ESoDoc - European Social Documentary

Where else can you access 3 weeks of world-class lectures as well as one-on-one mentoring with leading professionals in documentary film, NGOs, cross-media? Perhaps most important of all, you join a dedicated and generous peer group of participants who make up the growing ESoDoc family, and that network becomes essential for many productive years to come.

It was a great opportunity to get in touch with established documentary filmmakers and producers and to share the experience with emerging filmmakers from all over Europe.

The ESoDoc projects might be diverse, from personal to investigative, from creative documentaries to crossmedia projects - but they are all driven by the filmmaker's wish to take social responsibility.

ESoDoc not only helped me to develop my documentary project further, but opened a whole new world of cross-media possibilities and aspects for documentaries to me, which I will put in use for all my future film projects. Meeting documentary filmmakers from all around Europe and working together was a fantastic experience!

Within three workshops, ESoDoc successfully opens the essence of the world of documentary to more than 20 participants year after year - it is an amazing achievement!

ESoDoc always has a great mix of talented delegates, trainers and projects – it’s such a pleasure to share knowledge and creative development with everyone involved on the course.

ESoDoc gave me a powerful and supportive network of colleagues and friends which have opened up doors beyond what I could consider possible prior to it. The ESoDoc community continues to grow and I am often finding new and inspiring creative partnerships both in it and through it.

ESoDoc was a unique opportunity to learn from very experienced and well-known professionals in the field as well as to create links with fellow filmmakers from all over Europe. It was truly inspiring and a great opportunity to transform ideas into real projects!'

Lifechanging! And hopefully, not just for me, but for the people and communities I work with, too.

This cutting-edge workshop features people on the front-lines of the exciting new developments of the documentary field. The great trainers, networking possibilities, friendships and co-productions that ESoDoc provided has forever changed the course of my work.

ESoDoc inspired me to want to be a better filmmaker and a better person during the time I did the program in 2006 and still now five years later

ESoDoc was a fantastic way to build working relationships with filmmakers and documentary lovers from all over Europe. 4 years on and I am still in regular contact with former participants and teachers and have worked on many projects that have come through connections made during ESoDoc.

ESoDoc? Probably the best what happened to me, after I discover my interest in documentary filmmaking. Knowledge, practice, creative spirit and great people. Good way to find out how your ideas suits to market. Lots of re-thinking, questioning, networking and killing stereotypes.

Where else do you get to the meet the "living legends" and leading trailblazers of the documentary world, develop your projects with them, attend their invaluable masterclasses - and all in the company of the ever supportive and ever inspiring ESoDoc Family.

ESoDoc inspired me to start a participatory videoproject with young refugees and immigrants that came to my hometown Utrecht. Filming and screening their impressive stories was emotional and wonderful.

One of the things that makes ESoDoc so special is the way that highly experienced teachers are brought in to very work closely with each and every student, interrogating their ideas in depth and then helping to them to create strong documentary films, television programmes and internet productions of distinction.

Changing the world to better by documentaries? I`m still not shure wether this really works - but the people at EsoDoc gave me the inspiration and the boldness to give it a try: That`s one of the reasons why I am doing Participatory Video Workshops with young people and that`s why I am working since four years on my documentary "Flowers of Freedom" - which follows four women and their struggle for freedom and democracy in the vastness of Kyrgyzstan.

Since participating in ESoDoc I have worked with hundreds of people through community filmmaking projects and have been able to share the knowledge I gained about filming with integrity in a Human rights context.

ESoDoc has been a unique experience that allowed me to go further with my documentary project, to share doubts and difficulties of making documentaries with wonderful and talented people, and to learn about new ways of telling stories and financing them.

ESoDoc is one of those rare occasions where I have been feeling part of a trans cultural community, worried about the responsibility of images and projects in the fight for the endorsement of social values and a better world.

I have taught for the last 10 years around the world on many different courses and institutions. ESoDoc is still the only course that truly prepares its participants for the evolving multiskill new media world we all face as filmmakers today.

ESoDoc was a wonderful place to start making relationships with broadcasters, distributors and fellow producers and directors, all finding ways to tell the best social documentary stories across multi platforms.