The money isn’t yours.

This is the one sentence I wish I’d heard when my philanthropy journey began in 2013.

Back then, “strategic philanthropy” was the hot trend, thanks in large part to the publication of a seminal book on the subject: Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy (Brest & Harvey, 2008). The cohort program I attended at The Philanthropy Workshop West (now Forward Global) that year taught me that my giving should be driven by my passion. My personal connection to an issue, they extolled, would sustain my commitment for the long term. This made sense: When challenges arose or efforts felt futile, I could dip into a reserve of passion to stay the course. And if enough donors followed suit, more money would ultimately flow in a more sustained fashion over a longer-term. The tools and practices we learned in the nine-month program and the capstone theory of change we presented all centered this passion. Cohort members focused their energy on topics such as Type-1 Diabetes, local public health systems, and social entrepreneurship. After a grueling monthslong soul-search for a passion, I chose documentary film.

The funds at my disposal to deploy had already been deposited into my donor-advised fund as an inheritance disbursement following the death of my father in May, 2013. The tax deduction had already been taken, and I could not pull the money out to spend on myself. I could, however, allocate the resources to any 501c3 of my choosing on whatever timeline suited me; or never, since there is no mandate to spend DAF funds at all.

Don’t worry! I’ve spent it. I happen to be one of those DAF-holders with (some?) ethics, who from the start viewed the account as a temporary waiting room for money to quickly find new homes in the nonprofit sector. I made spending it my job, and I went all-in. Where did it all go? Broadly-speaking, twenty-five-ish documentary shorts and features, a handful of artist support/regranting/ecosystem nonprofits, a couple film festivals, the Dear Producer Award, and the Forever Roxie campaign. I do not regret for one second any of this expenditure. In fact, I’ve been a vociferous champion of grants for documentary film, especially for the kind of films the market alone wouldn’t resource. Though I am deeply uncomfortable tooting my own horn, I think it’s fair to say that there are films in the world, filmmakers with careers and community, audiences reached, and institutions sustained thanks to the checks I wrote. I’m really proud of this legacy, and even more grateful for the learning and relationships my funder work brought into my life.

But never, not once in these twelve years, did I entertain the notion that there might be a problem with me making all the decisions; that, even though the DAF account had my name on it, the money wasn’t actually mine. Why would I have? Ours is a donor-centric society, with funder perks, promises of exclusive access, and grantee-funder power dynamics that reinforce the donor-centrism I cultivated back in my TPWW cohort. With the benefit of hindsight, I also now recognize the breathtaking degree of privilege of my approach, the kind that often comes with being the Only Daughter of a Very Successful White American Male. I followed my passion, developed all the strategies, chose all the grantees, and accumulated all the EP credits.

Completing the TPWW program in mid-2014 didn’t signal the end of my philanthropy learning; rather, it was just the beginning. Cataclysmic global and national events — the election of Donald Trump, twice; COVID-19; the national unrest of the summer of 2020; the widening income gap and stratospheric wealth accumulation among the super elite – shone a brighter spotlight on philanthropy and how it was, or wasn’t, “meeting the moment.” The books Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas and Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance burst onto the scene in 2018, exposing the ways in which philanthropy mirrors our society’s inequities more than combats them. I discovered Vu Le’s blog, Nonprofit AF, a no-holds-barred and often hilarious sendup of the Philanthropic Industrial Complex. I learned about Solidare, Resource Generation, and Just Transition, wealth-holder groups committed to using their resources to address root causes of inequality rather than simply apply a Band-Aid to the symptoms. I followed with great interest the 2020 launch and subsequent impact of Trust-Based Philanthropy, a practice designed to “make equitable grantmaking and community accountability the standard of practice for effective philanthropy.”1

In 2021, I joined the board of the Stupski Foundation. Founded in 1996 by my dad, Larry Stupski, and his wife Joyce, by 2021 the foundation was a couple of years into its final spend-out chapter. By then both Larry and Joyce had passed away, and I was honored to be offered a seat at the table to sunset a foundation with a family tie. I also looked forward to working with my good friend and Stupski Foundation CEO Glen Galaich, who – how’s this for a full-circle moment? – I met when he led the very TPWW organization that had set me on my philanthropic path almost ten years prior. In 2017 he’d made the leap from telling others how to do grantmaking to becoming a grant maker himself at Stupski, and was leading the organization’s exciting last act. Along the way, he had also experienced a reckoning about donor control.

A foundation choosing to spend itself out of business is rare (the pull of perpetuity is strong!), so a core part of the Stupski strategy is using our experience to inspire others to follow suit. Via newsletters (Philanthropy Confidential and Who Gives?), a podcast (Break Fake Rules), a best-selling book (Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short), and public speaking engagements, foundation staff share learnings and challenge the sector to take a hard look at current practices, how they get in the way of fully meeting their potential for good, and engage in the critical work of real change.

Of all the myriad insights I’ve gained during my Stupski tenure, the one that really broke my brain was: the money isn’t yours. I mean, I knew that I couldn’t spend the DAF funds on myself, but it still felt very much like my money. Here’s what I’ve come to understand, though: The tax deduction I received for charitable donations was money that I kept for myself and out of the public coffers, to the tune of roughly 30 cents for every dollar I donated. By extension, then, in taking the deduction I made an implicit pact with the American public that I would allocate the funds in the public interest. You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? As long as it went to nonprofits in good standing, the money was benefitting the public and doing good in the world. Relax!”

The issue isn’t so much about where the money goes, but who does the deciding about where the money goes. The kind of person who is in the position to even take the deduction for charitable donations in the first place is likely wealthy to begin with, also most likely White, and more often than not inclined to direct donations to people, causes, and organizations that feel familiar and flatter their egos. And bypass those that don’t. This is how we end up with a charitable sector that reflects, more than challenges, the inequities of our broader society. Take, for example, this alarming finding by the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University: “While communities of color made up 44.3% of the U.S. population as of the 2020 Census, the Communities of Color Index shows that organizations serving communities of color received $16.0 billion in charitable contributions in 2022, accounting for 2.9% of total philanthropic giving” (emphasis mine).

It’s a complicated tension – some would say an oxymoron – unique to US philanthropy: a private steward of public resources. I’m not so sure most donors understand their role this way, and certainly most current systems and behaviors aren’t oriented towards this perspective. While I’ve come to view it as deeply problematic and inherently undemocratic, I’m also a realist living in the world that actually exists. We are not Sweden; we haven’t (yet) designed the perfect mix of capitalism and socialism that both encourages healthy free market competition and meets the basic needs of its citizens.

My Stupski Foundation role, Forward Global community, and insatiable curiosity expose me to trailblazing donors who turned their philanthropic decision-making over to the public right from the get-go and are using their capital to design new, more just, economies; foundations breaking down barriers between their organizations and their community partners to democratize resource allocation decision-making; writers who challenge the status quo, ask hard questions, and propose paths forward. It’s a small but growing movement of capital stewards who understand how the system is shaped to benefit them unfairly and are committed to designing an economy that works better for everyone.

This is the moment when all these inputs from the broader philanthropic field intersect with the world I know and love: independent film.

