“We Set Out to Make a Film About Struggle”: Distribution Case Study of Amazon Labor Documentary ‘UNION’

The Sundance prize-winning, Academy-shortlisted doc team reveals key dates, budget actuals and strategy following legacy distributor rejections.

This post is part of a series of case studies published from our Film-ADE Fund. Film-ADE gives grants for innovative experiments in the distribution and marketing of films. It’s our hope that sharing stories, and transparent data, of experimentation will help all film teams adapt new methodologies in audience-building for their own work. The UNION team received a grant from Film-ADE to tie a limited TVOD launch with Black Friday and present this case study, which was written by Samantha Curley on behalf of the UNION film team.

Introduction

The first question reporters often ask the team behind UNION (2024) during interviews is some version of “Were you expecting to sell your film at Sundance?” It’s a reasonable question in a post doc boom market where only a small handful of nonfiction films sell. 

The best way we can answer this question is to go back to the origins of our project. Through intimate cinema vérité, UNION chronicles the extraordinary efforts of an unlikely group of warehouse workers as they launch a grassroots union campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Our film team gained early, unfettered access to follow the story from day one of the Amazon Labor Union’s unionization campaign in March 2021. We fully funded the film (at a healthy US$1.2M budget that we wouldn’t recommend any doc producers try to independently finance today) before Chris Smalls and the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won their election in April 2023. This matters because our team didn’t set out to make a film about a victory—we set out to make a film about struggle. About how ordinary, untrained people come to believe they can work together to change their circumstances. About how grassroots movements take shape. About the pitfalls and necessities of organizing. 

In some ways, no, we didn’t expect the film to sell because we never intended to make a commercial film. And in other ways, when a story you’ve been intimately following for years becomes front page news around the world; when the project premieres at a prestigious festival to great reviews and a jury award; when you have some of the most respected people in the field supporting your film… you do start to imagine that someone may in fact buy it. 

Two months after our Sundance premiere, with every major distributor passing on the film, we found ourselves gathering a bespoke team to work toward our own robust independent release, which is detailed in the following case study. 

It’s important to note a few things at the outset: 

• From the very beginning of the project, we planned to carve out impact and community screenings from any sale, knowing this would require us to fundraise and run our own impact campaign. 

• We were incredibly fortunate to be supported by a wide range of funders and industry leaders during production who stayed on in various capacities for the year following our premiere.

• While external collaborators were all paid (at reduced rates), our film team primarily worked for free throughout 2024. While we hope to raise enough money to back pay the team at least a portion of their fees, our impact and distribution campaign was not possible without significant unpaid labor by the film team. 

• The film industry has limited philanthropic funding opportunities earmarked for impact and distribution, so we planned to raise our budget primarily from funders in the labor movement who had expressed interest in supporting the film. However, holding our impact and distribution campaign in 2024 meant that many of these potential partners were focusing their resources on the presidential election, making it especially difficult for us to fundraise.

• We partially funded production through equity so revenue from our self-distribution efforts first repays investors. This means our distribution revenue has had to remain separate from the impact and distribution budget we’re raising philanthropically.  

• In a scarce, even antagonistic market, releasing a film in an independent, grassroots, incredibly collaborative way mirrored the ALU’s own story of organizing against Amazon. The symmetry between the stories of the film and our distribution journey bolstered our team’s passion, efforts, and successes. 

Our team includes directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story, producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone (who also led the distribution campaign), cinematographer Martin DiCicco, editors Blair McClendon and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. UNION was produced by Level Ground Productions and we worked in close collaboration with Red Owl, an impact strategy and production firm, throughout distribution. This film was funded by Impact Partners along with Ford Foundation Just Films, Anonymous Content, two private equity funders, and grants from partners including IDA, Catapult, Field of Vision, Sundance Documentary Fund, Omidyar Network, Perspective Fund, and NBCU Original Voices.

