Filmmakers Margo Guernsey and David Camlin spoke at DER's Summer Sponsorship Social, June 2024. Photo: Frank Aveni
Indie filmmaking is challenging, but through DER’s fiscal sponsorship program, we strive to make it easier and more enjoyable by connecting filmmakers. On June 12, DER hosted our first in-person event since the pandemic, welcoming fiscal sponsees and friends to the DER office for an intimate discussion over lunch.
At the event, panelists Margo Guernsey (No Time to Fail & The Philadelphia Eleven) and David Camlin (We are the Warriors) shared their experiences with grassroots screenings and audience-building. Ultimately, it became clear that each filmmaker’s distribution journey––like each film in general––is wildly different.
Margo Guernsey, whose film No Time to Fail focuses on uplifting the efforts of election administrators during the 2020 election, explained how those workers became a key audience for the project. Election work is not glamorous, she admitted, and in many cases, administrators were thrilled to see positive representation of their labor. Margo shared that it was at a mental health event for election officials where she realized election officials themselves would be the best promoters of the film. After this one event, word-of-mouth promotion exploded. Margo tailored her outreach for future screenings, and eventually landed a distribution deal that got the film onto Amazon Prime.
Guernsey said that her other film The Philadelphia Eleven, which follows the first women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church, resonated with a niche community in a similar way. She emphasized that creating community and buzz around this niche was key to finishing the film and putting it in front of audiences. Getting the funds to finish it was excruciatingly tough, she confessed, but through tying donations to distribution during her crowdfunding campaign, Guernsey created a strong incentive for people to financially support the film. Each donor who gave $500 was guaranteed a community event screening license, thereby creating a built-in audience who was dying to see the finished product.
Margo Guernsey speaks about The Philadelphia Eleven
Upon releasing the film, Guernsey put it up on Kinema, a platform that lets filmmakers manage their own non-theatrical exhibition. She publicized the release by linking it with the Philadelphia Eleven’s 50th anniversary. After almost a decade working on this film, Guernsey said that she has built a dedicated audience that is still requesting screenings and donating, almost a year after the film’s festival premiere in August 2023.
We are the Warriors, meanwhile, emphasized hyper-local engagement at the beginning of their distribution journey, and it paid off. The film tells the story of Wells, Maine as it grapples with community debate over an indigenous mascot; these are debates that, for the past few years, have been playing out intensely all over the country. Camlin shared that things took off for him in the festival circuit. The film won the Tourmaline Prize at the Maine International Film Festival in 2023, and through a connection with a festival programmer in Florida, he was able to organize community screenings with indigenous tribes in other states. Luckily, David acknowledged, Maine has fairly robust infrastructures for artist support. Through maintaining close relationships with local nonprofits and movie theaters, he, along with his creative partner Megan Grumbling, self-managed a theatrical release, something that wouldn’t be possible in many other states. The key was maintaining control over his email list, he emphasized; Camlin refuses to use social media for We are the Warriors, but having ownership over a list of email contacts has given him far more control than having a following on Instagram.
While each filmmakers’ journey was quite different, both touted the benefits of educational distribution and felt that it was complementary to the grassroots community screenings they were doing. Guernsey is working with Good Docs for The Philadelphia Eleven, and Camlin is currently working with DER for a fall 2024 release. These partnerships are key to reaching students and teachers as well as museums and community groups; Guernsey even referred to the educational market as “the bread and butter” for documentary distribution.
Independent film distribution is notoriously tricky right now, and nonfiction media makers often have to venture out on their own. Still, here at DER we believe that resource- and information sharing can go a long way toward making things easier for filmmakers.
In the documentary landscape as a whole, the resource-sharing and solutions that our colleagues have been producing in the past few years have been heartening to see. The Shorenstein Center’s Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative has been compiling a wonderful resource in their “Doc Distro Lit Review.” Another valuable resource is Seed & Spark’s Distribution Playbook.
At DER we remain committed to supporting the documentary community and look forward to hosting additional convenings.
