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Is AVOD the solution for struggling indie doc filmmakers?

“Beyond Utopia,” “A Still Small Voice,” “Deep Rising,” “It’s Only Life After All,” “Going Varsity in Mariachi,” and “The Grab” are all documentary titles that garnered good reviews, positive audience feedback and plenty of media attention at major film festivals including this year’s Sundance and last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But despite the high visibility, each title is still seeking distribution.

The chances of any of the six titles garnering a highly coveted distribution deal isn’t likely given the state of the entertainment industry at present. The dismal distribution landscape has forced some nonfiction filmmakers to turn to substantially less lucrative alternatives, such as ad-supported VOD, or AVOD channels, and revenue-sharing arrangements to get their work seen.

That list include filmmakers Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, who directed the 2022 Sundance grand jury prize documentary winner “The Exiles.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

2nd Chance (Ramin Bahrani)

It’s an eerie image. Richard Davis stands out in a field, wearing a kevlar vest, and points a pistol into his belly. Then he pulls the trigger, skips back a bit, and checks his red-burned skin. Over the course of his life, he would do this—shoot himself—192 times, proving the efficacy of his life-saving device in the most visceral and operatic way possible. “A lot of people think I’m stupid for doing this,” he tells the camera before one of these high-wire demonstrations, and for just a moment, an air of unpredictability hangs over this bullet-proof vest magnate’s next move. – Jake K. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Devotion (J.D. Dillard)

Devotion adheres to...

Gravitas Ventures on Wednesday announced a deal to retain the Video On Demand distribution rights for “The Exiles,” a documentary feature project from executive producers Chris Columbus and Steven Soderbergh that won the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize Documentary Award. It will debut on January 10, 2023. The doc, co-directed by Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, focuses on a trio of exiled dissidents who survived the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and ultimate massacre. It incorporates old footage of the event from documentarian Christine Choy, who was herself nominated for an Oscar in 1989 for her doc “Who Killed Vincent Chin?”

In 1989, Choy started to film the activists of the Tiananmen Square movement before ultimately shelving the project for some three decades. “The Exiles” finds her reuniting with them.

Said Bill Guentzler, Gravitas Ventures’ senior director of acquisitions: “Violet Columbus and Ben Klein intimately capture the passion and strength of Christine Choy and the activists...

Sundance grand jury prize documentary winner “The Exiles” is finally getting a release on video on demand. Gravitas Ventures will release the documentary executive produced by Chris Columbus and Steven Soderbergh on Jan. 10, almost a full year after its Sundance debut.

The documentary, directed by Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, centers on three exiled dissidents and survivors of the Tiananmen Square massacre, incorporating decades-old footage from the Chinese protests. The use of that footage, part of Christine Choy’s unfinished “Tiananmen/China Today” project, drew criticism from those involved in it following its Sundance victory, but those credit issues have since been addressed.

In 1989, Choy, recently Oscar-nominated for her work on “Who Killed Vincent Chin?,” began filming the leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. She reunites with the three dissidents in “The Exiles,” which interweaves Choy’s footage, shelved for 30 years, with newly shot interview segments

“Violet Columbus and...

It’s been a good year for several documentary filmmakers who sought and found distribution for independently made projects at major festivals. But for many nonfiction helmers, this year’s festival circuit hasn’t proven to be as fruitful as it once was.

Pre-pandemic, streaming services went to film fests to fill their slates, but now with media conglomerates consolidating, brands merging, and Netflix tightening its wallet, film fest documentary shopping sprees have slowed down. On top of mergers and economic unease, there’s been an increase in streamers like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, and Disney either pre-buying docus or commissioning their own nonfiction projects.

Some of this year’s fest favorites were commissioned docus, including Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ ‘The Janes” (HBO), W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need to Talk About Cosby” (Showtime), Rory Kennedy’s “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” (Netflix), and Ron Howard’s “We Feed People...

