INVISIBLE NATION: Lots Of Good News & Cool Things To Reveal
Our latest film continues to deliver joy
Who knew that the threats to peace and democracy could also bring so many smiles?
For those of you have been following along, my wife Vanessa Hope directed, and produced with me and an incredible team, a feature length documentary on how Taiwan’s democracy has flourished despite the harshest military and economic threats from their authoritarian neighbor next door. Told through unique access to their sitting two-term president Tsai Ing-wen, and capturing the precarious predicament that the nation is in, it is a riveting tale, eliciting both tears and cheers. Witnessing Taiwan’s resilience restores one’s hope for a more peaceful world — if I do say so myself!
It is a thrilling experience to present the film to audiences who have been denied a clear understanding of the situation as well as those who may know it well, but have not seen it represented until now. Giant smiles. People ca’t hep but come away knowing — and feeling — more than they did going in. And they give us a ton of support in exchange.
And when it comes to INVISIBLE NATION, we have some great news to announce. But that’s going to have to wait until next week. Sorry.
For now, let me tell you how the experience has been one pleasure after another — because I think it should change how you are thinking about your own film. And for those filmmakers out there who think you need both a Sundance debut and an immediate sale, we have a nice counterbalance to the dominate narrative. For those filmmakers who think you can’t tackle difficult subjects that the GSPs want to ignore, we prove otherwise. For those filmmakers who think they need the backing of America’s top talent and sales agents, but will never get it, we have good news for you.
Stamina and success in the realm of distribution requires so much support — in so many ways — for a very long run. People who reach far beyond their grasp and aim to go beyond other’s expectations don’t need to be fearful. The world remains full of wonderful people who once given the opportunity to help something they care about, leap to that occassion. Recently we got that many times over — but it hasn’t been easy. Inspiring, yes? Easy? Not at all.
Among the good things we recently stumbled upon was this great review from Bob Garfield — someone’s who work and perspective I have long admired:
It more than a review, and it is an excellent read — and not just because it is on our film. Bob’s a great writer, and solves one of the challenges we all have when we make films about politics — global or otherwise.
There are very few film writers who know the situation abroad. It’s great when someone can place your film in a greater political context. Between the death of the journalism industry, the building of the attention-deficit economy and ecosystem, the collapse of big media, and the domination of the GlobalStreamingPlatforms, it has become increasingly difficult for any film to have the care and handling that proper context once stimulated.
Movies were once experiences. They were topics of conversation. We used them to better understand our world and our lives. To do so, they needed context. The GlobalStreamingPlatforms have erased all context and turned everything into content instead, reducing the experience into a transaction. But we don’t have to accept it.
The ramifications of the removal of context can be seen in many film festivals refusal to tackle anything that may hint at controversy. Many play it safe, just like the plaforms do, pursuing the other four “C’s”: celebrity, crime, cons, and cults. They fear films that actually make a choice and have a perspective. But fortunately, this is only true of some, not all. We can find pockets of bravery — of support — if we just have patience and look around. On INVISIBLE NATION we hit some barriers for sure, but now we also won a bunch of awards, none so great though as the support from the communities we made the film for though
There is no substitute for the long slow road of bringing movies directly to the communities that most need them. Most movies can’t just drop in on this world of abundance of leisure time choices and expect to make a ripple. Since the GSPs gained the upper arm they’ve reduced the long lead press cycle for films from six months to six weeks. There is no anticipation of the upcoming; audiences have now been groomed to just be reactive. The non-dependent film model restores the world of building impressions, one upon the other, from word or mouth and people they trust.
Filmmakers have to do the hard work of showing up if they want their work to bloom. If the established players won’t bring context to your movie, bring your movie where proper context can be made. And that’s what we’ve been doing with INVISIBLE NATION. We committed to a year of festival play, with eight months in the US, and with international starting six weeks later and running longer. Like most things in America, the US film sales industrial complex is built only for the big and fast play. They don’t work with you to build a strategy of engagement. For a film like ours — or really virtually any non-dependent film made for under a budget of $5 million dollars — it is time for filmmakers to stop depending on a sale achieved at the first festival premiere. Our film functions as a case study of an alternative model — and we are finding numerous #OpImps along the way.
It’s easy to get beaten down by the system. The neglect and arrogance are both really hard to tolerate. Fortunately, those types pale in comparison to those who step forward in myriad of ways and say they want a better world. It is not just the Taiwanese community, but they have been especially wonderful. Place after place we’ve played they’ve come out and spoken up. It is really inspiring. Perhaps there is no better place to get a sense of that than from Vanessa’s newsletter. Please subscribe because we will be using it to share her personal experience of tackling such a challenging subject.
Where You Can See INVISIBLE NATION Next
If you are North Carolina or thereabouts, we are playing today and tomorrow — April 19th and 20th at the RiverRun Film Festival, Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina https://riverrunfilm.com/news-3-19-24/
We have our first screening in Los Angeles on May 3rd at the Visual Communications Festival: https://festival.vcmedia.org/2024/movies/invisible-nation/
But as I said, we have multiple pieces of exciting news to share next week….!
And although it is not a screening, I found it really cool to get cited in the LA Review Of Books this week.
When It Comes To T2P Films, I Stand Corrected (Sort Of!)
Thursday night I had the good fortune to see Yance Ford’s remarkable new film POWER. It is one of my favorite films of the year. I can’t think of an American film of recent vintage that has been so bold in how it tells — or rather interrogates — such an important story. By interrogate I mean question. And questions are a beautiful art in themselves. We have become biased towards answers, and if you are a reader of this newsletter, you perhaps long ago recognized how much I did the questions. Leave us the room to fill in the blanks ourselves, please!
Although one might say the film examines our history of policing, it deeply examines the questions of power and control, from a very personal perspective. I loved how it did not aim to have all images explain or even directly correspond to the “argument”. Argument is a misleading term here too, as it really is a contemplation and one that is very democratic in it’s approach. It grants the audience a participatory place that few films do. It advances our cinema language by granting the room for ambiguity and personal meaning, and in doing so it helps all of us better recognize our world.
Although Yance — who was at the screening — said he didn’t think the film could be made today, I hope the film inspires other corporations to grant such a personal approach to more filmmakers, as POWER speaks volumes of the need to trust filmmakers’ voices, approaches, and perspectives. That this film was made within Netflix and is being released now by Netflix sheds pounds of despair from my shoulders on the predicament of TruthToPower films — at least today. I think it is among the best Netflix movies of all time.
"It’s easy to get beaten down by the system." Amen. Thanks to folks like you, Vanessa and Yance, seeing a path to speaking T2P is made clearer. Taking cues, here.
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