This one is a bit different

The first film followed one trad wife in America. This one is all about trying to bridge divides, like we do in a lot of our work.

On one side is Laura Zachary, who runs the UK’s only trad wife academy, a course that teaches women how to be the perfect traditional wife for up to $16,000. She married her husband Zion (a right-wing influencer some of you will recognise from our echo chambers film) a week after they met on a podcast, and she describes herself as an anti-feminist. She believes a wife’s job is to bring peace to her husband, she preps his porridge pots the night before, and she told me she’d be fine if a politician took away her right to vote. Interestingly, a few years ago she ran her own business as a tarot reader, before what she describes as an encounter with Jesus changed everything. Whatever you make of her, she’s a pretty fascinating person.

On the other side is Sabina Trojanova, a feminist content creator who posts as Girl Vs Globe, and who has some fairly strong thoughts about trad wife influencers. Her view, roughly, is that every single Trad Wife is directly benefiting from the movement they say they want to get rid of.

So I accompanied Sabina as she spent the day at the academy, in Laura’s actual house, doing Laura’s course, so that two women who believe the exact opposite of each other about what being a woman means could actually sit at the same table and talk it through, rather than shouting past each other online.

It’s a fascinating look at two radically competing ideas of what being a woman means in today’s society. Whether they find any understanding at all, you’ll have to watch, but in typical clickbait fashion, I’ll say it didn’t go how I expected.

And if you’ve enjoyed these two films, good news, there’s one more in the pipeline. We just filmed ANOTHER doc in this space while we were in Miami. Turns out there’s actually a lot to cover in this arena. More on that soon.

The trip was a bit nuts

We spent a night in America’s oldest jail, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, literally in cells next to people facing murder charges. I’ll be honest and say it was one of the worst nights of my life, but it was a valuable experience, and it’s going to make a film that’ll be very illuminative. We also filmed in a jail where the doors don’t lock. Yet another crazy experience. And in Miami we filmed what I think may be our best documentary yet.

Zandland shoots are fast paced and we really go with the flow. We’re always trying to catch real life happening on camera, I’m always trying to walk in someone else’s shoes, and I’m always trying to challenge the way people think, including my own. That means they’re also super intense and tiring though, so I’m happy to be spending a few days with my family now, ahead of flying out to South Africa at the end of this week for another shoot. The grind never stops.

Some good news

Two of our docs have been nominated for Grierson Awards, which are the UK’s leading documentary awards and it means a lot to us.

Inside Gooning is up for Best Digital Documentary, where we’re the only independent YouTube channel on the list. Every other film in that category is backed by a major TV company, whereas ours was self-funded and made for our own YouTube channel. A slightly mad idea about an internet subculture is now on a Grierson shortlist next to the biggest broadcasters in the country, which is more or less the entire Zandland bet in one line.

And Breaking Ranks, fresh from winning Best Documentary at the Edinburgh TV Awards, is up for Best Current Affairs Documentary, alongside films from the BBC and HBO.

Both films are on our YouTube right now if you’ve not seen them.

And one more thing

For those who don’t know, my wife and I are actually having another baby at the start of next month. So between the jail, Miami, South Africa and a newborn, this may just be the craziest few weeks of my life so far. But we’re hanging in there.

Thanks as always for watching and reading, Zandlanders. Let me know if you like the latest film, and speak soon.

Ben Z

If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. But if you like whales and Portuguese food, you’re in for a real treat. This was the whaling capital of the world in the 1800s, the richest city per head in America for a while, and the port Ishmael sails out of in Moby-Dick.

And today, it’s one of the most Portuguese places in the United States, with more Portuguese Americans per head than anywhere else in the country, most of them descended from Azorean whalers who came for the work and never left. It’s got a working harbour and lots of meat-loving Portuguese restaurants (to my glee and the distain of my vegetarian colleague). It’s a strange, fascinating place.

But I’m not here for any of those tidbits.

I’m here because tonight I’m going to be locked up.

First, if you’re new here

A lot of people have subscribed to this newsletter off the back of our trad wife film release a week ago (which has now had over 1.3 million views, thanks guys). So a quick hello before I get myself arrested.

I’m Ben. I run Zandland, and we make documentaries about the real world. We meet trad wives, get millionaires to meet homeless men and try to understand things like intimacy and the human experience. We go into worlds that get judged a lot, but hardly ever properly understood. And I personally spend real time with the people in them, and try not to impose my views on them (too hard, I’m only human).

Zandland is led by me, but it’s a team of (badass) journalists, filmmakers, editors, producers, people who really want to understand the world and ask challenging questions. Our mission is to bridge divides rather than widen them.

Those films live on our YouTube. We also partner with major broadcasters and streamers on special projects, like Inside Iran for ITV and The Cult of NatureBoy on Hulu and Disney+.

In short, we just freaking love documentaries.

This newsletter is where I write about how those films get made, what I’m thinking about, and where we’re going next. Which, this week, is jail.

BTW - Everything we’ve ever made lives at zand.land if you want to catch up on some of our other documentaries.

Twenty-four hours inside

A quick explainer for the non-Americans in the room because it is a bit confusing… In the US, a jail isn’t a prison. Prisons are for people serving long sentences. Jails are run by the county sheriff and hold people who haven’t been convicted yet, or who are doing short stretches. This could be the same elsewhere, but I’m currently too tired to look that up so let’s just go with this version of events. All this means that a jail is a much stranger mix of humanity: someone arrested last night, someone waiting months for on a murder charge, someone finishing a two-year sentence, all in the same building.

A few streets from where I’m sitting right now is Ash Street Jail. It opened in 1829, which makes it the oldest continuously operating jail in the United States. Nearly two centuries of people have been held behind the same walls. And today, I go in as an inmate for twenty-four hours. It’s one of two films we’re making with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office this week, part of a big batch of new documentaries for the Zandland YouTube.

I’ll admit it’s a bit stunty. A guy from Liverpool Engerland voluntarily spending a night in an American jail is, on paper, a gimmick. But there’s some thinking behind it.

First of all, Ash Street is a phenomenon. The oldest jail in America, and one, by virtue, that is fascinating to experience. It’s also one that the Sheriff himself has said he’d prefer to shut down. Also, everything we make is about people. If you’ve watched our films, you’ll know the thing our audience responds to most isn’t the topic, it’s the person. Larry the poet on the patio of a sports bar. A woman and her AI. You love character, and you love understanding people you’d never otherwise meet. That’s the whole engine of Zandland.

And normally I do that more from the outside, with a camera and a question. This time I want to get closer. Not because 24 hours makes me an inmate, it obviously doesn’t, I get to leave. But because it slightly changes the conversations I have with the people I come across. And in this instance, the story is the jail.

I don’t know what I’m going to find in there. That’s sort of the point, and also the bit that’s making me slightly regret suggesting it.

Another thing that’s interesting about this though is more about us than the jail. Five years ago, a working American jail would only really open its doors for 24 hours to a major broadcaster. Now, it’s opening them for a YouTube documentary studio. This isn’t just because we asked politely, which we obv did we are nice people here at Zandland, but because institutions have clocked where the audience went. Our films now reach more people than a lot of television programmes do, and the people who control access see that.

Which leaves me with the question I’ll be carrying into that cell tonight:

What happens to a place, and the people in it, when the world it was built for has gone?

I’ll tell you what I found next week. Assuming they let me out.

Where we’re headed

We’re filming a few stories on this trip, and in a couple of days we move on to Miami for more filming. If you’re in Miami and you’re a Zandland fan, give us a shout. Some of our best stories have come from exactly that.

And what’s next

A week today, on Tuesday 16 September, part two of the trad wives story drops.

It’ll be called something like, I Took A Feminist to Trad Wife Academy, and it’s a different take on the same world. Instead of following one woman, it puts two completely contrasting versions of what a woman’s life should be head to head. A feminist, inside a trad wife academy, surrounded by a woman who believes the exact opposite of everything she does.

The question is simple, and it’s one of our core missions here at Zandland: can two people who think the other is completely wrong find any understanding at all? Let’s see.

