Real Documentaries, Synthetic Media: How Filmmakers are Using GenAI

AX Mina (she/they) is a special advisor for the Archival Producers Alliance and is director and producer of Rubbish: The Queer Kingdom of Leilah Babirye. She is a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications and member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the Asian American Documentary Network. She was a 2024 Sundance Trans Possibilities Intensive Fellow and has spoken at Sundance Collab, DOCNYC, the Atlanta Film Society and other industry events. She also works in nonprofit local news and media and arts philanthropy.

Eloïse King is a multi-disciplinary filmmaker working across film, photography, and journalism. Rooted in her perspective as a queer woman of Caribbean, working-class heritage, her practice seeks to interrogate cultural and institutional shifts and the tensions of "progress" - to disrupt dominant histories towards re-centering and reimagining marginalized collective memory.

Her debut feature, THE SHADOW SCHOLARS, was longlisted for the BAFTA Film for Outstanding Debut (2026), executive produced by Sir Steve McQueen and backed by BFI Doc Society, Film4, Firelight Media, Field of Vision, Bertha, and Perspectives. It pioneered the ethical use of AI/VFX to protect its Kenyan subjects. The film premiered at BFI London Film Festival, 2024 (Special Jury Mention), screened at 30+ festivals including IDFA, CPH:DOX, and Tribeca, and won the Golden Owl at Bergen International Film Festival.

King is the founder of Whiteteeth Productions and former Global Executive Producer at VICE Media, where she led multi-award-winning documentary teams across five continents, overseeing series and films including NEEDLES & PINS, HIGH SOCIETY, VICE REPORTS, and MYKKI BLANCO: Out of This World (MoAD, San Francisco and archived at Tate Britain).

Producing and directing credits also include the Grierson-nominated THE GATHERINGS, GURLS TALK: ADWOA ABOAH (Lovie/Webby Award), AMY WINEHOUSE & ME: DIONNE'S STORY (MTV/Paramount+), and THIS HOUSE NEEDS CLEANSING (Tate, 2025), in addition to directing commercial campaigns for Nike, Twitter (now X), and charity Coppa Feel (first TVC to show a nipple). King founded WOMEN ON DOCS (V&A, BFI, BAM), a curatorial program platforming women and non-binary nonfiction filmmakers.

She is a recipient of Film & TV Charity John Brabourne Award, Sheffield DocFest Queer Realities Director Bursary, Netflix Non-Fiction Fellowship, Firelight Media Fellowship, and Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, and has been a BFI Future Film Festival Keynote Speaker, BAFTA Guru Mentor, and BFI London Film Festival Grierson Documentary Competition Jury President (2025). She also serves as a Guest Lecturer on the Nonfiction course at the NFTS.

Sandra Luckow (Producer -Writer - Director - Editor) is a Mexican-American filmmaker who founded Ojeda Films, Inc. in 2000 to bring a bi-cultural voice to independent film. She is known for Sharp Edges, Belly Talkers (1996 Sundance US competition) and the multiple award-winning, That Way Madness Lies…. Sandra has worked at Warner Bros., and Universal in casting, as well as network and cable news programs and daytime dramas. She taught documentary film production at Yale University, School of Art for 22 years as well as classes in producing, screenwriting, camera, editing and acting for the camera at Columbia University, Barnard College, Wesleyan University, and Sarah Lawrence College. 

Her pedagogy includes democratizing accessibility to modes of filmmaking by using smart phone technologies and teaching all aspects of production. She has traveled and worked internationally giving workshops, most notably with the US State Department’s cultural exchange: Lines and Spaces. She is a member of the Director’s Guild of America and holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Vanishing: A Love Story is her most recent feature documentary and it has won multiple awards in the US and internationally. Started in June of 2022, it premiered on the festival circuit in 2025. It is a continuation of Luckow’s intimate documentary portraiture where she allows her subjects as much agency as possible. It is a hallmark that has dominated her work.

Stephanie Jenkins has fifteen years of experience seeing documentary films from development to delivery. She has worked with Ken Burns and Florentine Films since 2010, and has contributed research to non-fiction media such as The New York Times Op-Docs “ENCORE” series, Radiolab, Spike Lee’s Forty Acres and a Mule Productions, as well as multiple independent films. In 2023, Stephanie co-founded the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), a nonprofit advocating for archival producers and establishing industry standards around the ethical use of synthetic media and generative AI in documentary. The APA is working closely with non-fiction mediamakers and archivists to protect the historic record in the age of Generative AI, including on a local television news preservation project. 

She is a Governor of the Television Academy’s Documentary Peer Group, and is an active member of multiple organizations, including the Producers Guild of America (PGA), Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA) and Archivist Roundtable of New York (ART). 

She was in DOC NYC’s 2024-2025 class of New Leaders, is a Consulting Partner with History Studios, and was an Impact Partners Producing Fellow (2018-2019). In addition to her work in documentary film, Stephanie is a musician who is known for her clawhammer banjo playing. 

She has a B.A. from Cornell University, and lives with her husband in Hudson, NY. 

Rachel Antell has worked in documentary film production for over two decades, but found her true passion in archival producing. In 2014 she co-founded Sub-Basement Archival, where she’s had the honor of being archival producer on dozens of documentaries that have screened worldwide, and garnered FOCAL Awards and an Emmy nomination for research and use of archival footage. In 2023, Rachel co-founded the Archival Producers Alliance (APA) with Jen Petrucelli and Steph Jenkins. 

The APA was created to organize archival producers, educate the film community about the craft, and advocate to make archival materials accessible and affordable to independent filmmakers. The APA's first initiative addresses Generative AI’s impact on documentary film and archival work. Last year, the APA published the first industry-wide guidelines, Best Practices for Use of Generative AI in Documentaries, with endorsements from over 50 organizations, foundations, production companies, and film festivals, as well as dozens of filmmakers.