We’ve been curating a regular screening series in conjunction with our friends at Goldcrest all year. It’s free and every screening has been filled to capacity. We send out 800 emails to “influential media types” here in NYC and have 60 seats. Makers Mark Bourbon gives us some fine sippin’ whiskey to share afterwards. The filmmakers always come and we do a Q&A afterwards. It’s a lot of fun, the films have been great, and the filmmakers have made important connections from it. Most importantly it builds word of mouth for these films that deserve more. My dream is to get some form of sponsorship so we could give the filmmakers a speaking fee and fly folks in from out of town.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of more. My friend Pericles Lewnes and his wife Lisa have a series down in Annapolis, Maryland called The Pretentious Film Society and they have gotten good press. And you can follow them on Twitter here. But there’s got to be a whole lot more of such clubs, right? Let’s find them.
Imagine if we had a list of 50 or so of these, that could be used to build advance buzz for your films so that when they eventually played in those markets you had supporters who would help promote your film to their social network. Wouldn’t that be great?
Imagine if all these societies actually had a little funding to bring filmmakers to town so that they could do advance publicity in anticipation of their release. Field publicity always helps but its expense makes it out of reach of most Truly Indie filmmakers, particularly those taking the DIY route. Finding a way to decrease this cost is crucial to indie film’s survival.
So let’s get started. Let’s build this list. You did a great job building the list of blogs that cover undistributed films (although Jake Abraham still gets the most gold stars for his contribution).
Do you know of any film clubs? How do we contact them? What do they like to show? Do they require filmmakers to be there? Can they pay anything? There is a spot in our Indie Film Hero list for whoever contributes the most information.
Subsequent notes:
Christophe Lepage pointed out on FB this great listing of over 92 Film Clubs world wide:
And finally, if you don’t know of a film club in your area, why not start one? We did. I am sure I can put a lot of indie filmmakers in touch with you who would love to screen their film.