I’d love to say I’ve figured it all out. But that’s not where I am; lucky you, you’re witnessing thinking, learning, and reflecting in real time. When I was a high school English teacher, I loved to assign a text for my students to read at home and then come to the next class with questions. I learned more about what they understood and were thinking by the nature of the questions they asked than their answers to any of mine. So my homework for myself these days is to develop good questions. Right now I’m asking:

• How does donor centrism show up in US independent film, and what are its impacts?

• In the US, where filmmaking relies solely on private capital (commercial markets and philanthropy; no state funding here!), what say, if any, does “the public” have in allocating charitable resources?

• If we are going to continue to have tax-subsidized funding for independent film (which we are), how should that resource be distributed, and who decides?

These questions — or better versions of them, are my companions for the next few months as I attend festivals, join new boards, dig into new initiatives, read, and write. I learn much better in collaboration than by myself, so let’s make this a group assignment! What are your questions and observations about indie film donor centrism? Please feel free to comment and share questions of your own: hello@thebacklight.org

(Note: I am delighted to share this essay by my friend and collaborator, Multitude Films President and Co-Founder Anya Rous. I have long admired — and, in full transparency, previously funded — the work of Multitude Films for their commitment to deeply thoughtful approaches to not just the “what” of documentary making, but also the “who” and “how.” Hollywood Reporter recently announced Multitude’s decision to become a nonprofit; here Anya shares more of the backstory and thoughts on the journey ahead. Deep gratitude to Anya for her generous storytelling and taking the time to write during a very busy season! -Maida)

I’ve spent the past decade producing artful, politically bold documentaries alongside the team at Multitude Films, where we recently arrived at a decision that surprised even us: to become a nonprofit. After ten years as a hybrid production company (that is, a fiscally sponsored LLC) operating on a combination of production fees and philanthropic support, we’ve undertaken this shift to secure the most viable path to sustainability and maintain our commitment to our mission.

From the start, we’ve been committed to transformative culture change through nonfiction storytelling including a representative documentary landscape that values courageous filmmaking, invests in the culture workers who produce it, and builds meaningful collaboration between filmmakers and movements. This ethos has applied as much to how we operate internally as to what we make publicly, with respect for the contributions of our team, transparency, care, dignity, fair compensation, and genuine opportunities for growth in skill and leadership.

We’ve understood that cultural production is a catalyst for the personal and collective political action needed to build lasting systemic change, that stories paired with intentional community engagement can move people to reconsider their perspectives and act collectively. That belief has guided every film we’ve made and every relationship we’ve built.

Our Origin Story

When we entered the field in 2016, the industry was riding the early wave of the streaming bubble, though those funds went primarily to commercial projects by white, straight, and cisgender filmmakers rather than to social justice-oriented work by LGBTQ+, disabled, and BIPOC filmmakers. Still, we carved out a lane, building the track record and relationships needed to get social change films distributed by Netflix, HBO, Peacock, POV, and Independent Lens, among others. We also formed a separate LLC for each project, which is both industry standard and additionally essential when making politically charged films that target litigious powerholders like policymakers, the evangelical church, or the FBI. Pray Away’s release on Netflix in 2021 drew five potential lawsuits within months; while all were ultimately without merit, our structure meant those threats didn’t endanger our other films or our company.

Mainstream production relies on a film-by-film approach, where crews and operations are recreated for each new project with limited attention to sustainability, equitable labor practices, or growth for emerging filmmakers. We built our model to straddle the conventional, commercial space while drawing from best practices for organizational development from the nonprofit, movement-oriented space. We’ve long wanted to challenge an industry that relies on gig labor, exploitation, and poor management, and to demonstrate that an independent film company could be both successful and genuinely sustaining for multiple producers. What that looked like in practice: staff producers, associate producers and production coordinators with salaries, benefits, and PTO. It’s worth naming how rare this actually is, because these are too often treated as benefits reserved for executives or nonprofit artist support workers, rather than the baseline labor standards we believe make for stronger, more accountable producing.

The fiscal sponsorship layer allowed us to receive foundation grants and philanthropic support, key to resourcing our productions, impact campaigns, apprenticeship program, and a portion of operations. Our initial vision was to phase out philanthropic support within seven years and move toward a B Corp structure; our core funding partners talked us out of that, wisely recommending we maintain a diversified funding pool. Even so, the prolonged contraction of recent years required a hiring and salary freeze, leaving us unable to fill key positions and managing uncertainty that had no clear end.

Several years ago, our track record seemed like it could reasonably project a pathway toward financial stability. That hasn’t borne out, and if anything the possibilities for self-sustaining models for politically-minded productions have narrowed further. The burst of the streaming bubble is one major factor: even at the height of streaming output, only a small fraction of those funds went to documentary, and as platforms pivot toward reality TV and celebrity-driven true crime, funding for politically-oriented films continues to dwindle. Streamers we had built real relationships with have significantly pulled back, narrowing the lane of commissions and acquisitions we operate in.

Simultaneously, the national and global political landscape that we’re operating in has only continued to get narrower for independent storytelling. The dismantling of independent media and democratic institutions is on display all around us, with authoritarianism, state violence, and the accelerating climate crisis shaping our political terrain. Public trust in the media continues to erode, compounded by the rise and largely unregulated use of AI, while multiple costly wars and military escalations abroad strain an already fragile economy, driving up the cost of living and furthering the disinvestment of public infrastructure and support systems for everyday Americans.

Like other culture producers, we operate in an increasingly hostile political environment defined by a steady expansion of state control over people’s bodies, movements, and lives, affecting immigrants, people of color, queer and trans communities, and women with particular force. The contraction of private funding and the gutting of public funding, combined with a retreat from investment in political storytelling and the consolidation of corporate media power, are limiting which stories are told, who is resourced to tell them, and whether those stories are positioned to contribute to meaningful cultural and political change.

And yet, the authoritarian dismantling of our civic institutions and deliberate falsification of the public record, sowing disinformation, and undermining the cultural means of production that could galvanize us toward different political possibilities, demonstrates that this work is more vital than ever. Figuring out how to sustain felt even more so like an urgent non-negotiable.

Our Pivot

We asked ourselves: was there another hybrid model that could better serve us? Would nonprofit status open the door to funders, arts and culture and issue-focused alike, who had been hesitant or unable to support what they perceived as a for-profit company, even though Multitude generates no profit and our revenue model has always closely resembled nonprofit accounting? We got clear messages from several funders that they couldn’t support us as a hybrid; the legal structure was signaling something false about where the money was going.

To think it through, we engaged industry allies, veteran producers, former nonprofit executives, lawyers, and accountants. We surveyed the field, studied the philosophy and governing principles of different nonprofit models, deepened our knowledge of liberatory and cooperative work structures, and held a team training to build on democratic principles of leadership that support genuine shared ownership across the organization. We also looked hard at what nonprofit structures can become: beholden to politically misaligned boards, bogged down in bureaucratic processes, mission-drift dressed up as sustainability. But every structure is defined by the people who shape it, and we intend to shape this one with the same values that have defined our work from the start.

The economics of our industry cannot sustain a mission-driven production company, and our hybrid model was quietly blocking certain philanthropic partnerships, even as our programmatic work already served those funders’ own institutional goals. Financially, we couldn’t see a horizon for keeping our doors open on market resources alone. This decision hardly safeguards us against financial precarity: it was our best calculus among imperfect choices, not a naive belief that the philanthropic sector is reliable or secure.

