At Sundance, New Approaches to Finding an Audience

Posted on January 25, 2010 in Selling Your Film | No Comments

The big question – how to find and reach your audience, is being pondered by the folks at the film festival that has become synonymous with “Independent Films”. Alternatives include, online sales, YouTube, and Video On Demand.

…PARK CITY, Utah — The starkest picture to emerge from the opening days of this year’s Sundance Film Festival may be of an independent film business forced to stretch in untested directions because its old distribution model no longer works.

Standard operating procedure over the years at Sundance, the cinematic bazaar now under way in this resort town, has been simple: show your film and hope it plays well enough to attract a theatrical distributor or, if the movie is particularly small and arty, a video-on-demand deal.

If no deal happens — and this is where more than 75 percent of Sundance offerings landed last year — you go home and try Internet downloads, DVD and foreign television sales.

But even that risky blueprint is being redrafted. With more art-house theaters closing and most of the big studios no longer interested in distributing specialty films, a theatrical release is becoming increasingly hard to secure. So some filmmakers are trying to turn that system on its head, using Sundance not just as a sales tool but also as a platform for immediate digital delivery.

— New York Times | Read The Full Article