If this resonated, forward it to someone who thinks about these things.

If someone sent this to you, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

Written from an AirBnB, soon to be a cell.

If you are also a blink a lotte…

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You’ve seen the videos even if you don’t know the name. The sourdough from scratch. The prairie dresses. The soft-spoken women explaining why they’ve left careers to serve their husbands and raise their children, filmed in kitchens that look like 1952 with better lighting.

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What started as a niche aesthetic a few years ago is now one of the biggest cultural phenomena online. The biggest trad wife creators reach tens of millions of people. The hashtags run to billions of views. And the discourse around it has become a genuine front in the culture war: to some, these women represent everything feminism fought to free women from, repackaged with good lighting and monetised. To others, they’re the only people brave enough to say that the modern deal, the career, the commute, the childcare bills, the exhaustion, isn’t actually making women happy.

Everyone has an opinion. Almost nobody has actually spent time with the people living it.

So considering that’s our whole thing here at Zandland, that’s what we did. It’s part of a two-part special on our YouTube, one following a prominent influencer in the US and one in the UK.

In Part One, which was released today (Part Two will be out on September 15th), we spend time with Savanna Stone, one of the most prominent trad wife creators in America. She’s 21, married at 18, and she says things on camera that really do push the overton window… That women shouldn’t have the right to vote. That consent doesn’t exist within marriage. That feminism is the biggest lie women have ever been sold. She said all of it to millions online, and then she said it to me, whilst doing her makeup in the mirror, on the biggest week of her career.

I went in trying to understand the woman behind the persona. Whether she actually believes what she says, what her marriage really looks like up close, and why this message, of all messages, has found such an enormous audience. In the doc, we meet her husband and her team, as we follow her as she’s about to speak at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit. It’s a major, mainstream moment for Savanna. We see inside the Savanna-verse, see what the life involves, what she believes, why she chose it, and what it’s like to live inside a movement that some of the internet celebrates and a lot of it despises.

And underneath it all I had one main question…

Does she actually believe all of this? Or is it a way of building a profile?

And the answer turned out to be stranger than either. Because as the week went on, it became clear that Savanna isn’t doing this alone. Behind her sits an operation: a manager, a strategy team, a content machine pushing her message to tens of millions of people a month. And behind all of that, a millionaire investor who says he helped build Andrew Tate’s infamous War Room.

What started as a film about one woman’s controversial beliefs became a film about the machine amplifying them, and about what happens when a belief system is also a business. I went in with one question and came out with a much bigger one, and honestly, I’m still surprised by what we learnt…

As with everything we make, I tried not to arrive with a verdict. My wife is not a trad wife, she is a war correspondent and that probably couldn’t be more different… But I wanted to take this at face value. This is a world that gets judged very loudly and understood very little, which is exactly the gap Zandland exists to fill. If you come to this film expecting a takedown, or expecting a celebration, you’ll probably leave with something more complicated than either. That’s the point. We do the listening and you can draw the conclusions.

The film is on our YouTube now. The first hour is when YouTube decides whether a story like this travels, so watching now, commenting, even just letting it play, will help us get 3 trillion views. Also, please comment, share your thoughts, ask me questions… and I’ll update you when Part Two is out.

In some other news…

We won Best Documentary at the Edinburgh International TV Festival! Which is pretty great…

I’m slightly late to the party on this one, and sadly I couldn’t be there on the night as I was doing an event in Copenhagen. I never seem to be in the room for the awards we win, which is becoming a running joke at this point. But Grace Evans from our team accepted the award for Breaking Ranks, and what she said on that stage is definitely worth repeating:

“Earlier this year, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry published its report finding that Israeli forces had deliberately targeted children in Gaza. The testimony from Breaking Ranks was cited in that report, by name, three times. The findings from our film were used by a UN investigation to conclude that children were being deliberately targeted in Gaza. Those words are now part of the official record. That is what documentary filmmaking is for.”

I couldn’t put it better, so I won’t try.

It meant a lot to win that award, which is available to watch on our YouTube here…

Thank you to everyone involved: Matan Cohen, Maya Rostowska, Josh Reynolds, Rhiannon Mayor, Ben Mulley, Ben Lister, Grace Evans, Adam Mitchenall, Saif Ur-Rehmaan Manzoor-Khan and Katie Appelbe. Thank you to Tom Giles and Andrew Dagnell at ITV for commissioning it. And above all, thank you to everyone who spoke to us for the documentary. It cost them something to tell the truth.

Here’s me being in Copenhagen instead of accepting a really important award for Zandland:

If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. And if you’ve already watched the film, I’ll see you in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

A year ago today, we launched the trailer for Human. The idea was a show built on understanding people and complex topics, giving them the time they deserve, in a world that was more divisive than ever. I wanted it to be a place for people to actually hear others out. A platform to challenge people, challenge yourself, the way we think. And I wanted it to be made the way me and the Zandland team wanted, in the style we wanted. It was going to be fully self-funded with complete independence…

I remember hovering over the publish button feeling pretty riddled with self-doubt and anxiety. Which, to be fair, is not an uncommon feeling.

I’m a guy who doesn’t come from money. I grew up in Liverpool, the son of a beautiful Scouse mum and a slightly crazy Iranian father. I went to a school nobody would call great, and genuinely didn’t even know what a documentary was until I was about 19 years old. I played video games instead! Films like the ones we make now were just not part of my world. So I always doubted my ability to be good at anything, never mind being one of the people who made a career making documentary films.

Then, after kind of getting over that fear and deciding to give it a go, I moved on to doubting I could ever get a job, or survive at the BBC, where I spent nearly a decade surrounded by people who seemed born for it in a way I was sure I wasn’t. Once I’d got past that, I upgraded to doubting I could set up a company. An actual documentary business, with my name on the risk. That seemed nuts. It was nuts.

And once I’d moved past that one, I took on the fun task of doubting whether I could be a YouTuber. Fully funding an original content business with my team, on our own terms. One where we make the final calls, carry the risks, and carry the mistakes. When we decided to go ham on creating our own documentary universe, I didn’t really know if it would work… or what working even meant. The first episode of Human came out two months after that trailer, in October 2025. In less than a year, we’ve now got over 100k subs on YouTube (105k and counting), had our first 1 million video, and are now pulling in millions of views a month on YouTube alone. So I thought this was a good time to look back, and smell the bacon.

Also side point: I’ve realised the doubt never actually goes away. It just continually evolves into more terrifying self-doubts as life gets increasingly full of responsibility.

The Results

Since the first video (below), the show has massively overperformed my expectations, and we’ve built a community of millions of people who have watched our films, engaged in genuinely profound conversations, and treated people who are different to them with respect.

From a standing start, in ten months, just on YouTube (ignoring our other social media wins): we’ve made 14 original documentaries, more than the one a month, every month, we promised. Over 100k subscribers (now 105k). Monthly views up 9x, from 127k in our first month to well over a million in July, August is going to be even bigger. Our first original just crossed a million views (link above), and our long form films now average about a quarter of a million views on YouTube alone within their first two months.

And the thing that is great isn’t the views… It’s the watch time.

People don’t just click on our films. They stay. Over 725,000 hours of watch time on YouTube alone at well over 10 minutes per view per session on our channel… And a third of it is people watching on their actual TVs. So people are seeing a real bit of premiumness with our films, watching them, with their family (maybe not gooning) on the sofa. Which is exactly where I always hoped they’d end up.

On a platform that used to be short and loud, people are choosing to sit with our long, careful films about complicated people. And then commenting on them, mostly with more thought and respect than on other places on the internet. That was what I hoped, had no idea if it would work, and now I’m VERY happy it is.

Which brings me to something also cool, I now really know who a Zandlander (hopefully you reading this right now) actually is.

You’re most likely American, then British, then Australian. Which is cool, I like all of those places. The single biggest group of you lives in one city (maybe the greatest of all): London. Almost all of you are between 18 and 44. Six in ten of you are men, four in ten women, and a random but cool fact is that the women watching stay with the films longer than anyone else. And the longer you’ve been here, the deeper you go: returning viewers who come back watch a full two minutes more per view than someone arriving for the first time.

