Taking Off: How we grew ideas from an in-person retreat, before our next one.
Some insider reflections as I board a plane for this weekend's Distribution Advocates gathering.
This weekend, Distribution Advocates is heading to an in-person retreat. In preparation, I took a look back at the notes from our previous retreat, two and a half years ago. What did we learn from that gathering and how did it impact the direction of our work? What has happened since that last retreat until now that can potentially inform our mindset for this weekend?
There have been seismic shifts in the industry since we posted our initial manifesto over five years ago. In February 2020, Distribution Advocates started as a conversation between like-minded people. We have used our nimbleness to learn, evaluate and grow our work when needed, while our boldly stated “unshakable values around distribution” from the manifesto have remained potent and constant.
Lessons from the 2022 Retreat
Two and a half years ago, in Greenport on Long Island, Distribution Advocates gathered for our first in-person retreat. The guests included core members of DA (me, Karin Chien, Carlos Gutierrez, Abby Sun, and Avril Speaks), various stakeholders in the independent nonfiction ecosystem, and leaders in tech, city government, public radio, and other fields outside film.
Given the large number of pain points in the film ecosystem, we questioned if the work we were doing by provoking important conversations, and providing information to filmmakers through dozens of panels, teach-ins, and one-on-one consulting was enough. Especially given how the many stakeholders throughout the supply chain were failing to adapt to new conditions in our field.
The diversity of perspectives at the retreat allowed for robust and generative debate that led to these specific new potential paths for Distribution Advocates:
Production of a high-quality limited podcast series to pivot our work toward narrative-driven change as opposed to centering data-driven education. We looked at podcasts like Viewers Like Us that used filmmaker stories to examine institutional biases and systemic blind spots.
Creation of a marketing fund to support public releases of social justice-oriented films by BIPOC filmmakers. These films are overwhelmingly distributed by non-theatrical distributors, i.e. those whose primary revenue derives from educational sales and public performance rentals. This fund would uplift the theatrical experience of these films, which would enhance each film’s word-of-mouth, critical reception, and attention from educators and activists. It would aim to signal to audiences that theatrical exhibition can be a powerful space for communal experience and collective dialogue that holds the power to spark transformative cultural and societal change.
The building of a platform or reimagining of an existing platform with the goal to center local exhibitors, strengthen diverse curation, and create robust tools for independent distributors. This work would amass collective attention for longer-tail cultural impact of curated films, while increasing reach and sustainability of community-driven and mission-driven entities. Part of this exploration would look at the streaming platform Ovid.tv, which has done the heavy lift of tech development to provide online consumer access to films from 50 independent distributors, and which could be a good partner to create a hybrid non-profit entity in a similar way that PRX has done in the audio and podcast spaces.
Post-Retreat Podcast and Growth
Two months after the retreat, we asked the forward-thinking Perspective Fund to pivot the remainder of a grant to do a season of a podcast, and allow for research around a potential larger intervention centered on the idea of a marketing fund. Due to bandwidth, we would table the platform conversation for another day. With Perspective Fund’s approval, the podcast was the first new activity we got off the ground.
None of us had previously made a podcast, so after some research, we hired Moso Haus, a women-owned, Black-owned podcast production and marketing studio. We elected Avril Speaks to be the host, with her warm voice and smart interviewing skills, and settled on the name Distribution Advocates Presents the Truth About… Each episode is titled “The Truth About” plus a commonly misunderstood aspect of film distribution. The five members of Distribution Advocates formed an editorial advisory council (a model we later mapped onto the marketing fund).
The resulting podcast was incredibly successful in achieving its goals. Not only did we have over 40,000 downloads, people were talking about it and recounting the stories with an intensity and at a scale we couldn’t achieve with our previous teach-ins. Huge credit here goes to the retreat participant Gary Chou who first pushed the podcast idea at the Greenport retreat.
At the same time we developed the podcast, from March to June 2023, Karin Chien and I went on a listening tour, talking to investors, tech platform founders, acquisitions executives, nonprofit exhibitors, and film teams. We talked about membership models, community giving circles, public radio, music industry models like Merlin. Central to the research was the question of how to encourage a change in the mindset and modus operandi of the many stakeholders.
Summer of 2023 was set aside for writing. The resulting proposal honed in on three specific doable “interventions” or pillars which were meant to cross-support one another and move the field forward. These adapted the remaining two retreat-based priorities into the following:
Creation of a collectivist structure for small, independent distributors through regular meetings, providing shared resources, and training on new tools for enhanced engagement capacity. This was inspired by Europa Distribution, which acts as a network, think tank, and voice for independent film distributors across Europe. It would also draw inspiration from the group of eight founding distributor members Ovid.tv.
Creation of an audience development and engagement fund or granting program that encourages experiments in distribution in order to drive new distribution pathways. A crucial design element was the public sharing-back of data and narratives around learnings from the experiments. The concept was broadened from supporting only social-justice oriented films to expand the types of innovations available to the field for iteration.
Training and resources for audience design and engagement, marketing and publicity, throughout the film-to-audience ecosystem, around social engagement, visual assets, and storytelling in media.
Our final proposal was detailed and ambitious. Karin Chien’s Color Congress Keynote in October teased elements from our work together. Karin and Carlos Gutiérrez would later work with Color Congress to design their own distribution initiative.
