One of the distinct pleasures of owning an independent film distribution company is basking in your own curation, even if it reflects others’ creations. But in the bruising terrain of arthouse cinema, you must bank those rays fast before your theatrical releases sunset on the big screen.

Narcissists be forewarned: theatrical releasing remains an unforgiving endeavor governed by fleeting and fickle windows. Even in cinematic capitals like New York, festival darlings lauded by taste-making press may only survive on a solitary screen for a week or two. Once that brief moment passes, these films recede into the vast constellation of VOD thumbnails. Physical media presents its own paradox. A dedicated collector class keeps the video disc alive, treating mint-wrapped favorites on their shelves as pristine cultural talismans. Yet, while owning the physical artifact offers comfort against digital disappearance, it often extinguishes any urgency to actually watch the film. Having it is enough.

At Kino Lorber (and Fox Lorber before it), we long entrusted the fortunes of our growing library to external allies. Shortly after I acquired Kino International and launched Kino Lorber in 2009, my mission was to navigate the surging digital tides and future-proof our legacy theatrical and home video businesses. I quickly established a deal with an industry friend named Ted, who had strong digital instincts and a catchy company name: Netflix. We were early partners co-buying all rights to festival titles, releasing them theatrically while Netflix made them available exclusively under their “Red Envelope” mail-rental model before we rolled them out to retail stores. Their compelling pitch—NO LATE FEES—was enough to upend corner video rental stores and eventually bust even Blockbuster. They got out of that business too. From the early rent-by-mail heyday, the Netflix title count shrunk from about 100,000 on disc to eventually fewer than 7,000 on their streaming site. Our early association did help us secure an output deal for several years, providing a welcome financial backstop that allowed us to keep acquiring great films and make them at least digitally available even as home video use and rental outlets steeply declined.

Around the same time, we connected with other digital visionaries. One opportunity arose with an outfit named The Auteurs, led by Efe Cakarel. Efe needed more titles—our library had crossed more than 1,000 films—and he needed a better name. He initially landed on KINO, pointing out its international resonance and classic origins, proposing to buy it from us. I was flattered, but declined to sell him our birthright name. Still, we formed a close association with his bold experiment. Newly renamed MUBI, the platform initially offered one new film a day (365 a year). Within a few years, we had licensed them over 200 titles—accounting for nearly two-thirds of their entire catalog. In its early curatorial incarnation, MUBI was really the prequel to our own future streaming service.

A similar dynamic unfolded with our friends at Criterion. Founders Peter Becker and Jonathan Turell sought to launch a standalone streaming platform after the 2018 dissolution of their Warners/TCM partnership in FilmStruck. They needed to refresh and expand their Janus Films-based programming. Also, Warners/TCM retained non-exclusive rights to this glorious library and many of their iconic classics would continue to be available (to this day) on TCM and now HBO Max. We also had a shared lineage with my late partner Don Krim, founder of Kino International. He had distributed the iconic Janus Films trove in the early 1980s before the Turell and Becker families acquired it. When I acquired Don’s company in 2009 to form Kino Lorber, the Janus library was the core of the Criterion Collection before streaming was even a dream. By 2019, we had struck a major output deal, making us Criterion Channel’s largest independent film supplier with several hundred of our curatorially distinguished films—what we asserted were our “classics of the future”—available on their new independent streaming platform.

Then came the pandemic disruptions. With arthouse screens shuttered, MUBI and Criterion prospered among home viewers. Facing an existential threat to our primary brand-forward effort—releasing films in theaters—we had to innovate. We launched Kino Marquee, a virtual theatrical initiative affording as many as 300 arthouse theaters the technical means to host their own branded digital screening rooms and share revenues. The project earned us a special honor from the New York Film Critics Circle as “first responders” to independent cinema’s crisis, keeping theaters solvent when it mattered most.

These convergence points—adapting to streaming innovation with shifting partners, navigating home video declines, and weathering the pandemic—led to an inevitable conclusion: if early indie streaming services owed much of their prestige and success to our films, it was time to plant our own garden. And just at this point, Lisa Schwartz (past co-president of IFC Films and architect of the IFC Films Unlimited streaming service) entered the Kino Lorber orbit and immediately saw the ripe opportunity to turn the vast Kino library into a dedicated streaming service.

Now, two and a half years into the launch of the Kino Film Collection (partnering with Amazon, Roku, Comcast, Vimeo, and other major platforms), we believe our SVOD is the fastest-growing North American independent film subscription service. The success of Criterion, MUBI, and now Kino Film Collection as streaming services seems a clear indication of a large and growing audience of film fans perhaps not feeling fully served by mainstream movie houses and streamers.

Looking at our 600+ film offerings, what excites me most is how many gain renewed currency from fast-breaking events, topical headlines, and a resurgent interest in cinematic artistry. Hieronymus Bosch’s visionary Garden of Earthly Delights mirrors in my mind’s eye the range—and derangement—of creativity in cinema. In coming postings I’ll be highlighting with comments and clips my personal favorites in a romp through the ever-surprising landscape of the Kino Film Collection. Please join me…

Let me pick up where I left off, and then go somewhere else.

I’ve been reflecting in recent posts on the annual film awards races and our run with a couple of titles for the biggies: Césars, BAFTAs, and king of them all, the Oscars. The last two we won, with trophies for best doc feature for Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The BAFTA weighed more than the Oscar, due to its heavy base, but the metal itself seemed flimsier, like a drama mask that asked to be worn. At the Césars we came close but no cigar with our nom for Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (it did win a little glass plaque from the National Board of Review earlier in the year).

Another of our docs, Four Daughters, won the Best Documentary César two years prior and that trophy was a crushed metal cube fashioned by and eponymously honoring the well-known French sculptor César Baldaccini. Enough has been written about the 8 ½ pound, strangely sexless statuette of a knight known as Oscar. Leave it to the French to ennoble cinema, which they lay claim to have invented, with a trophy designed by an actual artist of international renown. The races to win these fetish objects ranged from sprints to a marathon, with differing intensities and variations of campaigning within strict regulations from each organization. Each happy outcome was only achievable with the passionate, inexhaustible participation of our filmmakers, who also recruited their agents and local distributors to hustle for funding to supplement our own budget to elevate our chances. Each contest culminated with a nail-biter of a ceremony.

Winding down from this hyperventilating spring cinema ritual, we welcomed a calming surprise: seemingly out of the blue, we won two Peabodys , for Mr. Nobody Against Putin and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. This doubleheader capped a trifecta with prior BAFTA and Oscar crowns for Mr. Nobody. But it afforded more than just another ego boost. It put in more meaningful perspective what a cinema honor should stand for. The Peabody media award, hardly a “trophy,” looks like an oversized coin upended on someone’s desk. But this light little medallion on a black plastic cylinder may, in the truest sense, be the weightiest of them all.

I had heard of this award for years but knew little about it. Lesser known in the heady, hypey entertainment ether than the Golden Globes, Emmys, Gothams, Indie Spirits, and the like, the Peabodys are under the radar, even though they would arguably give an award for radar if it were put to distinguished social use. Recognizing distinction in all forms of electronic media, the Peabodys are a unique breed with academic and philanthropic roots, spreading across a wide swath—TV, cable, streaming, and now podcasts. It all started in 1941 with awards for radio, when that looked like the future of mass media. Across the decades, the Peabody eyes have never swerved from their journalistic focus on work that celebrates truth-telling, social justice, equity, often in the wrappings of enlightening entertainment.

Barely unpacking after Cannes, I quickly decided to get back on a plane to attend the Peabody ceremony. For Mr. Nobody, our director David Borenstein would accept and deliver what would surely be impactful remarks. Since Sepideh Farsi, the Iranian-French filmmaker of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk could not make the trip, it would fall to me to accept, delivering a text she had prepared—her alarming, heartfelt words I would contextualize with my own brief comments. We were allotted about 30 seconds but with no threat of “get the hell off the stage” music if we went a little long. This patient civility was typical of this ceremony. All the prizes are announced well in advance so everyone in the room up for an award already knows they are winners, and the also-ran nominees in attendance are graciously integrated into the honors. It takes any competitive heat out of the room.

The Beverly Wilshire—a grand palace of an old Hollywood hotel—transformed its big ballroom into a sprawling dinner party where everyone was seated with friends, family, and industry colleagues—and very few bold name stars. There’s no big TV deal for this show—just a rudimentary taping to be edited for a future airing on YouTube. The overall mood was so congenial and relaxed it made the event seem almost inconsequential. But that was far from the case. One honoree after another underscored the parlous state of our democracy. The event was a celebration of truth in media, ringing with clarion calls from one speaker after another to push back the ways and meanness of the Trump cabal. There was no looming fear of FCC retribution with loss of broadcast licenses.

While most people are not familiar with the Peabodys, those in the know are deeply honored to be winners (as Walter Cronkite once said: “You count your Emmys, you cherish your Peabodys.”) It dawned on me that this prize on the “circuit” might be the one that really matters. Highlighting social impact in media born of courageous storytelling and culturally significant journalistic vision it also reinforces the value of thoughtful entertainment. As such, it’s an odd grab bag of media categories, spanning documentaries, podcasts, news broadcasts and the like, with streaming, cable, and old-fashioned local broadcast TV all on equal footing. But the show was also fun. The entertainment component was deftly left in the hands of recipients like Amy Poehler and Nathan Fielder, with minimally intrusive but incisive remarks from host Mo Amer, a Palestinian comedian who won a Peabody a few years back for his comedy series on Netflix. When I introduced myself backstage as the distributor of our Palestinian doc, he shed his jocular persona and warmly embraced me with thanks for the heartbreaking film we were honored to present. When my turn came to be shuffled into the green room before onstage honors, I particularly enjoyed chatting with David Muir of ABC News, a major news star nationally respected but warmly affable, and an unabashedly progressive figure. His network and corporate owners are taking the most courageous stance against Trump’s media stormtroopers. Earlier in the night, though we didn’t meet, Jimmy Kimmel was most deservedly awarded the Peabody for Entertainment and we were duly proud that our Oscar for Best Documentary was presented by him a couple months prior.