Documentary trailblazer Christine Choy kicked off Hot Docs’ Industry Live conference with a captivating fast-forward through the plot points and ideologies of her experimental, activist filmmaking, including her recent turn in front of the camera in Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s doc-feature debut “The Exiles,” winner of this year’s U.S. Grand Jury Prize in documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film has its international premiere at Hot Docs on Thursday, with a followup cinema screening on Sunday.

A beloved, outspoken film professor for many years, Choy has also worked steadily behind the camera since the early 1970s, and was a founding director with New York-based Third World Newsreel, one of the oldest alternative media arts organizations in the U.S., and through which she made the seminal “From Spikes to Spindles” (1976). Her current projects include a doc about the WWII U.S. air squadron the Flying...

Sffilm announced the full lineup for the 65th annual San Francisco International Film Festival, the longest running film festival in the Americas. This year the Festival will make its return to theaters in person, featuring more than 130 films from 56 countries, including 16 World and 10 North American premieres, along with many Sffilm-supported titles. Of the films selected for the Festival, 56 are helmed by female or non-binary filmmakers and 52 are directed by Bipoc filmmakers. The Festival will also celebrate cinematic icon Michelle Yeoh with a special tribute to be presented by critically acclaimed actor Sandra Oh. The 2022 Festival will run April 21–May 1, with tickets on sale now at sffilm.org.

Michelle Yeoh was recently hailed by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott as “one of the great international movie stars of the past quarter-century.” Her tribute will be an intimate conversation with Emmy Award-nominated actress Sandra Oh, about her prestigious and extensive...

To describe documentarian Christine Choy as a bit of a live-wire would be like describing the national grid as a bit of an energy source. "How do I describe myself?" she asks, "Fuck you, you can't describe me." This sort of sparky response is what propels this debut feature from actor-turned-director Violet Columbus and Ben Klein as it flits between being a profile of Choy and her work and a consideration of what happened to the Chinese activists who were exiled in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Back at 1989, Choy - who had been Oscar-nominated for her documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin two years earlier - was drawn to the news story of the Chinese student protests, encapsulated by footage of an unarmed demonstrator standing in front of a tank. How many hundreds died in the subsequent government crackdown still isn't known. Several of the leaders fled to.

What first appears to be an energetic, biographical sketch of NYU Professor and filmmaker Christine Choy becomes a film about her lost project, one that seemingly has yet to be completed and, by the conclusion of The Exiles, feels incomplete. Choy, who describes herself as “philosophically homeless,” is a half-Chinese, half-Korean 100% New Yorker, finding herself most at home in lower Manhattan—below 23rd St, distinctly. Yet she’s also proud of her Chinese heritage and had been a founding faculty member of NYU’s Shanghai program, where she stumbles across the suppression of the student movement in the late 1980s that culminated in the Tiananmen Square protests. For her, completing a film she started years ago—as many in the movement were traveling to the US—is a challenge to reckon with.

As directed by Choy’s former students Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, this isn’t a dry, neatly...

Last weekend, “The Exiles” took home the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for US Documentary. In some ways, this victory is not so surprising. Though this is directors’ Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s documentary debut, the New York University students possessed a compelling subject and mentor: Christine Choy. Choy – always seen with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other – stands as one of the behemoths of Asian American cinema today. In addition to her sixty-plus awards, she directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1988). Her other films likewise uncovered buried histories of Asian American suppression. From the 1880s railroads to 1992 LA riots to the model minority myth, her filmography touches upon a century’s worth of Asian American history.

It comes as even less of a surprise, then, that Choy should have her own personal archive of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. When Columbus and Klein investigate,...

Chicago – The 2022 Sundance Film Festival concluded on January 30th, and had a full weekend of award screenings. The festival is wrapping up as virtual/online for the second year in a row, meaning that again anyone/anywhere with a ticket or a pass got to indulge in the film offerings and events throughout the festival.

