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Vegas, baby! The Ankler is heading back to NAB Show for a second year in a row — and doubling down on conversations with the smartest people in the industry.

From April 18–22, we’re partnering again with the industry’s biggest media and tech gathering to break down the Business of Media and Entertainment as it’s actually evolving: faster, riskier and increasingly driven by new formats, new audiences and new power players.

This curated series will bring together top creators, executives and innovators to tackle the forces reshaping the industry — from the AI disruption of Hollywood’s creative ecosystem to the rise of the creator economy, shifting audience behavior and the changing economics of production.

We’ll be rolling out more programming in the coming weeks — including top speakers from leading AI studios, prediction markets and beyond — so keep an eye on the Business of Media and Entertainment hub.

But first up, we’re announcing two panels about what’s actually working in Hollywood:

• The Scary-Smart Business of Horror A good scare has become one of the entertainment economy’s most reliable engines. With disciplined budgets, built-in fandoms and global box office upside, horror consistently outperforms. From theatrical releases to streaming-first originals and creator-driven IP, the genre is artistically flexible and financially durable — and one of the last truly communal experiences for Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences. Join YouTube creator Mark Fischbach, aka Markiplier, whose independent feature Iron Lung earned more than $50 million at the global box office, Atomic Monster president Michael Clear and screenwriter Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) for a conversation moderated by Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey about why horror travels so effectively across platforms and borders, how studios and independents are building sustainable genre pipelines and why the next wave of breakout franchises may emerge from unexpected sources.

• Inside the Microdrama Boom Short-form serialized storytelling is having a major moment. Microdramas, social-native series and creator-led narratives are capturing massive audiences with low-cost, rapid production cycles and direct-to-fan distribution. What was once dismissed as niche or experimental is now attracting major platform investment. Moderated by Jarvey, this panel of microdrama creators and executives — including one of the format’s top stars and producers, Kasey Esser, and Dhar Mann Studios’ head of vertical content, Erin McFarlane — examines how format innovation, fandom dynamics and algorithmic discovery are reshaping the economics of scripted storytelling and what traditional studios can learn from these agile models.

For sponsorship opportunities, contact Lynne@theankler.com; for speaking opportunities, contact info@theankler.com.

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At AnklerEnjoy, the home for post-Ankler Events content, you can watch all of the documentary panels from our virtual Jan. 7 event (and previous Documentary Spotlight events).

• Cutting Through Rocks (Gandom Films)

• My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (Marminchilla)

• The Alabama Solution (HBO Documentary Films)

• Yanuni (Malaika Pictures)

• You can also listen to audio of these filmmakers in conversation with Thom Powers here on the Pure Nonfiction podcast. (For information on Thom’s new book, Mondo Documentary, head here.)

In what marked the 10th collaboration between The Ankler and Pure Nonfiction, Powers hosted our latest Documentary Spotlight, a virtual event highlighting The Alabama Solution, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, Yanuni, and Cutting Through Rocks. The Jan. 7 edition was attended by members of AMPAS, BAFTA and IDA from around the world.

Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Sara Khaki grew up witnessing women striving for independence in a patriarchal society. When she moved to the United States, Khaki still thought of the women who never left Iran, unlike her.

“What are they doing, and how are they pushing for space for the women and girls around them?” Khaki recalls thinking.

Her answers came in the resulting documentary, Cutting Through Rocks — filmed over seven years with her co-director and eventual husband, Mohammadreza Eyni. The film follows midwife Sara Shahverdi as she runs for a local council seat in her Iranian village, aiming to break long-held patriarchal traditions, like discouraging teenage girls from riding motorcycles.

“It’s such a normal thing now for women to ride motorcycles,” Khaki told Pure Nonfiction’s Thom Powers during a Jan. 7 conversation. “This is one of the many examples of the change and the evolution that happened within this one small part of the planet.”

Khaki and Eyni, along with the filmmakers behind three other Oscar-shortlisted films, joined Powers to share how they managed to take big themes — the Iranian patriarchy, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cruel American prison conditions and the cost of resistance — and deliver narratives about them with a tight, personal focus.

