Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.
Name: That Documentary Girl
Instagram: 2.1M Followers
Tik Tok: 1.3M Followers
Who Is That Documentary Girl?
Christie Boschman advises more than five million followers and subscribers what documentaries are worth watching.
Boschman has been obsessed with documentaries since she was young. She was nine when years old when she first she saw Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater. Then she eventually attended Toronto Film School, initially thinking she might work in fiction, but nonfiction kept her attention.
That Documentary Girl started with a simple observation. There were endless accounts recommending movies and television, but very few devoted entirely to documentaries. Boschman posted one recommendation, people responded, and she kept posting.
True crime is a big focus of the community, but the account stretches well beyond it into music, sports, nature, scams, cults, social justice, and independent films that barely registered when they were first released.
People are not following Boschman because they generally like pop culture. They are there because they like documentaries and need less obvious titles to watch. That makes her recommendation unusually powerful.
Boschman has talked about posting a documentary that had been sitting quietly on transactional platforms and seeing it climb to number one on Apple TV rentals the next day. Filmmakers now lobby her directly because her support can put a film in front of millions of people who already love to watch nonfiction.
For an independent documentary, that kind of concentrated attention can be hard to come by. A trailer might reach a larger random audience and do very little. Boschman can talk about a film to a smaller but far more relevant group and suddenly people are renting it, discussing it, and sending it to friends.
That Documentary Girl has become a curator in the typical sense of the word. Her followers trust in her taste and vision of non fiction works.
Boschman recently asked her community to put forwrad the best documentaries ever made. Nine of the top ten came from Netflix. Studios including Prime Video, Hulu, Lifetime, and Netflix have hired her for campaigns, while independent filmmakers use the same concentrated audience to give smaller documentaries a real shot at being seen.
Christie’s Movie Club runs through Patreon, where members watch and discuss documentaries together. The DocuList packages recommendations into guides organized around subjects like true crime, music, cults, nature, and scams. She also has merch, aimed squarely at people who have made watching documentaries part of their identity.
Boschman has spoken at Hot Docs about film marketing and is developing a television series and documentary coffee-table book.
For filmmakers, the value is big. Boschman does not simply have a large community. She has a concentrated group made up of the exact people a documentary producer is trying to reach.
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Three Things We Love About That Documentary Girl
Her recommendations can help a documentary become widely known: Boschman has seen films climb rental charts after she posts about them. Her community arrives looking for documentaries, which gives an independent filmmaker access to viewers who are already interested.
She keeps digging after release weekend: A documentary can vanish quickly if nobody knows where to find it. Boschman regularly pulls older, independent, international, and overlooked films back in front of people.
She has concentrated on the documentary world: The recommendations, movie club, DocuList, polls, and conversations all serve nonfiction fans. For a documentary filmmaker, very little of that reach is wasted.