Meta-Cinema and Why This Distributor Is Embracing the New Creator Economy

Day 75 of FilmStack’s Daily Inspiration Challenge

A still of Fatma Hossana and Sepideh Farsi from Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

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.

A still from Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

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.

A still from Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl

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.

Untitled painting by me.

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