For my own moment in the spotlight, accepting the award for Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, I weighed my brief words with care as an introduction for the poignant text I read from our filmmaker, Sepideh. I bracketed her sorrowful comments about the genocide in Gaza, noting the closing of many windows for documentary viewing in the United States.

Many platforms have diminished their volume of serious docs, cable TV now rarely brings pertinent nonfiction to air (with worsening prospects for CNN after the Ellison putsch of CBS—a worrisome preview of Warner things to come with the award winning social issue docs from HBO possibly also endangered? ), and Paramount just shut down MTV Docs—run by the long time former HBO doyenne of nonfiction Sheila Nevins. Even doc stalwarts of public television like Independent Lens and POV have been severely diminished by funding cuts. One wonders if they will have to be more gun-shy about issues they used to champion and pull back on their more polemical commissioning temperament.

We applaud the indies who are still getting important docs made, with financing from abroad, from impact supporters, and from everyday citizens of varying wealth who can still get a tax deduction for funding docs about causes they care about through a 501(c)(3). Arthouse theaters are also supporting these important works by showing them. Though neither of our highly awarded docs this year—Mr. Nobody Against Putin and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk—received any offers from the major streamers, we’re happy to feature them exclusively on our own streaming platform, the Kino Film Collection. It’s docs like these that have helped our 2-year-old SVOD become the fastest growing new indie film service.

If you care to see my Peabody acceptance speech and hear our filmmaker’s stirring words, it’s here.

Moving on from the awards circuit, I find myself reflecting on the purpose and potential value of these Substack postings. I wonder sometimes if I am the only founder and currently working owner-operator of a “traditional” boutique film distribution company writing in this “Non-De” dominated space. If I am a unique species in this Substack landscape, I am honored, sobered, and hoping not soon to be extinct. Composing these postings is time-consuming but genuinely gratifying. They allow me to reflect on and, in some cases, reimagine the components of my business and creative life and how they intersect.

But now it’s time to return to the matter that continues to inspire me to go on in this game. I’ll be diving into some of the films that have shaped my thinking about cinema as both an art form and medium of social discourse. I’m gratified that many of them can now be streamed on the Kino Film Collection. It’s a delight for me to romp across our title tiles in this playground of the cinematic imagination, remembering the first time I watched these films, recalling favorite scenes, and reminiscing over the backstories of how they came to us or how we came to them. In posts to come I’ll be sharing why these favorite films continue to flicker brightly for me and ignite my imagination with electric excitement for the future of cinema. I hope you’ll keep me on your radar.

Forty years and counting I still get lost on the backstreets of Cannes. In a way, that is a good thing; it helps me discover great little restaurants that no one ever recommends. But more meaningfully for me, a heady bewilderment characterizes the changing and challenging value of Cannes.

The Cannes Film Festival used to work like a map: fixed routes, sites, and borders, with each of its sections and selections demarcated. Now, it has become an unruly landscape—a shifting terrain. A seemingly beaten path becomes a fractured grid with unknown forks, bypasses, and switchbacks that can leave you lost or shortcut you to a better place than you intended to go. To make sense of Cannes is to realize it’s no longer merely a film festival.

Festival mania still abounds. Outside the Palais, there are long lines of hopefuls dressed to the nines, hoisting signs and begging for a seat inside. Streets behind them are still cluttered with ladders that grow taller every year, mounted by scruffy paparazzi craning for celebrity snaps. But this is all local color and distraction. The Festival’s main attraction has itself become a sidebar. The real deal now is the “Other Cannes.”

Broader than the official Marché du Film, this new commercial realm is not a circumscribed retail marketplace with identifiable buyers and sellers on respective sides of the counter. Showing and selling films now feebly competes with a spectacle of national location promotions, luxury product placements, new media branding, and more—the myriad marketing byproducts of corporate and entrepreneurial aspirations. Cannes is now a “twofer.” The glamorous festival has become a barker for a far bigger business bazaar—a bustling, hustling appointment for the attention economy set against the backdrop of a global entertainment extravaganza.

From its earliest years as a cultural Hajj for the emerging Art of Cinema, Cannes has remained a dazzling seaside spectator sport. However, with the huge explosion of wealth in cinema entertainment, its identity has become more profane. Some see it as an insider-dominated corporate affair, much like what has been called the “Oscar Industrial Complex.” Yet, the value of winning in Cannes versus getting an Oscar are oceans apart. There’s been a sea change in the pursuit of the Palme d’Or.

As a verdict-conferring conclave, Cannes is an opaque and hierarchical operation. It awards its crowns in a compressed timeframe of a few weeks, ordained by a self-selected committee that assigns competition slots, which are then juried by a handful of film professionals selected by those same organizers. The Oscars, on the other hand, represent a cumulative achievement. It is a Darwinian marathon of months of campaigning, screenings, promotion, politics, and no-expense-spared lobbying to elevate films that might best survive the final running. Ultimately, the scrutiny of thousands of film professionals around the world serves as the final arbiter. Fortunes are spent in Cannes on yachts and resorts hosting celebrity events, but the best payoff for U.S. players is to steer films toward sought-after Oscar shortlist slots. Big money cannot guarantee an Oscar win (as we proved with our Mr. Nobody against big streamers), but ostentatious investment in Cannes does buy you a shot at that slot—and perhaps a Palme d’Or.

With many festival darlings now flopping at theaters, awards validation is more critical than ever to give an arthouse film a fighting chance to find its paying audience. A coterie of Cannes players seems to have mastered the playbook of turning financial leverage into monetizable aesthetic destiny. For several years now the festival has had just two or three sellers out of hundreds controlling rights for most of the 20-plus titles selected for Competition. Maybe there’s a backroom pipeline to the festival programmers, or maybe they’re simply the most connected curatorial insiders, swooping in early to snap up the whispered top contenders.

The same applies to a handful of U.S. buyers. One well-known indie goes on a buying streak each year to snatch titles with the most critical wind at their backs, mostly buying from those few anointed sellers. They are powered by a rare output deal with a top U.S. streaming platform that pays them a fee that’s usually a multiple of what they spend. They wound up with last year’s Palme d’Or as they have done for the last six years and snared four of the five slots for international films nominated for this past year’s Oscar, which of course they won. Having a streaming partner of this scale offers them a safety net from box office tumbles.

All guessing has gone out of this current Cannes game, too: almost half the films in Competition were pre-bought before anyone at the festival or market could even see them. They’re already touted as likely winners. Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that being pre-bought by the company that always wins will mark a film as a likely winner. To any outsider, it would seem like insiders are gaming the system.

Nevertheless, the game is still the game. No one has been accused of breaking any rules, and there have been no allegations of corruption. Cannes was never conceived as a cinema democracy. By contrast, a handful of sellers and one or two buyers have never skewed outcomes at Sundance, Berlin, or Venice. It’s arguably dispiriting for the wider Cannes constituency and the global film community when winning power at the world’s most important festival seems concentrated in so few hands, but there is an irony here: a capitalist comeuppance.

As arthouse cinema faces steep economic contraction, even Cannes winners are behind the curve in the very market they are trying to dominate. U.S. audiences are increasingly disaffected from celebrated high-arthouse fare and most of the big spending Pay 1 streamers have lost patience with awards glory, even for films in the winners’ circle. Unfortunately, it has also sunk the fate of many of the best Cannes films that don’t surface with wreaths. This is a problem that will continue to impact the fate of the Cannes festival.

But there is hope—the “Other Cannes” may be picking up the slack. Outside the official festival selections there’s a broader market fracturing into new subsets of offerings, targeting different genres, demographics, and new niches. As business gets worse for the biggest players, smaller distributors and producers keep popping up. Nimble and lean, the smartest are finding opportunity in fragmentation, even if it is a corollary of industry-wide contraction.

If the stature of Cannes may be diminished by insider predictability and receding arthouse interest, the tide is coming in strong for the “Other Cannes,” not just for films in the official Marché, but wheeling and dealing in the larger marketplace of the “attention economy.” Those fairgrounds are booming with conferences, sidebars, tech demos, seminars, and a scheduling maze of “special sessions.” It’s a digitally dizzying, buzzy onslaught of acronyms and media memes: AI, VR, DTC, Micro-Drama, Creator Economy, NonDe, etc. It points to a media future that is bigger, younger, messier, and culturally more dynamic with outcomes that may be more meaningful than festival validation. It’s the wild child of the old Festival de Cannes.

My company and I still have a big stake in and love for that legacy event, with an honor roll of winners that have also gone on to Oscar fame. Arthouse cinema is our DNA, but it is recombinant in the new attention economy, morphing into new species of cinema, media, art, and thought. “Winning” at the Festival may yet become a losing proposition at the hands of the Other Cannes. We’re happy we’ll always have the Oscars for an enduring reputation. This year, while plying the old festival ways, screening and bidding and standing on lines, we’ll be newly “Cannes curious,” exploring the fast-changing landscape of the Other Cannes. Maybe there’s a new rainbow over some undiscovered cove of the Croisette. While we won’t count on it, that rainbow may also yield new Oscar gold.

