Creative Distribution 101

This interview was recorded in July 2022 and dives into the entire film ecosystem. Carlos serves on the board of directors of Film Forum and is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Cinema Tropical, a New York-based non-profit and media arts organization that has become the leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the United States, founded in 2001 with the mission of distributing, programming and promoting what was to become the biggest boom of Latin American cinema in decades. Carlos is also one of the co-founding members of the coalition in formation Distribution Advocates. 

Christie Marchese is the founder and CEO of Kinema, a social cinema platform connecting films to in-person and virtual audiences. Before Kinema, Christie founded the award-winning impact agency Picture Motion in 2012, developing grassroots marketing and social action campaigns for films such as Free Solo, 13th, Fed Up, and many more. This episode dives into what filmmakers can expect from working with the Kinema platform, and what role this new company plays in the indie film ecosystem.

Jonathan Miller runs the new subscription video-on-demand service called OVID.tv. which is a collaborative effort between several documentary distributors. Jonathan is also president of the distributor Icarus Films. OVID.tv aims to provide North American viewers with access to documentaries, independent films, and notable works of international cinema, that may be unavailable on other platforms, streaming a library of over 1600 titles. The content partners behind OVID are a group of established distribution companies. OVID was founded with a commitment to openness and transparency regarding their data.    

In this episode, we are exploring more radical paths for indie distribution with Karin Chien, an award-winning producer and distributor. She is the founder and president of dGenerate Films, the leading distributor of independent, contemporary Chinese cinema. She is also one of the co-founding members of the "coalition in formation" called Distribution Advocates.

Two young filmmakers Sarah Kambe Holland and Mollie Mulvey share tips and insights from their successful TikTok experiences for their films Egghead & Twinkie and The Better Part. Learn how to leverage TikTok to build your audience.

Naomi McDougall Jones was a guest on this podcast before talking about her second feature film called Bite Me, which developed into the Joyful Vampire Tour of America, an innovative 51-screening, 40-city, three-month tour in an RV. Naomi has since teamed up with the former CFO of the City of Chicago to found The 51 Fund, an investment fund to finance films written, directed, and produced by women. Through it, Naomi became an Executive Producer of the acclaimed documentary feature film, Cusp, which premiered at Sundance in 2021. She was also a writer for season 1 of Amazon's original series, The New Yorker Presents. In this episode Naomi dives into everything she's learned about the film ecosystem, starting with her DIY iTunes strategy.  

Michaela Bethune is Vice President of Audience Development for Participant, which is a global media company dedicated to entertainment that engages audiences to participate in social change. Previously, Michaela was Head of Campaigns for DoSomething.org, the largest tech company exclusively for young people and social change, and she led California's digital strategy and voter mobilization programs for Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign. Today, Michaela leads impact campaign strategy for Participant. Participant's more than 100 films include academy award winners Spotlight,  "American Factory", "CITIZENFOUR", "The Cove" and "An Inconvenient Truth", and recently the award-winning film "Judas and the Black Messiah" which we will talk about today.

Ani Mercedes who is C.E.O., Founder and Impact Producer of Looky Looky Pictures, an impact production company that connects the power of films with the power of people. They work with stories that go beyond empathy; that aim to participate in the transformational work of building solidarity with (rather than for) the communities they aim to serve. Ani and her team have implemented and advised on impact production for over 800 filmmakers including the films Through the Night, Councilwoman, Building the American Dream, and LIYANA.

An indie horror movie case study with the acclaimed director of "Ruin Me", Preston DeFrancis.

Christina Raia is an award-winning Writer/Director. In this episode, she dives into an intriguing distribution case study and the film ecosystem. She is the Founder of CongestedCat Productions and was also head of education at crowdfunding & distribution platform Seed & Spark. Her work, consisting of over a dozen short films, a web series, and two feature films, has screened at film festivals around the world.  

Sian-Pierre Regis shares everything he learned on the incredible distribution and impact journey of his first feature film Duty Free, telling the story of his immigrant mother who at the age of 75 was fired from her lifelong job as a hotel housekeeper.  Duty Free premiered on PBS Independent Lens in 2021. It was not only a #1 Apple News story, but one of the most-talked about documentaries of the year, receiving press from CBS Sunday Morning, USA Today, NYT, CNN, and getting an IDA Award nomination for Best Writing in a Feature.   

