PRESENTING THE DX PUBLIC FORUM
Accountability journalism in America never belonged solely to those carrying press credentials. The right to film in public, request records, and demand that public bodies meet in the open belongs to everyone.
This year’s inaugural DX Public Forum builds its program around that premise, at a moment when the record itself is under strain from both directions: deliberate efforts to manufacture doubt, and the accumulated toll of institutions that haven’t always earned the trust placed in them.
Thursday, November 5
Continental Breakfast
9:30am
- 10:00am
Come early for social time and a continental fare before today's sessions.…
The Internet Archive and Documentary Film
10:00am
- 12:00pm
Where does a documentary live once the festival run, the streaming deal, and the distributor’s interest are over? For many films, the answer is a hard drive, a platform that may change its terms, or nowhere at all. The Internet Archive wants to expand its role as a lasting home for documentary film, a nonprofit library where films can be preserved and freely accessed, independent of any one platform’s business decisions or shifting political and commercial pressures. Mark Graham, Director of the…
Creating a New Impact Pipeline
1:00pm
- 3:00pm
A documentary can fill a festival house and then disappear. For most films, there’s no clear path to the local audiences who’d care most, and for most newsrooms and community organizations, no easy way to host a screening that sparks a real conversation. This facilitated, two-hour roundtable brings filmmakers, journalists, funders, and impact producers into one room to work on that gap together. It isn’t a panel or a pitch. Participants will compare notes on what’s gotten in the way, what has wo…
Friday, November 6
Continental Breakfast
9:00am
- 9:30am
Come early for social time and a continental fare before today's sessions.
…
Rights from the Ground Up
9:30am
- 10:30am
The rights journalists exercise — to film in public, to request government records, to refuse to identify sources — belong to every citizen. But unlike professional journalists, whose rights are defended by the in-house counsel, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and a network of other press freedom organizations, ordinary citizens face the consequences of exercising those rights largely alone. As government conduct has grown more aggressive —…
Your City Your Story
10:35am
- 11:35am
What happens when a community stops waiting on institutions and does accountability's work itself? In Los Angeles, the gay community banded together to investigate a cold case murder and push it toward resolution — the subject of Rachel Mason's new film My Brother's Killer. It's happening nationwide as legacy news organizations scale back and new local news outlets emerge: Chicago-based City Bureau trains community members to cover public meetings; Outlier Media in Detroit involved citizens in c…
Faked, Erased, Distorted: Does the Record Matter?
12:15pm
- 1:15pm
You've seen the footage. You've watched the clip. And at some point in the last few years, you've probably stopped and asked: is this even real?
That question used to belong to archivists and forensic experts. Now it belongs to everyone. AI has made it easier to generate, alter, or strip context from images and video, while disinformation campaigns and propaganda operations — run by governments and non-state actors alike — work to shape what the public sees and believes. At the same time, the re…
Cast Out and Speaking Up
1:15pm
- 2:30pm
Over the last two years, thousands of federal employees have been summarily dismissed. Some were forced out for political reasons, others as part of sweeping reductions that have gutted agencies responsible for public health, environmental protection, scientific research, foreign aid and national security. Private-sector workers who speak up about harm to the public face a parallel threat from Non-Disclosure Agreements, which the administration would like to impose as a new condition of federal …
DX Academy Masterclass: The Making of The Oligarch and the Art Dealer and Rescue, with Andreas Dalsgaard
2:45pm
- 4:00pm
How do you build an investigative film when neither side will give you the full story, and one of them won't even meet you in person? And how do you tell a story whose subjects have almost no power at all, when filming could put them at greater risk?
Andreas Dalsgaard has faced both questions. As director of The Oligarch and the Art Dealer, Double Exposure's Opening Night selection, he spent years unraveling a $2 billion art fraud dispute between a secretive Russian oligarch and the Swiss art de…
Saturday, November 7
Arbiter: Uncovering the Digital Networks Gaming Your Brain
10:00am
- 11:15am
The average person spends two hours a day browsing the social internet, consuming information that influences their decisions on everything from voting to healthcare to how they spend their money, and more. But which narratives might be influenced by hidden networks echoing claims in a coordinated manner, with the goal of dominating your feed? How can we uncover messaging that targets certain demographic groups to polarize them?
This session provides exclusive access to Arbiter, a private platfo…
Continental Breakfast
9:30am
- 10:00am
It's workshop day! Grab coffee and a light bite ahead of training sessions.…
Rights on Paper, Risk on the Ground
10:00am
- 11:20am
Citizens who take on the work of journalism rarely have an institution or a legal team standing behind them when things go sideways. This workshop is built for that gap — covering both what the law actually protects and what it takes to stay safe in the moment when protection isn't guaranteed. Participants work through real scenarios: securing devices and communications, recognizing the lines of the reporter's role, documenting encounters with law enforcement, and reading a situation in real tim…
The People’s Archive: What’s In It, How to Use It
10:00am
- 11:15am
A conversation on the vast public record housed right here in Washington — historical photographs, civic documents, and primary sources anyone can access, often for free — and what it actually takes to turn an archive into a film. Lisa Warwick, the DC Public Library's People's Archivist, is joined by Marisa Fox, director of Double Exposure's Closing Night film, My Underground Mother, and Bonnie Rowan, the archival researcher who helped unearth some of the buried records at the heart of Fox's fil…
Visual Investigation Breakdown: How Evident revealed dangers of ‘less-lethal’ weaponry (and you can too)
11:30am
- 12:45pm
The nonprofit newsroom Evident teams up with the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley to present their visual investigation into a controversial weapon used by police on the streets of American cities. This session will pull back the curtain on the research and storytelling process, featuring documentary storytelling, data visualization, and a range of dynamic visual journalism. The team behind the project will also offer guidance and ideas for citizen journalism to cover police use of less-lethal…
Restoring Reality: A Wayback Machine Deep Dive
11:30am
- 12:45pm
The Wayback Machine holds hundreds of billions of archived web pages — but knowing it exists and knowing how to actually find what you're looking for are two different skills. This hands-on workshop, led by the Wayback Machine's own director, walks participants through the practical mechanics of searching the archive: how to locate a deleted government page, track how a public statement changed over time, and verify that a record once existed even after it's gone from the live web.
What you'll l…
HOW TO KNOW WHAT’S REAL
11:30am
- 12:45pm
This workshop teaches practical, everyday habits for checking whether what you're looking at is what it claims to be: how to trace where an image or video actually came from, what warning signs suggest manipulation, and what questions to ask before you share something or believe it. Bring your phone. Bring your skepticism. Leave with tools you'll actually use.
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