Distribution Timeline

• November 2023: Onboarded Red Owl to support our impact campaign 

• January 2024: Premiered at Sundance; Onboarded The Film Collaborative to manage festivals

• March 2024: Hosted the first of 3 braintrust screenings—a brainstorming session with key partners and stakeholders that helps inform an impact campaign’s strategy

• April 2024: Invited to screen at New York Film Festival; Onboarded Michael Tuckman as our theatrical booker and distribution consultant 

• June 2024: Committed to a minimal awards campaign and started weekly distribution meetings including our production team, Impact Partners, 5 different publicity teams (all working for indie rates), Michael Tuckman, and Red Owl

• October 2024: NYC premiere at New York Film Festival; Followed (2 weeks later) by our NYC theatrical premiere at IFC 

• November 2024: Launched TVOD during a limited 5-day window on GATHR (and ended up keeping TVOD available through the end of January 2025) 

• December 2024: Made it on the Oscar shortlist

• January 2025: Released LOCAL ONE, a companion short film, with Field of Vision

• April 2025: Some big distribution announcements coming soon! 

Using the Festival Circuit to Test Our Distribution Strategy 

UNION participants and ALU co-founders Jordan Flowers, Derrick Palmer, Christian Smalls, and Gerald Bryson (L-R) on the red carpet at the film’s 2024 Sundance Premiere

An “impact campaign” is often siloed or carved out from the rest of a film’s distribution life. By contrast, UNION’s impact campaign formed the foundation of our independent, direct-to-audience distribution strategy. 

Ensuring that the film reached workers (which, when you think about it, includes most of the general public) guided every decision we made related to festivals, awards, theatrical screenings, and our digital release. It’s very difficult for us to separate “impact” from “distribution” and so, throughout this case study, we use these terms interchangeably to refer to our independent, direct-to-audience release. 

Guided by The Film Collaborative, we believe festivals are the first stage of a film’s distribution and therefore utilized our festival circuit to start engaging audience response to the film—and as a kind of testing ground to explore our impact strategy. 

For example, during our True/False screening in March 2024, we met a group of workers engaging in a local, underground union campaign and hosted our first private impact screening with them one month later. During that impact screening, we learned valuable information about how front-line workers in the labor movement were engaging with the film. 

Another example comes from our Full Frame screening in April 2024. We brought 2 film participants (and ALU organizers) to participate in the festival screening Q&A, and also set up our own private screening with a burgeoning independent union campaign at a nearby Amazon warehouse in Raleigh, NC. We witnessed Amazon workers from different warehouses engaging each other about organizing tactics and questions inspired by the film. 

We committed to doing our best to include film participants in festival screening Q&As (like at the Patois Film Festival), and when that wasn’t financially possible, to connect festival programmers to local worker-organizers to ensure the film could be presented within a local context (like at Doc10). In addition to paying for travel (when it wasn’t provided by a festival), we paid a small stipend to our film team and participants every time they appeared with the film to do a Q&A, and also paid participants for any missed work.  

Early in the spring of 2024, we found out we would have our NYC premiere at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) later that fall. This development helped finalize our strategy and timing. Ryan Werner, our Sundance publicist, felt the NYFF selection justified launching a scaled down version of an awards campaign (scaled down because of limited resources, not potential). It also meant our theatrical release—aka the next stage of our distribution strategy—would have to wait until after NYFF. That only gave us a few weeks to release the film in theaters before the 2024 election, which we knew would dominate both press and audience attention. Michael Tuckman immediately started reaching out to theaters about dates, six months in advance. 

At the same time, we got the film to Adam McKay and his company HyperObject Industries. They really loved and understood the film. They agreed to come on as EPs to further bolster our distribution prospects. We strategically announced the partnership ahead of NYFF, which did result in some mainstream distributors looking at the film again, before passing (sometimes for the second or third time).

A Limited Theatrical Run With Impact Partnerships

For our theatrical distribution, we utilized the impact partnerships we’d been cultivating for six months. During our 30-city theatrical run, we invited over 250 labor organizations, local unions, and affinity groups around the country to host and co-host screenings. Michael Tuckman advised us to do traditional week-long runs in a few markets (NYC, LA, Chicago) and eventized, one-night screenings in other cities where we had built strong impact partnerships.

(L-R): Chenjerai Kumanyika, (ALU-IBT Local 1 President) Connor Spence, Jamaal Bowman. Screening presented by NYC-DSA at IFC Center. Photo by Alex Chan.