This episode features journalists Natalie Pattillo and  Daniel A. Nelson, Co-Directors and Producers of AND SO I STAYED, an award-winning documentary about survivors of abuse fighting for their lives and spending years behind bars. This is the story of how the legal system gets domestic violence wrong. The film was featured in the NYT, ABC News, and more. It is a moving portrait of  Kim DaDou Brown, Tanisha Davis, and Nikki Addimando three survivors whose strikingly similar stories are separated by over 30 years. None of them were believed, and each of them was criminalized for fighting back.

True crime fans, anyone? For our last episode of the power of fandom season, we'll talk about documentary fans with Julia Largent, an Assistant Professor of Communication at McPherson College in Kansas. Her research focuses on documentary studies, fan studies and social media. She is the vice president of The Midwest Popular Culture Association and will dive into her research on fandom and documentaries.  

This episode explores the business of fandom, how marketing and fan communities are increasingly connected within the corporate world, which communities get power, inequities in media representation, and much more, with Fangirl Jeanne, a writer, media critic, consultant, and unapologetic fangirl, who built a great following with her expertise in deconstructing popular media.

A deep dive into the dark side of fandom, racism, toxic fans, the complex business of fandom, and more, with Stitch, a writer and critic who has spent two decades in online fandom and is vocal about anti-blackness. Stitch writes a Teen Vogue column called Fan Service studying fandom, and personal blog Stitch's Media Mix, with commentary on and criticism of both pop culture and the fandoms it spawns. Stitch works on projects that focus on positive and diverse representation in fandom spaces and in the media we consume.

Looking at case studies such as the Venom movie franchise, TV shows Supernatural, The 100, and more,  this episode explores the power of fan communities to influence storylines and distribution in entertainment, and dives into the issue of queerbaiting, featuring interviews with fans and fandom experts Yael Tygiel, Stephanie, and Chrisha Anderson.

Interview with Samantha Highfill, a long-time writer for Entertainment Weekly. Samantha covered the CW show Supernatural for many years, interviewing the cast at Paley Fest for their Scooby-Doo crossover celebration, or planning their goodbye photoshoot cover. 15 seasons, 327 episodes later, Supernatural is the longest-running sci-fi/genre series in the history of American broadcast television, launching in 2005. It is well known for its very active and passionate fandom, the SPN Family, who has rallied many times to keep the show on the air and for various charity projects. 

We discuss Fan Activism with the co-founder of Nerds of Color and the managing director of Fandom Forward (formerly Harry Potter Alliance). Shawn is a founding author of www.thenerdsofcolor.org, and a founding organizer of The Black and Brown Comix Arts Festival. He is a recognized scholar and sought-after speaker in the areas of pop culture and participatory culture studies, mythology, folk and netlore, experimental theater, and media studies. In his other life, he spent twenty years in non-profit adolescent mental health and juvenile justice work. He was a Senior Fellow with the Pop Culture Collaborative. Currently, he works as a coach and consultant for individual creatives and organizations and is a university lecturer.  Katie has been leading Fandom Forward's campaigns since 2013. Fandom Forward is an international nonprofit harnessing the power of pop culture to make activism more accessible for everyone. They've been doing this for over 15 years with hundreds of thousands of fan activists. Katie has played an integral role in some of their most iconic campaigns, and her commitment to relational organizing and community-centered leadership has played an essential role in shaping the organization into what it is today. 

Sami Khan is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose work in fiction and documentary has been supported by the Sundance and Tribeca Film Institutes, Rooftop Films, the Gotham, and the NBC/Universal's Directors Fellowship. Sami's films have screened at leading festivals including Tribeca, Toronto, Hot Docs, and Mumbai. The Globe & Mail called Sami's 2016 fiction debut, KHOYA, “an often startling work of compact storytelling.” His first feature documentary THE LAST OUT (with Michael Gassert) won a Special Jury Prize at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and will be released in 2022. The verite doc tells the harrowing tale of three Cuban baseball players and their dangerous journeys to the United States. The Hollywood Reporter called THE LAST OUT “a powerful true story of athletics and exile.” His 2019 short documentary ST. LOUIS SUPERMAN (with Smriti Mundhra) about Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson activist turned politician, was nominated for an Academy Award and won prizes at Tribeca, Hot Docs, Big Sky, Traverse City, AFI Docs, and Indy Shorts. The film was acquired by MTV Documentary Films.  