One of the highlight offerings is free to anyone, with no need for extra tickets or credentials. Beyond Film programming offers something for everyone … with filmmaker chats, meet-ups and a daily talk show with Festival Director Tabitha Jackson. Festivals stars and directors participating include Emma Thompson, Dakota Johnson, Amy Poehler and Eva Longoria Bastón. Click on Beyond Film for the archive. And click Award Winners for list of Sundance Film Festival honorees.

‘Nanny’

Photo credit: Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Sundance Institute – an organization founded by...

With nearly every feature film at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival reviewed, it’s time to wrap up the first major cinema event of the year. We already got the official jury and audience winners here, and now it’s time to highlight our favorites.

Our Sundance contributors have shared their top picks from the festival, also including a handful of shorts (with a more substantial shorts overview coming soon). Check out everything below and stay tuned to our site, and specifically Twitter, for acquisition and release date news on the below films in the coming months.

Mitchell Beaupre

1. Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford)

2. After Yang (kogonada)

3. Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup)

4. God’s Country (Julian Higgins)

5. A Love Song (Max Walker-Silverman)

6. Resurrection (Andrew Semans)

7. Nanny (Nikyatu Jusu)

8. Happening (Audrey Diwan)

9. Emergency (Carey Williams)

10. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Sophie Hyde)

John Fink

1. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier...

This year’s Sundance Film Festival featured 84 feature films, 59 short films, and 26 jury-awarded prizes — with at least 7 of them distributed to Asian productions. Unsurprisingly, most of the Asian award winners revolved around tales of precarity. Shaunak Sen’s Delhi-based ecology-conscious film “All That Breathes” won a Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary category. Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s on-the-ground documentary about Rohingya discrimination in the Rakhine State, “Midwives” won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Excellence in Verite Filmmaking. Maryna Er Gorbach’s Ukraine-Turkey co-production about a family living along the precarious Ukraine-Russian border, “Klondike”, took home the Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic.

Several dramatic films took their pickings, too. Philippines-based Martika Ramirez Escobar’s love letter to cinema, “Leonor Will Never Die,” also was selected for the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award: Innovative Spirit. Shorts “Night Bus” (Joe Hsieh) and “Warsha” (Dania Bdeir) likewise swept the shorts fiction awards,...

Nikyatu Jusu’s horror drama Nanny and Ben Klein and Violet Columbus’s documentary The Exiles won yesterday the two top U.S. prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Nanny took the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic while The Exiles was awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. About the former, juror Chelsea Barnard said, ““For this Grand Jury Prize we celebrate a movie that flooded us with its compassionate and horrifying portrayal of a mother being separated from her child. This film cannot be contained by any one genre —it’s visually stunning, masterfully acted, impeccably designed from sound to visual effects, and […]

The post Nanny, The Exiles, Navalny Win Top Prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Nikyatu Jusu’s horror drama Nanny and Ben Klein and Violet Columbus’s documentary The Exiles won yesterday the two top U.S. prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Nanny took the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic while The Exiles was awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. About the former, juror Chelsea Barnard said, ““For this Grand Jury Prize we celebrate a movie that flooded us with its compassionate and horrifying portrayal of a mother being separated from her child. This film cannot be contained by any one genre —it’s visually stunning, masterfully acted, impeccably designed from sound to visual effects, and […]

The post Nanny, The Exiles, Navalny Win Top Prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Chicago – The 2022 Sundance Film Festival announced their Grand Jury Prizes on January 28th, and the top films were “Nanny” (U.S. Dramatic), “The Exiles” (U.S. Documentary), “Utama” (World Cinema Dramatic) and “All That Breathes” (World Cinema Documentary).

After nine days, 84 feature films and 59 Short Films, honors were also given for Audience Awards, Festival Favorite Award, Jury Awards for Directing, Screenwriting & Editing and Special Jury Awards.

The list of all award winners are below.