There is an endemic bias in our industry that projects a false dichotomy between impact and artistry, and we’ve always resisted that. Our experience bears it out: films produced with a high standard of quality and professionalism, centering stories of safety and liberation of Black, brown, queer, and disabled communities, can compete at top-tier festivals and earn serious critical attention. For us, those platforms are never ends in themselves; they are leverage for the communities and movements we work alongside. The work that sits beyond individual productions, including our mentorship and apprenticeship programs, field-building, impact strategy, movement coordination, and the care practices led by our Head of Care Dr. Kameelah Mu’min Oseguera, cannot be resourced through production fees. The nonprofit structure allows us to resource this work as the core of what we do, not a footnote to it.

Looking Ahead

We refuse to give up on making artful, political films simply because the market for them has constricted. I’m ever more invested in making sure this generation of storytellers can beautifully and boldly disrupt the status quo, and in building the conditions that make that possible over the long term. We wouldn’t be where we are without a deep and powerful community of creative collaborators, funders, movement partners, and allies, and this new chapter is built on that foundation.

The conditions for representative, politically-grounded storytelling are continually contested and fraught: funding is contracting, corporate media consolidation is narrowing which stories get told, and the communities we work alongside are facing unprecedented attacks on their rights, safety, and freedom of expression. Despite these pressures, we will not cede the narrative space that repressive forces aim to shrink. Documentary production remains at our core, and the nonprofit structure enables us to deepen our commitment to cultural production that serves movements and reaches communities beyond the film industry.

We are committed to this work for the long haul, and to doing it in a way that is clear-eyed about the structures we operate within, realistic about their limits, and sustained by the relationships that have carried us this far.

Over the past twelve years, I have financially contributed to somewhere in the ballpark of thirty films; mostly feature docs and a handful of doc shorts. On most of those, I am a credited executive producer, or as I’ve come to call it, Chief Cheerleader. Twelve years is my longest stretch in any professional capacity, and “professional” applies here, because I treated it like a job. A very part time job, but a job nonetheless.

What is an “executive producer,” anyway? The Documentary Producers Alliance crediting guidelines define the role as “... a financier or a film professional who contributes to the creative development and production of a film, offering essential value and guidance through editorial input, fundraising, producing issues, legal matters, or distribution strategy. The EP may also be an early champion and validator of the project, willing to offer initial backing before other entities take on the risk. The EP is the highest-ranking financing producer credit for an individual, and the second-highest non-financing producing credit after that of Producer.”

This is a helpful start, but the nature of a definition is to focus more on the “what” than on the “how.” This murky gap is fertile ground for a wide range of interpretations and misunderstandings. EP relationships can be rewarding and productive, but they can also be tricky and stressful.

Because EPs are humans, and the role is open to a lot of interpretation, we run the behavior gamut. Rebecca Celli shared a few examples in a recent 8 Above guest post: on one hand, the band of seasoned EPs on Cutting Through Rocks played an instrumental role in crafting a standout year: festival run, distribution, and awards campaign. On the other, the frustration and disappointment when high net worth individuals shift direction, close up shop, or behave disrespectfully. In “Can Indie Film Trust Rich People?” Anthony Kaufman explores the precarity of a reliance on the whims and interests of individual funders over time, and wonders about the role these folks might play in the future. My response to Anthony’s question is: I can’t say if a class of citizens can be trusted or not, but as long as we’re here let’s try to help steer these relationships in the most productive, positive, and joyful direction possible.

To that end, I’m sharing some practical wisdom I’ve picked up as an EP with a little help from my friends. To prepare this piece I reached out to about twenty working producers and asked for their EP “roses and thorns.” I wanted to ground my advice in the experiences of people actually doing the work, dealing with a wide range of individuals paying for their films. My thoughts are in standard font; producer contributions are in italics.

📣 Communicate clearly and in a timely manner

Try not to lead a filmmaker on while considering their project. If a funder asks for follow-up meetings and expresses high levels of enthusiasm, we get our hopes up. If you’re still on the fence, just be honest so we can temper expectations. We’re used to rejection but it can sting worse when all you hear is positive feedback and you spend extra time and work, but it’s a pass.

When you get to “no ”in the courting phase, communicate as quickly as possible. I really struggled with this. Saying “no” SUCKS. As much as my head knew it wasn’t a fit, my heart ached at the prospect of letting someone down. Writing a personal and thoughtful rejection is exhausting; so much so, I’d do just about anything else to avoid writing one, delaying the inevitable for far too long.

I have a confession to make, and it may be controversial: AI writes my rejection drafts to cold pitch emails now. I load the whole email text into Perplexity.ai with the prompt: “write a kind rejection note.” I hate to say it but the AI writes far lovelier text than what I’d come up with on my own, and in about one second. Note here I said “draft.” I review the words carefully, edit appropriately, and make sure I stand by it before hitting “send.” Outsourcing this emotional labor in service of crafting a respectful and timely response is a trade-off I am willing to make.

Once you’re on a project, respond to incoming requests and questions promptly. If I’m buried, I’ll write a quick email saying, “Got your note. I’m buried; I’ll get back to you in a week,” or whenever I expect to have the bandwidth. We all hate being left hanging; a little acknowledgement goes a long way. If you have an assistant or a team, delegate. Filmmakers are happy to connect through a representative if it allows you to be more responsive to follow up and navigate delicate matters.

Goes without saying: No ghosting.

📣 Make expectations explicit

I challenge you to find a better guideline to assist in clarifying expectations than the Active Voice Lab Prenups. Published in 2009, they remain an indispensable resource to frame conversations between filmmakers and funders before they sign on the dotted line. Taking the time at the beginning to work through the questions will head off all kinds of head- and heartaches later. Nothing I could say here would add to what’s contained in that amazing document.

I love when an EP can provide clarity about their WHY, which helps with positive outcomes on both sides. If an EP has a strong interest in social impact, or really wants to recoup their money, or loves going to film festivals and parties, or cares especially about seeing their name on print and onscreen, I’d rather know about it!

Remember: Clarity is kindness.

📣 Leverage a wide range of resources…and follow through

Some EPs just want to write a check and attend the premiere (see above: expectations) and that’s rad. But we have a wide array of other resources we can bring to a project; here is a list to get your creative juices flowing:

• Who has a friend with a restaurant where we can host a fundraiser or premiere party?

• Who knows a great recent college grad who can join the team as an intern or PA?

• Who can host a screening at their home or a friend’s home?

• Provide housing during a shoot, festival, or theatrical event

• Use social media to amplify film

• Provide in-kind production services

• Make introductions to businesses for sponsorship funding

• Throw the premiere party/take the team out to dinner

• Contribute airline miles to offset team travel expenses

• Do something fun and unexpected, like swag.

• Don’t just finance – funnance!

Offering resources before the film team asks earns you bonus points. If the offer is accepted, do it, and in a way that puts the absolute least amount of work back on the film team as humanly possible.

📣 Understand that filmmaking is a non-linear creative process

Often funders don’t know what they don’t know. Watching a lot of movies, loving movies, funding movies, is not the same as making movies.

