Doc : Doc — Steven Bognar on Full Frame and the Power of Documentary Film

Academy Award® winner Steven Bognar tells us about his first time at Full Frame, and why he keeps coming back. 

Doc : Doc is a new interview series from Duke Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), where we talk shop with documentary artists and explore the evolving field of nonfiction storytelling. Through candid conversations, we illuminate the creative process, celebrate the power of documentary and highlight the programs that make it all possible.

In this first feature, we speak with Steven Bognar, Academy Award®-winning filmmaker and longtime friend of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, about what makes the festival so special and why he comes year after year. He is known for films that explore the lives of working people — such as the Oscar®-winning American Factory and 9to5: The Story of a Movement, both of which screened at the festival.

Full Frame is a flagship CDS program and a cornerstone of our mission. Every spring, it’s a place for documentary filmmakers — from Oscar® winners to emerging voices — to share their work, connect and get inspired.

This past April, Full Frame hosted more than 100 filmmakers in Durham to screen their films. The Call for Entries for next year’s festival is now open, and we invite filmmakers from all backgrounds to submit their work and experience what makes Full Frame a “filmmakers’ festival.”

CDS: I feel so honored to speak with you today. Thank you. 

Steven Bognar: I’m happy to do it. I love Full Frame very much. It’s a great festival.

CDS: I know you’ve been coming to Full Frame for years, and participating in various ways. Do you remember the first time you attended?

Steven: My first experience with Full Frame was when it was still called the DoubleTake Film Festival, I think it was in 2000. I had a short documentary play at the festival, and it was a real thrill.

“I found myself, as a new, younger filmmaker, hanging out with legends like Barbara Kopple, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles.”

Immediately, I was struck by how welcoming and unpretentious and down-home the festival is for everybody. It did not matter how much experience or how little experience you had as a filmmaker — everybody felt invited. And suddenly I found myself, as a younger filmmaker, hanging out with legends like Barbara Kopple, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles. For a kid to be hanging out with these legends, it was amazing.

CDS: Full Frame has been called “a filmmaker’s festival.” From your perspective, how would you describe the spirit or atmosphere?

Steven: What Full Frame offers us is a gathering of the tribe and a chance to see the state of documentary filmmaking. We learn, watch each other’s movies, have deep, rich conversations. It infuses our work for the next year, or two, or three.

“I go home full of fuel to keep working, and hunger to keep working. And that's the gift that Full Frame has given me for years.”

Like any art form — whether it’s dance or writing or painting — you have to have an annual gathering where everybody can share their struggles, discoveries and setbacks. And then we inspire each other. I go home full of fuel to keep working, and hunger to keep working. And that’s the gift that Full Frame has given me for years. And there’s less market pressures at Full Frame than you find at other festivals, like Sundance. It’s more purely about the cinema.
 

CDS: What sets Full Frame apart from other film festivals? Why is it important to continue and to fund?

Steven: Full Frame may not be as well-known as Sundance, but for the documentary world it’s so important because it allows us all to see the cutting edge of where things are with the art form. For audiences, it’s a really rich, beautiful experience. And for filmmakers, Full Frame is an essential experience, because it allows us to go forth and improve our own work, and take our work to the next level.

“For filmmakers, Full Frame is an essential experience… it allows us to take our work to the next level.”

Now, that’s me talking as a filmmaker. As a human being, I would say that the curation of the films at Full Frame — the work that Sadie (Tillery, festival co-director and artistic director) and her team has done for so many years — is extraordinary. They curate a weekend of movies from all over the world, stories that I had no idea existed of people struggling for justice or struggling to make the world a better place. And I leave feeling like my soul and my heart have expanded hugely. Every year I go, I have more empathy for people. And I think we all need that right now. That empathy has been in short supply.

And we’re all kind of hunkered down because things have been so tough. But we make the world a better place when we have empathy and when we don’t just retreat into our little corners. It requires generosity and it requires courage. And the films that we see at Full Frame offer us so many humans who are generous, brave and risking things to make things better. And I love that so much. 

It’s just so meaningful and powerful. I’m sort of a weepy mess by the end.

CDS: That’s beautiful. It’s so great to hear how Full Frame has influenced and inspired your work over your career.

Steven: I’m lucky that I’ve had multiple films in the festival and the opportunity to curate. One year my late partner, Julia Reichert, and I curated a section on labor documentaries and that was very meaningful. And I’ve been on the jury, which was also really meaningful.

