Breaking into the establishment

In the 1960s Frederick Wiseman began a series of documentaries exploring institutions – schools, hospitals, government departments and even the Juvenile Court. For him, the institution was the star and a gauge for the health of our society. Nowadays, the establishment is still fertile terrain for documentarians but the people inside prisons, psychiatric care facilities and domestic violence organisations tend to hold the media at arm’s length. Bureaucracy and ‘duty of care’ also make institutions very difficult to penetrate. In Breaking into the Establishment, we explore the balance of ethical and legal responsibilities against practical considerations filmmakers face negotiating access to subjects and their stories. Breaking into the Establishment – a panel on how filmmakers got access to various institutions to make ground-breaking documentaries.