As a former teacher, I relate to this sentiment deeply. Because almost everyone spends a significant part of their life as a student, many assume they know how to teach. Most haven’t a clue. Observing a thing – even for years at close range – is not the same as doing the thing. Executive producing thirty films has maybe made me a better EP, but surely has not turned me into a director.

Trust the director/film team’s vision and artistic approach. The message my financial support communicated was, “I believe in you; I want you to have the resources required to realize your vision.” If I didn’t feel that deep in my heart, I wouldn’t have signed on. I was in the fortunate position to have the philanthropic capacity to provide grant support, which surely framed my approach to the role. Without the expectation of a financial return, there was never any tension between my and the film team’s goals, never a moment when I felt intervened on a decision because I felt the outcome would better serve my pocketbook. I understand this is a tremendous privilege.

It helps to take the long view, especially in documentary; it’s impossible to put creativity on a timeline. I’ve worked with EPs who have seen scheduling changes or creative shifts as failures in the moment – even if these changes ultimately make the films better. And yes, sometimes these changes lead to budget shifts (archive costs, edits, fair use ends up being not, accessibility packages, etc.), but that’s more the norm than the exception. Decide in advance how open you will be to additional requests for money. You know they’re coming.

I could write a whole separate post on giving notes (and maybe I will), and don’t want to go down that rabbit hole in this already long piece. So for now I’ll leave you with some sage words from a producer: Giving notes can be fraught territory but bear in mind that an EP does not have creative control or final cut and offer your feedback from that standpoint. It is a gift to the filmmakers, as long as you’re not trying to put your own mark on the film but want to stay true to the filmmaker’s vision. EPs have a valuable fresh perspective and can remind the team of what the EP saw in the project originally.

📣 Show the money

To the extent possible, once you’ve committed, don’t make us chase you for the money; there’s a line between hustling and begging. If there is a delay on your end, communicate it to the team with an expected arrival date. Productions run close to the bone, and predictability is a gift.

I experimented by importing a couple of philanthropic best practices (oxymoron, I know) into project support: multi-year, “general operating” support. If I joined a project early, I knew it could be one, two, three, four, maybe five years or more before the film would be finished. I thought about my commitment as “x dollars per year” as I would a nonprofit organization, vs. as a one-time contribution. The result was an increase of overall, unrestricted support and the opportunity to shape the timing of funds distribution with the film team. They all opted for annual disbursements vs. a one-time payment; income predictability was a priority. Another approach was to promise a final tranche for when the film premiere was set; having these funds in the proverbial back pocket helped assuage some anxiety about finishing and festival expenses.

Funders committing funding and then pulling out of a project is destructive -- I don’t know if funders realize the sophisticated game of Jenga that is putting together financing for indie films, and how one block pulling out can mean everything will fall apart.

It sucks when a movie doesn’t recoup its costs. Holding that over a filmmaker’s head — especially when a funder knows the risks of investing — does little to solve the problem and creates a power imbalance between the filmmakers and the funders. A filmmaker should always want to get their investors’ money back, but bringing it up in public social situations, guilting them in private, or shaming them is not a money-making strategy. Funders should work with filmmakers they’re happy to fail alongside, given the state of the industry.

🩷 Hanging it up

Careful readers will note the use of the past tense in this essay. For a host of reasons (watch for a future post!) I’m retiring as an EP. I am so proud of every single film I played a small part in bringing into the world, and all the wonderful relationships I now have with those brilliant and creative people. Lucky for us, new EPs enter the scene every day. I hope these words will contribute to fun and meaningful partnerships for years to come. Go team!

I’m just home from eight days of what I called “Tribeca adjacent” activity: gatherings and one-on-one time with friends and collaborators both long-standing and new. Most of these people live in New York, and it’s a gift to spend time with them on their home turf. I wanted to see movies, especially premieres produced by some dear friends, but it felt important to prioritize conversation over screenings on this trip; if someone could meet and it was the same time as a movie, bye-bye movie. There will be other chances to see the films, and I will.

Early in my trip, I began to notice a trend that became so powerful that with each subsequent conversation I came to anticipate it’s appearance. I was both bowled over and not at all surprised when it arose: Big Change. People are on the verge of becoming parents, moving out of state, putting property on the market, going back to school, becoming empty-nesters, getting divorced, pausing to caretake. They are in the throes of shifts in health and wellbeing, causing redefinitions of career and new approaches to the unrelenting pace of modern work life. Others are stepping into new jobs with greater responsibilities or launching new funds. I know they say the only constant is change, but right now feels like an especially turbulent time on the personal life level.

Part of this is to be expected as most of my film crowd is forty and up. I, myself, graduated to a new age-range pop up menu response by turning fifty-five while in New York. By midlife most external cultural milestones have been met or foreclosed upon-ish: formal education, partnership, childbirth, early career. With all of that in the rearview mirror, hopefully some wisdom gained during the drive, and a growing sense of the end of the road ahead, it’s not unusual to take stock and fine tune (or blow up – they don’t call it a midlife crisis for nothing) one’s life for whatever time remains.1

But this week I’m wondering if there’s more to it than this. Is the seemingly unrelenting pace of change globally and nationally, as well as the dizzying disruption in the film industry, now reaching into our individual lives and shaking them up too? Six years on, are we still living the reverberations of a global pandemic on the personal level? It seems so.

Listening to these stories brought to mind a book that’s had a profound impact on me since a wise friend passed it along when my dad died. First published forty years ago, William Bridges’ Transitions is considered a classic, spurring a raft of follow-up explorations on the subject since. I was forty-two when I first read it, and by then I’d lived through many big changes myself: moves, school transfers, graduations, marriage, careers, divorce – mine and my parents’. I’d moved through them unconsciously and as quickly as possible, holding my breath and keeping my head down through the deep discomfort of the unknown, praying for new stability, pronto.

Bridges distinguishes change, which is situational, from transition, which is psychological. You can have change without transition, but you can’t have transition without change. In other words, transition is not …events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture.

He breaks transitions into three phases: endings, the neutral zone, and beginnings. Our culture doesn’t normally associate an ending as the start of something, but even though we are all likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also the initiation of a process. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.

Endings can be chosen by us or for us, but either way are ordeals, and sometimes they challenge us so basically our sense of who we are that we believe they will be the end of us. How we handle endings now has a lot to do with how we experienced them in our past. Early life traumas, griefs, and disruptions that leave behind emotional residue can make present-day endings feel unbearable, causing us to sometimes stick around in bad situations longer than necessary to avoid the discomfort of letting go. But we have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one – not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are. The good news is we are not doomed to repeat our past until the end of our days, and that with intention, support, and time we can all change our relationship with this inevitability and even embrace it.

Once we’ve said goodbye to the old, we enter phase two, or the neutral zone (which I’ve come to refer to as “the messy middle”), where the real opportunity for transformation lies should we choose to accept it. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to the next. For the lucky butterfly this chrysalis stage is built into its DNA; for some cultures ancient and contemporary, rituals that include solitary time in the forest or a sacred hut apart from the tribe acknowledge that a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence is a necessary step to receiving the signals and cues – if only you could decipher them! – as to what you need to become for the next stage of your life. For Americans living in a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation we have to have enough self-awareness to identify when we’re in the neutral zone and the tools and strategies to make the most of it. Bridges shares great wisdom on that topic that would take us off track, but to me the key of the neutral zone is that we give ourselves a lot of grace while keeping the antennae up for the unexpected signposts that are pointing us to stage three: Beginning.

