Then there’s the story of David and Nathan Zellner, filmmaker siblings from Austin, who prove that starry-eyed Sundance still embraces deeply idiosyncratic work made on a shoestring budget. After screening some of their short films at the festival, the filmmakers introduced their eccentric debut feature, “Goliath,” there in 2008. A comedy about an aimless thirtysomething (played by David) whose life begins to come unglued after his cat goes missing, “Goliath” received encouraging reviews and eventually secured a video-on-demand and DVD release through IFC Films.

But the brothers didn’t immediately book one-way tickets to Los Angeles. Instead, they chose to remain in Austin, where they continued to make shorts and direct music videos for their favorite local bands.

 

a wormhole has opened up between Sundance Past and the Online Present. Through it, films seemingly lost in time — or swallowed up by the gaping maw of bad distribution deals, or no distribution deals — might find commercial redemption.

Thanks to a recent arrangement between the Sundance Institute, which operates the festival, and the Manhattan distributor New Video, six Web homes — Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and SundanceNOW — are making Mr. Noonan’s movie, and any other eligible Sundance film, available for streaming online. The option is open to every film ever shown at the festival, or brought to a Sundance lab, or given a Sundance grant. Filmmakers don’t surrender their rights. They (17 so far, with thousands of potential participants) can opt to go with any or all of the half-dozen sites. They have, in essence, a guaranteed means of distribution.

Read Sundance Offer New Video Streaming for Films – NYTimes.com.

In this new era of digital downloads, film festivals are one of the few ways that you can see your film with an audience. Film festivals are like colleges – you need to apply to a wide range. And if you find that you need to have that icky conversation where you have to turn a festival down because another one offers you a premiere that is more ideal for you film, there are worse problems to have.

Read Navigating The Film Festival Maze.

Sugar rush hour from Bianca Consunji on Vimeo.

This is admirable filmmaking: a documentary exactly as long as it needs to be, and not a second more. There are filmmakers out there who would try to make a feature-length doc out of this but documentarian Bianca Consunji sums up a man’s life in two exquisite minutes. I don’t know if this was submitted to film festivals but it could play a ton of them.

The new twist here is the way his experiment changes video “windows” — which determine when shows and movies show up on different outlets. By going direct-to-fanfirst, C.K. doesn’t shut off his chance to end up working the Big Media Companies he says he doesn’t want to work with. He’s just making them wait. So the people who really love him can get it right away, and he can capture almost all of that value in the transaction.

Kafka points out that there’s plenty of room for traditional distributors to get in on the action after the first “fan-only” release:

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a million people pony up for the concert — basically, that is, everyone who watches his (great) show on News Corp.’s FX channel. (News Corp. owns this site, too.)

That’s a wildly optimistic estimate, and it will still be a fraction of the people that HBO, which has some 28 million subscribers, can reach. You can fault Big Media for a lot of things, but it remains pretty good at rounding up Big Audiences.

Filmmakers looking for validation in the DIY distribution model need look no further – the more experiments like this that we see, the more likely it is that distributors will look seriously at filmmakers who prove their worth by finding their own audience first and building a platform for bigger things later. While distributors have traditionally viewed DIY distributed films as damaged goods (perceiving the sales already out the door as missed opportunities for them), the model of building on previous success may become more common. Let’s hope so.

At some point in the near future I may write up a semi-serious response to this video, but for now – just watch.

Check out the full description of this 90 minute seminar with live Q&A on the seminars page.

A rare glance behind the scenes at the Sundance Film Festival from Roger Tinch. If this wall works anything like the scheduling walls I’ve seen at other festivals, each sticky note represents a film in a particular venue at a particular time. Unsurprisingly, this one is a bit more complicated than most of the others I’ve seen.

Oh, and Sundance announced their slate this week.

Programmers are no different than anyone else. Just as it is with audiences going to a local multiplex, we look at trailers and we instantly decide if films are ones we think we want to see, as programmers and as film lovers, if we think will enjoy them.

. . .

Unfortunately, too many films submitted to festivals either have misleading trailers–stop playing by the Hollywood big budget marketing playbook and you would be much better off. Or they do not have strong trailers at all.

 

So far this season I’ve seen at least three films that a filmmaker sent me a trailer for that had me pumped, and I walked away a little disappointed that the film was nothing like the trailer.

I’m in favor of cutting a trailer for your film and as a screener for festivals I rarely watch the trailer first.

Read How Your Trailer May Kill Your Chances of Being Accepted.

Science documentarians take note: this touring science film festival may be the place for your film, particularly if it caters to children.

From the Jakarta Post:

The Science Film Festival is a roadshow of 16 science-themed documentaries geared to children and youth. This year, the Goethe Institute, as the organizers of the event, has settled on 20 venues across 12 cities stretching from Jakarta to Gowa and Jayapura in which to screen the free movies.

Agus added that the movies highlighted not only matters of the environment, but also spoke of poverty and justice in a softer light.

“There were not many special cinematographic techniques used but the method of storytelling was adapted to children,” he said.

The movies were indeed geared to a more boisterous audience. One of the documentaries, a nearly 10-minute German film called Nine and a Half: Bees in Danger featured high school students speaking on the importance of bees and a comical woman dressed in a bee costume, complete with a detachable stinger.

The festival is held by the Goethe-Institut in Germany and select films tour Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand. The next call for entries opens in January.