Distribution
Filmmaking - Distribution
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Sundance Selects Pick Up Alexandre Moors’ Blue Caprice
IFP Lab film Blue Caprice, a chilling drama about the Beltway sniper starring Isaiah Washington, was today acquired by IFC’s Sundance Selects imprint. The movie is the debut feature by NYC-based French director Alexandre Moors — one of Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” of 2012 — and had its world premiere in the NEXT section at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Later this month, it is the opening night selection at New Directors/New Films. Commenting on the pickup, Sundance Selects/IFC Films president Jonathan Sehring said, “Alexandre Moors has made one of the most distinct and haunting American independent films of the year […]
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Sarasota Film Festival Announces Partnership with Factory 25
Today the Sarasota Film Festival announced that it is joining forces with Factory 25 to offer a distribution deal as the prize for one of its competition sections. The winning movie in the Independent Visions strand will get a deal with Matt Grady’s Brooklyn-based boutique label, which has released many Sarasota alumni films from recent years. Here’s the info from the press release: The Sarasota Film Festival today announced that its Independent Visions Award will be presented by Factory 25, heralding a new partnership with Brooklyn-based film distributor. The winner of this prestigious award will also be presented with an unprecedented […]
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The Internet and the Cult Film: On A Fan’s Notes
I stopped collecting comic books years ago, and I was never much of a vinyl person. Do you know anyone who truly fetishizes out-of-print books, because I don’t. Who needs rare DVDs anyway? Not suckers with Netflix streaming or HuluPlus accounts. The DVD has only been around 17, 18 years — what could possibly count as rare, even? Is there such a thing? Perhaps that DVD of an oddly artful B horror film from the ’70s that went out of print in 1996 and has never returned, but piracy has gotten so advanced now, surely you can find a stream […]
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Watch Kenton Bartlett’s Missing Pieces for Free
Here’s a good way to get the weekend started: download or stream for free Kenton Bartlett’s wonderfully original and inventive Missing Pieces, starring Melora Walters and Mark Boone Jr. The film, which the 24-year-old Bartlett began work on at the age of 19, was made on a shoestring budget but brilliantly used its meager resources to fashion a compelling and unique narrative. Birmingham, Alabama-based Bartlett cites filmmakers like Christopher Nolan as inspirations, and indeed Missing Pieces has much of the ambition and canny creativity of Nolan’s early works such as Following and Memento, though it has more heart than those […]
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Gambling on a Distribution Strategy
Until I shot Life on the Line, I never realized how much independent filmmakers and professional gamblers have in common. Many of us leave our hometowns, move to the center of the action, and risk everything to make it in a nerve-wracking and highly competitive environment. Every bettor is a long shot to succeed, just like filmmakers who dream of making their first picture in Hollywood. After spending the last two years meeting, interviewing, filming, and befriending some of the most colorful and successful bettors in Las Vegas, I can honestly say that we’re a lot more alike than I […]
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Opportunities for Indies?
Traditional broadcast and cable television is in free fall. More and more viewers are turning to alternative viewing options offered through “broadband” services facilitated by the Internet. Traditional TV programming, like editorial content in newspapers and magazines, is really an eyeball hook for the show’s advertising. And traditional TV viewing is suffering its biggest loses among its most coveted demographic groups – Generation Y (ages 13 to 32) and Gen X (ages 33 to 46). A recent report by GfK, a German research firm, paints a dismal picture of TV audience erosion. It found that among Gen Y folks, only […]
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Seven Ways to Fail at Promoting Your Film Online (Broken Record Edition)
Since repetition in the form of rote memorization is a major element of education, I’m not going to apologize for this, one of my periodic rants on the ways in which filmmakers (and, sometimes, their publicists) fail in the promotion of their films online and through social media. I’m sure that over the years I’ve posted every one of these points before, as have other writers on our site, like Jon Reiss. But, based on my encounters with filmmakers, their films, and their websites these past few weeks, these are worth repeating. Want to decrease press interest and the size […]
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Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher Picked Up by Oscilloscope
Our current crop of “25 New Faces” are a busy bunch (I recently wrote an update on their exploits), and the latest alum to make headlines is Hannah Fidell, whose debut feature A Teacher has just been picked up by Oscilloscope. The film — produced by another of 2012’s 25, Kim Sherman — tells the story of a 20-something teacher (the excellent Lindsay Burdge) who has an affair with one of her students. It premiered at Sundance last month, and will play at SXSW in March. In a press release announcing the acquisition, Oscilloscope’s David Laub and Dan Berger said, […]
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Four Tips for Festival Rejectees
Your film didn’t get into the A-level fests so far? With Sundance, Berlin and SXSW having already been announced — or come and gone — for 2013, there are some disappointed filmmakers grappling with an official rejection and its impact on the life of their films. Not getting into a major festival is certainly not the end of the world, but being unprepared for anything except acceptance really can be the end if filmmakers haven’t planned and budgeted for the lack of a conventional distribution deal. Because it isn’t smart just to play the festival circuit and hope for a […]
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Free the Mind Launches Distro Campaign via Indiegogo
Wanna give the finger to Big Pharma and maybe meet the Dalai Lama? Danish director Phie Ambo’s Free the Mind was one of my big discoveries at IDFA 2012. The film’s a truly revelatory exploration of the mindfulness movement, led here in the States by the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson (who made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world back in 2006), an expert in “contemplative neuroscience” who moved into the field after being asked by none other than the Dalai Lama why modern neuroscience didn’t study kindness and compassion. Ambo’s doc is a […]