Pairing theatrical and impact requires additional considerations. We designed a customizable toolkit so that each partner could easily promote their screening on their own social channels, newsletters, and word-of-mouth. Partners often programmed their own post-screening panels, distributed materials in theater lobbies, and utilized a unique QR code we provided to link audiences to local calls-to-action. Almost every theatrical screening included a Q&A—with the film team when travel was possible—featuring relevant, local speakers, such as Jamaal Bowman, Cecilia Myart-Cruz (the president of United Teachers Union Los Angeles [UTLA]), Adam Conover, and Wyatt Cenac. This strategy was wildly successful, as our run got extended to 3 weeks in NYC and 2 weeks in LA, and we sold out almost every one-night screening to be the highest grossing film of the night in most of those markets. 

At the end of our theatrical run, in November 2024, UNION was still not widely available to the public. By many other markers, the film was a success: 80+ festival screenings and growing, phenomenal press coverage, a sold out eventized theatrical tour, a growing number of impact screenings (public and private) with major established unions, conferences, and local worker-organizer groups, and a major EP announcement. Our theatrical grossed in the high five figures and we could have kept going to even more success, but ran out of money to fund our modest social media ad budget and the external (non-film team) labor we needed to make it happen. 

In truth, we faced many challenges in mapping out our next steps. Theatrical revenue takes months to arrive. In our case, it was all being collected for the waterfall and therefore couldn’t be reinvested in our distribution efforts. We were managing the financial and scheduling commitments of a limited awards campaign, our film team was working for free, and it was extremely challenging to raise philanthropic money to release a film during a presidential election year. Because we didn’t have a distributor, we had to figure out the next stage of our release ourselves.

Direct-to-Audience Digital Release Success & Future Plans

We decided to experiment with a limited TVOD release on a direct-to-audience platform called GATHR. (Note: GATHR is a tech platform, not a distributor.) We chose GATHR because we could collect actual data on the film’s performance—everything from detailed revenue reports, viewer email addresses, geo location tagging, and how long someone actually watched the film. Unlike waiting weeks for theaters to cut checks, GATHR disperses revenue weekly. They also offer a unique partner TVOD platform that creates a profit sharing incentive for partners to help you get the word out about your film (i.e. affiliate marketing). Once a partner signs up, they receive a unique rental link to distribute to their audience. When someone rents your film from that unique link, the partner receives a percentage of the sale (the percentage is determined by the film team). GATHR takes a small fee for each service. 

Because our budget was low and marketing can be expensive, we tied this release to Black Friday, hoping that it would help us get more attention on the release and lead to more rentals. This stage of our release was supported by a Distribution Advocates’ Film-ADE grant to explore how digital marketing, limited windowing, and specially timed digital releases can bolster a film’s independent distribution success. 

On the heels of NYFF, and our first theatrical run, this timing helped keep UNION in the press and we were able to recruit no-cost influencer support from Adam Conover, So.Informed, Michael Moore, and others. 

Insta campaign: This Black Friday, don’t order from Amazon. Watch UNION.

Insta Campaign: Amazon workers are on strike. Don’t cross the picket line.

During our initial 5-day TVOD release, we netted as much money in film rentals as we did in our entire theatrical run… for way less money, time, and resources. 

Our theatrical run was incredibly important and successful, but our direct-to-audience TVOD success showed us a way to maintain our self-release as we struggled to raise our full impact and distribution budget. We extended the rental window on GATHR until the end of December, and when Amazon workers around the country went on strike just before Christmas, we decided to keep the film available through the end of January 2025. Because GATHR gave us complete control over distribution decisions and revenue, we committedI 50% of TVOD rentals during this period to striking Amazon workers and raised $7,000 for their strike fund. 

Final 2024 Gross Revenue by Source Type

2024 Film Team Share of Revenue by Source Type

Throughout these early distribution stages, we were simultaneously working on an independent awards campaign that shared many of the same goals, intentions, and priorities of our impact campaign—to elevate and honor the story of our participants and to contribute to a crucial moment for the labor movement. Each of our publicists were working for low, independent rates, but even the most modest of awards campaigns is expensive (and exhausting!). As our awards budget was spent almost exclusively on our publicists, we didn’t have money to spend on fancy screenings and receptions around the world. This meant every time the film screened and every time we did an interview, it had to serve multiple purposes—meeting our impact goals, reaching general audiences, and fueling our press and awards campaign. 

