Distribution Advocates Presents: The Truth About Exhibition (Episode 5)
Distribution Advocates Presents: The Truth About Exhibition (Episode 5)
Conversations that explore new frameworks for exhibition by bringing the focus back to the basics: reaching audiences.
Host Avril Speaks has a variety of conversations that explore new frameworks for exhibition by bringing the focus back to the basics: reaching audiences. By examining the direct connection with audiences, filmmakers are recentering exhibition as the primary focus of filmmaking. This episode features conversations with Alece Oxendine,
, , Kaila Sarah Hier, , Efuru Flowers, Carlos Gutiérrez, and Jemma Desai ().Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Alece Oxendine:
Connect with your audience, identify your audience. What are their ages, ethnicities, gender, expression? Who are they? How are they watching your film? Are they watching on their phones, computers, laptops, and theaters, on the fire stick? There’s a lot of indie content being made and most of it will have a difficult time finding a home. The number of companies to place material is fairly limited, especially compared to the amount of content that’s being created.
Avril Speaks:
Hello out there and welcome to Distribution Advocates Presents. I’m your host, Avril Speaks, producer, filmmaker, and co-founder of Distribution Advocates. Our team has commissioned this series of conversations where we delve into concerns about the current landscape of independent film distribution. We’ll chat with folks who are navigating these spaces, debunk some outdated myths, and look to innovative, sustainable, and equitable solutions for distributing films to their waiting audiences. Exhibition is the physical or virtual space where films are shown.
This can be a movie theater, a micro cinema, a bar, a film festival, an iPhone app, or a streaming platform. Discussion about exhibition involves how those venues and platforms are owned, managed and run. Distribution and exhibition go hand in hand because distributors license or rent content to exhibitors. For example, Sony Pictures Releasing is a distributor, whereas AMC Theatres is an exhibitor. A streaming platform like Netflix functions as both, a distributor and an exhibitor. It’s so confusing, which is why we’re here.
This episode will take a look at exhibition and the current hurdles of screening films for audiences. We’ll hear from film curator Jemma Desai, economist Matt Stoller, publicist Kaila Hier, Distribution Advocates’ co-founder Carlos Gutiérrez, and filmmaker Barbara Twist who was the director of partnerships at Vidiots, an independent cinema that recently opened in LA.
Barbara Twist:
I’m Barbara Twist. I am a filmmaker and exhibition consultant and the executive director of Film Festival Alliance. No matter what I do, I seem to find my way back to exhibition. I’m passionate about making sure that people get to see movies.
Avril Speaks:
You have your hand in a number of areas. Tell me about your journey. How did you get involved in filmmaking in the first place?
Barbara Twist:
I grew up going to the movies. I grew up going to the video store. It was part of my family culture. We didn’t have a lot of traditions growing up and we also didn’t have a lot of money growing up. With four kids, the movies were the affordable thing for us to go out and do. On the weekends, my mom would take us to the video store, we’d get a couple movies. There would be the seven o’clock show and the nine o’clock show in the living room, and once you turn 12, you could go to the nine o’clock show.
My first nine o’clock show was Moulin Rouge in the Twist Family Robinson Living Room, and then I got very interested in making movies. We had a video camera and every time my friends would come over would try to make little videos here and there. I went to a high school that had a morning television show, so I was one of the producers for that. I went to University of Michigan where I did film studies with also some film production, and after I graduated I was looking for a job. I had joined this Young Professionals in Cinema Club at the local art house theater.
Thinking maybe that would lead to something and at the meeting, the executive director of that theater asked if anyone was sticking around for the summer. I was the only one who raised my hand and he said, “Do you want a job?” The job was to research art house theaters in America and essentially create a database of every art house and independent theater in the United States, how many screens they had, how many seats they had, what types of movies they showed, what their budget was, create this survey.
In the five years that I worked there, I moved on from the survey work to eventually running this organization called Art House Convergence. I went from filmmaking into my first taste of movie theaters.
Avril Speaks:
Is that pretty much what led you into exhibition?