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In the Action: The Alabama Solution; My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow

Journalists cannot just speak to people who are incarcerated, explained The Alabama Solution co-director and producer Charlotte Kaufman to Powers. “They cannot visit prisons, historically, unless they have the permission of the state,” she added. “What is very unique about our film is that we are seeing the truth about what incarceration is without the permission of the state.”

To expose the corrupt, cruel conditions present in the Alabama prison system, Kaufman and fellow co-director and producer Andrew Jarecki crafted a documentary using contraband cell phone footage provided by the inmates over several years. It all began in 2019, when the duo visited Easterling Correctional Facility to film a religious revival meeting. Off camera, the incarcerated men — often put away for non-violent crimes — discreetly hinted at stories of the abuse they had endured.

“There is widespread use of unpaid labor within the prison system in Alabama and within prison systems across the country,” Kaufman said. In Alabama, she explained, that means being leased out to different towns and municipalities to do all of their landscaping or even to work in the governor’s mansion. “That alone is hard to accept, but when you combine the violence that exists in the prisons, and you realize what’s at stake if they refuse to work,” she said. “It’s coerced labor at the threat of bodily harm. It takes it to a whole other level.”

Jarecki and Kaufman had “terabytes and terabytes of information,” Jarecki said, from inside the prisons. The challenge then became how to assemble a film about a topic as nuanced and layered as the prison system.

“You have so many elements that you would like to talk about,” Jarecki said. “It’s critical to talk about the slave labor. Without it, you don’t understand what the big economic engine is that’s driving this. But then again, they’re building $3 billion worth of new prisons. Then again, they’re not paroling people.

“Every one of these things could be a film.”

Faced with a similar predicament (too much footage, not enough time), documentarian Julia Loktev opted to turn what was once intended to be a feature-length film into a two-part project (with the potential for a third part). Loktev first traveled to Russia in October 2021 with the goal of documenting independent journalists; then, four months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

“Everything about the process feels very organic and, obviously, surprising and unexpected,” Loktev told Powers. “When I started making the film, I obviously had no idea that a few months later, all of these characters would be facing the decision of, ‘Do we go to work tomorrow? Do we go to prison? Or do we go to the airport right now with a carry-on suitcase,’ which is a pretty tremendous thing to happen in your life.”

Loktev became a one-person crew with an iPhone, which allowed her to remain inconspicuous while capturing the rapid disintegration of Russia’s civil society. The resulting film, then, became less investigative and more of a “hangout” movie with the journalists as they faced the agonizing decision of whether to abandon their country.

“All the journalists I was filming were expecting a crackdown, and they thought this was going to get worse and worse,” Loktev said. “Everybody thought the monster would eat them, not invade the neighborhood.”

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow concludes in March 2022, and Loktev is currently editing a sequel that follows her subjects, who made the difficult choice to leave Russia and head into exile.

“Part II starts two days later as they’re in Istanbul. They have no idea what country they’re going to. Their bank cards don’t work. They have no media. Their country has just started a war, which they’re incredibly ashamed of and horrified by,” Loktev said. “They feel like they should report on it, but they don’t have any media because all their media has been closed.”

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Powerful Women: Yanuni; Cutting Through Rocks

Juma Xipaia, an indigenous chief who rose from Amazonian activism to Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, had survived six assassination attempts when she met documentarian Richard Ladkani. He proposed an out-of-the-box solution: Use a documentary film not only to stay safe but also to bring meaningful change.

“If millions of people know who you are,” Ladkani recalled saying, “you will become a much harder target to take out. There will be outrage, a media storm and questions and answers. I see it as a new tool in your tool set, basically, to fight.”

Ladkani served as director, producer and cinematographer on the resulting film, Yanuni, which counts Leonardo DiCaprio and Xipaia herself as producers. To add to Xipaia’s dangerous circumstances, her husband, Hugo, a federal agent, conducted raids on environmental criminals throughout filming. Ladkani joined Hugo on dangerous operations to capture the Amazon rainforest’s destruction firsthand, using small cameras and no crew to avoid attracting attention. But that wasn’t the only potential danger the documentarian put himself — and his subjects — in.

