A take on Sheffield Docfest 2026 by Kimberly Godbolt, Joint MD of Talented People & The A List community
Rosie and I are back from DocFest with sore feet, a camera roll full of half-finished conversations, and one question rattling around our heads. It’s the same question we put to almost everyone we met, mic in hand, somewhere between a bar and a brunch: what’s next?
Spoiler: doing things differently. That tells you everything about where this industry is heading.
The vibe: small, restless, and very much awake
For an industry that’s wobbling its way through a reset, Sheffield felt anything but flat. The Mercure – ahem, Voco – bar was the busiest we’ve seen it in ages. Wall to wall, the kind of crowd where you abandon any hope of a quiet word and just surrender to the scrum in a cash only bar (yes really, eek). The Sky docs brunch was rammed. Restaurants were heaving with companies and the people who make their content.
What struck us both was how small it all felt, in the best way. You see the same faces everywhere – on a panel at lunchtime, across a restaurant at dinner, at the bar by midnight. It’s a useful reminder that this is a relationship business first and a content business second. The deals follow the conversations, not the other way around.
And the mood? Restless. Not gloomy – restless. There’s a real difference.
One thing that didn’t quite work: the new online booking system for industry tickets. We found it genuinely confusing, and we weren’t alone – plenty of people missed out on sessions they’d have loved to catch, and the change seemed to create long queues rather than spare anyone from them. A friend summed it up perfectly afterwards: not sure what the benefit was.
Everyone is diversifying (and they all said so on camera)
We went round with a simple question – what’s next? – and the answers were almost comically aligned. Podcasts. YouTube. New partnerships. New routes to money that didn’t exist on the commissioning slate two years ago. Whether we were talking to an exec at a group or an indie founder nursing a coffee, the feeling was the same: the old single-channel model isn’t enough on its own any more, and everyone is busy building the next thing alongside the thing they already do.
It’s tempting to read that as anxiety. We’d read it as adaptation. The smartest people in those rooms aren’t waiting for the market to go back to how it was. They’ve accepted it won’t, and they’re getting on with reinventing how their work gets made, funded and watched.
The money conversation got honest
You couldn’t move for talk of money, and refreshingly, it was candid. The phrase that stuck with us: commissioning is now “a set of pieces that go together.” Gone are the days of one funder writing one cheque. It’s co-pro, it’s partnerships, it’s dev funding stitched into a patchwork, and it’s commercially complex in a way that asks more of everyone. The blunt summary from one session: we’re all having to work harder for the money. Nobody said it bitterly. They said it like people rolling up their sleeves.
The First Cut session was a brilliant, grounding antidote to all the big-budget hand-wringing – a reminder that you can still make something that moves people on a shoestring and a single day in the edit. Proof that ambition and budget aren’t the same thing, which is a message this industry could stand to hear more often.
True crime grew up
One of the most thoughtful sessions we caught took aim at the genre that’s been carrying the schedules for years. The panel questioned the label itself – aren’t a lot of these “true crime” titles simply documentaries about tragedies? – and got into the craft of it: the storytelling grammar we’ve quietly developed, the duty of care owed to teams as much as to contributors, and the genuinely hard editorial call of when to press go even when access isn’t fully there.
The Katie Price session was a masterclass in the same maturity. A film that started with an unfiltered podcast appearance became a project with Mindhouse, built on telling each chapter of a very public life from every perspective in it – getting to the lived experience underneath the headlines. The detail we keep thinking about: Katie herself reportedly only just watched it back before us in the room – like a viewer – finding answers to her own story decades on. Pretty mad. Very trusting.
The conversation Sheffield didn’t quite have
If we had one note – and this came up more than once in conversation with people whose opinions we rate – it’s that the festival was a little light on the biggest conversation of all. There were a couple of token sessions nodding at AI and YouTube, but not much in the way of intelligent, grown-up debate about how the industry actually navigates this new world, or the ethics of the tools now landing on everyone’s desks.
That feels like a missed opportunity. Because judging by every bar conversation we had, the appetite to talk about it is enormous. People are hungry for somewhere to think this through out loud, properly and without the doom.
So, what’s next?
If Sheffield told us anything, it’s that the people who’ll thrive in the next few years are the ones already diversifying, already building, already asking the awkward questions about money and craft and where the work comes from next. The restlessness is the point. It’s the sound of an industry refusing to stand still.
Rosie and I came home energised, with a notebook full of names and a renewed conviction that the conversations happening at the edges of these festivals are the ones that matter most. We’ll be carrying plenty of them into the weeks ahead.
What’s next for us? Following up on every one of those half-finished chats, for a start.
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