Real beginnings are more noticeable in hindsight than in the present moment. They don’t usually hit like a bolt of lightning, but rather are small steps that eventually lead us to our new selves. Once we’re there, we look back and think, “Geez - I hardly recognize that old me.” Lately I’ve said that my life today resembles almost nothing of my life five years ago, but I couldn’t point to a single specific moment of transformation, a clear marker of the new.2 Bridges warns that in making a beginning, you can become so invested in the results that whatever you have to do to reach them looks pretty insignificant and that (i)n an important new beginning, a preoccupation with results can be damaging. His advice: Shift the attention from the intended goal to the process of investigation. I love this so much I’m going to say it again and boldface it:

Shift the attention from the intended goal to the process of investigation.

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I wonder if this industry we call independent film is in transition as much as it is in disruption. Transitions is focused on the personal; by definition it is an internal process. But industries are made up of individuals so perhaps there’s some value in treating this time as a collective neutral zone. Feels like we’re living in a messy middle to me.

Coming out of the pandemic and for a couple years afterward, the “conversation” was all about the ending; of exactly what is debatable, but the general gist was, “things were a certain way, and they don’t feel like that way now, this is hard, will it ever come back?” After a time, that conversation felt repetitive, tired, and unproductive. But maybe it was the necessary process that a collective needed to grieve a death – of business models, expectations, resources, and even optimism. As individuals, too, we move through endings in our own way and on our own timelines.

Within the past year or two, more people have come to terms with that ending and initiated ideation and experimentation with surely more to come: new ways of moving capital to support creative work, possible community ownership of platforms, shifting business models, new studios, ecosystem builders, DIY distribution and curation, audience development & engagement experiments and documentary marketing tests just to name those that are top of mind. The goals are clear: create pathways both for artist (and team) sustainability and connect films with audiences who are excited to watch them.

Of course it’s critical to maintain a focus on the goal, but during this middle time perhaps we would also be wise to shift some attention to the process of investigation. What does that look like? I’m no expert, but a few questions might shape our thinking, like:

• How much are the new things we are designing stuck in the old ways that got us into this mess in the first place, versus truly different and better (i.e. less extractive and more cooperative)?

• How are we resourcing these initiatives, and do they have what they need to be properly implemented and evaluated for learning purposes?

• Who is invited into the room where it happens, and are we tapping into a rich and diverse set of expertise and experience in designing our collective future?

• What are we learning from this work, and how are those learnings distributed and metabolized into new forming experiments?

We won’t see the new beginning until after it’s happened, both in our own lives and in the world beyond. So during this time of personal and professional messiness, my goal is to stay as curious as possible, open to receiving signals and cues as they appear. And have as much grace for myself and others as I can muster during this liminal time, and gratitude for the new beginnings, whatever and whenever they may be.

In proud defiance of the Missing Persons claim, I walked the 20 minutes from my front door to The Lighthouse (Venice) on a clear, sunny May morning to attend a daylong convening on the creator economy. Scalable Summit promised that “(f)ounders, creators, marketers, investors, tech executives and other industry leaders who are shaping the industry” would come together to address “scale” and “sustainability.” I read a lot about the intersection of the creator economy and Big Hollywood, but less so independent filmmaking, especially documentary. So with this event happening in my own backyard, I figured I’d go and see what’s what.

I was entering foreign territory. The majority of my career has been in the nonprofit sector, I am passionate about “legacy” media, I quit Meta platforms last year to protest their addictive business model and protect my precious attention span, and have never laid eyes on TikTok. So I approached the day with the mindset of an anthropologist, a curious observer of a culture not my own. As someone who can lean fairly judgy, I resisted the temptation to proclaim the “good” and “bad” as I listened to panels and chatted with other attendees. My guiding questions for the day were along the lines of: What’s happening over here we in the film community can learn from? Are there opportunities we’re missing? Is there stuff we do that they could learn?

This is hardly a comprehensive overview; after all, it was only a one-day event. I came away mostly struck by how similar the broad themes of the conversation in the two sectors are, even if the context is different.

The business model works for only the very few

Given that the foci of the day were “scale” and “sustainability,” this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The conference website set the stage: “(f)or the creator economy to truly reach scale, brands must rewrite their old playbooks. Media companies need to adapt or risk getting left behind. And creators need to stop playing misunderstood and get down to business.” The subtext – and sometimes the text text – across every panel and breakout was revenue: how can independent creators earn more (or any) from the content they produce? How can brands partner with creators to reach new audiences (consumers), who represent revenue growth for their products?

I’m reminded of statistics Scott Galloway shares on the regular, including in an edition of No Mercy/No Malice following the 2024 election (“The Podcast Election”):

A scant handful of pods, those with the biggest listenerships, capture nearly all the ad revenue. By some estimates, of the 600k podcasts that produce content each week, the top 10 get half the revenue. Put another way, to build a business in podcasting that pays people well and keeps the attention of a host with high opportunity cost(s), you likely need to be in the top 0.1% by listenership. The odds of success are admittedly long. If you’re a high school drama student who goes on to join SAG-AFTRA, you’re 2x more likely to win an Academy Award than have a sustainable pod. As a member of UCLA’s crew team, I was 3.5x more likely to end up in the Olympics than telling dick jokes (and making a good living) on a successful podcast.

I heard someone at the Summit say there are currently 50 million active US creators. I have no way of verifying that number, but the point remains: the vast majority of creators aren’t making enough revenue to support themselves, let alone a business that pays other people.

Hey, filmmakers out there: sound familiar?

A Barbell Sector

It seemed to me that the Summit attendees fell into three main groups: employees of large corporations, independent creators, and those who are trying to build the intermediary organizations that scrape off some revenue by delivering efficiency or services to the other two. Based on what I heard in the panel presentations, I imagine the sector shaped like a barbell: On one end, Instagram, Twitch, Spotify, YouTube and the like sharing how their platforms support independent creators and expressing a seemingly genuine wish that they all be as successful as possible. The brands on stage felt similarly huge and impenetrable for a solopreneur: Visa, NFL, Adobe. On the other side of the barbell, an army of 50 million creators clamoring to get their (and our) attention.

The middle, the skinny bar in our metaphor, feels like the least developed of the three groups. I’d put creator studios/production companies in this band, as I would also established management firms trying to break into this space (CAA was in attendance), plus any other organization attempting to efficiently and profitably connect creators with corporations and audiences. I suspect there were more startups in this arena at the Summit, but because I don’t know what their company names mean I couldn’t tell you what they do. Perhaps the hypothesis that day – and in the sector more broadly – is that “scale” and “sustainability” will come from a more developed middle infrastructure of talent representation and service providers – as long as everyone can make the business model work.