“Here I was with a camera running around in one of the most dangerous places of the Amazon,” Ladkani said of his travels, “where people get shot and killed every day on the streets.”

To build trust and mitigate security risks, Ladkani spent six months learning Portuguese, eliminating the need for a translator. In the end, all the danger and precautions were worth it.

“The community sees it as their indigenous film that has made it out there to the world to tell their story, and they’re super proud,” Ladkani said. “Juma is super proud because this is her film.”

Likewise, for Cutting Through Rocks filmmakers Khaki and Eyni, doing right by their noble subject and her community was paramount. The challenge became that the moment the duo walked into the village, “there were questions about who we are and what our intentions are,” Khaki recalls.

The two-director approach helped, with Khaki able to access intimate female circles and Eyni allowing men to feel their voices were being heard. Eyni’s fluency in the local dialect also helped. As the duo built up their relationships within the community, profound cultural shifts were underway. Shahverdi asserted herself as a role model in the community, inspiring a new generation of village girls to pursue education — and yes, ride motorcycles.

“For us as filmmakers, it was a lesson to see how change is contagious, to see how it’s possible,” Eyni told Thom Powers. “It seems that it’s impossible, but if you fight for it, you can make it possible.”

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At AnklerEnjoy, the home for post-Ankler Events content, you can watch all of the documentary panels from our virtual Nov. 21 event (and previous Documentary Spotlight events).

• Child of Dust (Ya Man Studio)

• My Mom Jayne (HBO Documentary Films)

• Norita (Doctorastories)

• Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (Kino Lorber)

• Qotzuñi: People of the Lake (Red House Productions)

• You can also listen to audio of these filmmakers in conversation with Thom Powers here on the Pure Nonfiction podcast. (For information on Thom’s new book, Mondo Documentary, head here.)

“I just love the healing power of storytelling,” said star-turned-director Mariska Hargitay, when asked what excites her about documentaries. “I love how the forum can connect us to our own humanity and immediately put us in community.”

Hargitay’s film, My Mom Jayne, centers on her mother, Jayne Mansfield, who died in a tragic car accident when the Law & Order: SVU star was just 3 years old. In digging past the public image of her mother as a sex symbol, Hargitay meets and embraces “the woman behind the pose,” she said. Along with Hargitay, the filmmakers behind some of this year’s best non-fiction films joined Pure Nonfiction’s Thom Powers to share how they connected audiences to their own humanity, as Hargitay put it — each project centering on a noteworthy, heroic individual (or, in one case, a tight-knit community).

Powers hosted the latest Documentary Spotlight event, which marked the ninth collaboration between The Ankler and Pure Nonfiction, also spotlighting rousing titles Child of Dust, Norita, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk and Qotzuñi: People of the Lake. For the first time, the event was held virtually, featuring a livestream viewed by players in the documentary space.

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Center of the Action: Norita, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

“She didn’t want to be a part of it. She had no interest in being in a documentary, let alone one focusing solely on her,” Norita director Jayson McNamara told Powers. “We really had to prove ourselves.”

McNamara is referring to Nora Cortiñas, the legendary Argentine human rights activist, who — after an extensive goodwill campaign — agreed to serve as the subject of McNamara’s documentary, produced by DoctoraStories in association with Picabu Films and Tidetivity Studios. To prove himself, McNamara went to Cortiñas’ weekly protest for several years, where she rallies practically every Thursday. Producer Sarah Schoellkopf, meanwhile, has known Cortiñas for nearly 30 years. When Schoellkopf told the crew she’d love to be involved, she was still a professor (her academic arenas were human rights and gender) and assumed she’d just be promoting the film. “But now I have left education,” Schoellkopf said. “I’ve gone from professor to producer.”

Schoellkopf has been with Cortiñas through thick and thin, from a 30-hour bus ride in 1996 en route to a march about indigenous disappearances, to the activist’s death in 2024 at the age of 94. So she knows as well as anyone how inspiring Cortiñas’ story is, especially right now, as Argentine President Javier Milei faces multiple controversies, including corruption allegations. “Based on what’s happening politically right now in their country, this movie is a catharsis,” Schoellkopf says. “It’s a call to arms.”

