Creative Distribution 101

Leah Warshawski is a director and producer and her first feature, called FINDING HILLYWOOD, won multiple awards and screened at more than 65 festivals. She gave a TedX talk entitled “How Do You Cope With The Trauma You Didn’t Experience?”.  Her 2016 feature film, BIG SONIA,  features her grandmother, Sonia Warshawski, who is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City. The film has screened around the world and was praised by critics in the  New York Times,  NPR, and more.

James Ward Byrkit is a director and writer, known for the science fiction thriller "Coherence", for which he was nominated for a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Director. He was the storyboard artist on the first three films of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the storyboard artist and Co-Writer of the Academy Award-winning film Rango. "Coherence" earned critical and audience praise around the world.

Deia Schlosberg made national news in October 2016, when she was arrested and charged with 45 years' worth of felonies for filming the #ShutItDown pipeline protest in North Dakota. Her feature documentary "The Story of Plastic", just premiered on April 22 on the Discovery Channel. Previously, Deia produced the Sundance film, "How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change", directed by Academy Award nominee Josh Fox.

Caitlin is the new Director of Industry and Education at DOC NYC, North America’s largest documentary festival. Before that, she founded and spent a decade at the helm of Film Sprout, a grassroots distribution and audience engagement firm which paved the way for a lot of the campaigns we see today. She has worked on so many award-winning and impactful documentaries such as, The Invisible War, Vessel, The Hunting Ground, Fed Up, Where to Invade Next, Unrest, Whose Streets? And Trapped.

Mia is the founder of Fourth Act Film, where she works with filmmakers and content-creators on distribution strategy, sales, and innovative marketing tactics. She has worked on distribution and impact campaigns for award-winning films, including Sundance hits like The Game Changers, The Great Hack, Always In Season, and indie gem “306 Hollywood”, which was a recipient of the Sundance Creative Distribution Fellowship.

Heidi Nel is a social impact strategist and producer. She has developed impact strategy and led successful engagement campaigns tied to award-winning films, such as Batkid Begins, The Best of Enemies, Food Chains, Happening, The Human Experiment, The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War, Newtown, The Return, Racing Extinction, and The Rape of Recy Taylor. Currently, she is working on Just Mercy featuring Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

Sarah Mosses is the founder and CEO of Together Films, a Marketing, Distribution & Data agency, specializing in Impact Distribution Strategy. They have worked on campaigns for award-winning films such as Sundance hit The Hunting Ground, on sexual assault on college campuses, the Oscar Shortlisted documentary Unrest, by Jennifer Brea, the HBO film The Tale by Jennifer Fox, and Roll Red Roll by Nancy Schwartzman, tackling rape culture.

Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning actress, writer, producer, and women in film activist. Naomi’s second feature film, Bite Me, went on the innovative, paradigm-shifting Joyful Vampire Tour of America in summer 2019, a 51-screening, 40-city, three-month, RV-fueled event tour. Naomi shares her distribution journey with radical transparency to create a new distribution model for independent films.

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, an entertainment platform building a new studio model, with fair and transparent business practices, to provide every filmmaker the opportunity to create a sustainable career, no matter where they live or what they look like.

Curtis has written for ABC, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon. As a community activist, he co-founded the Asian American Writers Workshop and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress. His documentary, "Tested," which follows a dozen racially and socioeconomically diverse eighth-graders as they fight for a seat at one of New York City’s schools, has screened at hundreds of schools and communities around the world, and Curtis planned this campaign himself. He’s here to tell us how.

Leah Meyerhoff's debut feature film I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS premiered at SXSW 2014 . Her previous short films have screened in over 200 film festivals, won a dozen awards, and aired on IFC, PBS and MTV. She has been shortlisted for the Student Academy Awards and has been featured in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The New York Times. Leah also created in 2013 the acclaimed non-profit Film Fatales which advocates for an inclusive community of women feature film and television directors.

Mark your calendars for mid-August when brand new episodes will drop every week for Season 2 with guests including Leah Meyerhoff of Film Fatales, Emily Best of Seed & Spark, Curtis Chin of Tested, amazing alumni from the Firelight Media Impact Producer Fellowship, Naomi McDougall Jones of the Joyful Vampire Tour, and experts from Picture Motion, Together Films, The Raben Group and more !

Welcome to episode 5, with Maria Judice. Maria is an award-winning writer and director, who also founded INDIGO IMPACT in 2016 with a mission to bring left of center stories and creators to global audiences as an Impact Producer. She worked for such titles like DREAMSTATES starring Saul Williams, Haiti’s first Oscar selection called AYITI MON AMOUR, and SXSW breakout JINN by Oakland native Nijla Mumin. WIRED magazine called Maria a “filmmaker provocateur” bridging technology thinking with art making.

In episode 4, Robin Hauser Reynolds, the director of the award-winning documentary “Code: debugging the gender gap” about women in technology shares her distribution and fundraising tips. CODE premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2015, and has caught the attention of the international tech industry and of policy makers in Washington, DC and abroad with hundreds of screenings around the world. Robin ran the kind of creative distribution campaign filmmakers only dream of, and shares what she learned.

In episode 3, Orly Ravid, who founded THE FILM COLLABORATIVE in 2010, tells us all about how to market docs and fiction films, the golden rules of online distribution, how to have a sustainable career with creative distribution and build festival relationships. Orly has spoken on distribution at Sundance, Cannes, SXSW, and many more places.