Barbara Twist:
Yes, there was very little conversation about exhibition when I was in school and it was primarily about production. A decade later when I was in graduate school. That was still the vibe, still primarily about making films and less about what happens to films after. Working at the Michigan Theater really gave me a direct link to what people were watching, who was showing up. All of a sudden I started to understand box office.
Avril Speaks:
That’s really interesting to me. What did you learn from that experience?
Barbara Twist:
We would get weekly box office reports. We would compare our cinema to the national average. I was working in a hallway next to the programmer who was on the phone with the distributors and the film booker every Monday, deciding whether to hold things over, what new films to bring in. And all of that really informed my understanding of what goes into an independent cinema and what goes into the decisions of what actually shows up on screen at an individual theater and more broadly in the independent space.
I started to get a good sense of the economics, how many seats were selling on average, usually sub 30% of the audience, of the seats sold for any given show. And I also started to see the pressures of the traditional distribution model, of showing three screenings a day, seven days a week. We had two screens. They would watch us show the same two, maybe three films for two or three weeks. Yes, we were in Ann Arbor, which is over a hundred thousand people. Population is decent size, but still having to hold those titles for so long and do so many shows.
Your primary days are the weekends and that’s really when people are coming in, Monday through Thursdays are a lot lighter. So you try to come up with alternative programming ideas to get people in for those nights, but that’s challenging if you’re bumping up against the distributor expectation or requirement that you’re showing three screenings a day, seven days a week. Starting to see the restrictions placed on cinemas by distributors was challenging. I also was there at a time when cinemas were shifting from 35 millimeter to digital.
I came in 2012, which was sort of the tail end of the VPF, the virtual print fee transition, the digital cinema transition in which the studios made a push to have all of the cinemas in America move from 35 millimeter to digital. Major chains like AMC, Regal—they were able to strike these deals with the studio distributors where they would essentially offset the cost. It’s about a hundred thousand dollars per projector to make the switch. Up until this happened in 2008, 2009, a lot of theaters had 35 millimeter projectors that had been there for decades.
They had inherited them, they were already there. They do routine maintenance on them, but the studios and the distributors spent a lot of money shipping prints. So in their desire to reduce their costs, they saw an opportunity. The rise of digital technology. All of that worked semi-favorable in the short term for the major chains because they had support from the studios in the form of these VPFs, which were paid out every time they played a film and it was sort of a reallocation presumably of the print fee that they would have paid by shipping the 35 millimeter print.
Avril Speaks:
As I spoke with economist Matt Stoller, he was also able to provide context on the relationships between studios, theaters and audiences.
Matt Stoller:
The only reason that movie theaters showed mostly movies from studios is because the distribution system was set up that way. Technologically, the studios were the ones who could actually make movies. It was expensive to make movies and that technology was very limited. And that’s not true anymore. What is weird about this current moment is that even though the technology and the raw material offers the opportunity for this remarkable ability to connect audiences and creators with one another, we’re instead highly atomized and we’re all only really able to see whatever the front screen of Netflix is and AMC is dying.
And that’s crazy. Why is this happening? Why is it that we can’t really get new product in front of people when that’s what people want? The markets are broken. What markets are good for is pricing, is essentially carrying information. When people are paying for something, it means they want it. When they’re not paying for something, it means they don’t want it. The pricing is broken. Netflix, Apple or Amazon, if you green light a movie, there’s no way it can do well because there’s no actual price that anyone is paying.
There’s no actual way for audiences to communicate that they like something or that they don’t like something. What would typically happen in entertainment industries is people would make shows or movies and if people bought those shows or movies or if advertisers wanted to advertise with those shows or movies, they would make more of them and they would try to make similar ones. And they would find a new audience that they weren’t serving before. They would say, “Oh, here’s a new audience and we can serve them.”
That’s what, for example, the Financial Syndication Rules in 1970 did. It’s also what the Paramount Consent Decrees in 1948 did when Hollywood was very consolidated and basically the movie theater chains and the studios were one integrated network. When that got broken apart, what you saw years later was the new Hollywood. It was much more European-influenced films. You didn’t have the big Cleopatra type of movies. Instead, you have Easy Rider, that different type of film, and they found a youth audience. 1970, very similar.