Julie Cohen directed and produced alongside Betsy West, the Academy Award-nominated documentary “RBG,” about the pioneering Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Their new films include "My Name Is Pauli Murray" about the non-binary Black lawyer, activist and poet, and "Julia", profiling America's food icon” Julia Child. Before she started making documentaries, Julie Cohen was a staff producer for Dateline NBC. In this episode, we're talking about fans, social media, and audience building!

Welcome to the new season on the power of fandom. We obsess over films, shows, etc., and were wondering, how does that translate to filmmaking and film distribution? What can we learn about audience engagement, community building, and impact from fandom? This season features many incredible guests and will dive into the Venom franchise, the Supernatural tv show, fan activism, documentaries like RBG, and much more.   Tune in every week for a new episode and tell us what you think on social media, @creativedistribution on Instagram & FB, and 101distribution on Twitter! thank you!

Leigh Stein is a writer interested in what the internet is doing to our identities, relationships, and politics - and also a marketing genius! Her critically acclaimed novel Self Care was released in June 2020. Leigh is the author of 3 other acclaimed books. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker online, and many more publications. Leigh was also the co-founder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist literary nonprofit organization. Her fifth book, What to Miss When, is a collection of poetry written during the Coronavirus pandemic, coming out today august 10th. It's self-described as "Poetry for people who hate poetry". The poems make mischief of reality TV and wellness influencers, juicy thoughtcrimes and love languages, and the mixed messages of contemporary feminism.

Suhad Babaa is the Executive Director of Just Vision, an organization that fills a media gap on Israel-Palestine through independent storytelling and strategic audience engagement. Suhad executive produced their 2017 acclaimed feature-length documentary, Naila and the Uprising, which portrays the women at the forefront of the First Intifada in the late 80s. Suhad was also an integral member of the impact campaigns around Just Vision's critically acclaimed film Budrus, and the Peabody award-winning documentary, My Neighbourhood. She is also a producer, news publisher, media strategist, human rights advocate and leads Just Vision's journalistic efforts as the Co-Director of the award-winning Hebrew-language news site, Local Call. 

In My Blood It Runs was made and distributed through a deeply collaborative process between the filmmaking team and the communities in the film, which this episode dives into. The acclaimed documentary was directed by Maya Newell who has previously directed the 2015 film Gayby Baby which streamed on Netflix. Rachel Edwardson, producer, is a Native from Alaska and her documentary series on the history of the Iñupiaq was the first all-native produced and directed history series in the United States.

Eliza Licht has been working in the social-issue documentary field for 20 years, and spent 17 years at the PBS documentary series POV, where she spearheaded broadcast campaigns for over 250 films. Eliza has also spearheaded engagement campaigns for over 200 films, including American Promise & Food, Inc.    Currently Eliza works at Red Owl, and in this episode she discusses working on the acclaimed Netflix documentary Disclosure, and the award-winning documentaries Roll Red Roll & Belly of the Beast.

Vanessa Cuervo Forero is a queer feminist Colombian cultural organizer, dancer & impact strategist working across art, activism & social justice. With DOCCO LABS she designed a virtual training program for Colombian Impact Producers, creating an online community called !ACCION! As part of the peace process in Colombia, she supports the ongoing work of the Colombian Truth Commission as an advisor for Historias en Kilometros co-creating shorts with Afrocolombian teams, in order to come to terms with decades of conflict in their regions and contribute to the national historical memory. In this episode, she talks about various award-winning film projects she collaborated on.

Welcome to our new season, "The Power of Community"! Andraéa LaVant is a nationally and internationally sought-after disability inclusion expert. She is widely recognized for spearheading a global disability justice movement as impact producer for Netflix’s Oscar-nominated film, Crip Camp, executive produced by President Barack and Mrs. Michelle Obama. Andraéa is founder and president of LaVant Consulting, Inc. (LCI), a social impact communications firm that offers cutting-edge corporate development and content marketing for brands and nonprofits. LCI’s specialty is helping brands “speak disability with confidence.” Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, NBC, Essence.com, the Root, and a host of other national media. As a black, disabled woman, Andraéa is committed to working toward a future where disabled people, particularly disabled people of color, are power players in every room.

