HOT DOCS DISTRIBUTION GURUS' PANEL TRANSCRIPT

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Here is an excerpt of one of my diatribes during the panel:

"The key things that are important - I'll probably say this multiple times:  knowing what your goals are, understanding who your audience is, connecting with that audience early and understanding what your resources are and saving resources for distribution and not relying on gatekeepers to decide whether your film get seen or not are essential. Those aspects of your release are fundamentally the same and have been the same for decades and certainly the same since 2007, when the film market collapsed in advance of the overall market collapse. So in a sense, we're going through another film market collapse. And filmmakers, unfortunately, whenever there's a boost in sales (after a collapse) kind of think, "Oh, the halcyon days of acquisitions are back", and then they stop doing best practices such as what I just outlined. People need to hunker down and go back to best practices. The other thing is that, I think it's really important, hopefully we'll talk about this later, is that the distribution community, especially funders and organizations, need to start finally recognizing that distribution of marketing is important. It's half the battle for filmmakers and funders need to stop only supporting making films and need to start supporting the distribution of the films that they helped make and other films as well."