The TV networks were prohibited from having syndication arms. CBS sold off its syndication arm, which was called Viacom, and they had to buy a portion of their primetime from someone else. So you saw an incredible diversity of television shows like Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family and Sanford and Sons, all the way down to Seinfeld—different shows, weird shows that try to appeal to different kinds of audiences.
Avril Speaks:
As Matt’s historical background notes, well-regulated markets can drive the diversity of content made to audiences. Barbara noted this in our conversation as well.
Barbara Twist:
So a lot of the smaller cinemas playing more international art house titles—a lot of the independent theaters in the art houses couldn’t participate in these VPF deals because they weren’t playing the titles that were getting VPFs paid on them. They weren’t playing more commercial titles, so you see a lot of independent and art house theaters from 2010 up through 2014, 2015 running these digital cinema fundraisers.
It was a very interesting time of economic contraction of increased expenses. There was an incredible amount of independent films being bought and made available through distribution
Avril Speaks:
And so how has the landscape shifted today?
Barbara Twist:
I think that we’re seeing the very top-down shareholder-driven cinema, that’s leading of course to these films that are repetitive. I think that you can see in art house culture that audiences are in fact interested in original movies. Studios are primarily focused on realizing profits as quickly as they can, and that is not the business of art. That’s just the business of selling a product, and that’s a tension that has always existed. But I think that it is really impacting a lot of the arthouse and independent theaters that used to be able to operate outside of some of those economic forces, primarily because a lot of the distributors who used to operate outside those economic forces are now owned by those studios. Orion is now part of Amazon; MGM, part of Amazon. You have some wonderful distributors who are not owned by the Mouse [Disney], but it’s challenging. There aren’t as many and that restriction of movement of freedom is very dangerous for filmmakers.
Matt Stoller:
There’s this argument that there’s been technological disruption. People don’t like movies anymore, they don’t want to go to the movies. It’s a fragmented culture, and then Barbie came out and Oppenheimer came out and it turns out people want movies. All of those arguments were crap. It’s just that for some reason Hollywood is not delivering the movies that people used to like. I’m not just talking about the box office ones, that’s one segment of the movie industry. But a lot of the infrastructure for distributing and producing movies is misfiring.
The way that people internalize that today is they’re like, “Another Marvel movie. Great.” They’re not excited about that. They don’t know how to access movies they might like. This gets into some of the other consolidation trends in America, like newspapers have collapsed. The person who used to do movie reviews for their local newspaper isn’t there anymore, and a lot of the film reviewers are just doing pay-to-play stuff.
So you actually don’t know what good stuff is out there because you can’t rely on anything. So you’ve had a kind of collapse of a lot of the ecosystem that could actually introduce new product.
Avril Speaks:
Publicist Kaila Hier spoke with Distribution Advocates’ co-founder Abby Sun, about this system and its effect on awareness and placement of independent films.
Kaila Sarah Hier:
It feels like it’s never been harder for indie films to get programmed on theatrical screens in a meaningful way. We’re seeing such a rise of what I call a “roadshow theatrical,” which is like a weekend here in New York, and then a weekend in LA, a one-off in Chicago. Maybe you get three screenings in Austin.
You hear distributors say that it doesn’t make sense to do a weeklong [run]. That financially it either costs too much or the cinema doesn’t want to invest in it because there’s too many Marvel movies or there’s too many A24 movies, and they don’t want to commit to a week for a smaller film—even a smaller film that might have done TIFF or Sundance or Tribeca. If it is considered too small for them to make that return, you get a weekend. But I don’t know if limited roadshow theatricals are the answer that we need for saving the theatrical landscape because as a publicist it’s way harder when you have a movie doing a weekend here and then a week later, another weekend. And most of these movies are the smaller movies.
They can’t afford a firm. So then you have one person who’s doing all of this and you have this weird chimera of a release structure. Although that’s theatrical screen time, the sad reality is that when you look at it from a PR perspective, a lot of outlets won’t consider it a theatrical release if it doesn’t do a weeklong. And weirdly, distributors—a lot of them don’t seem to know this. They get surprised when you can’t get the New York Times, even though you just played one night in New York.
