Blogging IDFA: Advice About Documentary Distribution

A still from Franny Armstrong's "McLibel."

In the true spirit of blogging, below are some notes I took during a presentation that was part of IDFAcademy and open to filmmakers whose work was presented in Docs for Sale. I hope this information is helpful to other filmmakers. We are in a time of great shifts in documentary distribution and my experience at IDFA left me with many unanswered questions, and a sense that the old world media order may be morphing faster than it knows itself.

Deborah Zimmerman of Women Make Movies moderated this session and began by describing the traditional model of independent film distribution.

She noted that, though most films are released using traditional distribution method—festivals, theaters, broadcast, educational and home video—every rule is meant to be broken. She noted that sometimes films may be launched on TV, and that people are even doing “day and date” releasing (booking theaters and selling DVDs at the same time).

She also spoke about how a distributor’s back-end is the educational market, and that you do have to decide if a film has more of a general market as a DVD or an educational market.

Zimmerman then introduced Diane Wireman who runs the documentary division of Participant Media.

Participant Media creates entertainment that inspires and compels social change. All their films are intended for cinema and social activism campaigning. Participant is most well known for An Inconvenient Truth, the fourth highest all-time grossing documentary.

Diane spoke about how the past year and a half has been rough for documentaries in the theaters, but she commented that all it takes is another film to work for people to start believing again.

Speaking about festivals, she commented to filmmakers that we shouldn’t send rough cuts to festivals unless we know the programmers.

She explained that P&A—prints and ads—are usually paid for by distributors.

The second guest to speak was from Joost.com an online distribution platform that, like many of the other new platforms, is eager to see if their model will catch on. I recommend that filmmakers check it out.

The final person to speak was filmmaker Franny Armstrong who was representing the D.I.Y. filmmaker position. She spoke about her experience with her first film McLibel, and her current environmental film showing at IDFA called The Age of Stupid (view the trailer).

Franny spoke about how their aim is not the highest profit, but the most number of viewers. She explained that when she decided to make McLibel she had no funding, quit her job, went on the dole, used credit cards and had a rich boyfriend to support the film.

The film went on in the following eight years to reach 25 million viewers. She said they wound up making a lot of money, and was very pleased to work with the non-exclusive Journeyman sales agent.

For her new film The Age of Stupid she decided in 2002 that she wanted to make a film about climate change, and that she didn’t want to work without funding.

They have been working with a Crowd Funding model, where people invest £500-35,000 and each own a percentage of the film. With this model they raised £1million. Their orchestra donated space, the BBC opened their archive for them, and their goal is to reach 250 million viewers.

One of Franny’s central points about working in the film industry is that she always wanted to maintain all rights to her work, and not give them to a distributor. She spoke of working with distributors in different ways—instead of them receiving a percentage of revenue, she is employing them to do work they are good at, like organizing the theatrical run of the film. In this way all revenue comes back to the filmmakers and the ‘crowd’ owners of the film.

To distribute the film they will be partnering with the many groups in the UK working on climate change issues, and as it opens in theaters whey will be bringing different speakers each night. They are also working with a model of independent screenings where anyone can license the film and get a DVD for a week and keep the profits for themselves.

In concluding the discussion Zimmerman made an important note that while there have been a few distribution/funding models that have excited many people (Robert Greenwald, for example)—there haven’t been any that have been reproducible. It seems that the first time gets a lot of press attention, but doesn’t necessarily translate for other filmmakers.

And so for now, it seems to me, the traditional distributors will continue to do what they are good at, and a few will survive, while filmmakers inspire and conspire to imagine new ways to work independently or in collaboration with our old paradigm partners to get our films made and distributed.

Based on what I learned at the Silverdocs and IFP conferences, and now at IDFA, I am witnessing this new distribution/financing paradigm be envisioned and worked out, and I’m seeing how government funding and broadcasting is affecting the filmmaking culture in various parts of the world. While some people are doing quite well, many people are noticing resources for documentary drying up. While I’m often quite envious of my European and Canadian filmmaking brothers and sisters, I can see that the libertarian US spirit produces a kind of wild bravery—from online business models to the credit-card-funding culture that Europeans simply can’t believe is a significant part of film financing in the US. I would love to see an international discussion amongst independent filmmakers addressing these questions of funding and distribution, seeing how we can support one another with a goal of more self-sustainability, and the hope of sharing our stories and strengthening friendship.

Link to this page: http://www.independent-magazine.org/