2024 was all about utilizing a more traditional film distribution model for our impact goals. Now that we’ve done the theatrical release, played over 100 festivals around the world, made the Oscar shortlist and several “Top 10 Films of the Year” lists, we are heading into 2025 focused on reaching a broad general audience and deepening our partnerships in the labor movement and intersecting fights for social justice. We’ve brought on an educational distributor and international sales agent. We’re planning a “People’s Release” launching on May Day where we’ll go back into theaters and the film will be widely available across all TVOD platforms (including GATHR, and yes even Amazon). And we’re gearing up for an exciting distribution announcement leading up to May Day that we think proves our grassroots, direct-to-audience strategy has paid off. 

Distributing a film and doing the hard work to ensure it reaches an audience is a long road that requires significant resources. We are so proud and excited to continue the journey of releasing UNION in a way that amplifies and reflects the film itself and the reasons we made it. In many ways, we feel like we’re just getting started.

Our Learnings

Distribution is part of making a film and needs to be just as strategic, creative, and contextual to your film as its team, artistic vision, and style. Put another way, the goals of your distribution plan should be aligned with the goals of your film. This should be true regardless of who is distributing your film. 

There are two key factors to consider in the decision to independently distribute a film.  First, the budget. It requires an incredible amount of labor to plan and execute a distribution strategy (regardless of who is distributing your film). This labor is full-time work and includes booking theaters, managing print traffic and deliverables, creating marketing assets, doing interviews and screening Q&As, building partnerships, taking meetings, sending (so many) emails, executing communication plans, and more. If you’re doing it yourself, it’s unrealistic to imagine you can manage all the labor for free so you’ll have to pay yourself and/or a team that will likely include an impact producer, publicist, theatrical booker, and social media manager. It also requires a budget to market your film which includes creating a trailer, posters, website, as well as doing press and paid ads.

Many distributors don’t put a lot of marketing dollars behind documentaries so it doesn't take a lot of money to keep up. Being able to create your own marketing assets, run social ads, pay for influencer content, and travel (even minimally) with the film are all absolutely required for a successful distribution campaign. 

Second, the available technology. Theaters are capable and willing to show independently distributed films (you just need a budget to manage the labor and marketing spend required). And there are more and more companies invested in creating platforms capable of replacing traditional digital channels (i.e. SVOD and TVOD). These platforms aren’t perfect yet, but even HULU crashes during the Oscars so technology never is.

Some direct-to-audience platforms

The more the independent film community invests in supporting these platforms' success, the better it will be for our industry. So keep using GATHR, Kinema, Eventive, Jolt, and all the other ones to come. Let’s insist on supporting a plethora of options to maintain a robust, healthy, and filmmaker friendly ecosystem for independent, direct-to-audience distribution. These platforms are going to cost less than traditional distribution and give us more opportunities to maintain our independence, secure more net revenue, and build our own audiences. 

Our team was not anticipating doing daily work on UNION for over a year after our premiere. Producers need to start working the 12–18 months following a film’s premiere into their schedules, timelines, and budgets. There’s ample opportunity for doing so in creative, collaborative ways and the industry needs to create more opportunities for philanthropically supporting this stage of a film.  Additionally, independent producers and their production companies could set up an independent distribution fund to utilize when needed. Yes, this would be great for when a film doesn’t sell, but if we do this right, we can imagine a future where filmmakers might actively turn down offers (even from major distributors) because we can do it better ourselves—while maintaining more control, reaching more audiences, earning more revenue, and making the kind of impact we hope to make through our work.

By the Numbers

• 439,000: Views on Adam Conover’s instagram video talking about UNION as the “film Amazon doesn’t want you to see”

• 25,000: People who tuned into Hasan Piker’s live-streaming of the film on his Twitch channel (how do you quantify this by “industry standards”?!)

• 142,000: UNION trailer views (across platforms) 

• 23: Countries where the film has screened 

• 2,000: Rentals during our 5-day Black Friday TVOD launch

• $10,000: Raised through pay-it-forward ticketing so people who couldn’t afford the rental price could watch for free

• 15: Different awards we submitted to 

• $800,000: Full budget for our 18-month independent distribution campaign (including impact and awards)

• $400,000: Amount we actually raised in 2024 (which to be clear, is significantly more than the revenue received from independently distributing the film so far)

Correction [April 10, 2025]: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that certain philanthropists had a mandate to focus resources on the 2024 presidential election. This has been edited for clarity.