My last posting here ended on a cliffhanger: After winning a BAFTA, what would happen with Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the Oscars? No spoiler now: our film won!!

With Kino Lorber’s 16 Oscar nominations over 25 years—eight in the 16 years on my watch, including consecutive Best Documentary Feature noms in the last three years, our company finally pulled it off. Reported as the biggest upset of this year’s awards, our film Mr. Nobody Against Putin was really Mr. Nobody Against Putin and Netflix. With the might of the major streamer behind the Oscar campaign for The Perfect Neighbor, an unequivocally excellent Sundance-winning doc, how did we ever win? It has something to do with why we probably won’t be in any winner’s circle in the upcoming Cannes. These two peak film events—the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival—serve very different purposes, but looked at together they tell us a lot about the state of the entertainment industry today.

First, our Oscar story.

Passionate movie fans assert their politics by buying tickets to documentaries aligned with their partisan preferences. And a typically progressive entertainment industry tends to privilege docs that register outrage against forces of injustice and inhumanity. Now with international members of the Academy exceeding 25%, having one of the two “foreign” docs in the race helped.

Mr. Nobody’s Danish and Czech producers pulled out all the stops with a brilliant digital campaign, some governmental financial support, impact grants, plus prestigious international visibility with BBC (Storyville) investment along with Arte buying in for French and German television. And as a top boutique distributor with years of nominations under our belt, our team really knew how to run a scrappy, cost-effective campaign that would heat up the awareness and effectively compete for an Oscar win. Almost a year after its Sundance premiere when we started pursuing Mr. Nobody, and with the clock running down to launch a national theatrical release, the film’s producers made the call to sign with us.

We then faced a daunting scarcity of screens. Distributors of every size scramble to release films for awards qualification and “For Your Consideration” (FYC) promotions in the fourth quarter leading into January. The seas parted for us with the Academy’s announcement in early December. Trade publication handicapping had given us reasons to be optimistic. In a record field of 201 documentary features qualified for the running this year, we were exhilarated to be one of 15 on the shortlist. From this list the final five nominees for Best Documentary Feature would be selected in January. Our small theatrical distribution, marketing, and publicity team of about seven rose to the occasion, firing on all pistons with impeccable timing. Outside help from top tier publicists who had been working with the producers for months moved over to our payroll and significantly amplified our efforts. Within days, we secured a hard-to-get opening in January at a key NYC arthouse theater. The savvy programmer of the IFC Center, a long-time company friend, really believed in the film and gambled with us to open on the weekend the final nominations would be announced.

We were at this year’s Sundance when, after a nearly sleepless night, the official nominations were announced at the crack of dawn. Fearing disappointment, I still tried to sleep through it until text alerts awakened me to good news. And happily, being at Sundance, we could talk it up among the many Oscar voters we knew were there. We still recognized our chances were iffy, with an international doc up against a strong English-language trio backed by Netflix, HBO, and Apple, as well as the one other nominee that took the top international grand jury doc prize at Sundance (our doc prize was the special jury runner-up.).

Rare as it is, some rule changes can stack the deck in your favor. The Academy had just leveled the playing field for “little guys” with some of the best films. AMPAS doc branch members who pick the nominees, as well as the entire 10,000-plus membership who elect the winners, now had to swear on their celluloid hearts that they actually watched the films they would be eligible to vote for. We believed we had one of the two best films among the five nominees (reinforced by many awards and critical raves at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes), giving us better odds than one out of five…maybe a 50% shot! Also, the tide had gone out for previous years’ starry bio docs and celebrations of unsung music talent in favor of serious socio-political themes that speak to our fraught times. And we played our hand well.

Our theatrical and publicity teams touted our fresh Oscar nom the same day we opened in New York and immediately landed dates at arthouses across the country. Our digital team pulled all levers to get prime placements fast-tracked on essential TVOD platforms like Apple and Amazon. And we premiered the film with pride of place on our own subscription platform, the Kino Film Collection. Our usual windowing of media releases went out the window…not our typically preferred approach but we drove hard at a day and date strategy to overcome our late to the game disadvantage in the competitive compression of Oscar time.

We revved up like never before for the final sprint to the March awards. Other years, when we stalled at the finish line, we consoled ourselves with the notion that just getting the nomination is a “win.” This time we refused to anticipate disappointment. We were encouraged by a cult of interns telling us they were all “manifesting” our win.

Fact is, winning really is a horse of a different color. As distributors, we’re not a film’s creator, producer, or even financier—we don’t get called to the stage or take home a statue. At best we might get a shoutout in an acceptance speech and photos holding the gold at the Governor’s Ball before the creative team rushes it off to Vanity Fair—the trophy their entry card.

But in our own sphere of engagement, the film gains a new currency, a new life, in all its media incarnations, and elevates our standing among our peers and public. Mr. Nobody set records for us in TVOD, in the educational market, and on the Kino Film Collection. It also garnered a healthy box office gross, despite a limited spend and its competing availability in all home media outlets. After almost six months in about 200 arthouse markets large and small—some screens we never played before—there are theaters that are still booking it. We’re gratified that our thoughtful P&A spending and strategically coordinated home media digital release will generate a healthy financial return for our filmmakers. A 93-page dossier of press clips brimming with critical and audience praise is also hugely rewarding. We’re a commercial enterprise but mission-driven on the many paths arthouse cinema leads. On Oscar night we could not have been prouder to be a distributor evangelizing for cinema as a tool of truth, where a “Mr. Nobody” can expose a brutal regime that’s poisoning young minds with lies about a quest to “de-nazify” Ukraine.

Our film’s co-director David Borenstein is now reprising his memorable Oscar acceptance speech about “losing your country” in new public forums and wide-ranging media. The film’s titular “Mr. Nobody,” and co-director, Pavel “Pasha” Talenkin now lives in exile in Europe and is contemplating his own future. He’s been condemned by the Kremlin as a “foreign agent” and unlikely to ever return to his home.

When Pasha last traveled back to the Czech Republic with his Oscar statuette in hand, a TSA agent disallowed it as a carry-on brought on board. Placed in an unmarked carton and transferred to the baggage hold, it went missing when the plane landed and was assumed stolen or otherwise lost. Days later, after a press uproar, Lufthansa found and returned it to Pasha with an apology. There was no such apology from the TSA, who had never confiscated a carry-on Oscar before. But they had unwittingly made an ironically appropriate call. For this gently explosive film, which has awakened new outrage at Putin’s tyrannical regime, its own Oscar can now claim new status as a potentially “deadly weapon.”

With euphoria fading, Oscars in the rear-view, our sights are now set on Cannes. But the concept of winning or acquiring a winner there is for us a totally different proposition. Cannes continually challenges our idea of how we function in the entertainment industry within our self-selected identity as a film distributor who does not make films. We are struck by how our business is changing as we look at ourselves refracted in the mirrors of Cannes. As arguably the most important film festival in the world, Cannes seems to keep complicating its raison d’etre and redefining itself each year, something the Oscars never quite desires or does. We learn lessons from both. More on that soon…

No sooner did a cinematically eventful January come to a close—with plenty of new SkyMiles to show for it—than I was back in NYC, laundry refreshed and packing again. We were headed to JFK for Charles de Gaulle. Paris would be home for the next month, for easier jumping off to Berlin and London.

Expectations were subdued, but tensions were high at a new Berlinale.

The Berlin Film Festival and its European Film Market commercial sidebar had returned to its best form in years under the guidance of its new London imported director Tricia Tuttle. While we mostly were tracking follow-ups and finalizing offers for the just completed Sundance, there were some discoveries and disappointments in equal measure. Although not the hotbed of hype that marks and sometimes scars Sundance, consolidation in the international film sphere has made buying the best in Berlin a trickier bet. We’ve acquired about six of the Golden Bear winners over the last 10 years, invariably before they were picked for the prizes. But these days, deals are slowing for the U.S. as box office has tumbled for international arthouse films. Sometimes a seemingly commercial film that remains unsold keeps financiers happier with a projected price on their books than the reality of a sale spelling an investment writedown. In the downturn, dismayed sellers can’t close deals without capitulating. At the same time, arthouse film production overseas has powered on, financed largely with tax dollars funneled through government programs and financial incentives to promote national identity and elevate local auteurs.

We didn’t come away with any winners yet, as the slow grind of deal-making has barely begun for Berlin, and we focused on clinching some other Sundance acquisitions. But something else generated more heat at the Berlin Film Festival than any of its films. Political tensions swirled around the Berlinale when several filmmakers condemned Israel in their speeches, prompting the German government, the festival’s backer, to call for restraining such protests. As crisis meetings and potential firings made headlines, film deals waited in the wings, if not the shadows. More than any one film we’re eyeing, we’re rooting for Tricia to stay on.

Paris respite, then London calling and a moment of truth with Ted.

I was exhilarated to return to Paris for a few days of recovery from festival hangover. My preferred remedy is painting and cinema detoxing in my euro-bureau of choice, the magnificent Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which houses the greatest art history library, the Institut National d’ Histoire de l’Art, in a spectacular 1860s temple of culture on Rue de Richelieu. I’m proud to be a card-carrying member.

Then it was off to London for the second installment of the TV market MIP, now relocated there from Cannes, and converging with the long-standing London Screenings. Afterwards, I met with our acquisition executives for our international TV series streaming platform MHz Choice. While TV may have brought me to London, the real highlight was the BAFTAs.

