At this year’s Marché du Film in Cannes, some of the most quietly radical conversations taking place were not about box office trends, streamer consolidation, or the next wave of AI disruption. They were about power: who holds it, who gets excluded from it, and how the business of storytelling might be rebuilt when traditional systems no longer serve the people making, or needing, socially impactful creative work.
Expanding the Frame: New Frontiers for Public Interest Storytelling, presented by Curiosity Capital, Lighthouse Reports, and Think-Film Impact Production, with support from Cannes Docs, brought together a panel that cut through many of the industry’s current talking points to examine the underlying dynamics shaping the future of public-interest storytelling. Speakers Felipe Estefan (CEO of Curiosity Capital), Tessa Pang (Impact Editor at Lighthouse Reports), Daniel Bekerman (Producer, “The Apprentice”), and Taylor K. Shaw (Head of Film at Kickstarter), moderated by Andria Wilson Mirza (Women in Film), collectively articulated a compelling argument: the future of film may depend less on distribution deals or institutional approval and more on relationships – between filmmakers and audiences, journalists and communities, creators and one other.
This idea was perhaps most clearly framed by Shaw, who described crowdfunding not as financing but as participation. “[It] is an invitation to be part of the change, and to do something in a time where a lot of us don’t know what to do,” she said.
This statement did more than champion alternative funding routes in a difficult market for independent film; it pointed towards a radically more horizontal media model – one in which creatives retain power over their own stories, while audiences cease to be passive consumers targeted by marketing campaigns and instead are recognised and valued as active stakeholders in what gets made and why.
That idea of agency threaded through the entire discussion. Again and again, the panel returned to the need for creators to build independent relationships with audiences rather than rely on increasingly opaque institutional systems. Shaw challenged one of the entertainment industry’s most persistent assumptions: that audiences “don’t care” about politically difficult or socially challenging stories. “We are often told that audiences don’t care about certain stories – but that is based on data held by large corporations with enterprise value that will never be shared,” she said. “We can move on and make our own stories.”
The panel argued for a need to break out of closed corporate systems that act predominantly as barriers, build our own public interest information systems for audience data and trust, and embrace what Estefan described as an “engagement-centred paradigm”; a two-way dynamic in which audiences are understood not simply as ticket buyers at the end of the value chain, but valued as collaborators throughout it.
Crucially – as Estefan urged – this means thinking structurally, rather than project by project.
Estefan repeatedly pushed the conversation away from isolated success stories toward ecosystem thinking. His argument was not simply that more money is needed, but that the flow of capital itself needs redesigning to be located at the intersection of social purpose and market opportunity. “Bring money to more people than have access to it now,” he argued. “Do things that are impactful, inclusive and commercial.”
Estefan’s combination – impactful, inclusive and commercial – fundamentally rejected the false binary that often dominates conversations around social-impact media: the assumption that meaningful work and market realities operate separately. Instead, the panel proposed that public-interest storytelling can and should build sustainable economic models, designed differently from the start.
What emerged across the discussion was a broader redefinition of infrastructure itself. Infrastructure was not described as studios or platforms, but as trust, participation, collaboration and community resilience. For Estefan, this also extended to labour and ownership. The goal, he suggested, is not simply financing films but “creating environments where employees are paid as they should and feel belonging as they help us imagine the world we deserve.”
That same thinking appeared in Pang’s reflections on investigative journalism. She described how Lighthouse Reports has experimented with bringing affected communities directly into investigative processes through WhatsApp groups and collaborative feedback structures. The underlying idea was simple but transformative: people most impacted by stories should not be the last people reached by them.
Pang also spoke about the growing overlap between investigative journalism and cinematic storytelling. “Journalists and actors collaborating can propose different types of storytelling,” she noted, while arguing for applying “an impact lens” to narrative structure itself.
That observation hinted at something larger happening across documentary, journalism, and public-interest media more broadly: the erosion of rigid boundaries between disciplines. As trust in traditional media institutions weakens, collaborations between filmmakers, journalists, artists and activists may become less experimental and more necessary.
Bekerman brought perhaps the panel’s most philosophical intervention. Reflecting on the fraught distribution journey of The Apprentice, he described the pressures that emerge when political and financial power align to suppress stories before audiences can encounter them. But rather than focusing solely on censorship or risk aversion, he shifted the conversation toward storytelling itself. “I want to go below the branding to the sentiment that the medium is the message, and look at how we can produce more human-oriented outcomes,” he said.
Bekerman’s argument was that audiences are increasingly exhausted by stories designed primarily for optimisation – content reverse-engineered from algorithms rather than lived human complexity. He added: “With storytelling that is open to questioning and exploring who we are, we find better points of connection with each other.”
It was striking how often the panel returned to uncertainty as a creative value. In an era dominated by ideological absolutism, algorithmic reinforcement and increasingly polarised media ecosystems, the panel reinforced that storytelling’s role is not to flatten complexity but to hold space for it.
That perspective also shaped the conversation around AI. While many industry discussions frame artificial intelligence primarily around efficiency or threat, the panel approached AI as a tool whose value depends entirely on the values embedded within it. Estefan argued that AI must not replicate existing inequities: “We need to ensure AI is used to reduce barriers for entry rather than exacerbate existing power structures,” he said, rejecting what he called “systems of exclusion.”
At a time when the film and entertainment industry is increasingly fixated on scale, automation and predictive systems, the panel repeatedly returned to intimacy, trust and representation as the real drivers of future resilience. Estefan articulated the panel’s sentiment most directly: “Humans talking to other humans about what it means to be humans is the core of storytelling.”
Towards the close of the discussion, Estefan reflected on his own journey “as a small gay boy from Bogotá” now sitting on a stage in Cannes. It was not framed as personal triumph so much as a reminder that the industry still carries enormous power, and therefore responsibility. “The crisis is not the future of our space,” he said. “As long as the people telling the stories are representative of the people hearing the stories there will always be an opportunity in the middle of the crisis.”
Shaw echoed this sentiment, emphasising that filmmaking itself is a brave act, and that platforms like Kickstarter can provide some of the infrastructure and solidarity needed to sustain that bravery over time. Crowdfunding, she argued, is not merely transactional, but a way of signalling that audiences want more of certain kinds of stories and are willing to stand behind them. Pang added that both filmmaking and journalism have historically rewarded individual success – awards, bylines, festival slots – and that there is an opportunity to redefine success around collective achievement and audience demand for content that challenges dominant narratives.
For Think-Film Impact Production, the session reinforced a core conviction: investment in social impact storytelling is bigger than any single film. It is about investing in creators, companies and ecosystems that can keep telling complex, challenging stories, and about building communities that troubleshoot together, support each other and keep pushing the frame wider for what public-interest storytelling can be.
In a moment where many conversations about the future of media are dominated by collapse narratives, Expanding the Frame offered something more constructive: the idea that crisis can force new ecosystems into existence. “The solution is community,” Estefan concluded. “Through collaboration, this future we are ideating is actually possible.” For an industry still largely organised around competition, exclusivity and scarcity, that idea may be more disruptive than any technology.