This episode features Gretel Truong, VP of Impact Campaigns, and Carla Fleisher, VP of Impact Distribution at Represent Justice, which started as an impact campaign inspired by the life and legacy of Bryan Stevenson, featured in the film "Just Mercy", starring Michael B. Jordan and Oscar winners Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson. The campaign was launched alongside the Warner Bros. theatrical release of the film. Represent Justice’s mission is to turn stories into action to change the justice system while building the capacity of system-impacted communities. They fight for a fair legal system, dignity for system-impacted individuals and communities, and an end to extreme sentencing and mass incarceration.      

Sriyanka Ray is a Brooklyn based Indian Video Journalist, Storyteller, and Producer of social issue content. She works as a Senior Producer at BRIC TV, an Emmy Award-winning cable TV and digital network for Brooklyn, New York. She helped create and develop BRIC TV's #BHeard strand of public affairs programming. Her films have broadcast on U.S. public television and earned her eight NY Emmy® nominations among other accolades. In 2018, Sriyanka and her team won a NY Emmy Award for their town hall on school segregation in New York City.

Sonya Childress served as the Director of Partnerships and Engagement for Firelight Media for 16 years, where she led impact campaigns for veteran director Stanley Nelson’s films, including Freedom Summer, Freedom Riders, Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. Sonya previously held staff and consulting positions at Active Voice, California Newsreel, Kartemquin Films, ITVS, and Working Films. She founded Firelight’s Impact Producer Fellowship, a yearlong mentorship and training program for impact producers of color. She currently serves as a Senior Fellow with the Perspective Fund, a philanthropic resource for documentary film and impact campaigns, where she conducts field-building research.

Adele Free Pham is an activist and filmmaker whose work has appeared in over 20 film festivals, on HBO, PBS, and The Smithsonian. Her feature documentary called “NAILED IT”, about the genesis and culture of the Vietnamese nail industry, premiered on PBS in May 2019 and is the highest streamed film of the documentary series “ America Reframed”. She’s also Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow. 

Leah’s career in film began in Hawaii working in the marine department for the tv show LOST and HAWAII.  She’s a director and producer and her first feature, called FINDING HILLYWOOD  won multiple awards and screened at more than 65 festivals. She gave a TedX talk entitled “How Do You Cope With The Trauma You Didn’t Experience?”  Her 2016 feature film, called Big Sonia,  features her grandmother,  Sonia Warshawski, who is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City and one of the only survivors there who speaks publicly about her wartime experience. The film has screened around the world and was praised by critics in the  New York Times,  NPR, and more and is currently available for educators and digitally on Amazon, Vimeo on Demand, and Kanopy.  

James Ward Byrkit is a director and writer, known for the science fiction thriller Coherence, for which he was nominated for a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Director. He was the storyboard artist on the first three films of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the storyboard artist and Co-Writer of the Academy Award-winning film Rango. "Coherence" earned critical and audience praise around the world. The film follows eight friends at a dinner party who experience a troubling chain of events due to the influence of a passing comet.  

Deia Schlosberg made national news in October 2016, when she was arrested and charged with 45 years' worth of felonies for filming the #ShutItDown pipeline protest in North Dakota. She is currently directing the docuseries Bootstraps about universal basic income and her feature documentary The Story of Plastic, just premiered on April 22, for Earth Day, on the Discovery Channel. Previously, Deia produced the Sundance film, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change, directed by Academy award nominee Josh Fox. She also co-produced Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock distributed on Netflix, among many other environmental projects.

Caitlin is the new Director of Industry and Education at DOC NYC, North America’s largest documentary festival. Before that, she founded and spent a decade at the helm of Film Sprout, a grassroots distribution and audience engagement firm which paved the way for a lot of the campaigns we see today. She has worked on so many award-winning and impactful documentaries, that I recommend you to watch,  such as, The Invisible War, Vessel, The Hunting Ground, Fed Up, Where to Invade Next, Unrest, Whose Streets? And Trapped,  which premiered at Sundance in January 2016 (and not 2015, quick correction for the following interview). Please note that this conversation took place before the pandemic hit.