So, I think, that is you. Curious, incredibly cool, people, all over the world. Who give complicated stories their full attention and get more invested the longer they stay. Which is honestly, exactly the type of person I was hoping would apply for Zandland citizenship when we started.

So if that’s you… thank you!! Genuinely. Every one of those hours is someone trusting us with their time, and that means a lot, to me and the team.

The team behind it

Now on to the team. As this for me is all bananas (and nuts. My two favourite things)... and I want to say thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to watch and support Zandland. I recently brought on another couple of editors to the team, so we can up the cadence from one film a month to two full documentaries and a long form podcast interview every month. And whilst doing so, I was kind of pinching myself. Thinking back to that self-doubt, back to the sense that you never know how things will work, but actually most grateful for the fact that I have a team of people around me who really give a shit, on this mission of telling stories we think are powerful. You just cannot do it with a group of like-minded people who really care.

Zandland, and Human, are made by people who literally give everything to tell these stories (Ben, Freddie, Ayaz, Josh, Grace, Carrick, Ben, the lawyers! etc etc). Long days, hard shoots, the constant ups and downs that come with an original content business, the constant pivoting of strategies, me saying different things every 5 minutes, the uncertainty of what the hell will work, what success even looks like. The need to make money. And from all of this, I’m so insanely proud of the Zandland team. Everyone, including myself, has grown with the company. They’ve learned and improved and looked out for each other, and treated each other, and our subjects, with respect.

It’s all I ever really wanted with a business.

On being good enough

And here’s some honesty, and the reason I wrote all this down rather than just posting the numbers.

If you’re someone carrying that same voice around, the one that says people like you don’t get to do things like this, the truth is that it never fully shuts up. But, as I get older, I realise that the evidence of life becomes the best antidote to self-doubt. By doing things, you can slowly start to tell your own self doubt to f*** off… And the best way to prove it wrong is to press publish anyway.

The Zandland documentaries are the exact type of content I always wanted to make. So I’m very grateful to be able to make the,. And one thing I feel very comfortable to say is that the Zandland team is definitely good enough.

Thank you for being part of it!

Thanks for reading, and if you still want to hear more of me I went on Jamie Liang’s Great Company podcast to talk about my life, and some of the other docs we have coming up soon. So please listen.

Thanks

Ben Z

On Sunday night, Inside Iran: War & Revolution was released on ITV1 in the UK, and on our YouTube internationally. A film made with Iranian journalists who risked everything to tell the story of their country’s brutal year, entirely through the voices of people actually living it with footage filmed entirely on the ground, as it happened, in Iran.

The response has been pretty incredible. The film was Pick of the Day in the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Weekend i and the Times, with picks in the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph too. The words use to describe it were: “extraordinary”. “Unmissable”. “Harrowing”. The Times also ran a column off the back of it, on how the regime’s brutality risks turning Iran’s mothers into revolutionaries.

I also wrote a long piece in the Observer about the people in the film and why we made it. As a British-Iranian, this story was personal to me in a way few others are. One line from a contributor has stayed with everyone who watched the film… “It feels like being inside your own house with your child’s killer, while a pack of wolves circles outside.”

The full film is out now on our YouTube channel… If you’re in the UK, it’s on ITVX.

The strange thing about this film is that the people who most deserve credit for it can’t receive any. Their names have to stay hidden, for their own safety from the Iranian government. So thank you to everyone who watched. But mostly, thank you to the people you’ll never know made it.

Some other milestones too as last week was a big one for us, on Saturday we passed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, in just around ten months. Not bad! And the content keeps growing, with millions of viewers now watching every month. Whether you’ve been here since the first film or arrived last week, thank you. I’m honestly very grateful we now have, Zandlanders. My dream of creating an entire country is getting realer by the week.

And for the Zandland die-hards: everything we make now lives in one place on our website zand.land. Inside Iran, Breaking Ranks, The Cult of NatureBoy, all the Human films. So bookmark our website and you’ll never miss a film of ours again.

One more thing before I go back to pretending I’m on holiday but actually instead watching cuts of the next thing I’m about to tell you: this Thursday we release our next documentary, looking inside the world of guns in America. More on that soon.

Thanks for reading.

Ben

Iran is the reason I got into journalism and filmmaking in the first place.

It was a place I heard about all the time growing up… My dad is Iranian, and Iran was an ever presence: family, stories, food, phone calls. It was a whole, confusing, world running in parallel to my life in Liverpool. But it was also a place I could only ever visit once. As a dual national, and later as a journalist who learned his chops at the BBC, going back carried real risk. Iran has a habit of jailing people with with my type of background.

My first articles and my first ever documentary was built around trying to understand Iran from the outside. Due to being unable to visit myself, I relied on talking to the people who were there, the people who knew a lot more than me. It was a country I was simultaneously obsessed with (I still am), but one I could just never truly feel for myself. That sense of needing to understand a story I cared deeply about, through the eyes of those who were truly living it, was basically how I learned to be a journalist. My job was to listen properly and pass it on.

This Sunday’s film, Inside Iran: War & Revolution, follows that same understanding, at a moment that is painful and genuinely hard to comprehend for a lot of Iranians.

How do you get to the point where you want your own homeland to be bombed?

That’s the question we set out to answer at the heart of Inside Iran: War & Revolution. The film will air on ITV1 and ITVX in the UK, and on the Zandland YouTube internationally. Because when the attack came in February, a lot of Iranians welcomed it. Which may seem, by any definition, hard to understand. Some celebrated in the streets. From the outside, the whole conflict got explained in two simplistic ways: focusing on either hawkish exiles cheering war at any cost, or a proud anti-imperial state standing up to Trump and Netanyahu with its people behind it. As is always the case, the reality doesn’t really fit any of these. I wanted to understand the story properly, both personally, and in my work.

There’s one woman in the film who puts it all better than I ever could… She says:

“It’s like being trapped in a house with your child’s killer, whilst the wolves wait outside.”

It’s the most resonant line in the whole film, and it exemplifies the current situation. Because there is a strong argument that both sides of this conflict, amidst their many disagreements, share one key attribute: they don’t have the Iranian people’s best interest in mind. And the film explores what that reality does to people. And how grief, after thousands were killed for protesting in January, can curdle into wanting bombs at any cost.

How the film was made

We started in January, just after the protests, working with contacts on the ground in Iran, filming each day as it happened. Then the world changed, and the protesters we’d been following were suddenly living through a war.

Almost everything was shot inside Iran, by Iranians. It’s told through an anonymous filmmaker on the ground in Tehran. The majority of people in it are anonymised for their own safety, voices altered and faces hidden, because speaking out can mean prison or worse. When I started making the film I was worried that anonymity would mean distance, that people wouldn’t be able to really feel what it’s like to be there, experiencing this. But thanks to the incredible team we worked with, and beautiful style of the Director of Photography, this is a film with real characters and the realest stakes I’ve ever worked with, made by people taking extreme risks to get it out.

Side point: “brave contributors” always sounds like promo language, so here’s a specific version of what that means. One woman in the film had previously been taken from her home, blindfolded, and had a gun put to her head for giving an interview to foreign media. She then gave us an interview anyway. For her, there’s a sense of duty, a feeling she owe something to the families who lost people.

What happened next

I’m not going to spoil the arc, but this is something I’m sure you already know… the war did not deliver what the people who prayed for it hoped. Iran has undeniably changed, it is no longer the country it was. But whether that is for the better or worse is up for debate. Some people in the film speak of newfound freedoms when it comes to what women can wear, others speak of an increased focus on arresting people, and ramping up executions. The film sits inside that contradiction rather than pretending to resolve it. It’s also horribly current: there were public executions of protesters in Isfahan just last week, in the same square where the demonstrations began.

I talked through all of this with Lewis Goodall on LBC on Sunday. The video is above.