Abby Sun:
So are there other things that you count now as a release for trying to get press and publicity?
Kaila Sarah Hier:
We are living in the age of digital releases. That’s a huge thing. If you track films, so many of them have just done straight to VOD releases. There may be a week in LA, a week in New York, and then boom, they’re on iTunes.
Abby Sun:
Exactly, what we call the narrowing of windowing between theatrical releases and going to home video or VOD and then day and date releases (when it goes into theaters and onto streaming platforms at the same time—it’s a day and date release).
Kaila Sarah Hier:
But we see the side effect of streaming platforms having so much original content and having such a hold on the release market because those are the films that thousands, millions of people are all just going to watch as soon as they’re out. And so those are the films that really take up a lot of the limited space that we have on the journalistic front. I hear it so much: “Unless it’s doing a week, there’s no point for us considering it.”
Efuru Flowers:
You’re competing with studio content. Netflix is making their own shows, everybody’s making their own shows, their own content, their own films. When Netflix came and was licensing content from the different studios, and the studios were like, “Well, we want to have our own streaming services.” They have to put their content someplace and then take it back from another place. Everybody’s competing for space, and so that’s what makes it a bit limiting.
Avril Speaks:
And not only are you competing for space and you’re also competing for eyes, and I think that does leave us in this place where we’re making a lot of content, but the outlets where to put those films, it’s a big hole and it’s a big problem, especially for indie filmmakers. I’ve heard from a number of people many times, particularly in the last couple of years. Filmmakers who say, “Well, there’s so many options or this is a great time because there’s so many channels and there’s so many places to put films.”
So there’s this idea that if you turn on your television set, there are so many channels and now we have all these apps, it almost makes it appear like it’s limitless. What do you mean it’s limited? There’s all these channels that we could put stuff on, but once you start to really pare that down, a lot of these companies are owned by one company. A lot of those companies have their own criteria of what they’re looking for, depending on the time, depending on the season, depending on so many factors that start to whittle that list down in terms of where to put things. It’s not as vast as it may appear.
In my conversation with Carlos Gutiérrez, a co-founder of Distribution Advocates and founder of Latin American media arts nonprofit Cinema Tropical, he echoed these concerns and provided his own perspective on how industry control affects film exhibition and circulation.
Carlos Gutiérrez:
Hi, I am Carlos Gutiérrez. Probably you can hear in my background I’m in New York City, the loudest city in the universe. I am the co-founding executive director of Cinema Tropical, which is a not-for-profit organization that promotes, distributes and programs Latin American and US Latinx cinema in this country. The film world is very fragmented by different areas—it’s full of intermediaries—by sales agents, programmers, distributors, publicists. So there’s a lot of fragmentation in the film world.
Cinema Tropical has been such a great space to really think about all these issues. We’ve been able to create a very fluid platform that has allowed us to work in different capacities as programmers, as distributors, as publicists. So in that sense I’ve been able to see a lot of the pitfalls in each one of those professional endeavors, which ultimately create problems for distribution and exhibitions of a film. A lot of those interests, a lot of times, contradict themselves.
The interest of a sales agent a lot of times contradict with the interest of the distributor or the publicist or the filmmakers or even the audience. I do personally think that cinema is living in a golden age. The problem: it’s the structure that contains cinema. That’s completely outdated and that’s what the crisis is. Not cinema in terms of production, but cinema in terms of distribution and exhibition. I think it’s also important to mention that these problems didn’t start during the pandemic. Since I started my career over 25 years ago, it’s basically the same problems.
Production exploded. Film production became more democratic, making a film became more accessible to many more people. But the film world, instead of opening up the same way, distribution and exhibition did the opposite. They closed down. Instead of opening opportunities or rethinking the formulas, the film industry kind of has expelled out the audiences. These days, regardless of the budget, if it’s a $10,000 film or it’s a $10 million film, all of those films have to compete in the same routes to get attention of audiences in general, in the film world.
