It was only after the legendary UK broadcaster and journalist Alan Whicker died in 2013 that former BBC director and producer Jane Ray discovered that he had set up an “extraordinary bequest” to “fund and recognise original and innovative [international] documentary.” What’s more, he wanted Ray, his friend and colleague, to run the foundation that would eventually bear his name.
When Whicker was active in broadcasting, the ground seemed much more secure for docmakers, Ray points out. Three or four, even five, decades ago, broadcasters would finance docs “end to end,” but these days money is scarce, and unless you are a name presenter fronting a subject which commissioning editors have some foreknowledge of, then getting any kind of green light is far from easy, she adds.
Whicker had foreseen this situation. “He said, it’s going to be particularly bad if you don’t already have an established reputation, because people will only invest if they feel that you are a sure ticket, and how do you get to be a sure ticket?” Ray remembers.
In establishing The Whickers’ future modus operandi, Ray was determined to run a tight ship to keep costs low, so as to best serve their constituency of docmakers, and to partner “with someone with a lot of pushing power and punching power,” which is why she met up in 2014 with the then-Chair of Sheffield DocFest, Alex Graham. “He looked at my vision statement and his big stubby Glaswegian finger came down on the page and he said, ‘curiosity, that’s my favourite word…I’m in’. And that’s when I knew that we had a chance,” Ray tells BDE of how The Whickers came to be subsequently launched in 2015.
“When we started, we had three awards at Sheffield because we had an age limit on the age of entry for the main Film and TV Funding prize, which was then 80,000 pounds,” Ray stresses. “That [the age limit] was something that was always invidious. And we moved swiftly to remove the restriction because it was immediately obvious that real documentary talent can emerge at any age. And in fact, most people who’d had another life before they turned to documenting it were those with the most interesting and deeply resonant stories to tell.”
Ten editions on, 2024 marks The Whickers’ tenth year of collaboration with Sheffield, with the Film and TV Funding Award now worth a whopping £100,000, and a £20,000 development cheque handed to the runner-up. These prizes will be handed out on June 16. One of the judges is Ibrahim Nash’at whose feature debut Hollywoodgate won the Whickers Close Up Bursary Award in 2022 and premiered at Venice Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival in 2023. “He’s part of this cycle of passing it on,” says Ray of Nash’at.
June 15 will see the second collaboration on The Whickers and Sheffield DocFest Podcast Awards. The main award is £5000 with a further £2000 development prize up for grabs. These awards celebrate “the global trend towards solo and episodic listening to factual audio, and together we have deliberated over the many original, educational, fascinating and, sometimes pretty whacky, entries,” the organisation stresses online.
“And then we attend Meet Market where Jane Mote [Consultant Editor] and myself are looking, if you like, for next year’s new talent, meeting people who are coming forward as first-time feature length filmmakers with a terrific idea but no funds whatsoever, and not able to get out of development and into production,” says Ray. “Obviously if they’re right for The Whickers, we encourage them to apply, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s just a little bit of matchmaking that we can do to connect them with a producer that we rate who would be looking for a project like that, or we quiz them to find out what they really need and what would help them move to the next stage.”
Sheffield 2024 presents world premieres of two projects supported by The Whickers. Director Duncan Cowles takes a journey through male mental health, stigma and taboo in the UK in his Silent Men in International First Feature Competition. The project won the £20,000 Development Award in 2017.
The organisation also celebrates the audio world premiere of the three-part investigative podcast Time Paper Bone by South African Catherine Boulle and Bongani Kona (June 13).
Alan Whicker was something of an anomaly in being so quintessentially British, yet having an extraordinarily international outlook in his storytelling. It wasn’t for nothing that his most celebrated series was named Whicker’s World. This internationalist approach is one shared by Jane Ray and her team, as well as by Valerie Kleeman, Chair of the Awards Committee and former partner of Alan.
“We have this Cost of Docs Survey that we run every year just to check the true price across docs, and we talk about pressure points to do with funding mainly, but also the mental health struggle of all the things that are required of you to get these things done during a cost-of-living crisis,” says Ray. “But we realized that there were parts of the world where even to get a trailer together that would stand up in an international market was nigh impossible…So that’s when we developed the bursaries, tiny amounts of seed funding, just £3000 pounds, which to you or I feels like a nice week’s holiday, but may be enough to propel a project that otherwise wasn’t going to get noticed internationally onto the next stage.”
“And that’s why I am particularly pleased that the judges chose Camels of the Sea [Vikram Singh] this year. That was a DocedgeKolkata bursary. How the bursaries work is that we team up with people in country who know the score and we bring a bit of money and distribute it where we see that where there is talent and potential.” Other bursary partners are Durban FilmMart (South Africa), Conecta (Chile) and Close Up (representing Southwest Asia and North Africa).
“As we say, The Whickers’ criteria is to shed new light on the hitherto unseen or unknown world,” says Ray. “Obviously that world could be what’s happening in North-western India right now or what’s happening inside your head. On one of our finalists this year in the Film and TV Awards is One of Us by Rachel Close [whose] documentary proposal is about the dissonance she feels when investigating somebody else being a Romanian orphan from the same place as her. It starts to unravel in her own mind. ‘Why couldn’t I get on with my adoptive parents in Teeside? Why, when I had everything, did I blow it and go off the rails? What was going on there?’”
Ray underlines the communal approach shared by The Whickers and the numerous international organisations with which they are partnered, which also include Docs By The Sea, IDA, and Chicken and Egg Pictures as well as the bursary partners.
“That’s one of the things I love. This is what energizes me. I get to work with some extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. I think when it works well, there is a hugely collegial atmosphere between us,” she says. “If it [a project] is not right for us, we usually can think of at least two or sometimes three people who would love to know about this project. We talk to each other a lot.”
“I’m having daily conversations with people who may not have won The Whickers top £100,000 prize, but we have remained in touch because by the time they became a finalist, we were passionately interested in their film and get a lot of satisfaction and pleasure from seeing them succeed.”
But “it’s not all fun in the garden” in the doc sector, Ray reminds Business Doc Europe, and underlines how due diligence that must be strenuously observed.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat it because there [are] real problems in many ways with the cost-of-living crisis, escalating prices and funds losing some of their sponsors,” she says, referring again to the findings of her Cost of Docs survey.
“And there are less reputable, roving producers who will tend to alight on inexperience and offer them [the makers] the moon on a stick for sixpence and then get a little bit of funding and then bugger off with it, leaving them exactly where they were,” she notes. “We are very steely when it comes to codes of behaviour, both physical codes of behaviour and contractual. Is the person being asked to sign a contract, understanding it in their own language? It amazes me how many producers or commissioners would just hand over an 82-page contract, and expect somebody who doesn’t have any English as their first language to just sign it over. There are still things that happen in our industry, which I thought was a cosy, happy little cottage industry, which are not cosy and not happy and are bad practice.”
But the positives outweigh the negatives, Ray underlines on the eve of the 31st Sheffield DocFest. “Overall, there’s still enough joy in it for me to remain hopeful at the end of the day,” she signs off about the doc sector within which The Whickers plays an essential role, whether in terms of funding or advocacy.