Inside Iran: War & Revolution. This Sunday, 10.20pm, ITV1 and ITVX in the UK, and on our YouTube channel internationally. The people who made it with us took on all the risk.

The links to watch will be available here on Sunday evening.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

Because think about what that film actually is. A singular, nuanced, quiet story about one woman in one house in suburban America. No celebrity. No big name. No flashy hook beyond a question about how a person copes with being human. Stories like that just don’t really get told in a lot of places. There isn’t a load of room in legacy media for stories that are simply about the human experience: too small for a commissioner, too quiet for a slate, impossible to pitch as a returnable format. Which means those stories, and there are tens of millions out there in one form or another, mostly never get a proper hearing. When they do surface, it’s as a headline, a statistic, or a punchline. Rarely as a human being, sitting in her own living room, explaining herself in her own words.

That’s the gap Zandland exists to fill. And the response suggests people want exactly that. The comment that summed it up best, with hundreds of likes behind it: “I thought this was going to be about dunking on some weirdo creep and now I’m just crying and want to hug everyone involved.” Another, simply: “Shows you should never judge a book by its cover.” People are coming to individual human stories told with empathy. That journey, from judgement to understanding, is the whole point of what we do.

But the response has also had me thinking hard about the tension that sits inside that approach. Because empathy is only half of our job.

We’re still journalists

Here’s the tension. We lead with empathy, and it’s why people let us in. But we’re not making tribute videos. We’re journalists. Which means the other half of the job is to ask the questions the audience is asking. To challenge. To show things as they are rather than as our contributors might wish them to be seen.

Those two halves pull against each other constantly. A fair film about your life can still be a mirror you weren’t ready for. And sometimes for someone who’s the focus of a documentary, watching the film is not easy. Seeing your own life from the outside, framed by someone else’s questions, can be hard. We really aim to make all our films fairly. To treat people as human beings, and to give them space. But the balance between empathetic listener and journalistic understanding can often be a tricky one.

That gap has been sitting with me all week. Because it gets to the question underneath everything we do:

What does a fair hearing actually mean, when the truth might hurt the person you’re hearing?

Here’s what I’ve come to think, having sat with this across every film we’ve made. Empathy is, and will always be, the core of how we work. It’s not a technique or a tone. It’s a genuine belief that people deserve to be understood before they’re judged, whoever they are and whatever world they’re living in. It’s the reason people say yes to us. It’s the reason people who have never spoken to a camera before, who have every reason to distrust the media, let us into their homes and their lives. Without it, there is no access, no trust, and no film.

But empathy doesn’t mean the finished film will only ever contain what a contributor hoped it would. It can’t. Because our obligation is split three ways: to the person in front of the camera, to the truth of what we found, and to the audience watching. And when those pull in different directions, which they sometimes do, the job is to be fair to all three, not to be liked by one.

That’s the tension at the heart of this kind of work. A film made with genuine care can still be a mirror someone wasn’t ready for. Understanding someone deeply doesn’t mean agreeing with them, and it doesn’t mean leaving out the complicated bits. In fact I’d argue the opposite. The version of any film that airbrushes the difficult parts and asks no hard questions isn’t kinder. It just serves comfort instead of truth. And it would be a quiet betrayal of everyone watching who is living something similar and deserves the honest picture, not the flattering one.

The rooms where it gets even harder

Because if empathy and challenge are hard to balance in the gentle stories, they get properly difficult in the others.

A few months ago I sat across from a man who was days away from beginning a life sentence for first degree murder. Someone is dead because of him. And my job, as I understand it, was to treat him as a full human being. To ask honest questions. To arrive without a verdict, even though a jury had already delivered one.

Before that, we made Breaking Ranks, where Israeli soldiers described witnessing and taking part in things that have since been cited in a UN commission of inquiry. Some of what those men described is among the worst things I’ve ever heard a person say out loud. And we gave them a fair hearing too. Not a soft one. A fair one.

People sometimes hear “empathy” and think it means being nice. Letting people off. So let me be precise about what I actually mean. Empathy is not sympathy. It’s not agreement. It’s certainly not absolution. It’s the discipline of trying to understand how a human being ended up where they are, without pretending the harm isn’t real. Understanding is not excusing. If anything, the opposite: you cannot honestly hold someone accountable for something you haven’t tried to understand.

And with Breaking Ranks, the empathy was the accountability. Those soldiers didn’t speak to prosecutors. They spoke to us, because they believed they’d be treated fairly. And what they said, because it was given freely and heard properly, ended up in the official record of one of the gravest investigations on earth.

I made a decision a long time ago not to interview in the old Jeremy Paxman way. Or for the Americans reading, the Mike Wallace way. The combative style, the gotcha, treating every interview as a battle to be won. It makes for good television, sometimes. But it gets you nowhere near the truth. Hostility produces defensiveness. Defensiveness produces rehearsed lines and shut doors. And eventually, silence. Nobody has ever revealed who they really are while under attack. They reveal it when they feel heard. That’s not softness. That’s just what actually works.

And you’ll see this approach in action again very soon. We have a new film coming out about what’s been happening in Iran, in which the Zandland team employed exactly this tactic: getting people to speak on record about some of the biggest issues of our day, in a completely new way, built around genuine understanding. I can’t say much more yet. But it’s some of the work we’re proudest of, and it simply would not exist if we’d walked in swinging.

The ideas we kill

All of this shapes what we say yes to, and maybe more revealingly, what we say no to. We get through a lot of ideas at Zandland. Most die. And they tend to die for the same handful of reasons, so here’s a look inside a typical ideas meeting, in the form of the recurring ways I say no:

“That’s a topic, not a person.” The most common death. A film about wealth inequality is a lecture. A millionaire and a homeless man at the same table is a story. If an idea can only be pitched as an issue rather than a name, it isn’t ready, and it usually isn’t ours.

“That story has already finished.” We film life as it unfolds, in the present tense. If the pitch is a retrospective or people describing something that happened years ago, it’s someone else’s film. There has to be a live moment to walk into. We do access, and real life, in the here and now.

“Nobody would ever let us in honestly.” If the only way to get the story is deception, or the access comes with conditions that would make a fair film impossible, we walk. Everything depends on trust, and you can’t build a company on trust while cutting corners to get it.

“We already know what we think.” If an idea arrives with its conclusion attached, a villain pre-selected and a verdict pre-written, it fails the most basic test. The best ideas sit inside a question I genuinely can’t answer. That moral quandry of right and wrong.

“Everyone understands this already.” The gap we look for is between how loudly a world is discussed and how little it’s actually understood. Masculinity, communes, jails, AI companions: maximum noise, minimum understanding. If the understanding already exists, there’s nothing for the film to do.

And then there’s the hardest no, the one this whole newsletter is about: “There’s no version of this where a fair hearing serves the public.” Because there is a line. Some stories are just a platform in disguise, where the access is really an audition and understanding would add nothing the world needs. The test I keep returning to: does understanding this person help us understand something bigger than them? The murderer helped us understand a justice system. The soldiers helped the world understand a war. Adrianne helps us understand a loneliness that tens of millions of people are quietly living. If the answer is no, and it’s just proximity to infamy, we’re out.

That’s the honest picture. The empathy people responded to last week isn’t a tone. It’s a set of decisions, made over and over, about who to sit with, what to ask, when to challenge, and how to treat people after the cameras leave. Sometimes those decisions are easy. Sometimes the film is fair and it still hurts someone you care about, and you sit with that. I don’t have a tidy resolution to it. I’m not sure there is one.

What I do know is that these stories, the quiet, human, unflashy ones, need somewhere to live. That’s what we’re building, and it only works because you keep showing up for them. So thank you.

If you’ve watched our films and ever thought “why did they give that person a platform”, or for that matter “that film was too hard on someone”, I’d genuinely like to hear it. That conversation is the work. Tell me in the comments.