Mia is the founder of Fourth Act Film, where she works with filmmakers and content-creators on distribution strategy, sales, and innovative marketing tactics. She has worked on distribution and impact campaigns for award-winning films, including Sundance hits like The Game Changers, The Great Hack, Always In Season, and indie gem “306 Hollywood”, which was a recipient of the Sundance Creative Distribution Fellowship.

Heidi Nel is a social impact strategist and producer. As the head of The Raben Group’s Impact Entertainment division, she provides pro-social consultation to leaders in media, entertainment, and philanthropy, including the American Film Institute, Beachside Films, The Fledgling Fund, Fuse Media, Google, One Community, PBS, Peabody Awards and Media Center, Sony Pictures TV, STX Entertainment, and YouTube, as well as independent artists, filmmakers, and change-makers. Heidi has developed impact strategy and led successful engagement campaigns tied to award-winning films, such as Batkid Begins, The Best of Enemies, Food Chains, Happening, The Human Experiment, The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War, Newtown, The Return, Racing Extinction, and The Rape of Recy Taylor. Currently, she is working on Just Mercy featuring Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx. She has guest lectured at American University, Boston University, and George Washington University, and was an adjunct instructor at Duke University in the Sanford School of Public Policy. She has been featured in Variety, Real Screen, Screen Daily, Washington Life Magazine, and HuffPost. She has been recognized by the Case Foundation as a “Millennial Leader to Follow” and received the Media Impact Award from the PVBLIC Foundation and the United Nations Office for Partnerships.

Sarah Mosses is the founder and CEO of a fast-growing company, called Together Films. Together Films is a Marketing, Distribution & Data agency, specializing in Impact Distribution Strategy. They have worked on campaigns for amazing, award-winning films such as Sundance hit The Hunting Ground, on sexual assault on college campuses, the Oscar Shortlisted documentary Unrest, by Jennifer Brea, the HBO film The Tale by Jennifer Fox with Laura Dern and Common, and they also handled the US distribution for the award-winning film Roll Red Roll by Nancy Schwartzman, tackling rape culture, among many other projects. Together Films also manages marketing campaigns for film festivals such as the Human Rights Watch Festival and Doc NYC. they are currently helming the campaign for 2040, by Damon Gameau, an award-winning film on solutions to reverse global warming, and the film “For Sama”, by Waad al-Kateab, a documentary about the Syrian war, which won Best Doc at the Cannes & SXSW Film Festivals and was nominated for Best Documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning actress, writer, producer, and women in film activist. Naomi wrote, produced, and starred in the 2014 indie feature film, Imagine I'm Beautiful, which took home 12 awards on the film festival circuit. Naomi’s second feature film, Bite Me, is a subversive romantic comedy about a real-life vampire and the IRS agent who audits her. The film premiered at Cinequest, and then went on to the innovative, paradigm-shifting Joyful Vampire Tour of America in summer 2019, a 51-screening, 40-city, three-month, RV-fueled event tour that involved Joyful Vampire Balls, capes, a docu-series and a whole lot of joy.  Naomi shares her distribution journey with radical transparency to create a new distribution model for independent films. Naomi's first book, The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, will be published by Beacon Press on February 4, 2020 and is now available for order on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, IndieBound, and Beacon Press.    

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, an entertainment platform building a new studio model, with fair and transparent business practices, to provide every filmmaker the opportunity to create a sustainable career, no matter where they live or what they look like. Seed&Spark has curated streaming platform, which is fed by its crowdfunding platform, which has the highest campaign success rate in the world. An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. In 2011, she produced the feature film, Like the Water, starring Caitlin FitzGerald (Masters of Sex, UnREAL). Since then she has served as executive producer on a host of film and virtual reality projects that have played at festivals from Sundance to SXSW to Tribeca and beyond. Most recently she co-created and co-directed the web series F*ck Yes!, which Refinery 29 called, "The sex education you wish you had in high school." Emily was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Woman of Influence, was included on the 2015 Upstart 100 list, and graduated from the 2016 class of Techstars Boston. She has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding, and rewards based crowdfunding, and contributed to over 300 crowdfunding campaigns to date.