Audiences want to connect in an accessible way. You go premiere at the film festival, you get some press and distribution. But then by the time it will reach an audience, it will be probably six months or a year later. Who will remember that film six months or a year later? That process is already fragmented. We are spending a lot of the time fighting the wrong cases. Instead of looking for audiences, we’re so invested in the very hegemonic film world. I do think there’s a larger plan to dominate narratives.
Matt Stoller:
I think a lot of filmmakers understand that distribution mechanism isn’t functional. We have to figure out how to get around that and get to the audiences.
Efuru Flowers:
The goal being to be in the exhibition space, to be able to drive eyeballs to that content, whether it’s in theaters, in streaming or on television, it’s in the AVOD space or SVOD, etc.
Abby Sun:
How many theaters the film can get into is not a sign of film quality or appeal.
Kaila Sarah Hier:
And neither is a Rotten Tomato certification.
Avril Speaks:
What is some new work we could look to? Barbara Twist spoke about her work at Vidiots in LA. Barbara, I haven’t been to Vidiots yet, but many people I know are talking about it, which is important to note in and of itself.
Barbara Twist:
This past summer in June 2023, we finally opened Vidiots, which was founded in 1985 by Patty and Cathy, our co-founders in Santa Monica. And then they transitioned to a nonprofit in 2012. They shuttered in 2017 temporarily while they searched for a new home. So I joined Maggie McKay, who is the executive director, in June of 2020 as the director of partnerships. I spent the next three years really focused on raising funds, getting the organization set up and laying the foundation for the organization to return. And so we did, with a two screen movie theater, a video store.
One of the screens is sort of a micro cinema flexible community space and then also a beer and wine bar and concession stand. What I had seen over the last decade was that people want to go to the movies and there are barriers. Absolutely. There’s a cost barrier. Sometimes there’s the sticky floor barrier.
Avril Speaks:
I’ve experienced the sticky floor and I will definitely say it is a barrier. Especially after the pandemic, I realized how gross movie theaters are. The sticky floor. It’s a situation. It’s a thing.
Barbara Twist:
Yes. I think that speaks to one of those challenges that extends beyond exhibition, and that’s one of labor. You have a sticky floor because you’re not paying your staff. You’re not employing enough staff to keep the space clean, and that’s really critical as people are thinking about creating their own space. Labor is often your biggest line item and should be, often one of my frustrations with nonprofits. Everyone always wants to give you money for programs and they never want to give you money for people. And I always say, “Well, how are the programs getting done if not for the people?”
Avril Speaks:
Right? There’s a disconnect. People are interested in funding the product, but less so the process by which that product reaches its audience. And that goes back to your earlier point about the disproportionate level of funding and education for production versus exhibition.
Barbara Twist:
Yes, there are certain funders who are interested in funding exhibition. There are labs that are starting to really put an emphasis on what happens to your film after it’s made. It’s like if a tree falls in the woods, is a sound made? Of course the tree makes a sound, but does it matter if no one hears it? I think about that with movies. That you can spend this time and money and you can make a film and you have this big team and you put a lot of hours, years of labor into it.
But if you can’t fulfill it, if you can’t get it in front of an audience, what does it matter? And it doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t matter, but there is that final connection. It’s that final handoff. A filmmaker, their job in life is to make movies. They make one, then hopefully they make another and hopefully they get to have a long life making many films. But in audience, it’s unique to each film and they need to be there to receive it and experience it. People want to go to the movies on the big screen.
They want to have an experience. There is something really beautiful about being in community with each other. They want to see themselves represented on screen, and those are all achievable things if you build the right model.
Avril Speaks:
I think you’re onto something here in terms of the experience of it and also the conversations that we’re having right now. So many people are saying cinema is dead. As independent filmmakers, and as a producer myself, that’s something that I’m always having to think about. Where are we going to distribute the film? Where are we going to exhibit the film? Who’s coming to see this film? With everything that you’ve just said, what does this mean for independent filmmakers? You talked about repertoire films doing so well at Vidiots. Is this the future of film?