In indie film, we have a similar dynamic. Plenty of filmmakers on one end, massive corporate entities on the other, and a collapse of the middle infrastructure in between1. Sales agents, managers, distributors – all the services that broker connections between the independent artist and corporate entities (and, by extension, audience) finding it increasingly more difficult to derive revenue from business models that worked 10-15 years ago. Filmmakers are now expected to perform every function of the enterprise themselves: financing, production, delivery, marketing, distribution, etc.

Which brings me to…

The creator is responsible for audience development

The paradox I observed throughout the Scalable Summit is one that filmmakers will relate to, increasingly so nowadays: the creator is expected to make the content and develop an audience that can be neatly delivered to a brand in order to derive revenue. But the time and resources it takes to do all that work upfront? That’s on the creator’s dime. The revenue is what they need in order to build the audience, but it’s the audience they need in order to attract brand revenue. Classic Catch-22.

In indie film, distribution is hot and self (or “alternative”) distribution is increasingly a film team’s Plan A. The opportunity to develop your own audience and exploit revenue opportunities along the way is both liberating and a crapton of work. Just read any of the myriad case studies published on the topic to see for yourself2.

At the moment, the prevailing notion is that it’s the filmmaker’s responsibility to build the audience. Is this a sustainable future? What resources, tools, mindsets, and actions does it take to connect audiences with independent film during these topsy-turvy times – or a year or two from now? Six funders have distribution initiatives underway designed to better understand just that. My gut says we’re at the beginning of a lot of experimentation and innovation in this space, and that someday we’ll live in a world where filmmakers retain a lot of the control, but have mechanisms and tools to lighten the administrative and logistical burden of reaching audiences. At least I hope so. Perhaps that’s where the new missing middle infrastructure will emerge.

Key distinctions remain… and some related questions

While my mind was mostly drawn to perceived similarities, I did wonder about a few key differences and how they may or may not impact the future of each sector:

• Short form/constant vs long form/every couple years release. Burnout was on the agenda at Scalable Summit, with creators feeling the pressure to develop and release content at an unrelenting pace with little revenue to show for it. Filmmakers experience burnout, too, but for different reasons. Are there practices and lessons can each maker learn from the other, leading to more sustainable careers for both down the road? Or is everyone just screwed?3

• The creator is the brand (in front of the camera) vs the work is the brand (behind the camera). So much of what I understand to be the most popular creator content (remember, I’m kind of a Luddite) features the creator on camera doing stuff: getting ready, performing in skits, interviewing others, etc. They are their content, and they develop an audience around the thing they do and their approach to it. Filmmakers, on the other hand, usually make work featuring other people doing stuff. Eventually, a few do develop an audience over time, but filmmakers can create a wide diversity of work over a career that may not be as easily identifiable. Is there more overlap on the horizon, with these lines becoming increasingly blurrier? Is that what we want?

• Notably absent: art. I don’t want to offend anyone who identifies as a creator by claiming that what they do isn’t art, but I did notice that the subject wasn’t brought up explicitly at the Sustainable Summit. Given that the creator economy exists firmly in a market-driven ecosystem, this doesn’t surprise me at all; “art,” by some definitions, is inherently non-commercial. That being said, I feel like a lot of creators, deep down, wanna make movies. Open Gardens does a great job of tracking this convergence, and I’ll note that “long form is the future” was spoken more than once during the Scalable Summit. Is there a future where there is a space for artful — and revenue-generating —“content”? Is this where the push for vertical comes into play?

Thus concludes my field notes. The big takeaway is that it’s not like there’s some magic mountain of money in the creator economy that we film people are too naive or stubborn to grab. But there are enough similarities, open questions, and coming convergences to warrant keeping an eye on it.

A few weeks ago an email hit my inbox with the subject: “Lick-Wilmerding Film Class Needs You!” I opened it because Lick-Wilmerding1 is my alma mater and the author of this line wisely pulled at my high school heart strings and also, fine, my vanity. Said author was film teacher Barre Fong, reaching out to this alumna to ask if she would consider speaking to his class about her “career in film” (quotes are mine). I replied with an enthusiastic, “I’d love to!”

As luck would have it, I was planning to be in San Francisco for SFFILM a few weeks hence, so we arranged a time for an in-person classroom visit. Not only did I attend Lick as a student, but I also taught English there for three years in the mid-2000s. I hadn’t been back to campus since I left that job – and the classroom – in 2008, so I was both honored and a little nervous to step foot in that building at 755 Ocean Avenue again after so many years.

The 50-minute class period flew by in a flash of Barre asking me questions and me blabbing answers and then a few students asking questions and me blabbing answers. Before I knew it, it was time to go and I hadn’t had a chance to do what I was most looking forward to: Ask the students, “Why film? What do you love about it? Why do you want to learn how to make movies?” A lot of indie filmmakers teach, mostly at the college level, so they have a regular window into what would propel a 21-year-old digital native to want to learn filmmaking. But those of us who move in an all-adult world are just getting the bad news about our young folks and their shrinking attention spans and addiction to auto-loading short videos. I was excited to hear what these high school kids find cool about the movies.

As the students gathered their bags, I asked if it would be OK for them to jot a quick answer to my questions and send it via email to Barre to then forward to me. Guess what? You’re in luck! They completed the assignment and very kindly agreed to let me share their words with you. Here’s what they said, in all their enthusiastic, perceptive, inspiring glory.

I enjoy making films because I get to tell someone’s story in a creative, visually capturing way. I love the idea that you can turn someone’s passion into a story about who they are and why it is so important to them.

I think similarly to you, I’ve always loved stories and storytelling, and film is a very dynamic and interesting form of that. Many of my favorite stories have been movies, which has pushed me to explore storytelling through this medium. Even though we’re now entering a period where short-form media such as TikTok is becoming increasingly popular, I think and hope that film will continue to be a significant cultural force, as many people my age love watching movies and really appreciate things like good writing and cinematography.

Film to me means inspiration and connecting with myself. When watching a film, unlike short form content, you sit there watching nothing but the film in a dark room with sound systems and lighting that just draw you in. I find myself noticing all the little details and appreciating the soundtrack. I just love all of the components that make up a film, music, angles, cuts, color grading. It’s just an amazing art form. Additionally, whenever I watch a film I get inspired by the story, and it always makes me want to better myself.

Film matters to me because it gives me a way to express what I can’t always put into words. It lets me turn thoughts and emotions into images, and bring ideas to life in a visual, meaningful way. I love how it allows me to be creative while also telling stories that people can connect with. Stories that are not only entertaining, but also personal and impactful.

For me, film is a way to experience emotions, whether it is through the story or artistic techniques, if it is a serious film or a more playful one I think it is really powerful how they have the power to provoke such empathy and kind of serve as something that unifies all people under the emotions that we all feel and through that film can represent sort of like those shared experiences of life.

To me, film is about capturing and preserving motion. I think film connects us the most to people, because we can see, hear, and even feel the subject on the screen, and the emotions they express. I love and practice many mediums of art—from writing to photography to dance—but to me, film brings people to life the most, and their actual words (alongside their facial expressions and demeanor) can be captured simultaneously, which is super cool to me.