Grand Jury Prize

‘Nanny’

Photo credit: Sundance Film Festival

U.S. Dramatic: “Nanny” directed by Nikyatu Jusu

U.S. Documentary: “The Exiles,” directed by Ben Klein & Violet Columbus

World Cinema Dramatic:: “Utama” (Bolivia/Uraguay/France) directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi

World Cinema Documentary: “All That Breathes” (India/UK) directed by Shaunak Sen

Audience Awards

Cha Cha Real Smooth

Photo credit: Sundance Film Festival

U.S. Dramatic: “Cha Cha Real Smooth” directed by Cooper Raif

U.S.

Nanny won the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Nikyatu Jusu won the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance - in an awards 'ceremony' that was announced on Twitter - for her supernatural-inflected drama Nanny, about an undocumented Senegalese woman working for upper middle-class white couple in Manhattan.

Other films taking home prizes included Utama, The Exiles, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Navalny and All That Breathes.

Bolivian drama Utama, directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi, won the World Cinema Dramatic Competition gong.

The US and World documentary prizes were won by Ben Klein and Violet Columbus for The Exiles and Shaunak Sen for All That Breathes, respectively.

Dissident doc Navalny was named Festival Favourite - voted for by audiences across the festival, while audience awards went to Cha Cha Real Smooth, Navalny The Territory and Girl Picture, with Framing Agnes taking home both the audience award and Next prize.

After nine days, 84 feature films, and 59 short films, the Sundance juries have announced their winners, with all films screenings over Saturday and Sunday and tickets now on sale. One can check out the full list below, with Nanny, The Exiles, Cha Cha Real Smooth, and Navalny bringing home the major prizes, and see our complete coverage here.

Grand Jury Prizes

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to Nikyatu Jusu for Nanny / U.S.A. — Aisha is an undocumented nanny working for a privileged couple in New York City. As she prepares for the arrival of the son she left behind in Senegal, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, threatening the American dream she is painstakingly piecing together. Cast: Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Sinqua Walls, Morgan Spector, Rose Decker, Leslie Uggams.

Juror Chelsea Bernard said: “For this Grand Jury Prize we celebrate a movie that flooded us...

Apple has Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic winner for second consecutive year.

Nanny and The Exiles have won the Sundance 2022 US grand jury prizes and Utama and All That Breathes corresponding world cinema honours while Navalny was voted the audience favourite as the festival announced winners on Friday (Jan 28).

Nikyatu Jusu’s supernatural tale of an undocumented Senegalese nanny working in the US claimed the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and The Exiles from Ben Klein and Violet Columbus earned the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary and follows documentarian Christine Choy and she reunites with exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Sundance Film Festival revealed award winners for its 2022 edition Friday. Like the rest of this year’s festival, which was forced to go all-virtual because of the recent Omicron surge, the awards ceremony played out on Twitter, with honors spread around across the diverse lineup unlike last year, when Coda swept the top honors.

Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, while the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize went to The Exiles directed by Ben Klein and Violet Columbus. Marquee Audience Awards wins went to Apple’s big sales pickup Cha Cha Real Smooth, and the surprise secrent-screening documentary Navalny, which won both the Audience Award in the U.S. Doc section as well as the omnibus Festival Favorite Award.

Winners were announced in the U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Dramatic and World Documentary competitions as well as...

NannyU.S. – DRAMATICGrand Jury PrizeNanny (Nikyatu Jusu)Directing PrizeJamie Dack (Palm Trees and Power Lines)Audience Award Cha Cha Real Smooth (Cooper Raiff)Special Jury Award: Uncompromising Artistic Visionblood (Bradley Rust Gray)Special Jury Award: Ensemble CastJohn Boyega, Michael Kenneth Williams, Nicole Beharie, Connie Britton, Olivia Washington, and Selenis Leyva (892)Waldo Salt Screenwriting AwardKD Dávila (Emergency)Descendant U.S. – DOCUMENTARYGrand Jury Prize The Exiles (Ben Klein, Violet Columbus)Directing Prize Reid Davenport (I Didn’t See You There) Audience Award Navalny (Daniel Roher)Jonathan Oppenheim Editing AwardErin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput (Fire Of Love)Special Jury Award: Creative VisionDescendant (Margaret Brown)Special Jury Award: Impact for ChangeAftershock (Paula Eiselt, Tonya Lewis Lee)Utama World Cinema – DRAMATICGrand Jury Prize Utama (Alejandro Loayza Grisi)Directing Prize Maryna Er Gorbach (Klondike)Audience AwardGirl Picture (Alli Haapasalo)Special Jury Award for ActingTeresa Sánchez (Dos Estaciones)Special Jury Award for Innovative SpiritLeonor Will Never Die (Martika Ramirez Escobar...

