Rebranding at 20, Commitments to Collective Filmmaking, and the Release of ‘Emergent City’: Making a Production Updates From Meerkat Media

In December 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled Meerkat Media, the New York-based cooperatively owned production company and media arts collective. As a radical experiment in shared authorship and ownership, Meerkat built a sustainable framework for making the kind of films they cared about, while still providing steady paychecks, health insurance, and medical leave to their members. Since the publication of their profile, the group has faced industry-wide challenges, including tightening budgets and shrinking opportunities. At the same time, they’ve experienced major creative high points. In 2024, worker-owner Alessandra Lacorraza’s In the Summers won the top fiction prize at Sundance, and co-founder Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s decade-long project Emergent City (co-directed with Kelly Anderson) premiered at Tribeca. Meanwhile, Meerkat is celebrating its 20th anniversary and reintroducing itself to the world with a new website and public-facing initiatives.

Over Zoom, Documentary caught up with Sterrenberg to talk about Meerkat’s recent creative highs, the challenges of balancing freelance work with collective production, and how Emergent City, which opens at DCTV tomorrow and will be broadcast on POV later this year, took shape within the group. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: Generally, can you give us an update on what it’s been like at Meerkat since you all spoke to A.E. Hunt in 2023? 

JAY ARTHUR STERRENBERG: A lot has changed since those conversations. Meerkat still operates as both a production company and an arts collective, and both sides are active. But like many in the industry, we’re feeling the impact of shrinking budgets and the broader defunding of arts and media. Our model has long relied on client-based work—contracts with foundations, city agencies, and nonprofits. Many of those partners are now downsizing or disappearing. Even major clients like Sesame Workshop are facing cuts, so every project feels more precarious, with no guarantee of what comes next.

There’s a dual feeling: real financial uncertainty, but also a deep commitment to our model. We still believe in collective work, and those of us who are actively involved would rather face these challenges together than go it alone.

At the same time, the last two years have brought real creative momentum. Meerkat members have had major artistic successes, both individually and through the collective. Alessandra Lacorraza’s In the Summers won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2024. Emergent City premiered at Tribeca and is now headed to theaters and PBS’s POV. We also produced a new Art21 episode through the co-op, with four Meerkat directors each profiling a different artist. It felt like a true Meerkat project—and one of those rare moments where creative fulfillment and financial sustainability overlap.

DOCUMENTARY: I know that oftentimes artistic success and creative flourishing don’t necessarily translate to economic stability. What have been some of the challenges that have felt specific to the last year?

JAS: One of the biggest challenges has been the ongoing roller coaster of work and access to it. The first half of last year was one of our longest dry spells, and during that time, we kept checking in as a group, trying to understand what it meant and how to move forward. But in a collective like ours, where we’re committed to sharing work equitably, scarcity creates a problem: when there aren’t enough projects coming in, we each end up freelancing elsewhere, which leads to an unequal distribution of work.

Many of us take on outside freelance gigs between Meerkat projects, and while the flexibility is valuable, it fragments our capacity. We’re often pulled away just when we need collective focus to grow or develop new work. So we’ve been chasing long-term contracts—especially in branded content—where we can be on retainer with clients who align with our values.

Most production companies revolve around a single director’s vision and reputation, which makes them easier to package. We’ve taken a different path: a collective of talented, collaborative directors working under one umbrella. That can be harder for potential clients to process. We review our finances together every month, and the spreadsheets show how precarious things are. But we’re still small enough that one good contract could shift the outlook for the entire year.

DOCUMENTARY: The last time Meerkat spoke to Documentary Magazine, Sana Malik mentioned that you all were spearheading a rebranding process. 

JAS: With Emergent City coming out in theaters, the Art21 episode airing, and our 20th anniversary, we’re in the process of launching some new branding—a new website, a few public-facing events. The goal with all of this is to create a much clearer first impression—who we are, what we do, and what we’re capable of. I think because we’ve been around for a long time, it can be easy to keep talking about ourselves—or thinking about ourselves—in ways that may have been true ten years ago. So we’ve been doing a lot of internal work, having really generative conversations about who we are now, and making sure that how we show up in the world reflects that. 

I’d say in Meerkat’s early years, we leaned heavily into experimentation and collaborative authorship. There was a real de-emphasis on the individual artist, with a focus on collective identity and shared authorship. Now, we have a much clearer understanding that Meerkat is also made up of our individual successes. Meerkat is Alessandra, and Tristan [Daley], and Travis [Wood]—and each of us brings our own vision and work as directors. So with this new branding, we want to stop burying the lede. We want to make it clear that when you work with Meerkat, you’re not working with some amorphous collective identity. You’re getting access to a deep, experienced, creative, and diverse roster of directors, each of whom brings their own strong vision and a wide bench of collaborators, both within and outside the group.