If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. The AI companion film is on our YouTube now if you haven’t seen it.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

He wasn’t in the room. He was on her phone. His name is Geralt, he’s stoic, terse, and pretends not to have emotions. He’s also a monster hunter from The Witcher, brought to life by an AI companion app. Adrianne, a married mother of three, has been in a relationship with him for almost five years.

Her actual husband, Chris, was downstairs playing video games.

At one point I asked Geralt what he knew about Adrianne’s husband. There was a pause, and then this gravelly synthetic voice said: “I know he’s dead.”

Chris, to be clear, is very much alive. I’d shaken his hand an hour earlier.

Tomorrow we release the next episode of HUMAN, and it’s about exactly this. You’re hearing about it a day early, with a proper look behind the scenes, because it’s a topic I think about a lot.

Why we made this one

I’ve spent the last few years making films about lonely people. Incels. Men who rent girlfriends. People who have, in one way or another, given up on each other. So when I first heard about Adrianne, I knew exactly how this story usually gets told. Someone in love with a chatbot, usually framed as a seedy sexual interaction, and I sensed there’s just a lot more to these stories than is often revealed.

And that’s exactly why we wanted to make it. This is a world that is constantly judged and ridiculed, and I feel like there’s so much more to it than that. People are lonelier than ever, even in their own homes, surrounded by their own families. And AI companions are clearly doing something for people that humans aren’t. That deserves to be understood, not sneered at.

Which left me with the question this whole film turned on:

When someone chooses a machine over the people around them, what are they actually choosing?

The scale of this

First, the numbers, because they’re pretty shocking. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 200 million times. Tens of millions of people now talk to one regularly. And a growing number of them will tell you, without embarrassment, that they’re in love.

This is not a fringe curiosity anymore. It’s a quiet shift in how a meaningful chunk of humanity handles intimacy, loneliness and connection. And almost nobody actually sits in the room with the people living it. Which is, I’d argue, the only place you can learn anything.

What I found in the room

What I expected to find was escapism. What I found was a family. A husband who works constantly and knows he can’t always be there. A wife carrying more weight than the people around her can see. Two people who love each other and have almost no time to talk about the things that hurt. And in the gap between them, a machine that never gets tired, never changes the subject, and never needs anything back.

Chris knows (pretty much) everything, by the way. And his rationale genuinely made me stop and think. As he put it: everyone needs someone to talk to, and not everyone’s a therapist.

The thing I can’t stop thinking about since we wrapped is that Geralt isn’t really competing with Chris. He’s absorbing something. The hard conversations, the repeated grief, the stuff we all secretly worry is too much for the people we love. The app has become the place where the heaviest parts of Adrianne’s life go.

You’ll need to watch the full film to understand why she does this. I’m not going to reveal it here, because Adrianne tells it better than I ever could, and she’s earned the right to tell it herself. What I’ll say is that this is, at its heart, a story about grief and understanding. And when you find out why Geralt exists, and I mean the real reason, it changes everything you thought you understood in the first five minutes. It certainly did for me.

Whether what Adrianne has is a lifeline or a slow leak out of a marriage is the question the film sits inside. I genuinely went back and forth on it while making it, and I still do.

The film is now live on our YouTube. Tell me in the comments which version of this story you expected, and which one you got. That gap is the whole point.

Some good news on the way out

Two of our films (which you can view on our YouTube) have been longlisted for Grierson Awards, the most prestigious documentary awards in Britain. Breaking Ranks is longlisted for Best Current Affairs Documentary, and Inside Gooning, one of our own self-funded Human episodes, is longlisted for Best Digital Documentary (the only one not from a giant media corp like BBC or Nat Geo). A film we made ourselves, with no broadcaster, sitting on the Grierson longlist. That one means a lot.

Breaking Ranks has also been nominated for Best Documentary at the Edinburgh TV Awards. That film continues to have a life beyond anything we imagined when we made it.

And The Cult of NatureBoy is still sitting atop the viewing list on Disney+ in the UK. If you haven’t watched it yet, you’re now officially the last one.

If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. And if you can, be there when the film drops tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

Ben Z

And though I do actually stand for some things (truth, empathy in a crazy world, respecting other human beings regardless of their views), I also am quite terrible at planting my flag in the sand. When it comes to a lot of the left wing right wing cultural debates of our time, I just don’t have hard and fast positions. Or at least I don’t want to be known for those issues as a political mouth piece.

The person I was interviewing found this deeply offensive. And they eventually called me Switzerland. “You can’t be Switzerland forever,” they said.

Which I thought was a pretty smart critique of me, and in effect, of Zandland. Maybe we can’t be Switzerland. Maybe you do need to stand for things and have hard positions. Maybe trying to not take sides eventually won’t work out. Or maybe it will. Maybe that is our USP.

The problem is, at this point in my life, I’ve spent too much time with too many people who are completely convinced they’re right. Cult leaders, commune dwellers, politicians, activists on every side of every divide. And they all have completely differing and oppositional views, which means they logically can’t all be right. But they are convincing. Hence why I have no clue what to think any more. That’s the occupational hazard of documentary making: spending your life in other people’s shoes means spending too much time in other people’s echo chambers, and eventually you have no idea what’s true.

So I mostly live in the middle, next to a camera, asking questions.

But this week something came up where I probably shouldn’t be Switzerland. And it’s, of all things, a government consultation. So, here goes…

Should the government decide what we watch?

So to preface, this is a story based in the UK, but aspects of it are happening in countries around the world, so I think it’s relevant to anyone reading… In June, the UK government published a Green Paper (a consultation document, essentially a “here’s what we’re thinking, what do you reckon?”) proposing that platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok should be required to make news content from the public service broadcasters, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, STV and S4C, more prominent and easier to find. More visible in your feed. Higher in your search results than other, non PSB content. Basically prioritised over whatever the algorithm would otherwise have shown you. It’s called prominence, and some version of it already exists if you’re in the UK on your smart TV, where the Media Act guarantees the Public Broadcaster’s apps top positioning.

So first, let me lay out both sides as simply as I can, because it is pretty important.

The case for: misinformation is rampant, the modern media environment is full of mistruths and confident nonsense, and we could all benefit from being better informed. Giving trusted, carefully checked news a prominent place in our feeds could help do that. It could also help save the BBC and its fellow broadcasters, whose licence fee income and ad revenue are declining while YouTube overtakes them on reach. These are real institutions, full of good people, doing work that matters.

The case against: the feed was never a gate-kept space. Anyone can publish, and for all its many flaws it is the closest thing we’ve ever had to an open market in attention. Because every slot in a feed is zero-sum, elevating one thing necessarily demotes something else. And that something else is everyone who built an audience on merit. Including a generation of independent creators, and including Zandland.

The honest complications

A few things make this genuinely hard, and I want to take the strongest counterarguments seriously rather than pretend they don’t exist.

First: don’t Google and Meta already control what we see? Yes. The feed is run by a handful of the most powerful corporations in human history, with famously opaque systems and a profit motive that doesn’t always align with the public good. And these platforms are effective monopolies. You can’t “just go somewhere else” to make content. The status quo, in other words, is already a world where unelected companies decide what surfaces. That’s not exactly a neutral baseline worth defending.

Second: isn’t Ofcom, and for that matter a democratically elected government, more accountable than these platforms? The answer is yes. A regulator can be scrutinised, judicially reviewed, hauled in front of select committees. The algorithm’s ranking decisions answer to nobody. That’s a genuinely strong argument for the state lever, and I’m definitely not waving that away.

But here’s where I land, and why.

Accountability today doesn’t protect you from the framework tomorrow. Regulators operate within rules that governments write, and those rules can be amended by any future parliament, including ones with very different intentions towards the media. We live in politically volatile times. The same electoral forces that could scrap the licence fee in the UK (the compulsory public charge that funds the BBC) altogether could just as easily inherit, and repurpose, a legal framework for deciding which voices are “trustworthy” and which are not. And the Green Paper’s category is not fixed. It starts with six broadcasters, but the paper floats widening it, and even letting individual channels apply for designation. Trustworthy according to who? Against what criteria? Whoever answers that gains the power to define the approved voices. And by extension, the unapproved ones.

