Authors — Anthony Kaufman
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Silver Linings Playbook: Meet the New Indie Distributors
Has there ever been a good time to launch an independent film distribution company? Maybe not, admits Danielle DiGiacomo, former executive at Utopia and The Orchard, and one of the partners at a new distribution outfit launched at Sundance called Subtext. “We’ve always been operating under the shadow of giants, and it’s always been an uphill battle,” she says. “But we think the market has been correcting itself over the last few years,” says Subtext co-head Brian Levy. “And that we are now on the precipice of fertile ground for new opportunities.” Subtext is not alone. In the past several […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Mar 30, 2026 -
Hits & Misses: The Sundance Class of 2025
By conventional measures, the 2020s have not been very good for the movies. At mid-decade, there’s the nagging sense that the pre-COVID years represented glory days that will never be recaptured. Corporate media consolidation, the dominance of streaming and short-form content and the rapid rise of A.I. have far-reaching implications for the future of the medium. In many ways, independent film and filmmakers are in a far more perilous position than ever, increasingly squeezed out on screens big and small by an algorithmically driven and politically pressured media ecosystem irrevocably moving toward the middlebrow, mediocre and mainstream. Yet, independent filmmakers, […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 22, 2025 -
The More Things Change: How the Independent Film Business Has Changed Over 33 Years
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says veteran distribution and marketing executive Ira Deutchman. In the business of independent film “before it even had a name,” Deutchman helped market films such as John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1975, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989. For Deutchman and others working at the dawn of the American independent film movement, our current era of corporate consolidation, economic uncertainty and urgent need for dogged do-it-yourself showmanship isn’t so different from the past. “With the rare exceptions […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 17, 2025 -
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 […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 18, 2025 -
Blue Skies in Park City: Against the “Off Year” Sundance 2025 Narrative
Reports of Sundance’s death are greatly exaggerated. Even before this year’s festival was over, industry journalists rushed to declare its demise, from The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman (“Low Sales. No Standouts. Slow Sundance. Where Does Independent Film Go From Here?”) to The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield (“Get it Together, Indie A-Holes. What part of ‘extinction event’ do you not understand?”). But let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe “the vibe was off,” as one producer notes, but what do you expect after twin catastrophes—the Los Angeles fires and the inauguration of Donald Trump—were still smoldering during the event? “I think the market was […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Mar 18, 2025 -
Hits & Misses 2024: Case Studies of Six Sundance 2024 Premieres
In September, Variety declared, “Indie Films Are Staging a Box Office Comeback,” touting the success of the films Longlegs, Thelma and Late Night with the Devil as signs of life for a segment of the industry “crushed by COVID, strikes and streaming,” as reporter Brent Lang wrote. “And while it’s a long way from the arthouse heyday of the 1990s and early aughts, the turnaround is impressive.” Maybe not that impressive. Citing the more than $100 million global gross of Longlegs, a NEON-produced wide-release serial-killer movie, as some kind of indie darling misses the point. Thelma and Late Night are […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 16, 2024 -
Review This: Letterboxd and Independent Film Marketing
There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, “They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.” And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity. Matthew Buchanan, Letterboxd’s New Zealand–based co-founder, told Filmmaker, […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 18, 2024 -
A Crisis of Faith: Have Funders Lost Faith that Art Films Can Make an Impact?
In April, the collapse of Participant Media sent shockwaves through the film industry. How could a 20-year-old company—with box office hits such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Help and 21 Oscars, including two Best Picture winners (Spotlight, Green Book)—close its doors without warning? But earlier that same month, another nearly two-decade-old indie film company made a surprising move that offers potential answers to what happened, how the film industry is changing and how well-meaning financiers are reacting to it. Cinereach, a longstanding nonprofit that has supported hundreds of indie films through grants, financing and mentorship, announced a major shift […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 27, 2024 -
Solutions Based: Who Should Save Independent Film?
The Sundance Film Festival is a time for movie watching, deal making, talent scouting and, often, much soul searching about the state and future of the independent film industry. This year in particular there was no shortage of media coverage and conversations about distribution and the sustainability of the independent business. As Sundance CEO Joana Vicente told The Ringer’s “The Town” podcast, “Everyone is thinking about solutions… How can we help and figure out how all these films find a home, and what’s our role in the distribution exhibition piece?” For Sundance’s more commercial films—of which there were several this […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Mar 18, 2024 -
Doc (and Art-Film) Blocking: How Algorithmic Content Moderation is Hurting Indie Films
You have to look hard to find a trailer for the recent release of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Estonia’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film category, on Facebook and Instagram — and forget about clips. Even though the lyrical documentary about women in an Estonian sauna has won numerous top prizes around the world—Best Directing at Sundance 2023; Best Documentary at San Francisco International; Best Documentary at the 2023 European Film Awards; Best Cinematography at IDFA 2024—many of the film’s artful moving images of women’s bodies were banned by Meta’s algorithms, and the U.S. distributor Greenwich Entertainment had to […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Feb 9, 2024