DOCUMENTARY:  What’s your biggest fear for the collective’s future—and your biggest hope?

JAS: I guess my fear is that, because of the industry’s constraints—economic pressures, external imperatives—Meerkat could slowly dissolve, not through conflict or choice, but through exhaustion. We’re a group of artists who believe in free speech and value making independent work. And yes, repression could come through overt silencing. More likely, it’s the quieter pressures: limited work, financial scarcity, and the slow creep of self-censorship.

It’s not endings that scare me—everything ends eventually. What I fear is being quietly crushed by the very systems we’ve tried to resist. Meerkat has lived on the margins while holding onto its integrity, and we’re proud of that. We’ve built a business, made films, stuck to our values. But still, the question lingers: what if it stops working? 

And yet, I still have hope. Hope that Meerkat keeps thriving on the margins. That our members keep making bold, political art. That we continue finding ways not just to survive, but to flourish. There’s this delicate threshold we’re always trying to reach, where just a few well-scaled projects could let us invest significantly in shared resources. It doesn’t necessarily take more labor, just hitting that point. One of the things I love most about Meerkat is how we use our surplus. Instead of directing it toward individual gain, we invest it back into the group—into new gear, but more importantly, into projects. Emergent City got off the ground because Meerkat put a few thousand dollars into development—just enough to get started. That kind of collective seed support is rare, and every independent filmmaker needs it.

DOCUMENTARY: I’d love to pivot to Emergent City. Could you talk about how the project came about, and the role Meerkat played in its development? I know you co-directed it, but your co-director isn’t part of Meerkat, right?

JAS: Co-director Kelly Anderson isn’t part of Meerkat, but Emergent City really grew out of the collective. It brings together themes I’ve explored for years, especially the link between geography and power, and is rooted in Sunset Park, where Meerkat has been based for over a decade. Many of us have been involved in local organizing, and that groundwork shaped the film.

When I moved to Brooklyn in 2007, we were living near the Atlantic Yards development (now Barclays Center), which inspired an early short called Brooklyn Boondoggle (2009). That led to Public Money (2018), another Sunset Park–based film about participatory democracy. Through those projects, we met the people and encountered the dynamics that would become central to Emergent City. At first, we were just filming local meetings. But as the Industry City land use battle took shape, we recognized a clear narrative: a developer pushing for change, and a community with the power to stop it—or not. Sunset Park’s long history of grassroots organizing gave the film real stakes, and that clarity allowed us to formally experiment.

While we had a small microgrant, what really sustained us was access to the collective’s resources—cameras, gear, editing space, and a deep network of collaborators. We held retreats, screened cuts for feedback, and leaned on the wisdom of the group. That kind of collective investment is something I wish more production companies took seriously. If more production companies shared resources—whether gear or just time—with people in their orbit, including interns, we could begin to shift away from a top-down model that centers success on a single founder or figurehead.

DOCUMENTARY: I’m curious how the collaborative nature of Emergent City stretched or tested any aspects of your internal model, such as consensus building or crew rotation.

JAS: In the early years, Meerkat did some extreme experiments in shared authorship—Stages (2010) and Brasslands (2013) had 11 or 12 co-directors. Emergent City was different. Even though it’s a Meerkat production, the core creative team was smaller and more defined: Kelly Anderson and I as co-directors with Brenda Avila-Hanna, who came on as a producer. The three of us—Kelly, Brenda, and I—own the LLC that holds the rights to the film. We all met through New Day Films, a radical distribution co-op, so we already knew we worked well together and shared values around collaboration. We didn’t always agree, but we trusted each other and were committed to pushing one another. 

Meerkat’s role was more of a broad web of support. The collective didn’t have financial or creative oversight,  but there was still a deep bench of folks who plugged in in different ways. That’s pretty typical for how Meerkat operates now—each project has its own structure, with the collective offering support rather than control.

Where things did get stretched was around shared resources, especially equipment. We only have so many of the higher-end cameras. That kind of logistical negotiation is constant. At the start of the film, there’s a signature shot that moves from underwater to above water. It’s a composite. We shot underwater footage in that exact spot and layered it with above-water footage. To get it, Kelly and I bought an aquarium, snuck through a fence, and dipped the camera—inside the aquarium—into the water. We got the shot, but the aquarium cracked and the camera flooded. The camera eventually died, though the footage was preserved. Meerkat covered the repair, but while it was out of commission and someone needed to rent the camera for another shoot, Kelly and I pitched in ourselves. It was a kind of mutual aid—everyone doing what they could to keep our shared resources going.

Lucia Ahrensdorf is a Bolivian-American filmmaker, writer, and film critic based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in publications like Film Comment, BOMB, The Film Stage, and Foreign Policy.