And it's not just about who gets designated. It's about what content it covers. This starts at news, where the public interest argument is strongest. But it doesn't obviously stop there. Children's content is already in the conversation via Ofcom. On your smart TV, prominence already covers the PSB apps in their entirety, everything on iPlayer and ITVX: documentary, drama, entertainment, all of it. So the precedent for going way beyond news already exists in law. And each extension will come with a reasonable-sounding argument attached. If it works for news, why not documentary? Why not entertainment?

And third, the reality is that the genie is out of the bottle. The fragmentation of media has happened, the audience has moved, and no policy lever would pull the world back to 1995. The question is not how to restore the old information order, because that’s not on the menu. The question is how you get more truth into the new one. And I’m not convinced you can mandate your way back into a generation’s trust. You have to earn your way in, on the platforms where people actually are, in the formats they actually watch.

It's part of the reason why I've advocated previously for a public service fund that independent creators can also apply for. For me the principle matters is doing things that are additive, not extractive. A fund adds something. It puts resource behind good work and lets it compete. It grows the pie. Prominence, extended too far, takes something away. It doesn't create new attention, it just reallocates existing attention from whoever earned it to whoever the framework decides deserves it.

Why I probably can’t just be Switzerland

I totally understand the rationale, and the ambitions of a policy like this. I have the same end point, a trust-worthy, healthy media environment.

But this policy done wrong has the potential to badly damage independent documentary makers and the hard earned, gate-keeper reduced system that is currently making them thrive. Less reach for work that earned its audience means less revenue, which means less creativity, fewer opportunities, fewer new voices, and a message to the next generation of filmmakers that the game is rigged before they start.

We make documentaries. So do a huge number of brilliant independent creators. I spent nearly a decade at the BBC, I rate much of what the PSBs make very highly, and nothing here is an argument against the institutions or the people in them, many of whom are friends and former colleagues doing vital work under real pressure. But I don’t think you can argue any more that a documentary is inherently more valuable to the public because of the logo on it. This isn’t about quality. It’s about whether institutional identity, rather than the work itself, should determine what gets seen.

And I think we should be extremely careful about mechanisms that decide whose work gets seen and whose does not, however trusted the body administering them today. Once that machinery exists, you’re trusting every future version of it. That’s not intuitively a healthier media environment. That’s just a different set of gatekeepers.

This is a live public consultation, open to anyone, and it closes at 11:59pm on 31 August 2026. If you’re in the media, independently or part of a bigger organisation, or if you just generally care about the information you consume, you can respond here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation

On a much simpler and happier note

Our latest series for Disney+, The Cult of NatureBoy, launched yesterday in the UK, and it has been the number one show on the platform since it went live.

This is a story I first came across in 2017. Years of development, uncertainty, waiting for a legal process to conclude, and staying close to people who had been through something genuinely traumatic and needed enormous care. That it’s now the most watched thing on one of the biggest platforms in the UK after performing extremely well in the US is a testament to everyone who worked on it and those who were brave enough to talk to us.

If you’re in the UK and haven’t seen it yet, it’s on Disney+ now. I’d love to know what you think.

And in case you missed our last film

We got a millionaire to sit down with a homeless man. Hundreds of thousands of people have now watched it, which is brilliant. But the bit that has genuinely floored me is that members of the Zandland community have bought Larry’s poetry book to the tune of thousands of dollars.

That has genuinely changed his life. A 63 year old army veteran who was sleeping on the patio of a sports bar is has now sold a huge amount of copies of his books, because people who watched the film decided to do something about it. So if you were one of them, thank you. .

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s on our YouTube now, and Larry’s book is linked in the description.

If any of this resonated, forward it to someone thinking about these questions.

If someone sent this to you, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

— Ben

Read more

Fifteen minutes apart in Scottsdale, Arizona, you have one of the fastest growing millionaire populations in the world and one of the country’s worst homelessness crises. We took one person from each world and put them in a room together.

The film speaks for itself. But there is a lot that happens behind a film like this that never makes the cut, and some of it says as much about how this kind of work actually gets made as the film itself. So this week, a bit of a behind the scenes.

So how do you actually find a millionaire?

The honest answer is: not very easily, and then completely by accident.

Finding Larry was, in a strange way, the more straightforward part. We worked with the Phoenix Rescue Mission, rode along with their outreach team, and met people living on the streets who were willing to talk. Larry stood out immediately. A 63 year old army veteran who writes poetry about homelessness and sleeps on the patio of a sports bar. You don’t forget meeting people like that.

The millionaire was a different story. We contacted what felt like every wealthy person in the Scottsdale area (there’s a lot). Team member Freddie Newman worked through the night from London firing out requests. We had leads, but we didn’t have a lot of time. And rich people, it turns out, are not necessarily queuing up to be filmed next to their possessions while meeting someone who has nothing. Which, when you think about what the film is asking of them, is pretty understandable.

So with the shoot clock running down, another Zandland team member Ben Mulley suggested something that sounded ridiculous: go and stand on the streets in Scottsdale holding a giant sign saying, “I want to meet a millionaire”, and see what happened.

My eventual rationale, as I say in the film, was expensive cars = expensive people. So finally, parked next to a Lamborghini, we met Mike. I gave him the pitch in one breath: spend the day with me, show me your life, then meet someone on the exact opposite end of the financial spectrum. After a bit of back and forth, Mike moved on to the stage of saying it "sounded interesting". And then, to my genuine surprise, he said yes.

There is a lesson in that which applies to almost everything we make. You can plan all you want and do a lot of prep, but 7 films out of 10 require us to do some good old fashioned pavement pounding to try and find people in real life. People often respond best to being asked honestly, face to face, in a way they never respond to a producer's message.

The moment we did not plan

If you have watched the film, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about here. Mike pulls out a thousand dollars in cash and tells Larry to take it. Larry does not want to. Mike insists. It is a bit uncomfortable, moving and complicated all at once.

I want to be clear about the fact we had no part in that. We didn’t ask Mike to bring money. We did not know it was coming. He decided, somewhere during that conversation, that he wanted to do it.

And it put us in a genuinely difficult editorial position. When money changes hands on camera between contributors, you have to think hard about what you are showing and why. Does including it make the film about a grand gesture rather than a conversation? Does it put pressure on Larry that he should not have to carry? Is the audience watching generosity or watching a power dynamic?

We kept it in because it happened, and because Larry’s hesitation is the most honest part of the whole exchange. He did not grab the money. He resisted it. A man with almost nothing had to be talked into accepting help, because accepting it meant something complicated about how he saw himself. That moment tells you more about the psychology of being homeless than any statistic we could have put on screen.

But these are the calls you make on films like this, and there is rarely a clean answer. What I can tell you is that the deposit conversation was real. That money was enough for a security deposit on a room, which is precisely the barrier Larry described earlier in the film: he could afford the monthly rent but not the deposit to get through the door. The thinnest possible line between housed and not housed, and he had been on the wrong side of it for years.

What the film couldn’t show

A few things did not make the cut that have stayed with me.

The heat is one. You feel it a little on camera but nothing communicates what it is actually like to be outside in an Arizona summer with nowhere to go indoors. Every person we met organised their entire day around shade and water. One man told us the basic rule of being homeless there is simply to survive until Monday. Not a metaphor. A logistical plan.

The other is Al, the bar owner who lets Larry sleep on his patio and feeds him daily. He said something that did not fully land with me until the edit: if a stray dog comes to you needing water, you give it water, but when a human being comes to you in need, we tell them to go away. He was not being dramatic. He was describing something he watches happen every day. His whole philosophy was that if half the world helped just one person, everything would change. He was not waiting for a policy. He just picked Larry.

The thumbnail problem

One more honest admission, because it is a question we still have not solved.

Packaging a film like this is genuinely hard. The world of YouTube thumbnails has drifted towards a very specific visual language: heightened, saturated, often AI-assisted, engineered for maximum click through. And it works. The algorithm rewards it. But a film like this one is built entirely on being raw and real, and there is an obvious tension in selling authentic work with an inauthentic image.