Barbara Twist:
We are looking to the past to give us some insight into the future. We can use past experiences to inform where we might go. We did kind of a gut renovation thinking through everything from pricing models to partnership models to staffing really from the bottom up—rebuilding it. We definitely looked to a lot of existing cinemas as reference, but also talked a lot about how we wanted it to be different. Vidiots’ mission is about affordable, equitable, accessible cinema.
That was really important in building the financial model for the organization, being able to have a lower ticket price. The general admission price is $12, a member price is $9. I had a dream that a kid could get dropped off with a $20 bill and see a movie, rent a film and get some popcorn, and that’s totally doable. Some things in my opening months at Vidiots made me very excited about the future.
During the opening weekend, there was this 12-year-old girl who came up to the concession stand, and we struck up a conversation. I was like, “Do you think the theater is cool?” I’m always interested in anyone under 18 if they’re in a movie theater. I have so many questions for them. I want to know how they got there, who brought them, if it was their idea, if it was their parents’ idea, what film are they seeing? Do they watch movies? So I asked this young woman a lot of questions and she was so enthusiastic and she’s like, “I’m a huge movie buff. I dragged my mom here. I’ve been waiting for you guys to open.”
I took her around to a booth and said, “We’re so excited that we’re here and we’re excited to be here for you. Can’t wait to see you around.” A couple of months later, we did a screening of Stop Making Sense, and halfway through the opening party reception, I see this young woman dragging her friend across the lobby. She’s like, “Oh, I know the best places to sit in this theater. We better get our seats now.” And it made me so happy that this young person felt such a sense of ownership over the cinema.
We’d only been open a couple of months and already they had this idea that this space was for them, that they were welcome. I think that is really important. A movie theater can be that space. It can be a place for you to come experience the cinema, but also talk with people, connect, that type of thing, accommodating the experience that particular audience is looking to have. For filmmakers, there’s a lot on the table. It is a really interesting moment. It’s also a big change. It’s no longer going to be: “I’ve made a movie. I’m premiering it at a film festival, and a distributor is gonna take it and run with it.”
And frankly, that hasn’t been the experience for most filmmakers anyway. That it’s been the experience of a select few filmmakers and that selection was wider in the past, or larger—not necessarily a diverse selection of filmmakers. Today, I think filmmakers really need to confront, from the beginning before they even make the film, “Who is their audience?” And then once they have an idea of that, “Where does their audience engage with film?” And if you as a filmmaker really want the theatrical experience and you’re also making a film for an audience who you’re not seeing at theaters, then you got to think about that.
It doesn’t mean you need to change your film, doesn’t mean you need to change your desires of premiering theatrically, but it does mean that you’re going to have to seek out a distributor or a producing partner who can help make that theatrical experience come true for you. Because you may need to do more work in terms of marketing to bring that audience into the theater.
Avril Speaks:
Movie theaters, while perhaps the most recognizable form of exhibition, are not the only option on the table. In fact, independent filmmakers globally have been experimenting with methods of reaching audiences. When my Distribution Advocates colleague Abby Sun sat down with film curator Jemma Desai, they spoke about one such innovative practice.
Jemma Desai:
Deepa Dhanraj was talking about the Yugantar Film Collective films, and she’s spoken so much about how wild she finds it that the film festival world is showing these films, but they’re only really activated when they return to the people that need them. Yugantar Film Collective were working during the Emergency in India, during a huge time of political shifts, and Deepa Dhanraj and her collaborators were going into these rural communities. This was a time when working women, rural women, lower-class women were really active in the labor movement, and so she worked with them, she co-created these films. She made manuals for union organizing essentially, but they were made with the women. And these films languished in disrepair for many years in her home. And then she sparked up a friendship with an academic who then connected her with the Arsenal in Berlin. And they restored them and they circulated online in March 2020 or around that time, that summer. And now they’ve been shown in a lot of film festivals, in a lot of art contexts, but they’ve also been shown in domestic workers’ unions. That is a total inversion.
She talks about dragging projectors to lampposts to power them up and staying up till midnight and waiting for the workers to finish so that they could watch the films. There’s a real direct immediacy, that’s like, “How can I change the form of this exhibition so that it can meet the people that I want it to meet?”