To fête the nominees, the Brits threw a “modest” bash by commandeering the entire splendor of the National Gallery of Art, where guests dressed to the nines swirled their champagne and strolled galleries adorned with Turners, Cézannes, Constables, and Seurats. It was hard to leave.

The next day was the awards show. The red carpet, so to speak, unfurled across what looked suspiciously like a former loading dock, adorned with precariously hung giant screens under a brutalist overhang of Festival Hall. Amid the crowd, a familiar face—Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s visionary emperor of home viewing. We first met when he was just detaching from running video stores and I was still in the thick of the ‘90s video boom. We ran into each other on occasion and he was always eager to discuss how the business was changing, especially the prospects of renting videos by mail with subscriptions. The secret in the sauce of success then? NO LATE FEES….revolutionary! We soon partnered with Netflix in some early joint film buys for their newly branded “Red Envelope” disk releases. And as that business metamorphosed into renting streams, not things, the chrysalis became the Netflix we now know. Ten years later, in its still-developing days, I earned one of their early output deals, on the strength of the great Kino brand and the arthouse library I had recently acquired. We had a “put” to Netflix for modest license fees based on box office earnings for just about every film we released. It helped establish our company under my leadership and allowed us to take risks acquiring some of the greatest international films being made in the second decade of the 21^st century. That deal is long gone, as are almost all the deals that Netflix had with companies like ours.

I was touched that Ted spotted me in the scrum of gowns and tuxes and waved with a grin that seemed to say “it’s been a long road, but we’re still on it.” We were soon next to each other at the threshold of the hall sharing a warm handshake and back pats. He leaned toward my ear without breaking his smile and whispered something that confirmed his pain as one could have inferred from months of headlines. All I could say back was keep smiling through it, Ted. The next day he went to the White House, and shortly after it was announced he was killing the deal, happily before it got him first.

Mr. Nobody had everybody cheering.

Ironically, our doc’s main competitor among the BAFTA nominees was Netflix’s own entry, The Perfect Neighbor, a brilliant film we had tried to buy at Sundance last year but couldn’t come near what they were offering. Netflix’s backing this Perfect Neighbor was not exactly a Goliath, but our filmmaker was a David…Borenstein, that is. He directed Mr. Nobody Against Putin in close collaboration with Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, the co-directing cameraman and Russian teacher-turned-whistleblower who set the film’s mischief in motion.

When Monica Bellucci, the award presenter, opened the envelope and uttered her first Italian-inflected syllable, “Mis…”, our team and the whole Festival Hall exploded in cheers. It was a powerful moment that we celebrated through the night. A cab ride later, I was waiting with our producer’s gold trophy in hand for entry to the cool kids’ party Netflix was throwing at a private club on Grosvenor Square. After idling by a platter with a mountain of caviar, I left after less time than I had waited to get in.

So back to Paris, yes, again. For one more awards ceremony. Our poignant and widely praised, crushingly tragic Gaza doc Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which was snubbed for the Academy shortlist despite winning so many other notable prizes, was nominated for the French Oscar, the César Award. Our filmmaker, the Iranian Sepideh Farsi, who lives now in Paris, was the honoree but was understandably not in a celebratory mood, as the U.S.’s bombing of Iran was about to begin. Her anxiety over the safety of family and friends was the greater suspense than who would win the César. It was no surprise that we lost to Le Chant des Forêts, a poetic ecological nature doc, which was approaching a record-setting $20 million at the French box office.

Our Zorro, unmasked!

Sepideh declined to join but we went on to gather with many French friends and business associates at the glitzy Fouquet’s off the Champs-Élysées for bubbles and dinner well after midnight. As my wife and I were leaving, we bumped into the Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin (star of The Artist) and I couldn’t resist introducing myself. He’s the new Zorro in the French remake of one of my all-time favorite childhood shows. I told him we were thrilled to have just bought the series for our U.S. TV streaming platform. He cheerily asked if we had got the rights from CAA and for a premiere on Paramount+. MHz Choice may not have been the mark this new Zorro hoped for, but our streaming channel is making its own big mark. Jean’s brother is also the show’s producer and he gladly posed for a 3 a.m. post-César’s photo. He seemed pleased to know that his French homage to the black masked icon will find a new audience in the U.S.

By 4 a.m., we were in a taxi going home. Riding through the most beautiful city that sleeps late was ever inspiring, but my wife and I were looking forward to returning soon to New York. And shortly thereafter repacking for the last stop on this 2026 Q1 Cinema Journey: Los Angeles. The Oscars were waiting and I joked that a win for Mr. Nobody could make anybody a Somebody in the instant fame land of Hollywood. Our new mark of Zorro, a BAFTA trophy, and a Creative Vision prize didn’t hurt either. It seemed an eon ago that we had been jarred from our sleep by that Mexico quake. Nothing in these first months of 2026 had been quite that seismically dramatic. Some cinematic jolts and awards rumblings were ego-energizing, but what lingers and matters most is the reminder that the world—cinematic or seismic—has a way of shaking just enough to test our footing. The trick is to find your balance in the tremors and, maybe, catch a view of the fruit seller arranging his papayas like nothing ever happened. Will try to remember that in the quake-prone hours of the Oscars in LA.

We’ll be holding our breath for “the big one.” Stay tuned…

My year began with a bang.

Or rather, a shake. A real, geological one — a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in Mexico City where we had decamped for cultural R&R after the holidays and before the festival onslaught of the coming quarter. It was the day after New Year’s at 8 a.m., and in a jet lag daze it hit and woke me like I was in a bad movie: cheesy close-ups, abrupt cuts, hangers swinging wildly in an open wardrobe, cell phones vibrating with siren alerts. Cut to the window: panicked dogs yelp in a courtyard as a squadron of birds vault off the swaying power lines.

In our little hotel in Roma Sur the floors bounced, the walls shuddered, and then, with our hearts still pounding, the room froze as we awaited in terror for the next tremor. But the sequel was mild and calm settled on set. My wife leaned over the terrace and saw the fruit man, unbothered, setting up his stand, arranging bananas and papayas just as he did every morning seemingly for years. By 8:15, we were laughing at our own trembling hands. Local news reported Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum had been mid-press conference when the earthquake hit. She calmly left the podium as her staff scattered, only to return 10 minutes later to finish her remarks on the latest Trump contretemps. This not-quite-earth-shattering New Year’s event didn’t even merit a mention in the Times. But the jolt felt prophetic—a literal shake-up that foreshadowed instability in some areas of my concern: politics, cinema, the media economy. Would seismic surprises drive the script for ’26?

A last dance with Park City.

Mexico was meant to be a restorative trip—art, anthropology, culinary exploration—before returning to New York just ahead of taking off again for the film year’s first big event in Park City. With Robert Redford gone and the upcoming move to Boulder, was this the real Sundance’s last dance? Maybe not but it felt like a closing night. A morose mood was backdropped by snowless hills. It was the first “brown Christmas” in memory for many cranky merchants who would no longer have invading Hollywood hordes to love and hate and to whom to hawk their cowboy kitsch. Not exactly an earthquake, but our little festival world’s own seismic shift.

I’d been attending Sundance since the late ’80s, when it was the scrappier U.S. Film Festival before it was anointed Sundance. From my fledgling Fox Lorber days I continued showing up most of the next 38 years. Memories flooded back as I connected with several friends who started their careers in one of the incarnations of my “something-Lorber” named businesses; many have gone on to leadership roles that make me feel proud in this unforgiving industry. I liked to tell them I didn’t ski at Sundance—the film business was a slippery enough slope for me…and they’ve mastered it.

It shook me out of Sundance nostalgia when my Kino Lorber colleagues arrived. A mostly new crack team of five, with impeccable preparation, caffeinated enthusiasm, and confidence borne of the hard-learned balancing of art and commerce. They make our operation click profitably while burnishing our brand. This last Park City Sundance suddenly felt like an exciting opening night.

Over the course of a week, our onsite team screened more than 50 films, shared links with our gang in New York, and cumulatively wrote countless paragraphs of elevated coverage that sometimes read like Cahiers du Cinema. Long over are years of budget hunch, spend and pray buys. Our film corps was still inspired by their curatorial calling and taste, even as we all feared whether any favored festival darling could survive the frigid winter of cinema’s discontent. Big streamers and their few proxy distributors with cherished output deals have mostly fled the scene. Their Pay 1 license fees that can backstop and de-risk all rights buys or take titles totally out of theatrical play—straight to stream—would blow out of the water our carefully measured offers. The films we buy have to work first on the big screen. Expenditures supporting a theatrical rollout must be calibrated to booking momentum and progress at the box office. With big streamers receding from the acquisitions landscape, we’re actually encouraged by the more level playing field. The best companies selling to us recognize this reality and appreciate our long game for their films. That’s why we started our own boutique streaming platform, the Kino Film Collection. It’s now the fastest growing indie arthouse SVOD and helping us make financial ends meet while creating new revenue streams for our filmmakers.

