes essential for many productive years to come.

One of the things that makes ESoDoc so special is the way that highly experienced teachers are brought in to very work closely with each and every student, interrogating their ideas in depth and then helping to them to create strong documentary films, television programmes and internet productions of distinction.

ESoDoc always has a great mix of talented delegates, trainers and projects – it’s such a pleasure to share knowledge and creative development with everyone involved on the course.

The ESoDoc projects might be diverse, from personal to investigative, from creative documentaries to crossmedia projects - but they are all driven by the filmmaker's wish to take social responsibility.