In a lot of Global South cultures, there’s this act of hospitality, which is not about formality, but it’s about everything for everyone. That’s what I see in her articulation of what distribution was for those films.
There is some wisdom in these examples of when a filmmaker does see distribution as part of the ongoing process of making the film, making meaning from the film. What if we followed that logic? It might not be that your film is useful in the way that Deepa Dhanraj was talking about, like the union organizers. But what might you think of if you thought about that as an ongoing process that wasn’t detached and it wasn’t tied to status? It was tied to relation.
Avril Speaks:
This renegotiation of the methods of exhibition echoes similar thoughts and calls for centering audiences that Carlos found through his work with Cinema Tropical.
I want you to talk about how Cinema Tropical has been able to forge out this level of success in the midst of fragmentation, especially as you talk about these different systems that exist.
Carlos Gutiérrez:
What has been key for us is basically putting, at the center of equation the films, the filmmakers, and the audience, not the other way around. I think that’s the big problem—the film industry is at the center and not the filmmakers, not the audience. The film industry is very self-centered, so in that sense, Cinema Tropical has been clear from the beginning that we are about finding shortcuts between the films and the audience.
So in that sense, putting them at the center of the equation, it’s how we create sustainable ecosystems that we can all thrive in. We have to rethink the parameters of what distribution and exhibition means.
Avril Speaks:
Can you give any examples of people who have at least experimented with doing that in terms of going after the audience and breaking from the norm a little bit in terms of how they’re looking at distribution or exhibition?
Carlos Gutiérrez:
There’s certainly been case studies, success stories. I know a lot of filmmakers that have found their audiences in very specific realms here in the US in the academic world. I know filmmakers that make a career of doing tours around universities and selling their films to libraries. My motto these days is “we need to take the films out of the film world” because there’s certainly audiences very interested in our films. So how can we find partners in other realms? In visual arts, in the academic world.
Everybody loves cinema, everybody loves watching films, but how to create an ecosystems that we can also bring those films? In the documentary world, we’ve had those impact campaigns. That’s a good way to go, but also we have to reshuffle because a lot of the times those impact producers are at the center, again, of the equation. They need to work in tandem with the filmmakers. It shouldn’t be more important than the filmmakers or the audience. More horizontal, not that the impact campaign producer takes the center stage.
Avril Speaks:
And it just comes back to that central question of where is our audience and what is the best way to reach them? Wrestle with that question more, think about what are those spaces that will reach those people that we’re trying to attract.
Carlos Gutiérrez:
We need to protect it ourselves. We need to create spaces. So in that sense, Cinema Tropical is a safe space where you can experiment. We need the experimentation. Also, every film is very different. A lot of the times, if you’re going to put that effort to doing a whole film festival circuit and to try to get all the exposure and getting to international sales agent and trying to find local distributors worldwide. Maybe your audience is just right next door.
There’s so many different types of relevance in addition to, of course, the artistic one, can be politically, socially. So it’s finding relevance and then being very transparent with the audience, why this film is important. This film is relevant because this and this and this. From the beginning, detecting your potential audiences and rethinking the whole structure of it. What do you want? What are your expectations? And I think that’s kind of the harder part because the filmmakers don’t really know what to expect because the film world is not transparent.
There’s not much information. And the film world basically creates films for consensus, but usually those are the safe films, the ones that are not the most provocative. We really need to rethink that as well. Be less obsessed with commercialization and be more interested in finding audiences and then building that financial ecosystem. Right now, it’s a good opportunity also to rethink what cinema is. In the sense that during the pandemic, television, the platforms, basically aged cinema.
That was the only way to consume cinema, but at core, cinema needs that in-person experience. That’s what makes cinemas so powerful. We need to democratize in-person exhibition spaces. We need to make exhibition more accessible. For example, in Chile, there’s an association of 47 micro cinemas of different realms, some cinemas that are independent cinemas to really micro cinemas. And now these days it’s not very expensive to have a nice projector and a good screening room.