At the top of 2024, I spent a Spring fellowship at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center Documentary in the Public Interest Initiative conducting confidential interviews with dozens of independent distributors around documentary film releases. Some distributors expressed fatigue at the array of newly-formed groups spearheaded by film teams and nonprofits to address the now widely accepted crisis in distribution. Nearly all of the smaller distributors were already struggling with bandwidth and resources while being framed at the center of a growing crisis. I began to wonder if we needed to rethink how we could support a collectivist structure.
During our participation in the Sundance Catalyst’s Future Models program, Distribution Advocates invited Denitsa Yordanova, Head of UK Global Screen Fund and International Funds at the British Film Institute to work with us. Part of our work has always been to look outside our home country for other interesting models. She 100% supported our proposal, though warned that receiving innovative proposals would be an ongoing challenge. We gained other insight from her, and a direct connection with John McNight from the BFI to hear about the challenges and triumphs of the BFI National Lottery Audience Projects Fund. This program, which has overlapping ambitions to our own Fund, launched in 2017 and was already on a learning curve ahead of us.
Also in the Spring, Distribution Advocates did a first trial-run workshop at IDA’s Getting Real conference in Los Angeles as part of the training and resources goal of Film-ADE. This first workshop was a successful experiment in modeling out how we could maximize engagement with film teams. Our Gotham Week Expo event “Leveraging Data to Identify, Grow, and Engage Your Film’s Audience” opened up the possibility to go deeper into specific topics. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from participants and partner organizations. Our efforts have reinforced the urgent need for active training. Only bandwidth and funding limit our ability to widen access to this program.
The Film-ADE Fund and Ongoing Learnings
The marketing fund, now called The Film Audience Development and Engagement Fund, or “Film-ADE,” launched in June of 2024. By the time we launched, we had two key forward-thinking funders, as well as ongoing Distribution Advocates operating support from a third funder. We were still fundraising but decided to start the work and build from there.
It’s been instructive to read the Film-ADE applications from film teams and distributors as they think about new ways to engage audiences. Our Distribution Advocates advisory group conversations around the proposals have been robust and we are continuing to learn where future energies might better support film distribution. Finally, the case studies have gotten fantastic traction on our Substack and we are hopeful this is building the habit of sharing data and stories across film teams.
More experiments are in motion, including grants from this year that have not been announced.
What are some of the big picture observations we noticed from this initial round of granting that is informing the ones that are following? Three things come to the fore:
Innovation is hard, particularly if you’ve been blind to a system for so long. True to Denitsa’s insights on the difficulty of encouraging new ways of distributing films, Film-ADE now includes early pre-selection conversations with potential grantees to push their own innovative thinking. We also changed the brainstorming workshops. For a recent workshop, we gave twelve small groups each a different film page from a festival catalog (synopsis, talent attached) and instructed them to come up with different, risky, new ideas for audience engagement. The difference is subtle, but compared to our previous format of using one of the film team’s own projects, the shift to a more abstract scenario anecdotally increased outside-of-the-box approaches. There must also be other ways to encourage fearlessness in thinking about connecting with audiences.
Conflating impact and distribution is common, and may be difficult to separate when public interest art is under attack. As impact funding is increasingly used for awards campaigns and festival costs, are specific social-issue goals getting short-shrifted? Is arts funding for films, separate from specific impact goals, being sidelined in a time where the pipeline for cultural narratives has been politically hijacked?
Early on, we defined the difference between the Film-ADe Fund’s scope of work and impact producing:
This is distinct from the good work being done in the documentary field by impact producers, whose activities center around educational and targeted community screenings, study guides, online resources, and seeking change through increased civic engagement and legislation. DA funds support for the circulation of films to a broader public should be thought of as preceding and “supercharging” these aims. Building cultural power in tandem with the more focused lens provided by [impact producers].
We discovered that many of the Film-ADE applicants have impact producers and strategies in place and are already operating with a focus on measuring these goals, yet there is still opportunity for audience development to actually build and boost the impact process. Should Film-ADE look to support projects at earlier phases? As filmmakers and film workers, how can we better explain the urgency of our own work without co-opting subject-issue impact language?
Do we need another podcast? Our Film-ADE case studies pack in a lot of information and data that could be parsed and deepened through recorded conversations. We could, in this more fluid format, brainstorm and point towards potential iterations for future film releases. We are also cognizant of the many new podcasts that have sprung up in the field since we produced The Truth About…, so clarifying our unique approach is the task at hand.
This weekend at our second retreat, we are shifting into a forward-thinking mindset. While going to the movies may not feel centered in our culture right now, the way people tell stories, listen, search for the truth, take action based on understanding—these things can still contribute to a better world.
As we continue our journey to learn, grow, and spearhead new paths for audience development and engagement, we invite all funders to join us in supporting innovation. Reach out to learn more on how to support us or to find guidance in setting up your own practice in the field. We are excited to continue being part of building many more and better opportunities for all.
Hi there, Like you we find our work in distribution very inspiring! We have lots of detailed case studies available here on our Substack that came from the Film-ADE fund for you to take a look at and I hope I did convey how our podcast was a success. Thanks for reading!
Wow, a Father's Day Weekend Distribution Advocates gathering. Any father's in your group. The details and results of the first weekend brainstorm, seemed quite technical and not that inspiring. I spent 11 years working in the world of distribution and to say at the least, it was extremely interesting, if not physically and mentally demanding. I was hoping to hear about case studies using your findings and maybe some, at least, minor successes.