During February’s Berlinale, I attended a European Parliament event that convened policymakers and industry leaders to address a key question confronting the continent’s creative industries: How can cultural sovereignty and democratic discourse be safeguarded in a platform-dominated media environment?
The session—”Creative Industries Under Pressure: Balancing Cultural Diversity, Artistic Freedom, and Competitiveness in the Platform Era”— was framed not as a narrow industry debate but as a matter of democratic resilience. Moderator Michael Gubbins, former editor of Screen International, opened by suggesting that Europe has entered a period of cultural realignment requiring decisive choices about how its creative sectors are supported. Sabine Verheyen, First Vice-President of the European Parliament, argued that cinema is not only an art form or an economic sector, but a democratic instrument—one that strengthens empathy, diversity, and freedom of expression through Europe’s independent film ecosystem.
That ecosystem is increasingly under pressure. Global streaming platforms, overwhelmingly headquartered in the United States, are reshaping cultural visibility and production. Algorithmic recommendation systems, optimized for retention, risk narrowing what audiences see. When control over visibility is concentrated in relatively few hands, the implications extend beyond competition. They raise questions about cultural diversity, artistic freedom, and the health of the democratic public sphere.
Participants argued that addressing these challenges requires an ecosystem approach to cultural policy—one that spans creation, production, distribution, exhibition, education and regulation. They rejected the notion that governments must choose between supporting cultural diversity and maintaining global competitiveness. Both are necessary. Selective funding and economic instruments such as tax incentives each play distinct roles, while platforms must operate within rules that protect local industries, respect intellectual property and reinvest in national production.
In March, I attended the CPH:DOX industry summit on the timely topic of media sovereignty, which echoed many themes of the earlier discussion.
As in Berlin, speakers in Copenhagen described a media landscape undergoing structural change. Platform concentration, algorithmic distribution and the rapid emergence of AI are reshaping how audiences encounter information. Public institutions that once anchored the circulation of fact-based media—from broadcasters to cinemas to cultural venues—are under strain. The result is not only an economic challenge, but an infrastructure crisis for public-interest media.
One panel described this in terms of epistemic security, reflecting on threats to the systems through which societies produce and share trustworthy knowledge. Documentary and investigative journalism remain central to that ecosystem, yet the infrastructures that carry them are increasingly mediated by commercial platforms whose priorities may not align with democratic or cultural objectives.
Against this backdrop, documentary occupies a distinctive place in the audiovisual landscape. It assembles evidence, testimony and lived experience into narratives that help societies understand themselves. At its best, it operates as a bridge between journalism, culture and civic discourse.
Yet the conditions that allow these stories to be made and seen are evolving.
Documentaries rarely arrive with the signals that make financing decisions straightforward. They seldom feature internationally recognizable stars, often tackle complex or contentious subjects and depend on audiences that develop gradually through festivals, community screenings, educational engagement and word-of-mouth.
Documentary audiences, in other words, are cultivated rather than captured.
For this reason, several speakers in Copenhagen argued that public-interest storytelling cannot rely on market incentives alone. The infrastructures supporting documentary—from funding mechanisms to exhibition spaces to public broadcasters—must reflect the form’s distinctive dynamics. Cultural value and market value do not always appear on the same timeline.
These discussions were rooted in European policy debates, but the parallels with Canada are striking.
Here, too, the systems that support documentary are shifting. The Canada Media Fund (CMF) has previewed changes to its 2026–2027 program guidelines that will reshape access to public financing. A greater reliance on broadcaster and distributor envelopes means producers will increasingly require not only a licence or distribution advance, but an envelope allocation to unlock CMF support.
These changes reflect real pressures. Traditional revenues tied to linear broadcasting are declining, while demand for public funding remains high. In that context, it is understandable that the CMF is seeking stronger market signals and clearer pathways to audiences.
But the conversations in Berlin and Copenhagen acknowledged that market signals seldom capture documentary’s true value.
European policymakers increasingly describe documentary and investigative media not simply as creative industries, but as components of democratic infrastructure. Their argument is not that markets are irrelevant, but that markets alone are insufficient to sustain forms of storytelling whose impact unfolds through civic conversation, education and public reflection.
From that perspective, cultural policy has a dual role: supporting competitiveness while ensuring that culturally and democratically significant work continues to exist—even when its audience pathways are less predictable.
Canada’s cultural institutions share many of these ambitions. But the frameworks through which they are pursued shape which projects are most easily realized.
If investment systems rely too heavily on short-term market indicators, documentaries will be undervalued. Projects that explore complex social issues, regional realities, or marginalized perspectives often require time and sustained engagement before their significance becomes visible. Measured purely through immediate commercial potential, such works may appear riskier than they actually are.
And these questions are not unfolding in isolation.
Media reports have conveyed that Canada’s Online Streaming Act is again becoming a point of tension with the United States. A recent bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers seeks to trigger a trade investigation into whether the Canadian measure discriminates against American streaming companies, potentially leading to retaliatory tariffs. [In May, the CRTC released updates to the Online Streaming Act with major implications for documentary.]
This raises familiar questions about the limits of Canada’s cultural sovereignty. While cultural exemptions have long protected domestic policy, there are indications they may be tested in the digital context, where the boundaries of cultural regulation remain unsettled.
Taken together, these developments suggest that the debate over documentary—and public-interest storytelling more broadly—is not only about funding models or audience metrics. It is also about whether countries are prepared to assert and defend the cultural frameworks that sustain their creative ecosystems.
The conversations in Berlin and Copenhagen make clear that some jurisdictions are treating these questions as central to democratic resilience. Canada is now facing similar choices.
The challenge ahead is not a question of choosing between cultural policy and industrial competitiveness. Instead, it’s a matter of determining how far we are willing to go in sustaining both.
If documentary is to remain a means for Canadian society to examine itself, encounter complex realities and imagine shared futures, then the question facing our cultural institutions is not which projects demonstrate the clearest market potential.
Rather, the true question is whether we are prepared to defend the conditions that allow those stories to exist at all.
The post Isn’t Documentary a Bulwark for Democracy? appeared first on POV Magazine.