Curtis has written for ABC, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon, and won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the San Diego Asian American Film Foundation. As a community activist, he co-founded the Asian American Writers Workshop and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress. His first film, Vincent Who? has screened at nearly 400 colleges, NGOs and corporations in four countries. Curtis is currently a Visiting Scholar at NYU. His documentary, "Tested," which follows a dozen racially and socioeconomically diverse eighth-graders as they fight for a seat at one of New York City’s schools, has screened at hundreds of schools and communities around the world, and Curtis planned this campaign himself. He’s here to tell us how.

This is episode 6 with Leah Meyerhoff, whose debut feature film I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS premiered at SXSW 2014 and continues to travel the film festival circuit. Her previous short films have screened in over 200 film festivals, won a dozen awards, and aired on IFC, PBS and MTV. She has been shortlisted for the Student Academy Awards and Gotham Awards and received high profile grants from IFP, the Tribeca Film Institute and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation. She was honored with the Adrienne Shelly Director's Award and has been featured in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The New York Times. Leah also created in 2013 the acclaimed non-profit Film Fatales which advocates for an inclusive community of women feature film and television directors.

Mark your calendars for mid-August when brand new episodes will drop every week for Season 2 with guests including Leah Meyerhoff of Film Fatales, Emily Best of Seed & Spark, Curtis Chin of Tested, amazing alumni from the Firelight Media Impact Producer Fellowship, Naomi McDougall Jones of the Joyful Vampire Tour, and experts from Picture Motion, Together Films, The Raben Group and more !  

Welcome to Episode 5, with Maria Judice. Maria is an award-winning writer and director, who also founded INDIGO IMPACT in 2016 with a mission to bring left of center stories and creators to global audiences as an Impact Producer. She worked for such titles like DREAMSTATES starring Saul Williams, Haiti’s first Oscar selection called AYITI MON AMOUR, and SXSW breakout JINN by Oakland native Nijla Mumin. She brings affordable music, literature, art, and performance to the Bay Area as a Co-Curator of the MATATU FESTIVAL. She sits on the Diversity Board of SF FILM and Advisory Board of Code Tenderloin. WIRED magazine called Maria a “filmmaker provocateur” bridging technology thinking with art making. Here she talks about the decolonization of docs, how to build relationships with audiences and communities and about what an Oscar campaign entails.   Show notes: Thinking about your strategy before you enter the festival circuit is crucial. Even if you get into a top festival, it's about marketing your screening to fill the room with the right people who can amplify your message. You can get into a top festival and have very few people attend your premiere if you dont promote it properly ahead of time ! Depending on your goals, strategy will vary. If a film is meant for impact, or to screen widely, or to be a career milestone, all this will determine your priorities and the people you should meet. Oscar campaigns: Ayiti Mon Amour was the first Haitian Oscar nominee ever (short-listed for the final nominations), and just getting the pre-selection in was a huge deal as most films selected have a lot of money for marketing campaigns. Their team used this campaign to connect with the Haitian diaspora and make people think about Haiti in a new way, away from the poverty porn. The goal was also to put the director Guetty Felin on the map for her next career opportunities, which was a success. Very important to be realistic: if you don't have the money or star power, you need to take a step back and have realistic goals and do all the outreach necessary to cut through the clutter.  Until you're rich or famous, you do the work for people to come to you.  Maria has very real conversations with filmmakers who approach her about connecting with a specific community. If you're a white man who made a film about people of color, as is often the case, you might not be the right person to have those dialogues and might have to take a backseat during screenings, and let people from the community lead the conversation. You also can't expect people of color to want to embrace your film. Always ask yourself: Am I the right person to tell this story ? Do I have a genuine connection to the community I am filming ? How can I make them participants and not just subjects? It's a constant checking in. Once we turn the camera on, we have impacted their world, and can't pretend we are not participating with another person, and with that comes accountability and responsibility. If you made a film about or for underserved audiences, don't think of them as a pipeline to get your film seen. It's a complex relationship that takes time, especially for films about hard topics. Figure out early on and in-person how that audience is connected and rooted into the subject matter. It's "Holistic filmmaking" - treating your audiences as participants who help you curate and lead those conversations and the path of the film. When you do engage with audiences at screenings, it's also about creating a genuine connection and serving your audiences. They will always sniff out dishonesty and lack of authenticity. Treat your audiences with respect and intelligence. They are also your number one ambassadors ! Partnership building advice: look at what is around you, what partners do you already have in your community, the groups you already belong to, are involved in or who have invested in you ? Look at the low hanging fruits first. Relationships: show up to other filmmakers' stuff, be there for your community, remind yourself aboutt he support you do have around you and nurture those relationships.

