The Perugia Journalism Festival was attended by Lisa Nishimura, Netflix vice-president of documentary and comedy programming since 2007. Miss Nishimura was previously General Manager at Palm Pictures. A successful career that brought her to lead a big revolution: On Netflix documentaries come straight after TV series (overtaking films) and only in 2016, 73% of Netflix viewers watched a documentary in streaming, with a total of approximately 68 million people. A very good result, given the fact that the most watched documentaries are not just those about nature or cooking (which are anyway among the most viewed).
A clear example is The White Helmets, an original Netflix documentary which won an Oscar: the film, shot by Orlando von Einsiedel, tells about the Syrian Civil Defence, a humanitarian organization set up during the civil war. “We are extremely proud of this work” says Nishimura, “not only did we make it thanks to the contacts we had in Syria, but also because it informed millions of people about what was happening in Aleppo”.
The secret of Nishimura’s success seems to be the diversification over the territory: “Netflix does not offer the same contents in all countries: you have to know your audience, know what can interest them. For example the documentary Amanda by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn (about the story of Amanda Knox, protagonist of a case known in Italy as the murder of Meredith Kercher) has had a great success in Italy and the US, the two countries involved in the case. You should not stuck to the same topics, interests vary from one market to the other”.
The works followed by Nishimura are really crosscutting: beside the best hits half way between documentary and TV series (Chef’stable and Making a Murderer, for example), we find such works as Into the Inferno by Werner Herzog, a discovery trip to the most ancient volcanoes on the earth, The Ivory Game by Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani, on elephant hunting in Africa and ivory trade in China and Honk Kong, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom by Evgeny Afineevky (Oscar nominee as best documentary, about the Ukrainian crisis, and many others: “One of my greatest pleasures has been to offer a job to dozens of directors and videomakers” says Nishimura: “Many of them have an incredible passion which brought them to put their lives and their careers at stake just to carry out a project. That’s why they must be supported”.
