Documentary is a particular form of filmmaking that I follow.

Documentaries, or ‘docs’ as they are usually termed, are often created by writer-directors or writer-director-producers.

Docs were once made on film and often exhibited in cinemas, but today cinema release is a rarity, despite last year’s highly successful Mrs Carey’s Concert by Bob Connolly. That film managed to take more than $1 million at the Australian box office, which was better than the majority of our feature film releases in 2011.

So today docs are the province of television. And so the documentary gatekeepers at TV networks, particularly at the ABC and SBS, wield enormous influence about what gets made, and therefore what stories will be told.

The annual documentary talkfest, the AIDC, begins on 27 February, 2012. Are you attending?

For info on documentary see the Documentary category on the right.