Documentaries

Long-form films about people, places, and the things they're fighting for.

The subject is the story.

Documentaries are different from everything else we make. The film isn't selling anything. The subject isn't a stand-in for a brand. There is no integration to write around. The film is the film.

That changes how it gets shot, who funds it, where it ends up, and how long we spend with the subject before the camera turns on. It also changes what we'll take. We don't do documentary the way an ad agency does documentary. We do it the way a director who used to be inside the story does it.

Currently in production: Hemp Nation

A six-episode documentary on the environmental and industrial future of hemp, greenlit by the Angel Guild and shooting now.

Hemp Nation is the project that defines what we mean by full documentary at Ragtown. It's not a brand film. There's no client paying for awareness. The subject is the subject: the farmers, the builders, the regulators, and the people rebuilding an entire industry from the ground up. The film exists because the story exists.

Six episodes. Multi-state production. Field interviews. Real builds. Real fields. Real arguments about policy, soil, supply chains, and what happens to the next generation of the farm.

Watch the trailer

Other Documentary work

30 Years of MC Magic.

Feature-length music documentary on three decades of a Phoenix Latin hip-hop artist. Stage, studio, and the road. Directed by Clayton Lindley.

Groundwork Therapy

Character-led documentary on the science of horse-human connection. Shot across Tucson, Arizona and Melbourne, Australia. Subject-first.

Record Breakers

A Ragtown original documentary on Arizona athletes chasing verified world records at Revel Surf Park in Mesa. Process, pressure, payoff.

Pre-production is deep, not fast

Documentary lives or dies in the access. We spend the time before the shoot earning it. Subject sit-downs, location walks, real conversations with the people who'll end up on camera. If a subject doesn't trust us by day one of production, we haven't done the job yet.

How we work

We embed. We don't extract

Crew sizes stay small enough that the camera disappears. Rolls run long. The story shows up in the third hour, not the third minute.

Distribution-aware from day one

Streamer, festival circuit, broadcast, Angel Guild, independent release: each shapes the cut. We decide where the film lives before we shoot, so the deliverables fit the destination.

Edit to a destination, not a montage

Every film cuts to something that matters to the subject. A finish line. A planting. A reunion. A verdict. The film ends where the subject's story actually ends. Not where the runtime says it should.

Phoenix-based. National and international reach.

Ragtown Media is a documentary production company based in Phoenix, Arizona, with crew and credits across four continents. Recent documentary shoots have run Phoenix, Tucson, Mesa, Nashville, Melbourne, and across the Mountain West. Earlier credits include shoots in Switzerland, Antarctica, and Kurdistan.

Phoenix crew when we can. In-network hires when we can't. The director on every documentary is Clayton Lindley.

PITCH A FILM

If you have the subject, the access, and a sense of where the film lives when it's done, we can sort the rest. If you have the subject and nothing else, send what you've got.

Pitch a Film