Producer, interrupted: The hidden toll of being a Global South producer making documentaries for the West

Transnational documentary production relies heavily on Global South producers whose labor, expertise, and local knowledge remain central to nonfiction storytelling,yet their experiences and burdens often remain overlooked within scholarship on global journalism and representation. Drawing on dependency theory, postcolonial scholarship, and affective epistemology, I foreground documentary production as a critical site where power, authority, and authorship are negotiated. This allows me to examine how labor hierarchies and material inequalities shape both production and local producers’ embodied experiences. Using in-depth interviews with nine Pakistani producers alongside autoethnographic reflections from my own experience in transnational documentary production, I show how power asymmetries marginalize local producers despite their central creative and interpretive role. The findings identify an interconnected triple burden of material, narrative, and affective dependency at play. Local producers remain dependent not only on foreign funding and distribution infrastructures, but also on Western narrative frameworks that constrain which stories are funded, legitimized, and circulated globally. These asymmetries generate affective dependency, producing moral injury among local producers navigating unequal systems of representation.