Sundance came and went with some happy surprises, not exactly seismic, but they lifted our spirits. As the festival was just beginning, our recently acquired, Academy shortlisted documentary feature, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, got the nod for a nomination that put us in the Oscar race. No mean feat to be one of the five nominated out of a field of 201 feature docs that qualified this year, and our third doc Oscar nomination in three years. Then the next day I saw a film that cleared my cinema palate and quickened my curatorial pulse like nothing else in years. I went against my own better judgment never to buy on the spot at Sundance and convinced my team to put out a winning bid. Filipiñana was a miracle of a film by a 28-year-old director named Rafael Manuel. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit relief that this financial fling earned some validation when The New Yorker’s Richard Brody posted a review that announced it as a “masterwork” by a first-time feature filmmaker who “opens new vistas in the future of the cinema.” It went on to win the Sundance Special Jury award for Creative Vision. And key theatrical exhibitors chimed in with their enthusiasm to open it on their screens, a happy hedge for our bet. But as pleased as I was, there was a chill too, from a setting sun with this last old Sundance signing off. Then, heading back to New York, a tremor of excitement dispelled the shiver. BAFTA announced nominees for their British “Oscars” and one of the five slots for top doc went to our Mr. Nobody. Though the Berlin Film Festival was my next stop, by way of Paris, I added London to the itinerary.

What other seismic surprises were in store at this start of the new cinema year?

It’s a haunting, vital piece of work about a 25-year-old photojournalist and poet in Gaza named Fatma Hassona. Editing together a year of WhatsApp video calls the filmmaker introduces us to the world of an ever-smiling, hopefully courageous young woman. We see images of her camera-in-hand promenades that capture scenes of a community under constant bombardment and come to understand what she meant by saying she would “put her soul on her hand and walk.” The tragedy of the film is echoed by reality: days before Hassona was set to attend the Cannes Film Festival for the film’s world premiere, a targeted Israeli missile strike killed her and her entire family. That loss is staggering, but the film’s existence is now a testament and inspiration for the courage of survival and creation under siege.

The Great Divide

At the ceremony, as I nervously approached the podium to accept the prize, I looked out on an A-list movie crowd…Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson, among other bold-faced names of the Big World of Movies. The contrast of their works with our little doc was jarring. To call our film “low-budget” is a massive overstatement. We’re talking about modest thousands versus the hundreds of millions spent on One Battle After Another, the angry, astute epic that deservedly swept the awards that night.

The irony of the venue wasn’t lost on me. We were at the Cipriani on 42nd Street, a 30-foot-high ballroom of arches and columns that was originally The Bowery Bank. Martin Scorsese, handing the Best Film plaque to Anderson, reminisced about a different film era, remembering personally when the building we were in was just a bank. There we were, celebrating with cinema royalty, the alpha and omega of free film expression—whether costing indie thousands or Hollywood billions—in a magisterial bank named for what became a flophouse boulevard of broken dreams.

P.T. Anderson’s spare-no-expense movie and our lives-at-risk Gaza doc arose from the same creative DNA: an urgency for free expression outraged by social injustice and political repression. As I walked back to my seat, the director nodded a thank you to me with a knowing smile. It meant a lot to receive recognition from this gifted guy who pulled off a studio coup for a couple hundred million to make a brilliant cri de coeur that seemed certain to bleed red ink. May it have a long Warner’s afterlife on Netflix. In both cases, in different ways, freedom of film expression sure ain’t free.

Smuggling Truth: Mr. Nobody Against Putin

But what really goes into making award-worthy “freedom of expression” cinema? We think we found an exemplar of that with our latest Kino Lorber release: the Oscar-shortlisted feature doc Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

This Sundance winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award is DIY Resistance filmmaking at its finest. Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a provincial Russian school teacher and classroom videographer, used subterfuge to undermine the propaganda he was tasked to record and feed back to his students. Refusing to be a shill for “patriotic education” he found a surreptitious alternate purpose for his daily shooting assignments. He recorded hundreds of hours of propaganda sessions—military drills, ideological indoctrination, fun stuff like grenade-throwing competitions—and other rousing video scenes that would obfuscate and justify Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in the eyes of his young pupils. He managed to smuggle out footage of this insidious state-mandated curriculum and repurpose it as an indictment of Russia’s nationalist lies.

Seven hard drives of his videos eventually found a new home and became a feature film through collaboration with an American co-director living in Denmark. David Borenstein, who had been communicating with Pavel via encrypted lines, worked remotely with him to put it all together. When Pavel realized he was under police surveillance, he managed to flee Russia for Europe, leaving behind his family and beloved life as a teacher, probably forever. Now, Mr. Nobody Against Putin is in the mix for an Oscar.

Like Fatma Hassona in Gaza, Pavel Talankin is proving that film language can dismantle the lies that weaponize repression. Fatma’s final hope was that her words and photos through Farsi’s remote homemade film (they never met in person) will now be “free to fly across the world.” Pavel, now in exile, has with his co-director shaped contraband footage into wings of film that will, Oscar or not, similarly fly far and wide.

The AI Undead

Freedom of expression clashes with the social media those in power use to define reality. If we buy the concept that language shapes perception as some linguists and philosophers have argued, then it does so no more powerfully than through visual multimedia tools of video and film. But there’s a new force in the arsenal of expression upping the ante of this conflict. AI is accelerating the impact of the collision between social media and free expression. For better or worse it’s going to flip the script on how we perceive reality and content creators will be in the thick of it.

Though saddened by the death of Rob Reiner, I happily remember his final released film, which, as usual, provoked an equal measure of guffaws and cultural insights. In Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, the band’s guitarist announces he’s scoring a horror flick set in a retirement community called Night of the Assisted Living Dead. I fed that title as a prompt into an AI generator and got back a ‘50s vintage Mad Magazine-style poster for a nonexistent movie. Will some content creator take the next AI steps and generate a script and make an animated short or even a full-length feature out of it? I imagine these creaky zombies as economically distressed filmmakers keen to seek revenge on a system that spawned but eventually crushed them.

Let’s be on guard but not villainize AI. We can hope that today’s undying creators will pursue raw freedom of expression on new paths, from red-ink-bleeding big-screen epics by politically enlightened studio-enabled auteurs to no-budget filmmakers who dare to lead homemade cinematic truth crusades. May an AI force for good be with them all. It could rescue defeated creators from the zombiehood of hack work for a broken system and assisted living in a filmmaker flophouse. Let’s hope they’ll use the superpowers of AI to invest in truth, justice—but NOT today’s American way—and bank public support that pays good interest for deposits of Free Expression.

Recently, Kino Lorber had a holiday party with the main entertainment being karaoke. What better way to stir social interaction! It collapsed the hierarchies of our org chart as reserved senior executives became shameless exhibitionists delighting in their inept performances, while junior members rose to the top with real vocal talent and star charisma. Karaoke induced a unanimous glee that democratized our corps of 80. With erased audio lyrics projected as text, it was a perfect celebration of subtitles for a company that has for over 40 years been distributing international and silent films with words accompanying pictures…we truly march to the tune of text on screen. And in some ways, now our whole culture does.

For about 100 years, four generations have come of age processing moving images with text, first in silent cinema and later with sound in movies from around the world. The process accelerated with the rush of technology as text became ever more scrambled with images on TVs, computers, and the ceaseless scrolling of smartphones—today the marriage of image and text reigns over all shapes and sizes of screens. Mostly, though, we’re numb to the perception that text, which is basically static, requires effort to be read in time while our eyes and ears automatically, if not passively, absorb the simultaneous flow of images and sound. I had a wake-up call about this at my own party when my karaoke moment of truth came.

Severely unendowed with vocal talent and never having performed before, I sought out a favorite song with minimal singable lines, ironically from Talking Heads: “Psycho Killer.” I practiced it the night before—mostly syncopated consonants, howled vowels, and refrains of a French phrase I could confidently pronounce. I thought I could nail it:

Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?
Fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, far better
Run, run, run, run, run, run away
Oh-ho-ho-ho, aye-yi-yi-yi-yi…

As I ascended the platform, facing a friendly room cheering the Chairman, I began to sing. But as I started mouthing words, the text my eyes were following on screen went out of sync with the sound of the song A karaoke crisis! I felt like Chaplin in Modern Times on the sped up assembly line—stumbling over phrases, improvising grunts and screeches, trying to catch up to the lyrics. I’m sure it upped the enjoyment of my faithful audience seeing their boss undone by a tech glitch. Someone complimented me saying I really killed it, though I knew it was not the way David Byrne’s psycho intended.

Maybe it was residual disorientation from this out-of-sync karaoke fiasco, but I got to thinking about how I normally experience image, sound, and text in movies, and one of Godard’s intriguing ideas popped into my mind: he declared he sought the analysis of sound through image and vice versa. His use of text on screen had something to do with it too. I logged on to my own Kino Film Collection streaming site to revisit a few of our most relevant Godard films: La Chinoise, Le Gai Savoir, and his great career-culminating Goodbye to Language. In different ways, each of these visionary cinematic investigations makes radical use of text as a catalyst in his image and sound alchemy. Text becomes a kind of protagonist disrupting the rhyming rapport between pictures and sound. He believed each component of cinema should exist independently of each other, maybe to prompt different meanings and experiences for audiences. It’s a powerful modernist concept that informs the work of many artists, such as how Cunningham and Cage liberated the relationship between music, sets, and movement in dance—each component standing on its own terms, recombined in the unifying perception of the viewer.

My business career in film distribution has largely focused on connecting audiences with experiences of some concatenation of image, sound, and text on screens of differing types and sizes. Over two thirds of the 400 or so titles we release per year—in theaters, digitally, and in physical media—are international films, across Kino Lorber, Kino Film Collection, and our global TV streaming platform MHz Choice. Almost all of this content is subtitled, and that’s not even counting the many restored silent film classics we release with intertitles. But there’s more in our “lettering of images” than that. English language films and shows now must offer English captions and even subtitled international films require captions that describe the ambient audio of atmospheric effects for audiences that are hard of hearing or deaf. I’ve become so accustomed to subtitles and captions that it actually feels “foreign” to watch anything without them. Though aging baby boomers have long been the core audience for international films and have embraced subtitles to abet their dimmed hearing, they’re not the only ones gravitating to captions. All the end-of-alphabet “gens” have been processing image and text as their social media birthright since smartphones were invented.