In episode 4, Robin Hauser Reynolds, the director of the award-winning documentary “Code: debugging the gender gap” about women in technology shares her distribution and fundraising tips. CODE premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2015, and has caught the attention of the international tech industry and of policy makers in Washington, DC and abroad with hundreds of screenings around the world. Robin ran the kind of creative distribution campaign filmmakers only dream of, and shares what she learned.

In episode 3, Orly Ravid, who founded THE FILM COLLABORATIVE in 2010, tells us all about how to market docs and fiction films, the golden rules of online distribution, how to have a sustainable career with creative distribution and build festival relationships. Orly has spoken on distribution at Sundance, Cannes, SXSW, and many more places.   Show notes: Orly focuses on removing the middlemen so more money goes back to the filmmakers. TFC Offers free education resources (Distripedia, Guides, blog), paid consultation for members and custom distribution. Will educate everyone but doesn't distribute everyone. Not every film is a festival film. You have to know how to see past your immediate vision, most people won't go to Sundance and even if you do it might not work out the way you want. Think outside the box. Having distribution potential means some awareness and niche potential to market to. For narratives, if you have an unknown cast, you need niche appeal or themes that equate to marketing potential. Example of a fiction film that worked, "Light of the Moon": had some cast and a nice festival premiere, but also an issue and themes. If it's very funny, it's also a marketing hook. You need a hook, otherwise how many people are going to go see a film if it's just a poor version of a studio film ? You need a combination of factors for success. B-list cast can be very deceiving even if on a successful show, that doesn't translate into audiences. If you don't have A-list cast or a big festival premiere, be creative with niche marketing. The premiere creates buzz and gives you press. You need a plan B if it doesn't happen. Really think of the distribution very early on and look at what similar films did and what worked for them. Some of the films that worked well: "Mosquita Y Mari", a lesbian Latina film, "Hooligan Sparrow",  "Invisible War" and "The Hunting Ground" on sexual assault issues. Those issue-based films and with niche appeal will do well in every category, they also had top festival premieres. "Landfill harmonic" is our most successful film in festivals, made about 200K in festival income gross alone. We turned down Netflix worldwide to do a semi worldwide SVOD deal and a HBO deal, educational, etc. They got corporate sponsorships. We did a lot of various deals in various territories. It was a once in a blue moon movie that got covered in 60-min. It usually doesn't happen like that. Stuff you can do even without a big festival run: we had the film "Under our skin" about lyme desease, the director was making 25K a month just selling DVDs, when DVDs were still a big thing, but DVDs and educational licenses still sell very well. Niches and their strengths vary. For example LGBT content is more competitive now, because thankfully there is more content. In Europe there's a lot more public funding, but in the US it's about investors, equity, donations, grants, etc. The Basics: 1) Have a great publicity team 2) Have great marketing assets (trailer, stills, etc). You need new content to build an online community, and custom content for each platform.  Include all of this in your budget, it's just as important. Key ingredient: get everyone to sign up at every screening so you can let them know when the film is released and build  a mailing list. Get organizations on board, corporations, NGOs, schools, early on to be a screening venue and a place of outreach and marketing. Basically you need a plan before the film premieres: it takes time, work, and care. Assess where your film is and what worked or didn't for similar films. Coordinate timing if you were funded by a broadcaster, or adjust to SVOD restrictions or knowing when you have to turn that down. Corporate sponsorships take a very long time, so get help. Hire the right person if you don't have the relationships, it's rare that it's worth the time and energy. Windows matter: have the longest possible window when the licenses are at a high price, but also release the film online before people completely forget about it. It's a balance. If you are offered a lot of money from a streaming platform, weigh if it's worth it to forego other windows or not, and what they can bring tot he table. Each film is different. Streaming is king and transactional (iTunes ) diminished but still works for some films. Ad-supported VOD will be key, like original TV, as people won't to pay for multiple subscription services. Community screenings and educational are still generating plenty of revenue for the right type of films. Digital distribution advice: Don't assume that just putting it out there will be enough. If no one knows about it, if the platform is not promoting, no one will buy it, films don't sell themselves. Design key art that sells on those platforms. Some people don't want to own a film if they won't replay it over and over - renting or streaming with ads or a subscription service can be enough for most content.  Do not give exclusive rights to anyone when you don't know what marketing they are doing or if you don't know what other deal you could be getting from another platform. Build festival relationships with programmers, and other gatekeepers and entities that have reach. The film festivals' appeal is on the rise, as they are the ultimate curators within a sea of content.