For me, even though the physical act of watching a film, the anticipation, and the almost ritualistic aspect are not the same, the feeling and awe that film brings me are still immense. I think I love film, and it’s significant in my life because I see it as a reflection of humanity. Whether I’m watching a documentary or a narrative, it is the complex connection of emotions, relationships, and art that you could not get in any other experience or art form. When I watch great films, no matter the topic or genre, they bring me awe. It’s almost like a stylized memory or a summarized experience, choosing only the raw, emotional, and beautiful moments and presenting them in a stylized and easy-to-understand way.

To me, I think film is a huge inspiration loop. I believe that to some extent, many films are inspired by other films, and even key aspects of life. Film is an outlet for many people to start new journeys in their lives, whether it is through watching a film or creating a film, you have the freedom to choose what you want to do. This is why I love film!

Film has a special ability to convey emotions unlike any other medium. It has the ability to connect people unlike many other artforms. I love stories and film is stories. Film feels so special to me because it is the combination of many different beautiful artforms. I think most of all there really is nothing like watching a beautiful film with your loved ones and just being like woah.

For me, film is a way of storytelling. It’s kind of like when you see something and no one else can see it, and you just want to give them your eyes so they can see what you’re seeing. For me, those eyes are film.

I think films and different movies mean a lot about connection and how I find myself. A lot of times this kinda comes up through simplicity or beauty throughout the movie, but also a lot of the emotions evoked, even if it takes place in a completely fictional place, can speak to me and really resonate with me. I think this is why I find my favorite movies to be coming of age or based in reality, since I have a real connection and overall just pleasant association with the feelings being evoked or emotions portrayed.

I love film because I want to introduce the next era of animation to the world. I want to learn how to work with 3-D animation and incorporate 4-D into future films.

My favorite part about filmmaking is how significantly a movie or documentary can change your perspective. It was interesting what you were saying about how our generation is shifting toward short form content, but I think longer form film will always be able to strike a chord in you more than short form.

I’m so heartened by these young folks’ commitment to the power of long-form storytelling, of the communal viewing experience, the beauty, the emotional resonance that film singularly generates. I spend so much of my waking hours thinking, reading, writing, and talking about the gatekeeping, roadblocks, and resource constraints that choke creativity and deprive audiences from connecting with the beautiful work that does manage to make it to the finish line. These emails provide a wonderful antidote of pure inspiration I’ll tuck away and return to when I could use a little pick-me-up. Maybe you will, too.

Just being like woah, indeed.

Hello from San Francisco.

Even though I’ve lived in LA for almost four years, SFFILM is my home festival. My family moved from Connecticut to Marin County when I was six, and then to San Francisco the summer before fourth grade. The day after I graduated from Occidental College I packed up my car, headed home, and lived in The City1 until moving back to Marin in 2012. With nearly 40 of my 54 years on Planet Earth here, no matter where I live at any given moment, NorCal will always be home.

The SFFILM documentary program serves as a blueprint for the connections I look forward to making every April. As I scan the titles I think immediately about the filmmakers I will see if they can travel, parties to organize to bring people together in celebration of films I EP, and my local “non-film friends” to invite to watch movies they would likely never otherwise see. I buy at least two tickets to every screening so I can bring my 81-year-old mom who lives up here and, thankfully, is game to watch anything.

I feel so much gratitude this week I can barely stand it. I’ve been thinking a lot about the richness of my life today, how it does not at all resemble my life of 15 years ago, and that I have the doc community to thank for that. Maybe I’m feeling especially sentimental because of the films and filmmakers I’m connected with in this year’s program: Sam Green, who I met twenty years ago with deep ties here too, and explores the meaning of it all in The Oldest Person in the World; and Anna Fitch and Banker White, who also lived here once upon a time, and in YO share the beauty of a special friendship.

I wandered into doc film in 2014 in the aftermath of a huge midlife shake-up: the death of my father and the wind-down of a 15-year education career. I found myself at age 42 with enough assets to quit the rat race and (in hindsight) blithely decided to retire. I needed to find meaning, direction, purpose and community and couldn’t believe my luck when I learned about the opportunity to do documentary grantmaking. As a lifelong storyteller, design junkie, and newly-minted philanthropist, I found my new calling.

I put myself on an intense learning journey those first couple years, racking up airline miles attending many firsts: Sundance, Catalyst, True/False, Good Pitch, Getting Real. Everywhere I went I asked, “Where should I go next and who should I meet?” I was propelled by the creativity, passion, kindness and generosity I encountered at each stop. I started making some grants so that I could learn by doing, trying to better understand how philanthropy fits into a complex industry that mixes mission-driven work with marketplace dynamics, and how I could be most responsive to the needs and opportunities therein.

I need to acknowledge that funders enter this space from a position of immense privilege. Every door is open wide in the hopes that resources will soon follow. Your ideas will never be better, jokes funnier, or outfit sharper than when you walk into the room as a Funder. You jump right to the head of a line that so many others work for years to advance in, and oftentimes stay there even if your actions don’t warrant it. You can afford to hit the festival circuit. You don’t have to fundraise so you can make your film. The dark side of this entitlement is the little voice inside your head that says, “You’re in this room because someone is hoping you’ll write a check. They’re just humoring you. Your only value is your bank account.” Spending too much time listening to this devil can really do a number on your self-esteem. But, hey, we all have our stuff and this stuff is light fare by comparison.

Just as I was getting my footing in the film world, my marriage hit the skids. Following a year of tough conversations, my (now ex-) husband announced one morning he wanted a separation, and by that evening he was out. “Earth-shattering” insufficiently describes the profound sense of loss and destabilization of this moment. I’d been a partnered person for the majority of the previous 20 years and somehow I was going to have to make a new life, reshape my identity, and reestablish a new definition of home.

I thank my lucky stars that by the fall of 2016 I’d begun working with Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas, first on a collection of Florida-based short films and then the feature documentary, Pahokee. They could use another pair of hands and the financial backing to pull off what would be an incredible run and I needed a reason to get out of the bed in the morning. I was as green as could be (I called myself the 45-year-old intern), but they put me to work and I became a quick study. The rebuilding of my life happened in nonstop production and on the festival circuit for the next four years. I can think of much harder ways to get over the collapse of a marriage than jetting to the Croisette for your Director’s Fortnight premiere or traveling to Florida to screen the film you’re about to premiere at Sundance with the young adult protagonists and take them shopping for winter clothes.

What sustained me then, and does to this day, are all the relationships forged out there on the road and on Zoom (merci, Covid 19). I have this theory that if you work in a resource-constrained industry, where there isn’t a lot of money to be made and people are motivated by passion and creativity, relationships ARE the currency. I also think laughing and crying — especially crying — in the dark with strangers turns them into friends. Processing an emotional screening afterwards bonds people. Film festivals, labs and retreats pull us out of our everyday lives and into a little bubble, a time capsule, where we can just focus on the art and each other. I mean, c’mon! What a gift.

The line between friend and colleague in this world is blurry as heck, but it seems to work just fine. Maybe more than fine. This weekend my mom remarked that, “everyone is so HAPPY! There’s so much hugging!” If you ever feel cynical about the state of the field, bring your non-film friends and family to a screening; seeing our work and world through fresh eyes is a helpful reminder of how damn lucky we are.