Not only that, there’s a lot of empty spaces in the cities. There’s a lot of auditoriums. Every school, every organization have empty auditoriums. How to occupy those spaces? How to open up those spaces? Changing the idea that we have to bring people to the cinema. No. Cinema has to go where the people are because there’s places where people already get together, that they have their own auditorium. So it’s basically how do we get to those spaces?
Avril Speaks:
What do you think is at stake if we don’t find new ways to envision the realm of exhibition?
Carlos Gutiérrez:
We need to fight for diversity of narratives. That is really, really, really key. Protect different types of narratives, protect and support and promote. More so these days, I do think cinematics and other political importance in person cinema space provides a safe space where we can talk about the gray areas. Everything’s so polarized in our societies worldwide these days. Cinema and films allow that for 90 minutes, two hours, we’re going to understand the complexities of the world and in community. For me, it’s really important—creating communities, creating dialogues through cinema. The idea of democratizing exhibitions, spaces in cinema is very important. Precisely to create more safe spaces for the citizens and for the audience in general to come together and create dialogues. Going back to the idea I mentioned earlier, cinema is thriving. I think the film world has enabled different bridges of the world to really thrive. I think cinema can guide us through these very turbulent times.
It’s important to get inspired and get insight. We’re so desperate because we think we don’t have any answers to the complexity of the world, but I do think films, cinema in general, is providing a lot of those answers.
Avril Speaks:
Matt Stoller offered his thoughts in this regard as well. Calling on filmmakers to reimagine the possibilities of what connecting with their audiences could look like.
Matt Stoller:
Filmmakers should really spend some time thinking about how to get to their audiences outside of the studio and streaming system. Figure out if you can build an affinity group before you start making your movie. Try to bake that into the creation of the art itself versus thinking, I’m going to make this wonderful art and it’s going to go out there and people will just see it. Because that’s not how things are working right now.
I think this is an interesting moment to try some innovation. Creators can connect with their audiences. They can do physical events. We all have supercomputers in our pocket. There’s all sorts of ways to organize now with these tools. We should be able to figure out how to build communal experiences in communal spaces. The raw material is better than it’s ever been for that
Avril Speaks:
That ability to experiment, particularly for underrepresented communities, helps create an ecosystem where filmmakers can thrive, but also continue to have a space where they know they can come to not just to create something, but to have the film distributed as well, and to have it be seen. That’s often the big hurdle at the end. The avenues for exhibition and for distribution have gotten smaller, even though the field has been democratized. There’s some people who would say, “But that’s crazy. We have so many channels.”
When you turn on a television set, not realizing that many of those channels are owned by the same companies. And I often feel there’s a disconnect between what audiences say they want versus what audiences support versus what is put out there for audiences to support. And I think that there’s a big gap between those three things because studios say, “Well, the audience wants this, so let’s make this.” But I know audiences who are like, “We don’t want that. We want to see this other thing.”
And I found that, particularly in projects where I focused on getting the product to the audience, because there are so many channels and because there’s so much content, it’s really difficult to get the attention of that audience. But it’s like when you look outside of that box and you examine what are the other avenues for reaching that audience, it opens up other opportunities for getting the word out and for places for exhibition. So I think that that shift in mindset, it changes how we make films, but also how we distribute films, how we exhibit films too.
That’s all for this episode of Distribution Advocates Presents. Tune in for our other series’ installments, discussing the landscapes of film festivals, film school, distribution, sales agents and awards. This episode is produced by Moso House. Our producer is Nacey Watson Johnson. Our supervising producer is Ivana Tucker, and our production manager is Samiah Adams. Sound design is by Emily Crain.
Special thanks to the team at Distribution Advocates, Abby Sun, Carlos Gutiérrez, Karin Chien, Amy Hobby, and Kelly Thomas. As well as this episode’s guests Barbara Twist, Matt Stoller, Kaila Hier, Efuru Flowers, Alece Oxendine, and Jemma Desai. And of course, a heartfelt thank you to our funders, Ford Foundation, Prospective Fund and Color Congress. I’m your host, Avril Speaks, signing off.