My karaoke comeuppance got me thinking further about how image and text have historically been yoked together or yanked apart for different artistic and communication ends. In the visual arts, Braque and Picasso began integrating painted letters, words, and collaged snippets of newspapers into their breakthrough abstract compositions by around 1911. Fragments of text were presented, not to represent, but as images themselves, affirming their own reality as visual objects on a flat plane, markers with personal references and cultural associations. Those were followed by even more radical disruptions. Dadaists, Constructivists, Futurists and later avant-gardists all the way up to Pop Art represented an expanding cadre of visual and experimental cinema artists pursuing various conceptual strategies and political agendas that repurposed language and text in their work. The interplay of image and text—sometimes a fusion, other times a disjunction—dates back even further, to early hieroglyphic representations of language. Sometimes visual glyphs were simply images visibly depicting identifiable objects and actions. Other times, as in millennia-old Mayan culture, they were both ideographic and semantic symbols that have been deciphered as phonetic elements of speech.

All of this jars my thinking about the future of the language of and in cinema. Given the direction our movie economy is headed, more work will originate for the small screen. Sure, we’re still committed to releasing to theaters for that unique larger-than-life communal experience. Our Kino Lorber tagline remains “Experience Cinema.” But one of our biggest cinematic successes last year did much more business digitally and was a film that you watched, heard, and read in equal parts—the extraordinary Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

Winner of more awards than I can recount, the film was jocularly described by its brilliant artist-creator Johan Grimonprez as “an academic PDF disguised as a music video.” As challenging to synopsize as it was exhilaratingly praised, it’s a cinematic essay about the Congo crisis of the 1960s that led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba amidst Cold War imperialist machinations to take control of Africa’s greatest mineral wealth. This sprawling filmic collage unfolds over two and a half hours as a mind-dazzling visual and auditory tapestry of subtitled archival film clips, jazz performances, historical quotations, text segments, and scholarly footnotes all with a syncopating bebop score. I recall one reviewer describing the film perfectly as a sort of “double temporality” split between the fast paced reading experience of text driving your eyes across the images and the condensed information’s after-effect where the film lives on in your brain in a way that makes you want to read and learn more.

In his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot posited that when a “really new” work of art is created “something happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” He goes on to say that the “existing monuments” of past art are ever so slightly altered and “we should not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present.” After the unprecedented Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, the history of cinema may never look quite the same.

As I think about how image and text have been realigned over millennia and most conspicuously how image, sound, and text have forged new relationships in the short history of cinema, I see new possibilities for Creators. Given the steep decline in audiences going out to the movies and the economic duress of a legacy system producing and releasing films that start their economic journey there, ambitions to mount movies on big screens may steadily give way to new forms of imaginative engagement. Maybe there will be more new works that advance image, text, and sound on equal footings. Maybe we’ll see a new form of literate cinema in the palm of our hands. I see a path forward with at least one cinematic “coup d’etat.” T.S. Eliot would give it a thumbs up. But maybe not for my first karaoke outing. Oh-ho-ho-ho, aye-yi-yi-yi-yi … qu’est-ce que c’est?

More than 1500 films are available to my company annually from key festivals and markets, global sales agents, independent filmmakers, and other unclassifiable sources. Out of those, my team and I will screen a few hundred and pursue about 10% for theatrical and digital distribution. Maybe half will wind up in our hands, and not always in our upper tier. It’s an unforgiving equation for us and filmmakers. But the brutal truth is: there are too many films being made, lots for misguided reasons, and the old funnel can’t handle them. It’s clogged, cracked, and leaking badly…but maybe that’s a good thing?

As digital technology transforms the industry, fragmenting audiences and creating new vectors of access and origination, the traditional underpinnings of the cinema economy are wobbling. I was brought up as a gatekeeper, so to speak, and it’s my heritage to pursue films that I believe are of unassailable quality, ranging from poetics to politics, whether narrative or documentary, ticking the boxes of auteur originality, festival pedigree, critical acclaim, etc. But as a progressive commercial distribution enterprise, I’m increasingly caught in a clashing of realms between the Gatekeeper practice and the new Creator ethos.

By Gatekeepers, I mean curators and distributors and the like who follow the traditional model of one source transmitting content to many. By Creators, I mean the DIYers who disintermediate Gatekeepers and transmit content through multiple sources every which way to not just many, but many different kinds of audiences. When I lose out on winning rights to a film, it’s increasingly to a creator community model, maybe some hybrid of self-distribution with fractional rights sold off and a planned impact campaign funded by philanthropic investors, rather than to an all-rights-buying competitor in the traditional distribution cohort. I’m not exactly questioning my Gatekeeper faith, but I’m “Creator curious.” I’m still looking for films of quality but that come into being and connect with audiences in new ways and for new reasons. I like films that question and even deconstruct the rules of their own game. Works with this “meta-cinema” consciousness bridge the Gatekeeper and Creator cultures and, to my questioning mind, uniquely validate the relevance of filmmaking today.

Along these lines there are two films on my plate right now that didn’t get away. Each in its own way illuminates the new mission and old misuse of cinema in different eras. They’re essential works, and they’re both hitting screens in the U.S. as I write this, and starting to kick up gold dust on the awards scrimmage line.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was a revelation at the last Cannes Film Festival. For over a year, and with the the most limited of means, Iranian-French filmmaker Sepideh Farsi engaged in a series of FaceTime conversations with a brave young Palestinian photojournalist and poet named Fatma Hassona, who was trying to survive with her family in the midst of the Gaza genocide. The shaky connection and glitchy breakdowns of the video calls throughout the film become for the viewer a kind of experiential media correlative of daily life in Gaza—fragile, disintegrating, and regularly punctuated by bursts of bombs and plumes of smoke out the window.

Hassona almost always wears a charismatic, if pained smile as she guides our eyes across her powerful photos of the rubble and blood in her neighborhood. She reads lines from the poems of yearning she still writes; charms us with a tour of her claustrophobic dwelling, containing minimal but cherished possessions; and introduces us to a few friends and members of her family in between their risky errands to gather wood and water. She tells Farsi on subsequent calls that some of them have just been killed, forcing a smile through tears. The film achieves its most poignant and profound intimacy from the authentic communication between the filmmaker and subject. The conversations are accompanied on screen by their respective environments: comfortable domestic scenes and globe-hopping are seen from Farsi’s window, juxtaposed with the shattering destruction surrounding Hassona. But the contrast is grounded in empathy and seems to uplift Hassona’s optimism even further.

Toward the end of the film, Sepideh tells Hassona that the film in progress has been accepted by the Cannes Film Festival, and this thrilling news is greeted with Hassona’s gleeful hope that she can get her passport ready in time to attend the opening. We learn in an epilogue that days after this news, Hassona and 10 members of her family were killed in a targeted Israeli missile strike. Maybe they didn’t want the eyes of the world to see her walking the red carpet as a symbol of resilience among all the blood being shed.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a film that lives beyond its frame, whose surrounding events will be forever part of its fabric and legacy. But it would be no less a work of iconic consequence had Hassona not been murdered. As it stands now, though, it’s an exemplar of self-made cinema that defies conventions. Bypassing Gatekeepers in its creation, the film would also likely disseminate to viewers virally without a Gatekeeping distributor, probably in the same hand-held format in which it was created.

My other take on meta-cinema is an unnerving historical investigation of how the aesthetic virtues of cinema can be corrupted by Gatekeepers. Andres Veiel’s fascinating Riefenstahl diligently deconstructs the career of the eponymous filmmaker. Living to 101 and long after her celebrated output for the Third Reich, she pursued and documented a single-minded campaign to undue her association with perhaps the ultimate film Gatekeeper of all time, Adolph Hitler.

Veiel’s ingenious forensic strategy was to pursue a kind of filmmaking judo, filtering through Riefenstahl’s own archives—700 boxes of letters, photos, TV clips, and her films themselves—to build a compelling indictment that undermines her pleas of innocence. She always claimed that she was just an artist working at the pinnacle of her craft …and besides, her films won all the awards! At one point she even makes the absurd claim that she would have made similar films for Churchill if the invitation had been forthcoming. In a most damning discovery, Veiel shares a letter from a Nazi adjutant to Riefenstahl’s ex-husband, in which she requested a group of Jews be moved from the background in order to improve her shot of a gathering of German soldiers in a Polish village. With her insistence, it was interpreted as “removed” and they were. Off camera, 22 of them were shot.

If Farsi’s Gaza, film reaches a virtuous peak of Creator content. Veiel’s work shows the inverse: a Creator obsequious to Gatekeeper culture who rises to an aesthetic peak for nefarious ends. Riefenstahl was only second to Hitler as her own best Gatekeeper, but Veiel proves here that with skilled hands, diligent research, and moral imperative a film can be the ultimate Gatecrasher too.

Today, as I look at my relationship to these two worthy films, I’m seeing my role as a distributor through the dual lenses of Gatekeeper and Creator cultures. By any definition I am a Gatekeeper, but I’m also cheering the chorus of Creators who are trying to buck my system. I’m learning a lot from them. But there are dark sides too. Gatekeepers protect their power base by stagnating change and can commercially hobble artistic enterprise. The deadening impact of let’s call it the Gatekeeper Industrial Complex is widely discussed. Newer Creator culture has its own gauntlet of pitfalls, but less understood since they’re changing so fast with evolving technologies. These Creators are clearly more and more beholden to self-inflicted commercialization run by disingenuous influencers and merch racketeers seeking to monetize content by any means. They’re often devaluing their own content and processes that allow it to be created.