Then we started bringing students to the festival years ago, and that was transformative. Julia taught at Wright State University, and we would get a 12-passenger university van and go from Ohio through Kentucky and Tennessee into North Carolina, over those Smoky Mountains. And it was just really joyful and fun. We did it many years, and then these students are meeting these legends of cinema as well.

Some of the students would tell us before the festival, ‘Well, I’ll come to this so-called documentary festival, but I really want to work in fiction films, with actors and screenplays.’

“I have examples of filmmakers whose lives have changed because they had this immersive experience at Full Frame.”

But by the end of the festival, they’ve changed their mind. They’re like, ‘I want to work in documentary.’ Literally, I have examples of filmmakers whose lives have changed because they had this immersive experience at Full Frame. They saw how you could tell beautiful, powerful stories through highly-crafted, innovative, risk-taking cinema. That combination— something meaningful told beautifully — it’s changed students’ lives.
 

Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside came to Full Frame as students, as fiction filmmakers, but they went home wanting to make documentaries. And then, years later, they had a feature documentary that played at Full Frame, a wonderful film called América, about an elderly woman whose name is América living in Western Oaxaca, Mexico, and her grandsons who take care of her. It’s a beautiful film, like a cinema vérité family documentary. It’s very powerful. And it was so meaningful to see this full-circle moment.
 

CDS: You screened American Factory at Full Frame in 2019, and it went on to win the Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature. How did you know that this was going to be a great and important story? So much unfolded while you were filming!

Steven: Yeah, you don’t know. I think that’s one of the things about documentary — you have to have a feeling that you’re in a situation where things are probably going to happen.

In the early part of that factory story, we were just kind of showing up and getting to know people, and it took a year before the challenges started really percolating. We could feel tensions growing between the Chinese side and the American side. But we just had to do that, to give you the feeling that you’re on the inside of the story. You’re not just watching it pass you by. You feel everybody’s journey, dreams and fears. That’s what an immersive documentary can do.

“You feel everybody’s journey, dreams and fears. That’s what an immersive documentary can do.”

We were lucky to be allowed in that factory when it was just coming back to life and it was a great honor to be trusted by everybody — both the people on the assembly line, the blue-collar folks, and the management, and even Chairman Cao Dewang, the billionaire CEO.

Everybody took a chance on us, and they could have said, ‘Hey guys, we’re tired of you, get lost, go home.’ But they didn’t. They knew things were getting tense, and yet they still let us film, and that’s a testament to their desire to see this story come out in the world. You know, that was three years of filming compressed to two hours. And there were plenty of days when it felt like nothing much was happening.
 

CDS: Thank you for keeping the faith, continuing to make compelling and important films, and encouraging the next generation of documentary filmmakers. I recently spoke with Brittany Shyne, who screened her film Seeds at Full Frame this year and won the Grand Jury Award. She went to Wright State too and told me what important mentors you and Julia were to her, and that she had heard about Full Frame from you for years. 

Steven: Seeds is an amazing film, and Brittany’s journey making this film is very inspiring. Because she worked on it for like nine years, and I know that for a long stretches she just had to have faith that the story was happening. It’s an incredibly rich but subtle film, and it’s really through one of the gifts that documentary can do — compressing time — you see the narrative power of life in a way that ordinarily when we're in it we don’t. But the big moments of life are happening all around us. 

“For a film to press years into a two-hour cinematic experience, it has such power.”

And for a film to press years into a two-hour cinematic experience, it has such power. Brittany’s film is a brilliant example of that. Then for it to finally come out and have such a huge impact in the world, and to be such an amazing cinematic achievement, it's just very, very meaningful. 

Help Full Frame Support Filmmakers

Full Frame hosted more than 100 filmmakers from around the world at the 2025 festival, and invested over $135,000 to support their travel, accommodations and screening fees. CDS is committed to sustaining Full Frame’s commitment to artists and raising the funds necessary to continue hosting filmmakers, as well as curating powerful programs. 

If you are interested in giving to Full Frame, please contact Development Manager Jamie Webb at jamie.webb@duke.edu to explore opportunities for sponsoring artists featured at Full Frame, supporting the festival’s signature programs — such as the Thematic and Tribute Programs — or contributing directly to its leadership and artistic vision through Named Directorships.

Top photo: Ricky Garni