A Curator's Mission Is Discovering the Classics of Tomorrow
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.
bonne chance!