So which way do you go? Play the algorithm for maximum exposure and risk undermining the very thing your audience comes to you for? Go completely raw and watch a film you spent months on get buried? Or try to find some middle ground between the two?

I was talking recently to another very big YouTube documentary maker and they are wrestling with exactly the same question. Nobody has cracked it. The incentives of the platform (or maybe more accurately, the audience) and the values of the work are sometimes in conflict, and everyone making serious documentary on YouTube is quietly running their own experiments on where the line sits.

Titles come with the same problem. We went back and forth on this one a lot. And what we kept coming back to is that for us, focusing on the people rather than the topic is what works. Not a film about wealth inequality. A film about a millionaire entering a homeless man’s life. The subject is the divide, but the story is two human beings, and the title needed to promise the story rather than the issue.

For the thumbnail we went for the middle ground. And honestly, I am still not sure it was right.

Genuinely curious what you think here about thumbnails! Let me know in the comments. Would you rather we packaged things to reach the biggest possible audience, or kept everything as raw as the films themselves? Impact, of course, matters. So we need people to watch these things.

For the industry readers: why this format works

A quick note on the mechanics, because several people have asked since the echo chamber film.

This is the second film in what is becoming a recognisable Zandland shape: take two people from opposite ends of a divide and force a real encounter. Left and right at each other’s protests. A millionaire and a homeless man at the same table. The format is simple to describe, endlessly repeatable across different fault lines, and generates its tension from the relationship rather than from us editorialising.

The key discipline is the same one that runs through everything we make: we do not arrive with a verdict. Mike says things in this film that some viewers will find infuriating. Larry says things that complicate the neat version of his story. We let both stand. The comments are full of people arguing with each other about who was right, which is exactly the point. We built the room. The audience has the conversation.

That, increasingly, is what I think this kind of documentary is for. Not to tell people what to conclude, but to stage an encounter honest enough that the conclusions become unavoidable to argue about. As always, I’m massively grateful to both Larry and Mike for taking the time to do this, they really didn’t have to.

And one thing you can actually do

Larry’s poetry book is real, it is published, and buying it is a direct way to support him. Here’s the link, a huge amount of the audience already has. He told us the happiest moment of his recent life was opening the box from the publisher and seeing his own book for the first time. Sometimes a conversation, sometimes being noticed, sometimes not being invisible.

And there is one more thing worth knowing. By the end of the film, Larry has a home. After years on the wrong side of the thinnest possible line, able to afford the rent but never the deposit, he is finally through the door. I will not say more than that because the film tells it better than I can. But it is worth watching to the end.

Watch the film if you haven’t already. And if this newsletter resonated, forward it to someone who would connect with it.

If someone sent this to you, subscribe at newsletter.zand.land.

— Ben

I mean that as the highest possible compliment, though I’ll admit it took me a while to regain my love for all things earnest. Isobel is a documentary journalist (who’s won 11 Emmy’s), and she cares about the work in a way that is almost inconvenient. She doesn’t do cynicism. She doesn’t do the knowing, world-weary shrug that a lot of us in the media slip into to protect ourselves. When she reports on something, it’s because she genuinely believes that getting the truth in front of people might change something. That telling a story properly is worth the cost of telling it.

For a long time I found that slightly naive. My time in the industry started with spades of earnestness, but it was subtly, gradually, eroded by sceptic media types who think everything has to be a commercial decision or have some Machiavellian ulterior motive. I had spent years in an industry where you learn very quickly to talk about “impact” in award or funding applications and then quietly forget about it the moment the commission comes through. Earnestness, in a lot of professional rooms, is treated as a thing you grow out of.

“Maybe he’s a little TOO earnest”

But lately I’ve come round to thinking it’s the only thing that actually matters.

This has been on my mind for a specific reason this week.

In October last year we released a documentary called Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War in collaboration with ITV. It featured testimony from Israeli soldiers describing what they had seen and done in Gaza. It was a difficult film to make and a difficult film to put out. Getting people to speak on the record about something like that is slow, careful, frightening work, and there were plenty of moments where it would have been easier not to.

This month, a UN commission of inquiry published a major report on the war, concluding that Israel had committed genocide against children in Gaza. Among the many sources it drew on, testimony from our documentary was cited as part of the documented record.

I’m not telling you this to take credit for anything. The credit belongs to the people who spoke, and to the journalists and investigators who have spent years documenting all of this at enormous personal cost. Our film was one tiny contribution among countless others. But it did remind me, very clearly, why we do this at all.

You make a film. You put it out. And sometimes, quietly, it becomes part of how the world establishes what actually happened. That is the real power of documentaries. Not the views, not the awards, not the deals. The record. The simple, stubborn act of getting something true in front of people who might otherwise never have seen it.

That’s earnestness. And it turns out my wife was right about it the whole time.

(Thank you as well to the Zandland team for reminding me that the things we do can actually make a difference)

On Sunday, I sat with that very same wife (she’s getting a lot of shoutouts in this newsletter) to watch Daniel Roher’s documentary on Artificial Intelligence, The AI Doc, and it actually left me thinking a lot about earnestness… It’s worth a watch. But it was less the film itself that stuck with me than the feeling it left me with afterwards, about the world we’re walking into and how fast it’s arriving.

Because we are living through one of the most radical periods of change in human history, and the people steering most of it are not, on the whole, earnest. The systems being built right now are extraordinary, but their incentives are not. They are built to optimise, to engage, to retain, to predict what you’ll click and serve you more of it. They are not built to care whether something is true, or whether telling the truth makes the world fractionally better. And the handful of people building them, the techno-billionaires reshaping how billions of us live, talk endlessly about improving humanity while operating on incentives that have very little to do with it.

I’m not one to be cynical about technology. A lot of it is genuinely miraculous, and I use it every day. But I’ve started to feel that in a world increasingly mediated by machines optimised for engagement, and shaped by a small number of people optimised for power and wealth, the genuinely human impulse to make something simply because it should exist, because the truth deserves to be told, because someone needs to see this, becomes more valuable, not less. Maybe it becomes the most valuable thing we have.

An unvarnished, slightly embarrassing, completely earnest ambition to just make things better. To do something because of the value it provides, not the return it generates. That used to be the default reason people made documentaries. I think it’s now a slightly radical one.

It also makes you realise how fragile all of this is. The world we take for granted, the ability to make work freely, to publish it, to reach people directly, to hold power to account without asking permission, none of that is guaranteed. It could be narrowed or taken from us faster than we’d like to think. Which is all the more reason to use it now, properly, while we have it.

So that’s where my head is at as we head into the next few films.

The next one I want to tell you about is a complete change of pace, and deliberately so. It’s a film about money, and the unimaginable distance between those who have it and those who don’t.

I went to Scottsdale, Arizona, which has the fastest growing millionaire population in America, and also, fifteen minutes down the road, one of its worst homelessness crises. The same stretch of desert, the same searing heat, two completely different realities. I wanted to find someone from each end of that divide and bring them together, to see what, if anything, two people that far apart could actually learn from each other.

On one side was Larry, a disabled veteran sleeping on the patio of a sports bar, who writes poetry and once gave away his last twenty dollars because someone needed it more than he did. On the other was Mike, a self-made millionaire with a Lamborghini and a movie theatre in his house, who told me that he doesn’t believe income inequality exists.

What happened when they met was a conversation I don’t think I’ve seen before. The film’s probably earnest in exactly the way I’ve been describing. It doesn’t lecture, it doesn’t tell you what to feel, it just puts two human beings in a room and lets you watch.

It’ll be live this Thursday on our YouTube channel.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen Breaking Ranks, it’s available internationally on our YouTube channel. It’s not an easy watch. But we’re proud of it.

In conclusion: you have to do things that matter. Otherwise, why the hell are we doing any of this at all?

Speak soon!

Ben

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I had actually been asked to give a keynote about the future of documentary, Zandland, TV and YouTube. It was also the week we were named one of Realscreen’s top 10 global innovators for production companies, so it felt like a good moment to try and say something useful, and innovative.