Another documentary intended to rally viewers around a nation is Kino Lorber’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a look at life in Gaza through video calls between 24-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona and Iranian director Sepideh Farsi. In October 2023, Farsi wanted to travel to Gaza to document the war herself, but couldn’t. Instead, she managed to connect with Hassona.

“It was as though she had decades of experience the way she was describing what she wanted to do,” Farsi said. “I asked her a question: ‘What does it mean for you to be a Palestinian in Gaza today?’ And she says, ‘I’m proud.’ That’s the phrase that comes out immediately. She doesn’t think about it; it just comes out.”

The film is a powerful, oftentimes hard-to-stomach look at the dire situation in Gaza, where Hassona’s documentation of airstrikes and famine portrays the terrifying reality. The young photojournalist was excited about her work and words going out into the world, but the day after the film was announced for the Cannes Film Festival, Hassona was killed in an airstrike.

Her documentary’s subject found herself a victim of the violence she was portraying, and now, Farsi hopes to continue Hassona’s mission.

“I haven’t had time for grief,” Farsi said. “I have to go around with her legacy and her words and keep doing this.”

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Meet the Parents: Child of Dust, My Mom Jayne

In the wake of the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese children were left stranded by their American parents, mostly fathers in the military, who departed after the culmination of the conflict. For Child of Dust director Weronika Mliczewska, Vietnam, where a particularly profound cultural importance is placed on the father figure, made the perfect backdrop to a “story about fathers that are absent,” she says.

“But with time, I understood that this took me into so many different places that I didn’t even think about,” Mliczewska told Powers.

The film, produced by Ya Man Studio, follows a Vietnamese man seeking reconciliation with his American father. After three years waiting for the right person, the director found Sang, one of many children abandoned after the war.

The project empowered its subject, reestablishing his identity as Mliczewska and producer Bao Nguyen (the filmmaker behind docs including 2024’s The Greatest Night in Pop) chose a strictly observational filming method to document Sang’s journey. “Weronica has a way of touching the story that’s very nuanced and not overly sentimental,” Nguyen said.

Sentimentality was a necessary element of Hargitay’s HBO documentary My Mom Jayne. For her entire life, the star had what she termed “an extremely complex relationship” with her mother’s legacy, “not understanding some of the choices that she made and only seeing this very sort of presentational side of her.”

“I would sort of push it all away and had really sort of cut her out of my life in that way,” Hargitay explained.

Then, the Covid pandemic struck, and upon finally peeling back the layers of her mother, Hargitay came to understand the woman Mansfield was, her dedicated work as a humanitarian activist — and the documentary that could emerge from her search. “In 2022, she came to me, and she said, ‘I’m ready,’” producer Trish Adlesic, who’s known Hargitay for 27 years, said. “And I knew what she meant.”

Editor and co-producer J.D. Marlow was then tasked with a challenge he had never encountered in his career, spanning documentaries on NBA great Stephen Curry to television legend Norman Lear. “I’ve described it as sort of a biography with a personal essay wrapped around it,” he said.

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Climate Crisis: Qotzuñi: People of the Lake

Gastón Zilberman, an Argentine filmmaker, and Michael Salama, an academic focused on the history of equal access to freshwater, had only just met when they decided to make a documentary together. “We looked at our combined skillset, and we said, ‘Maybe there’s a film to be made here,’” Salama told Powers.

The Qotzuñi: People of the Lake co-directors both sought to demonstrate the struggles of the Uru community in Bolivia as it coped with the disappearance of an ancestral lake due to climate change and mining. “They call themselves ‘people of the lake,’” Zilberman said, “because they’ve been living for centuries surrounding that lake … That’s what (the film) is about: How can they continue to be ‘people of the lake’ without a lake now?”

Salama had been studying water issues in the area and arrived in Bolivia to do an oral history and archival project about the Uru community. But one of the things the Uru people wanted was to bring their story to the world. The natural medium for such an endeavor: documentary film.

“We realized that there was so much to be told, and it was such a visual story,” Zilberman said of the Red House Productions film.

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Image credits: Ya Man Studio, HBO Documentary Films, Doctorastories, Kino Lorber, Red House Productions