On Thursday, March 27, from 4-5 pm ET, Firelight Media hosted the event "Beyond Resilience: Owning Distribution" at Maysles Documentary Center, co-presented by Distribution Advocates.
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The conversation was live-streamed to Firelight Media’s YouTube channel, a recording of which is available above. The conversation provides key strategies from two newly published case studies on independent documentary distribution, going in-depth on the film's campaigns, sharing eye-opening data, and revealing new ways to approach independent film distribution.

Moderator Karin Chien (co-founder, Distribution Advocates) will be joined by Stephen Maing (Union co-director, Firelight Media Impact Campaign Fund grantee and Spark Fund recipient), Mars Verrone (Union producer and Impact Fund Grantee), and Set Hernandez (unseen director, Firelight Media Documentary Lab alum and Impact Campaign Fund grantee).

Distribution for independently made documentaries has never been guaranteed. And now, as major distributors become less reliant on films made outside their vertically integrated businesses, filmmakers seem to have fewer and fewer opportunities to find an audience for their urgent stories.

As traditional distribution options tighten, some documentary filmmakers are meeting this new era with a new plan: To own distribution. These makers, like the teams behind critically acclaimed films Union and unseen, have resisted the easy path by taking control of nearly every aspect of their film’s release: they’ve created savvy marketing hooks, locked in and leveraged major organizational partners, pitched and engaged the press, and, crucially, compiled key data about their audiences.

We’ll use recent case studies – produced by Firelight Media and Distribution Advocates, respectively – that highlight these individual filmmakers' paths as a jumping-off point to showcase new pathways to getting seen.

Accessibility Notice: The YouTube  recording of this event includes the live closed-captions.

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DOWNLOAD THE 'UNSEEN' CASE STUDY

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Participant Bios:

Karin Chien is a producer and distributor committed to bold voices and innovative forms that build practices of ethical filmmaking. As a producer, over the past 20 years, Karin has produced independent films, artwork and multi-format media that have broken new ground. Karin’s producing work has been recognized with top honors, including the Independent Spirit Producers Award, the Humanitas Prize, the Sundance Audience Award, the inaugural Cinereach Producers Award, and the 2022 Sundance Film Festival’s Producers Keynote speaker. As an advocate for producers, Karin co-created the CAAM (Center for Asian American Media) Fellowship and Karin created the Nevada City Artist Residency, the first creative retreat designed for independent producers.

As a distributor, Karin is the Co-founder & President of dGenerate Films, which has acquired over 100 fiction & nonfiction titles of independent Chinese cinema. In 2023, dGenerate Films received Special Recognition for Distribution from the New York Film Critics Circle. Karin is a Co-founder of Distribution Advocates, a coalition to equity in structures of distribution, and as part of that work delivered the 2023 Color Congress Distribution Keynote. Karin works as a strategic advisor across the media ecosystem.

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Set Hernandez is a filmmaker, poet, and community organizer whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. Unabashedly queer and undocumented, their filmmaking uplifts and complicates the stories of their communities. Set’s feature debut “unseen” (POV/PBS, PRX, 2024) received an Independent Spirit Awards and was shortlisted as Best Feature for the IDA Documentary Awards. Set’s past documentary work includes the short “COVER/AGE” (2019) and impact producing for “Call Her Ganda” (Tribeca, 2018). An alumnus of the Disruptors Fellowship, Set is developing a TV comedy pilot which won the SeriesFest Pitch-A-Thon at the Bentonville Film Festival. Since 2010, Set has been organizing around migrant justice issues, from deportation defense to healthcare access. They co-founded the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. Set’s work has been supported and catalyzed many times over by Firelight Media. In their past life, Set was a published linguistics researcher, focusing in the area of bilingualism. Above all, Set is the fruit of their family’s love and their community’s generosity.

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Stephen Maing is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker and cinematographer based in New York City. His most recent film UNION captures the historic efforts by workers to unionize the first Amazon fulfillment center. Co-directed with Brett Story, it won a Special Jury Award for The Art of Change at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Maing’s feature documentary CRIME + PUNISHMENT which he directed, filmed and edited is an immersive cinéma vérité account of a group of minority whistleblower NYPD officers. It won a 2018 Sundance Special Jury Award, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His previous films, HIGH TECH, LOW LIFE, directed, filmed and edited over five years, and THE SURRENDER, have screened internationally and were released on POV and Field of Vision, respectively. His film DIRTY GOLD, featured in Netflix’s Dirty Money series, intimately observers US involvement in the illicit mining and trading of gold and was filmed on location in Peru’s Amazon rain forest & Miami, Florida.

Maing's films seek to expand the aesthetic form and limits of longitudinal nonfiction filmmaking. They are highly observational visual investigations of societal phenomenon, complex power structures and the fascinating individuals who challenge them. One of his upcoming films, THE GREAT EXPERIMENT, is an ambitious cinematic experiment about one of the most volatile and perplexing eras of American history & identity.  Maing is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, Sundance Institute Fellow, NBC Original Voices Fellow and a recipient of the IDA's prestigious Courage Under Fire Award shared with the whistleblowers of the NYPD12.

As a D.P. he recently worked with Lana Wilson on her intimate and inventive LOOK INTO MY EYES, released by A24, and as Executive Producer on Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s EMERGENT CITY, released by P.O.V. As advisor, consultant and mentor he has worked with dozens of filmmakers including on Jessica Kingdon’s Oscar-nominated ASCENSION, Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzai's Oscar-nominated THREE SONGS FOR BENAZIR, JoeBill Muñoz & Lucas Guilkey’s THE STRIKE, David Siev’s BAD AXE, Débora Souza Silva’s FOR OUR CHILDREN, Julian Rubinstein’s THE HOLLY and Ursula Liang’s DOWN A DARK STAIRWELL.  

He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a frequent visiting artist and long-time collaborator with underground music group 75 Dollar Bill. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens with his partner and young daughter.

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Mars Verrone is a filmmaker, musician, and educator from Los Angeles, CA, currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

As a first-time producer, Mars developed and produced Oscar-shortlisted feature documentary UNION, (dir. Stephen Maing, Brett Story) which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition and won a special jury prize for “The Art of Change.” As producer, Mars received a Cinema Eye Honors Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Production.”

In 2022, Mars directed and produced award-winning short documentary GOLDEN VOICE, which continues to be programmed at LGBTQ+ festivals and events across the globe.

Mars is a Sundance Documentary Producers Fellow, NBC Original Voices Artist Mentor and Fellow, PGA Create Fellow, Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist Fellow, Dear Producer Mentee, and was selected for DOC NYC’S 2024 “40 Under 40” cohort.

Their work has been supported by Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, and the International Documentary Association, among others.