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Independent Rescue Mission: The Future Film Coalition’s Ecosystem-Saving Activism
Indie Avengers, unite! OK, perhaps the MCU isn’t the best analogy for an all-volunteer group working to keep independent film alive, but as Future Film Coalition producer and board member Sanjay Sharma says, “The streamers have lobbyists, the studios have the MPAA, but there really isn’t a nationwide nonprofit that is looking after this ecosystem, so we need the Avengers of indie film. Nobody else is fighting for us.”
Announced during the Sundance Film Festival, the Future Film Coalition was formed to create a bulwark against threats to the field by, as described on the organization’s Substack, the “business practices and consolidation of today’s corporate entertainment industry.” As board member Barbara Twist notes, “The money that used to trickle down from the top isn’t coming down anymore, so filmmakers and distributors are getting squeezed.”
Over the decades, the independent film community has had sundry support groups—from the Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers to the Independent Feature Project—but many have closed, fragmented or modified their mission over the years, leaving a gaping hole for a centralized nationwide network to represent the needs of the independent industry. The FFC now hopes to fill the void, and the appetite is there: At a late February digital town hall, 700 people attended, and 450 offered to volunteer. Currently, the group has more than 40 members participating in different branches (such as distributors, filmmakers, exhibitors, marketing/PR and nonprofits) in addition to eight board members. Along with Sharma, CEO of Marginal Mediaworks and a former technology attorney, and Twist, the executive director of the Film Festival Alliance (secretary), the board includes distribution consultant Jon Reiss (board president), former Sundance Institute CEO Keri Putnam (vice president) and producer Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte (treasurer), as well as the International Documentary Association’s Abby Sun, OpenTV co-founder and Northwestern professor Aymar Jean Christian and veteran consultant and former Tribeca Film Institute CEO Brian Newman. Each has their own superpower: coalition-building, self-distribution strategies, research, technology, advocacy.
Inspired, in part, by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin’s 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, Reiss began talking with people about the effort last year. “We realized that unless you start making plans, you can’t change the system,” he says. Though still in its infancy, the FFC is currently focusing on several areas in the face of mounting pressures, including simply expanding their volunteer staff, researchers and collaborators. (To join, go to futurefilmcoalition.org.) There are “visionary, long-term goals,” explains Reiss—such as policy recommendations around fair competition, corporate regulation and the positive economic and cultural impact of independent film—as well as “short-term achievable goals,” such as elevating indie film-specific carveouts in state tax incentive programs, joining FCC comment periods and working to protect public media.
These are big lifts, especially during the Trump Administration’s total war on arts, culture, accountability and equity. But they are much overdue and urgently needed, say FFC members. “Yes, we’re currently in a crisis on the national level,” says Reiss. “It’s unclear that anything we put forward would be acted on favorably. But we would hope that in two or four years, everything that has been slashed will be replaced or made into something better.”
“We all need to be working on these emergency or emergent responses,” says Sun, who is co-chairing the FFC’s research committee and working on policy monitoring in the nonprofit center and the FFC biweekly news digests on Substack Sun also firmly believes in the future and that detailed research can strongly support advocacy and change. “The two feed each other,” she says. “The other reason we are where we are today is that we haven’t done the work of connecting with the public and lawmakers. We need to build our political power and start connecting to the American people.”
Despite the seeming total collapse of federal support, Sun contends that “the systems are resilient” and there are still resources to be tapped. “Even if we don’t have an NEA, there are still government agencies that deal with film,” she says. “Whoever is running the government, they are still people, and we need to communicate to those people and advocate that public media and independent film are for the public good.” She compares the NEA’s pot of funding—around $200 million—to California’s production tax incentive (which may go from $330 million to $750 million), along with other states’ incentives, such as Georgia and New York (the latter of which has $700 million annual programs). While NEA grants are, of course, very different from recoupable tax incentives, and “the loss of any federal agency is horrifying,” says Sun, “we’re talking about scale. So, I don’t see a decrease in support of government support for film.”
The FFC is working hard to make sure the next round of aggressive state tax incentives—and an aspirational $7.5 billion U.S. federal tax incentive proposed by Gavin Newsom—won’t forget independent films. The FFC’s State Tax Incentive Working Group, led by Sharma and Putnam, has put together dozens of indie-specific recommendations for the California tax incentive, such as ensuring 10 percent of its $750 million program is devoted to indie film; creating dedicated lower-budget tiers for an indie credit for projects with $5 million budgets and below (so the “independent film” provision is not all going to $20 million-plus productions); lowering the qualified spend for ultra-low-budgets, such as $250,000; and speeding up the timeline for paying out the tax credit, or even doling out a portion of the funds upfront. “It is definitely an uphill battle,” admits Sharma. But he remains “cautiously optimistic” because the incentive programs are fairly bipartisan—even Texas’s Senate recently passed a proposal for a $500 million incentive fund—and their network is robust and continues to grow.
Twist, who is working on coalition-building for the FFC, says they’re looking to expand the organization’s reach to include those outside the film industry. Citing groups such as the Future of Music Coalition, the American Library Association, the Authors Guild and the ACLU, Twist says they need to start aligning with people and organizations at the intersection of policy and politics. “This is also an anti-trust issue,” she says. “So, there are going to be policymakers who we can get on onboard, whether it’s issues related to monopolies or censorship, unintentional or intentional.”
Kusama-Hinte, who in 2003, along with other members of the independent film community, successfully sued the MPAA over its “screener plan” policy, sees similar areas right now in which they can fight for “fair competition” in the marketplace; for instance, “having streamers disgorge their data on viewing and audience and their monopolization of the industry.” Like others in the group, he recognizes, “It’s absolutely a fraught political environment, but that’s the time when you need to get your act together.” Kusama-Hinte also makes the argument—one the FFC continues to bang the drum on—that the larger entertainment industry needs to work harder to support independents if they want a future, too. “It’s a little bit like farming,” he says. “We’ve been involved in this agricultural business that depletes the ground soil; it’s bereft of nutrients and suffused with pesticides. It’s hard to keep dragging soybeans out from the land if it’s dead.” Likewise, “if you don’t support independent filmmakers, there’s not going to be this stream of talent and everything you depend on for the industry to make films that make a lot of money. You don’t have Black Panther without Fruitvale Station.”