“Nanny” was the big winner at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, picking up the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition in a virtual awards ceremony Friday.

Cooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth” was also a winner, nabbing the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category, while “Navalny,” a late addition to the festival, won the U.S. Documentary Audience Award. The Sundance jury also recognized “The Exiles” in the documentary category and “Utama” in the World Cinematic category.

This year’s Best of the Fest announcement caps off the second year in a row in which the festival was forced to go virtual amid the pandemic.

Although the awards were announced virtually, the emotion was palpable when juror Chelsea Bernard announced that “Nanny” director and screenwriter Nikyatu Jusu had won for her harrowing story of an undocumented nanny working for a privileged couple in New York...

Given the Chinese government’s frighteningly successful attempts at retroactively erasing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from history, there is an urgent need for a soup-to-nuts retelling of that incident, solidly laying out the facts and figures, insofar as they can be known. “The Exiles,” from debut directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is not that film, although some of its most powerful sequences could be repurposed in their entirety to that end.

Instead, Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives. The results are untidy and unbalanced, but derive considerable energy from that eccentric approach. While “The Exiles” honors three of the erstwhile leaders of the protest movement, and also probes some intriguingly melancholy ideas about exile and the passage of time, a significant portion of its hybrid vigor comes directly from the enormously outspoken, rather amazing Christine Choy, the filmmaker who becomes the framing device here.

Shanghai-born,...

Earlier, Sundance announced that its 2022 edition will be hybrid. Most titles will be available online while their in-person festivities start up again in Park City. Their main slate has just gone live as well. Though the festival has a tendency to update their lineup as the festivities grow closer, their competition categories have at least been set in stone.

Naturally, we compiled all of the Asian and Asian diaspora-directed ones we could find so far. Like last year, most Asian titles tend to be in the documentaries. In the World Cinema Documentary Competition, at least 4 entries span from different corners of the continent: India (“All That Breathes”), Myanmar (“Midwives”), Lebanon (“Sirens”), and Israel (“Tantura”). 4 entries revolving around or by Asian diaspora filmmakers make their mark in the US Documentary Competition as well. “Free Chol Soo Lee”, “Jihad Rehab”, “Tiktok.Boom” and “The Exiles” cover fex-Al-Queda extremists, Tiananmen Square exiles, a wrongly-convicted Korean immigrant,...

When You Finish Saving the World The Sundance Institute has announced the films selected for their hybrid 2022 Festival, which will take place in-person in Park City, online, and in arthouse theaters across the United States.U.S. Dramatic COMPETITION892 (Abi Damaris Corbin): When Brian Brown-Easley’s disability check fails to materialize from Veterans Affairs, he finds himself on the brink of homelessness and breaking his daughter’s heart. No other options, he walks into a Wells Fargo Bank and says “I’ve got a bomb.“ Cast: John Boyega, Michael Kenneth Williams, Nicole Beharie, Connie Britton, Olivia Washington, Selenis Leyva. World Premiere.Alice (Krystin Ver Linden): When a woman in servitude in 1800s Georgia escapes the 55-acre confines of her captor, she discovers the shocking reality that exists beyond the treeline…it’s 1973. Inspired by true events. Cast: Keke Palmer, Common, Jonny Lee Miller, Gaius Charles. World Premiere.blood...