The "Creative Distribution 101" podcast features interviews with experts and filmmakers who have used creative, alternative and non traditional ways to get their film out there. Whether you're interested in the future of filmmaking, or just want to learn some distribution tips, this is for you ! Sarah Moshman is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and TEDx speaker. Her first feature doc The Empowerment Project: Ordinary Women Doing Extraordinary Things has been screened over 700 times around the US and around the world in schools, groups, organizations and corporations starting conversations about gender equality. With Indieflix as the distributor, the film has been sponsored by major brands like Nordstrom, American Girl and Microsoft . Sarah's second feature doc, Losing Sight of Shore, follows the incredible journey of four women who rowed across the Pacific Ocean. The film was released globally in 190 countries on Netflix in May 2017. Now she's making a documentary examining sexual harassment in the workplace entitled NEVERTHELESS.

The "Creative Distribution 101" podcast features interviews with experts and filmmakers who have used creative, alternative and non traditional ways to get their film out there. In this first episode I interview Liz Manashil  (@LizManashil) who runs the Creative Distribution Initiative at the Sundance Institute. Before that, Liz spent several years as a film critic for the PBS/Hulu series JUST SEEN IT (which she also helped produce and direct). Overlapping this, Liz worked with distribution guru Peter Broderick. Her debut feature, BREAD AND BUTTER, was called “an absolute must-watch for women everywhere” by HelloGiggles. It was released by The Orchard and can be seen on VOD nearly everywhere. Liz is currently in post-production on her 2nd feature film, SPEED OF LIFE. Show notes: The basics of distribution: in the old model, for a traditional deal a distributor might take all rights in all territories, you would get an advance and very little control on the life of your film. Creative Distribution is about splitting up rights (theatrical, semi-theatrical and community screenings, educational, broadcast, digital rights, etc.) and not give all of them to one or a couple of parties, but rather exploit them in various ways with various partners. Educational can be quite lucrative for documentary makers, be careful not to give away to a distributor a big slice of the pie. We publish data from the case studies of the films we take on and give more intimate support to filmmakers. Be careful when signing contracts: look at the term length, and what does this distributor know how to do Shame for filmmakers keeps them from sharing information, because we think we are the only ones not leading sustainable lives. Start small: email addresses are incredibly valuable, start with a newsletter, pull back the curtain on your process. Don't turn into a marketer, be authentic to connect with audiences who care about your topic. There's never nothing happening even in between projects: share your process, be transparent and share your story in your newsletter and on social media with your fans. Don't forget the value you bring as a filmmaker, we tend to underestimate our value. The Creative Distribution Initiative application process is very detailed and takes several months. The three big goals: Impact, Eyeballs, Revenue, the filmmaker has to figure out what to prioritize. For the films we take on we look at the platforms you want to use, the funds you have access to, what team mates we can connect you to, what resources we have that could be helpful. You have to start by building a team and figuring out what your windows are. (*specific windows for the various distribution rights listed above). Look at the materials you have and calendar out moments in your campaign to use each asset and announce things (trailer, casting, premiere, etc.) Always be humble and grateful in your communication with your audience. Unrest was very successful partly because of the director's incredible relationship with her audience, from her crowdfunding campaign up until now. It's also very powerful to come from a personal place. Don't do a deal with someone or a distributor who cannot add value to what you are doing. The bottom line, is we look for filmmakers who are ready to roll up their sleeves.