I, for one, am looking past these points of blockage and friction. I see a brighter fusion of both realms, where there may be a role for a distributor in a new kind of curation—seeking the best of meta-cinema or whatever we call it that bridges the Gatekeeper and Creator cultures, that takes the best tools of both worlds and applies them to exceptional films like the two discussed here. I’m looking forward to seeing how they will wind a path to the many.

Filmmakers like Farsi and Veiel inspire me to do what I do every day. It’s films like theirs that keep me going on my own Gatekeeper distribution path—an ever-changing one as new forms of content creation and ways of connecting to audiences rapidly transform the terrain. I’m enthusiastic about these and like-minded filmmakers’ careers. They’re blazing new cinematic trails. I’ll be pitching my distribution tent along the way to help give them and their films long careers. They deserve them.

RL

A few weeks ago, I joined a couple of friends to celebrate Rex Reed’s birthday.

Never met the man before, though I have been reading him on and off for over 40 years. Most recently it’s been off since most of the press outlets that were platforms for his often curmudgeonly comments have largely disappeared and, in fact, gone the way of the movies he most loves.

In person, Rex is an affably charming Southern gentleman and the evening with him was nothing short of delightful.

But I’ll share the bone I have to pick here with Rex. In the 43 film reviews he did last year, I could not count one from among the 30 or so I released. Given his mostly sour reviews of some of the films that most impressed me, I guess this was a lucky break.

At dinner Rex regaled us with delicious anecdotes from Hollywood’s glory years. At times he was a fly on the wall, other times a fly in the ointment (of some very sensitive-skinned stars). But his recurrent theme when looking at what is on screen today was to bemoan the lost art of cinematic storytelling. I’ve made my position clear about that in an earlier Substack post and didn’t interrupt his addicting narrative to argue my perspective.

So he’s old school, and bravo for that, even if for him the meat of the movies is still in an aging locker called Hollywood. But we’re at the stage in the short history of film where something’s seriously amiss.

Where’s the real meat in what we differentiate as “movies” and “cinema” today?

About 60 years ago, C.P. Snow threw down a dualistic gauntlet, alerting as he saw it of a great cultural divide. He bifurcated society into “two cultures:” the humanities and the sciences. The former was made up largely of literary intellectuals and latter technocratic scientists. The more modestly positioned humanities represented cultural preservation and a moral base of profound, historic artistic values while the sciences were championed by brilliantly progressive touting with near arrogance a triumphant march into an ever-improving future. They did not communicate effectively with one another, barely speaking the same language. Snow, trained as a scientist but vocationally a writer, felt he was uniquely positioned to view and comment on this divide. His own analysis was sometimes disputed as superficial, but intensely and extensively discussed by leading thinkers on both sides of the chasm. Whatever the flaws in his binary thinking, he touched a sensitive cultural nerve. The “Two Cultures” discourse has metastasized into other frames of reference. It’s a bifocal lens through which I as a distributor look at today’s world of film consumption.

So my dinner with Rex made me ponder the cultures of “movies” and “cinema” as two tastes in film, like different cuts of meat. But what’s closest to the bone: popular entertainment or artistic engagement? Fattening fun or soul nourishment? Emotional immersion or intellectual stimulation?

As an “arthouse” film distributor I’m squarely in the world of cinema. In fact, when I read the trades about the “movie business,” I often think I’m in an alternate universe. Studio box office disappointments that exceed my biggest successes by a factor of 10, if not 100, daze me, as do production and marketing costs of a single movie that may be several times what my company spends to release a year’s worth of films. Compared to companies making the trade headlines, we, and most other “arthouse” distributors, are like another culture, proudly collating and curating shreds of cinema’s meat or bone discarded by bigger movie-meal-making machines.

And yet, we play our films in hundreds of cities, reaching thin but hungry audiences seeking something nourishing and worthy of their time…and, let it be said, a good time. But the majority of our releases barely seep into media consciousness, except for the happy few that each year ascend to prestigious festival berths or rack up awards and nominations of key halo conferring organizations or events. But even these don’t significantly come to the attention of mainstream movie media the likes of which Rex Reed would keep score for.

We can spin out dichotomies about movies vs cinema until we’re blue in the face: entertainment vs art, narrative vs experimental, tabloid titillation vs political activism, studio vs indie (or Non-De), traditional distribution vs DIY solutions, passionate fan communities vs gargantuan franchise audiences, and so on.

So what’s the ultimate fate of these two cultures? Will there be some smackdown clash where one contender becomes king and redefines the culture for both? Or will they both wither as economic forces and diminishing audiences constrain the potential of each, relegating film culture a niche episode in history?

My takeaway from my dinner with Rex is that the meat and the bones of both movies and cinema, with all their cultural polarities, is already going through the grinder. The fragmentation of audiences, a process accelerated through proliferating and disintermediating new channels of access to “content,” is dissolving all outmoded categories and polarities. And it’s spawning hordes of new creator-consumers. The exploding “creator economy” is erasing distinctions between viewer and maker, participant and audience, niche and tribe, , mechanically reproduced screen media and participatory, immersive personal experience. YouTube may ultimately eat the lunch of Netflix. And we haven’t even touched on the ultimate meat butcher: AI.

As I left the dinner with Rex, I took comfort from his meaty nostalgic reminiscences about the movies. And I realized that as much as I wanted to gnaw more on the bones of cinema, what I was hungriest to taste was the essence of each…will creator content become their marrow? Will movies and cinema become merely the polished edges of creator content?

I’m in Paris now, it’s dinner time, and I’m heading to a favorite bistro for os a moelle. I have a feeling my metaphors for movies and cinema will taste even better as I scrape the bones and reward my musings with the delectable marrow. A restaurant review may follow.

People always ask me, “If you’re such a good film distributor, why don’t you become a producer?” There does seem to be some kind of riptide in the sea of film that pulls business types into the choppy waters of production. Most drown. I call it “producer-itis.” Being immune to this ailment has allowed me to build a sustainable business, now in its 45th year with more than 80 employees. It’s not that I’m risk averse. Distribution of arthouse films is inherently rife with opportunities to lose money. It’s no day at the beach, but I’m happily pulled into the deep by the current that is curation.

You don’t have to be an etymologist to know there’s some “sacred” calling here. From the Latin root “curare,” meaning to take care of health and souls (parish priests were “curates”), to more its current usage in the arts and broader culture, “curator” has come to mean an expert with roles in selection, care, and contextualization of works of worth and meaning. It requires taste, judgment, deep knowledge of a field, and a critical intelligence. Hard to be good at this!

But sometimes a good curatorial “pick” comes from serendipity and collaborative circumstance.

One of my happiest curatorial incidents goes back to the founding of Kino Lorber. An old college pal, Don Krim, and I were dancing around a deal in the late aughts to bring his Kino International and my post-Fox Lorber start-up Lorber Films into some alignment. Then we both stumbled on a title in Cannes by an unknown director that left each of us in a state of perplexed exhilaration. It had dim commercial prospects but we each had an appetite to risk acquiring it. This was Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 feature Dogtooth.

Despite our limited means, a commonality of taste stiffened our spines to overcome economic worry. We decided to buy it together. The way it worked, Don bought the film and I bought his company. It was our curatorial collaboration in 2009 that sealed the deal to form Kino Lorber. That this crazy Greek new wave film scored an Oscar nomination seemed to sanctify our curatorial marriage. I’m proud to say that Dogtooth remains one of our defining Kino Lorber titles to this day.

Compounding curatorial synchronicity, Lanthimos’s latest film, his just released Bugonia, is a remake of a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet, which I acquired and released years earlier, at Koch Lorber after selling Fox Lorber, well before Kino and Dogtooth. This now cult piece of comedic sci-fi insanity must have also tingled the same cinematic taste buds for Lanthimos as his Dogtooth did for Krim and me. Yorgos and I had a good laugh about it when we saw each other a couple of years ago at the Oscars.

But so much for the coincidences and mysteries of curation. Discovering films that truly light the dark may seem a sacred calling, but there’s a profane side too, ever more present as audiences shrink, pulled in so many directions away from cinema. I may fashion myself as a “gallerist” of cinema, but it also means paying the rent and selling what I show. Building a curatorial business based on arthouse awe is a shaky bet. Film culture is often a hothouse, an echo chamber of conversations among cinephiles, festival programmers, critics, academics, and certain distributor-influencers that rarely carries beyond a few hallowed media halls. We all struggle to monetize our curatorial chops but the reality is that “movie business” has become an oxymoron. Making films in particular is a pretty terrible game, with best efforts of distribution often unable to win the day. There’s never been a greater disequilibrium of creator supply and audience demand. There are too many films being made and too few people who want to see them. That’s the tough truth any curatorial mission must address.

I could go into the various reasons too many films keep getting made, but I’ll save that for another time. The flood of indie films, often fueled by vanity capital with increasingly frequent DIY distribution schemes, has in fact unleashed some great new talent that would be crushed by the studio systems of today and yore. Some have been justly elevated and celebrated by smart curatorial arbiters of taste. But for every truly exceptional work that surfaces there’s a tsunami of filmic flotsam that just gums up the works in sifting for the best. The media visionary Nam June Paik pointed out decades ago that as “recording” has become so much easier, access and retrieval has gotten much harder. It falls to the curator to navigate seas of content that audiences are drowning in.

