Category: Creative Distribution Initiative

Cheryl Dunn is a New York-based filmmaker and photographer whose films have screemed at numerous festivals including Tribeca, Edinburgh, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and on PBS. She is collaborating with producer and Sundance alum Lucy Cooper (Hesher) on the feature documentary Everybody Street. Click here to visit their Kickstarter page and help fund the final stages of production.

Richard Ray Perez is a documentary filmmaker and director of Cesar’s Last Fast, a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Grant recipient. Perez and his team are using Kickstarter to fund the final stages of production on their project. Click here to contribute.

Digital distribution has to be done in a certain order if Cable VOD is part of your plan. If Cable VOD is not an option, your digital release pattern can be more flexible, allowing for experimentation with the different platform options and timing. But for now, for films with Cable VOD potential, holding off on digital plays until Cable VOD has run its course is certainly worth it, given that it still accounts for 70-odd percent of your digital distribution revenues (it used to be approximately 80%).

Do you really know what “VOD” means?There is no universal standard yet for definitions of digital rights. While IFTA (the organization that runs the American Film Market) has rights definitions for its signatories, it doesn’t cover all contracts out there. Many distributors and digital platforms use their own contracts with a range of definitions that don’t match up with those of others.

This is part of a series by Red Flag Releasing that documents their ongoing efforts to position We Were Here (release date September 9) in the marketplace. You can read the first part here.
Last week, it was about 110 degrees and Paul were I were in line at the post office, with about 20 poster tubes and boxes each in our arms.

Jason Asenap is a Comanche/Muskogee Creek writer and filmmaker originally from Walters, Oklahoma, but now residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His project Rugged Guy was selected for the 2011 Sundance Institute NativeLab. Click here to learn more and help fund this film.

Madeleine Olnek is a New York-based filmmaker, director, and playwright whose debut feature, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Click here to help fund her film’s distribution. As I’m writing this, an article in Indiewire with a somewhat mocking title—“The Kickstarting Never Stops”—has appeared mentioning how three films (including mine) which played at Sundance are still looking for funds.

Anne Aghion is a New York-based documentary filmmaker whose films Gacaca, Living Together in Rwanda and In Rwanda, We Say ‘The Family That Does Not Speak Dies’ were supported by Sundance Institute Documentary Film Grants. Along with social scientist Assumpta Mugiraneza, she is using Kickstarter to fund the Iriba Center for Multimedia Heritage in Rwanda. Growing up as the daughter of a man who survived the deportation of French Jews, I spent many afternoons (and evenings) cutting classes and crying in front of movies—not just Holocaust films, but any films—in the Paris Cinémathèque.

Orly Ravid, founded The Film Collaborative, a nonprofit educational and services organization dedicated to indie film distribution. She has 12 years of experience working in distribution, acquisitions and sales at companies including Wolfe Releasing and Senator Entertainment. TFC’s first digital book, Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul, will be available in September.

The launch of the next realm of “Sundance” fills me with both pride and optimism. Frankly, I was getting weary of the ubiquitous chatter on “How digital cinema will change everything” not to mention the ever popular “Is independent cinema booming or dying?” depending on how you filled your glass. Cinema by its nature is always evolving.

Sundance Institute announced the expansion of the #ArtistServices Initiative, a program to help Institute alumni navigate the marketplace of independent film distribution, which was first made public during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with an initial team-up with Kickstarter. Since January, this collaboration has raised more than $700,000 for a total of 24 Sundance Institute alumni projects. Today’s announcement included the expansion of partners that filmmakers can now make their films available through online: iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, Netflix, SundanceNOW, and YouTube.

Peter Sillen is a New York–based documentary filmmaker whose documentary shorts Speed Racer and Branson: Musicland USA screened at the 1994 and 2003 Sundance Film Festivals, respectively.Jesse Bernstein was a brilliant, complex, and troubled individual. He lived a more colorful life than most people ever dream of.