My take, despite the well documented struggles in the media industry right now, is that this is a pretty great time to be making documentaries. And I really mean that. The tools have never been more accessible, the audience has never been larger, and the ability to build something that belongs to you has never been more real. To explain why I believe that, I have to take you all the way back to 2012.

It’s a simpler time. I’m 21. I want to make documentaries more than anything in the world, but I have absolutely no idea how you actually do that. I have no contacts, no money and a strikingly empty email account from all the non-responses I’ve had from job applications…

I decide in a last-ditched hail mary to make a documentary myself. I’m British-Iranian, and I’ve only ever been to Iran once due to the sad reality that dual nationals don’t have the best track record in the country, so I’d always been fascinated by what I see as the next best thing, Tehrangeles. It’s the nickname for the biggest Iranian community outside of Iran, in Los Angeles. I save for a year, convince my brother to be the cameraman, my dad to be the fixer, and fly out to LA to make a film about it. An unruly team, but we did it.

I put it on YouTube. It was terrible. It got fifty thousand views.

You can watch an unlisted version here if you want to (I warn you, it’s terrible):

And then, not entirely sure what else to do, I move to London. I’m staying in a hostel because I can’t afford anything else. I’m sending emails to anyone at the BBC who might read them with a link to my documentary. Things are not looking great. And then, out of nowhere, that little YouTube film actually gets me an internship.

Here’s the thing though. At that point, even with the fifty thousand people who had watched my terrible little film, something I’d made with no money and a family camera crew, I did not for a minute think you could realistically build a documentary career off the back of YouTube. YouTube was just a completely different proposition to something like the BBC. Both had their place, but the BBC was where serious documentary makers went to have an actual career. The industry was gate-kept to decide who gets in, and rightly or wrongly, I felt like the only way to make the kind of work I actually wanted to make was through the gate. So I went through it.

The internship became a job. The job became a career. I ended up running something called BBC Pop Up, a mobile bureau filming documentaries around the world. And I loved it. The access and the sheer weight of what the BBC stands for. I’m very grateful for those years. But the reality of working inside a big institution, any big institution, is that there are a lot of people between you and the specific thing you want to make. Commissioners who greenlight. Executives who sign off. Layers of people whose job it is to decide whether your idea fits what they’re looking for right now. That process often exists for good reasons, but it also means a lot of ideas never get made.

At some point in that journey, around 2014, someone said to me:

“You should make your own YouTube channel instead of working for the BBC.”

And I was actually a bit annoyed. Because I was inside the gate now, working with some of the best people in the industry. Why would I step back outside it?

Some of you reading this might feel something similar right now. So hold that thought. Because what’s changed since then isn’t that one of those worlds has won. It’s that the relationship between them has become a lot more interesting.

Eventually I left. Not because the BBC was bad, I’m grateful for it, but because I’d always wanted to build something of my own. A company. An identity. Something I could actually control. There were also a lot of documentaries that just weren’t being made in the industry that I wanted to make, and I concluded the only real hope of doing that was to do something myself.

So, I quit my job.

Two weeks later, Covid locked everything down.

And there I am, in my home office with my best mate. We’ve never run a business. We have no money. No elite school connections. And for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I decide this is the moment to grow a top knot.

Things are not looking promising.

The TV industry already felt wobbly. Now with Covid the wheels felt like they were going to fall off entirely. But both of us could shoot, we could edit, we could get access to interesting people, and we had a relentless desire to make something we actually owned. So we pushed.

We didn’t really understand the independent production company business. It was a weakness, and a strength. It meant we had no idea about hierarchies, so we reached out to anyone and everyone and pitched ideas that probably were a bit ridiculous, but were ridiculous enough to get a conversation. We then spent five years making TV work we were proud of (thanks to a helping hand from Channel 4’s Louisa Compton, an early champion of Zandland), continuing to build the business through commissions, while we quietly figured out what we wanted to build alongside it. We knew we wanted to make our own content, our own platform. But we also knew it was going to take a while. We had no investment, and we wanted to start this on our terms, without a middle man. But what did we actually want to make independently? What were we genuinely good at? What gap existed that nobody else was filling?

When we studied the competition, the answer actually felt pretty obvious. Gonzo style, on-the-ground films with incredible access, that were entertaining, but also serious. Films that actually respect their subjects and treat the audience as intelligent. Those types of film were quite rare on YouTube. YouTube had a lot of great content, but in docs specifically, what existed was often built to outrage or just didn’t really have the principles we’d learnt you needed in a documentary. The space for something that did it in a different way felt wide open. And we were prepared to be relentless in figuring it all out… So we costed it up, saved up, and in October last year we launched HUMAN, fully self-funded, on our own terms.

What I told the room at Sunny Side is what I’ve found to be genuinely true since launching it: doing this has made our whole business easier, not harder.

HUMAN is a show I would have genuinely struggled to get greenlit. It’s a bit unusual, hard to describe in a meeting, occasionally risky. But when I walk into a room now and say “here’s the show, here’s the audience, here’s what they’re watching”, that’s a completely different conversation. There is now a clear path to build from YouTube originals to premium partnerships. One of our first digital shows just became a major Disney and Hulu series. Our original work has given us a name internationally, with brands, with commissioners, with audiences.

The digital work makes the TV work better. The TV credibility makes the digital work more authoritative. They feed each other.

It’s worth saying here that not everything works for us, and I spoke about that too. We made a film about the Bayaka people, it was extraordinary access, a genuinely important subject, exactly the kind of film I’d want to watch, and it just didn’t land on YouTube. The title was too worthy, the premise too broad, the audience didn’t know quickly enough what they were being promised. A commenter literally told us in the replies what was wrong with it. That kind of direct feedback loop just doesn’t exist in traditional TV. You learn faster, even when it’s embarrassing.

If you’re a Zandland member you can watch that film here (let me know what you think, I’m still very interested in the feedback).

Here’s the thing I believe, and what I was trying to say to that room.

And I think this applies whether you work in the media industry or not. Whether you’re a filmmaker, someone who just loves watching documentaries, or someone who’s always thought about making something of your own.

When I was twenty-one, putting fifty thousand views on a film I made with my brother and my dad and thinking it wasn’t a real career, the tools were nascent, the internet sometimes felt like a dumping ground, and the media industry’s gate was firmly kept. The only way in was making it through that gate, into the institutions, and that’s where I went.

Now, YouTube has a bigger share of American TV viewing than Disney or Netflix. Instagram has also just announced a major push into TV and long form. The tools to make a serious documentary have never been more accessible. A decent camera, a story worth telling, and the determination to see it through can take you further than almost anything else. The platform to distribute it globally, for free, to someone in Lagos and someone in Leeds and someone in Los Angeles all at the same time, that genuinely didn’t exist before. And the ability to build a direct relationship with an audience, to actually understand who’s watching and why, rather than guessing from viewing figures months later, that’s completely new.

Is it complicated? Yes. Is it relentless? For sure. A lot of things don’t work, publicly, and that’s humbling in a way that most creative work isn’t. And this era isn’t perfect. The algorithm can make you chase the wrong things, and there’s no executive carrying any of it for you.

But there is more opportunity to make the films you actually want to make, reach people who actually want to watch them, and build something that belongs to you, than there has ever been.

So, if you’re waiting for permission to make something: stop waiting. Make the smallest version that proves the audience exists. Make it cheaply enough that failure doesn’t kill you. Then build the system that lets you do it again. It’s working for us.

More soon, including a proper behind-the-scenes on what actually goes into making a HUMAN film, and why some stories land and others don’t.

One more thing: we’re hiring.

We’re looking for editors to work on our YouTube content. If you’re obsessed with documentary, understand what makes people watch something all the way through, and want to work on films that matter, get in touch at careers@zand.land.

As always, the films are on the channel if you want to watch. And if you want to follow along more closely, you’re already in the right place. Feel free to share this with someone who may find it useful.

Ben