So how do I catch a perfect curatorial wave? As much as my aesthetic ego aspires to singularly impeccable taste, the act of curation for a seasoned distributor is a collaborative process, complicated by competitive forces. It sometimes means subordinating precious cinematic infatuation to the often profane economics of distribution. It’s gamesmanship with constant negotiations between short-term gain and long-term brand, between commercial opportunism and critical validation. We want our picks to become festival darlings, earn as much critical praise as box office earnings, and we want them to be in the running for all the top awards. We hack for advantages by searching for titles that have been pre-curated—identified earlier in the release chain by the best agents or from trusted auteurs and weighed as winners by prestigious festivals. Adoration by certain critics, arthouse programmers, and other cultural arbiters allows us to hedge our bets before we spring to acquire. We seek any way we can to stack the deck in our favor to buffer a curatorial misfire. Some mundane and even meretricious strategies come into play. But the sad reality is that the safest bet in theatrically releasing arthouse gems these days is managing expectations. We have to build a quota of disappointments into our business models.

Balancing the new release schedule with road-tested repertory helps. Since the pandemic, the mainstay of older audiences largely stopped going out to see new movies. But younger audiences started turning up to see old films—oftentimes musty classics they’ve heard about for years now gloriously restored in digitally refreshed form. We’ve learned to work all the levers of digital media to generate new income from our large library’s long tail. Sometimes that tail really wags the Dog (tooth 😉).

We also cherish and nurture physical media collectors who have learned that access and availability of films they love is no sure thing in the fast currents of the streaming pool. Our legacy home video business supports our curatorial mission. In an otherwise declining market we see both stable financial returns and reinforcement of our role as curators, here catering to physical collectors. It’s a virtuous circle selling the best of the old to help fund discovery of the best of the new.

Curation for us is building a brand that stands for quality and value, where watching a film is truly worth the time spent…and time is ultimately our most precious commodity. When we get the sacred mission of curation right, people come to trust our brand enough to try choices that they otherwise might not have made. We’re raising halos over the films we love. We hope changing audiences will embrace these works as a new canon and revere them as we do. When the mission of curation is fulfilled, new films become consecrated as classics of tomorrow.

I read a physical copy of The New York Times every day, despite all temptations to abandon the habit—it distracts me as I pedal my exercise bike. While I wouldn't say the run of the paper inspires me, some things do pop, especially if they resonate with my media interests.

Here’s one: E. Jean Carroll, who trumped Trump in litigation and was about to attend the premiere of the documentary Ask E. Jean at Telluride, said she had just figured out the difference between movies and documentaries: “A movie is where a woman gets attacked by a monster and men come and save her. A documentary is where a woman gets attacked by a monster and then makes that monster pay $83 million.” While it's not clear that the judgment will stick, I hope the doc does…and I look forward to seeing it.

But what exactly does make a doc “stick”? At Kino Lorber-land, we've had two docs nominated for Oscars back-to-back in the last two years, which are both now available to watch on our streaming site Kino Film Collection: Four Daughters in 2023 (which you can also watch on Netflix, I plug proudly), and Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat from last year. What partly made me want to acquire each had to do with what likely wouldn't have made them stick as “movies.” Each in its own way is a meta-doc, wrangling “storytelling” away from traditional narrative cinematic form—and in their own ways reinventing storytelling—but sparkling with information and emotionally powerful ideas all the same.

In Four Daughters, director Kaouther Ben Hania rips up the documentary playbook and creates something entirely new. It’s part documentary, part narrative feature, but also a secret third thing. The film tells the story of Olfa Hamrouni and her titular daughters by interviewing two of the real women while enlisting the help of professional actors to stand in for the other two, who, after being radicalized, have gone missing in Libya. The end result feels like a family watching a live theatre production of their story play out in their own home. It begs the question: What reopens more wounds—retelling your own complex family story or watching others reenact it?

Similarly, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat defies all definition. Part of the fun of the film is how many ways you can describe it. It’s a visual essay. A spy thriller. A “PDF disguised as a music clip.” I’m sure someone has made the comparison, but if not, then I will: It’s a jazz solo of a film. The virtuoso director Johan Grimonprez pieces together hundreds of archival clips and texts on the Cold War and post-colonial Africa, which may sound dry on its own, but when it’s propelled by a steady and frenetic soundtrack of jazz by legends like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Dizzy Gillespie, the doc keeps your feet tapping and your mind engaged. And we haven’t even gotten to the John le Carré-like true story at the center, which reveals the vast CIA-led conspiracy that toppled the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the assassination of Lumumba…Wild stuff.

What sticks with me for both of these docs is the bold re-envisioning of nonfiction storytelling. The very fact that the documentary form is characterized by what it’s NOT (fiction) makes it an open field for imaginative reinvention of what it CAN BE. In other words, without the constraints of narrative form, a documentary is intrinsically more free.

In our own new nonfiction offerings we’re launching now two stunning exemplars of formal innovation that both push the envelope of doc filmmaking and illuminate its strategies—simply put, one for good, one for evil.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, from Iranian-French filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, is an up-close and personal video conversation with 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona as her world is under siege in real time in Gaza. Structured around stuttering connections of sequential video calls with Farsi, we enter a living hell as experienced moment to moment by Hassona. But it’s her courageous, uplifting efforts to put on a brave face despite the tragedy encircling her that’s most memorable. Seeing the photos she takes and hearing the poems she writes all shared on FaceTime do much more than “documenting” a near apocalyptic event—they truly bare her soul as she walks into the fire. The film fuses an outer view with an inner experience in a way that can’t do anything but stick with you. Tragically, Hassona and her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike just days before the film was set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. But her story will live on. We’ll be premiering Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk in the US at the New York Film Festival in October before releasing it in theaters across North America in November.

Our other documentary that I must call out is Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl. The film not only reveals the true story of controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, but also exposes how the malleable medium of documentary can be hijacked for insidious purposes. As Hitler’s preferred filmmaker, Riefenstahl produced eye-popping propaganda works for the Nazi regime that brought her worldwide cinematic acclaim. She then built a platform on their critical appreciation to reconstruct her own identity and inoculate herself against claims of complicity with the Nazis. Filmmaker Veiel employs a kind of archival judo to unveil the evidence of her true Nazi engagement. He meticulously sifts through a vast trove of material from her estate to deconstruct her own fabrications by analyzing many of the documents underpinning her own documentaries. After acclaim at the Venice and Telluride Festivals last year, we’re now releasing Riefenstahl in theaters nationwide.

We’re excited to be discovering and presenting these kinds of highly original works of cinema that make so much more out of the NON in nonfiction. They reflect the vision and ambitions of some of the greatest filmmakers working today, and hopefully signal that documentary film will only get more exciting from here…they stick with you and we’re sticking with them.

As I prepared to write my inaugural Substack post, one question dogged my mind repeatedly: Why am I doing this? Isn't there enough random content congesting the media byways, especially Route A.I.?

But the team at Kino Lorber Media thinks I have something worth committing to print beyond my email screeds. "Keep it personal," they say, inviting me to turn my verbal itches into Substack scratchings. As a former art history teacher and art critic, I entered the film business with a particular perspective, and my team has encouraged me to lean into it…

Before starting my first distribution business, Fox Lorber, I spent about a decade teaching art history and related subjects, including as an assistant professor at NYU, while also writing regularly as an art critic for publications like Artforum. Even after 45+ years in film, my engagement with art has only intensified, and today most of my spare time is spent painting abstract compositions with major influences from the Cubists, Constructivists, Surrealists and more recent Abstract Expressionists—I sometimes refer to my work as “cubo-futurist.” Maybe I’ll share a few pieces in these postings from time to time. My painterly immersions are core to how I think about film and the dynamics of this creative process help shape the vision of the businesses I’ve built.

Viewing film through this art lens, I’ve come to a conclusion, albeit a controversial one: Film is so much more than storytelling. Just that term alone—“storytelling”—has a chokehold on the industry. I'm weary of hearing filmmakers and producers at every festival and film event proclaiming their mission as storytellers. Is this literary appropriation really what cinema boils down to? Was that the end game for Méliès and the Lumière brothers at the dawn of the form? My art background might make me biased, but I’ve never believed cinema had less ambition than to be a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Linear narrative engagement in film—call it “storytelling”—is but one means of giving shape through intellect to the experience of time. If that’s a filmmaker’s main creative objective it risks foregoing the greater non-linear sensory arsenal that can make a cinematic work a truly transformative experience.

The touchstone for this is undoubtedly Jean-Luc Godard. We’re proud to have several of his earlier and most adventurous late works in our collection. Take a look at one of his final films, Goodbye to Language, in our Kino Film Collection. Shot in 3D and aptly titled, the film annihilates the old language of film and creates an entirely new one. And there are others that dare to obliterate filmmaking boundaries too: Yorgos Lanthimos, Guy Maddin, even Bill Morrison’s eye-probing documentaries. These are the types of auteurs that have evolved the medium far beyond the initial concept of “motion pictures” and into “experiential storytelling,” which at least aspires to the sensory expansion of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

But it’s surprising today that linear narrative thinking should still have a purchase on the imagination of filmmakers when everything in our modern media sphere has fractured our experience of time. Between the constant flow of bite-size content on our phones and the cornucopia of a la carte streaming choices on demand, linear storytelling has become a recombinant cubist experience—a mosaic of fragments that flood our senses. Maybe it’s time for our filmmakers to rethink cinema not as storytelling but as a new form that aligns with our new media consciousness.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on film, art, and the art of film.