Authors — Sophia Haid and Keisha N Knight
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Revisiting the Neoliberal Echo Chamber
Of the millions of words we have published in thousands of articles, one sentence continues to haunt me, so trenchant and unsparing is its critique of the system undergirding so much of the work we champion here at Filmmaker. In a 2023 article titled, “Rebelling Against the Independent Film Industrial Complex,” Keisha Nicole Knight and Sophia Haid wrote, “In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics.” With […]
by Sophia Haid and Keisha N Knight on Dec 22, 2025 -
Rebelling Against the Independent Film Industrial Complex
The hyper-industrialization of the independent film space and the shift away from in-person screening to the vertically integrated streaming-sphere means that content curation is increasingly more general (massified), with fewer people participating in the process of sharing films with the public. In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics. Something has to change. Perhaps it’s time to turn away from the independent film industrial complex and toward […]
by Sophia Haid and Keisha N Knight on Jun 27, 2023