I don’t know if I left my heart in San Francisco, but it certainly feels overflowing this week. The films are so good! My current and future friends, people I care about so much, are making beautiful work and feeling the love and support of a live audience. People are gathering, celebrating and, yes, hugging. Fifteen years ago I didn’t have this. There is so much that is super broken today – in our industry and the world at large. In the context of all this – or maybe because of all this – I am more grateful than ever for this community.

To all you creative, brilliant, funny, generous, kind, passionate, tenacious souls: From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

I’m celebrating Tax Day 2025 with an exploration of your favorite subject and mine: the charitable deduction. I’d understand if pouring through the IRS tax code isn’t exactly your favorite pastime, so I hope to provide a bit of a public service by demystifying obtuse IRS gobbledygook. No matter what side of the donation equation you’re on – and many of us are both donors and recipients, depending on the circumstance – if you’re working in the nonprofit cinema ecosystem, the charitable deduction is always there, even if lurking in the shadows. So let’s shine a little light on it, shall we?

Before I go any further, all the caveats apply. I am not a CPA or a tax attorney. I met my college math requirement by taking Math As a Liberal Art during my Freshman year at Occidental College twentyfivehrumphteen years ago. Perhaps this makes me particularly well-suited to explain this; if I, a proud holder of a BA in English and Comparative Literature1, understand it then maybe you will too. And if you already do: you get a gold star! 🌟

The Story So Far…

A person’s relationship with the charitable deduction is based on their tax situation. Up until 2026 – more on that in a minute – the 90% of taxpayers (according to 2022 data) who take the standard deduction could not deduct charitable donations of any kind. Put another way, for the vast majority of Americans, there was no financial benefit whatsoever for donating to a 501c3 nonprofit. People still do, of course (as of 2020, about 47% of households), but that percentage has been steadily declining for the past 20+ years.

The other 10%, those who do itemize their taxes because deductions exceed the standard for that year, calculate their federal2 tax savings by multiplying the total allowed charitable donation amount by their marginal tax rate. For example, if a hypothetical taxpayer with a marginal tax rate of 35% donated $10,000 in a year, their charitable donation would reduce their tax bill by $3,500, or $10,000 × 0.35. The advantage grows for people in higher tax brackets who also donate big bucks. In a simplified example, someone earning $5,000,000 of taxable income could owe 35% in taxes, or $1,750,000. If they made $1,000,000 in charitable donations that year and could deduct the full amount, that donation would reduce their taxes by 35% of $1,000,000, or $350,000, lowering their tax bill from $1,750,000 to $1,400,000. That’s not nothin’.

Timing is what makes things interesting. These taxpayers can claim up to 60% of adjusted gross income for cash, and 30% for non-cash, donations in a single year. So it’s a common practice to sync up a bunch of charitable giving the same year as an anticipated wealth event (AKA a bigger tax bill year), in order to max out the deduction limits and thereby reduce an overall tax bill by as much as possible. But just because a person can maximize their deductions, does not mean they will. Every taxpayer falls on their own point along what I’ll call the Spectrum of Tax Avoidance, or the tolerance level for the gymnastics required to keep money out of local, state, and federal coffers. There’s another Spectrum at play here: one of Motivation. On one end is the person who is chiefly motivated by the application of the charitable deduction to maximally benefit their finances, and the giving is the byproduct. On the other is the person who has more money they can spend in one lifetime, wants to move it into the world to do some good, and organizes their financial (and tax) plan accordingly. I suspect everyone falls somewhere in between, and maybe some are so divorced from their finances they haven’t given it a whole lot of thought.

What’s New in 2026

The OBBBA, signed into law on July 4, 2025, introduced three changes to the charitable deduction beginning in 2026 for individual3 taxpayers. For now, let’s stick with “The Itemizers” (roughly the top 10% of taxpayers). Starting in 2026, there is a new 0.5% of AGI floor for taxpayers who itemize, which creates a minimum threshold before charitable giving becomes tax‑deductible. In plain language, the first 0.5% of your AGI given to charity each year does not reduce your taxes.

For example, our friend with $5,000,000 of AGI and a 35% marginal tax rate who donated $1,000,000 in cash to charity in 2026:

• Calculates 0.5% of $5,000,000 = $25,000

• Subtracts that $25,000 floor from the $1,000,000 in gifts, leaving $975,000 that counts towards the deduction

• Multiplies $975,000 by their 35% marginal tax rate = $341,250 of tax savings.

In 2025, before the floor applied, our friend’s donation reduced their taxes by $350,000, so this new rule increases their tax bill by $8,750. Put differently, in 2025 they effectively “paid” $650,000 to give $1,000,000 to charity, but in 2026, because of the new 0.5% floor, the same $1,000,000 gift effectively costs $658,750.

Taxpayers in the highest nominal income bracket of 37% are facing an additional restriction in 2026: itemized deductions, including charitable donations, are capped at 35% of income. So where previously this taxpayer could use a multiplier of 37% to calculate their charitable deduction, if that was their marginal tax rate, they are now limited to 35%. While this impacts a relatively small percentage of overall Americans, these folks account for over half of annual charitable giving and tend to be more prone to adjust their giving in response to policy changes.

Returning now to the Non-Itemizers, or the remaining 90% of taxpayers. Starting this year they will be able to deduct charitable donations: Up to $1,000 if single, or $2,000 if married filing jointly. This is on top of the standard deduction amount ($16,100 and $32,200, respectively); the filmmakers in the audience will appreciate that this is referred to as “above the line.” Taxpayer savings of this new policy are estimated in the couple of hundred dollars per person, and could lead to a significant uptick in smaller-dollar donations from a wider spectrum of taxpayers.

Still with me?

I have a confession to make. I had a career for many years in the nonprofit sector and made charitable donations from a DAF I opened in 2006 with no clue how the charitable deduction worked. If you relate to that statement, I’m here for you (and your secret’s safe with me). While I sympathize with your situation, I also believe that knowledge is power; and where knowledge gaps exist, erroneous assumptions often step in to fill them. I hope you have learned something you once assumed was irrelevant or just too confusing to bother with. And that this knowledge makes you feel more confident and empowered to ask questions, facilitate more transparent conversations, and make informed decisions. If it leads to more support flowing into the nonprofit cinema ecosystem, that’s a win.

At the macro level, smaller-dollar donations are expected to increase, while larger-dollar donations could decrease. The two are roughly calculated to offset each other, so the net effect will be a broader base of givers making up the $550-$560 billion expected in total charitable giving in 20264. That strikes me as a good thing in a healthy democracy. Let’s also not forget the estimated $2 trillion currently parked in foundations and DAFs, and with the projected Great Wealth Transfer that number could grow to $18 trillion by 2045. I know it comes as cold comfort to a nonprofit leader or independent filmmaker who suddenly loses a key donor as a result of policy changes, but at the risk of sounding Pollyannish, I look at these numbers and see a ton of money sloshing around out there, just waiting to be put to good use.

What’s your relationship with the charitable deduction, if you have one? How are you thinking about responding to the policy changes this year? If reading this sparked thoughts or questions for you, share them in the comments or send to hello@thebacklight.org.

In my previous post I offered a perhaps oversimplified formula illustrating the basic conditions responsible for the existence of the US Nonprofit Cinema Ecosystem. To repeat:

Late stage capitalism + minimal federal arts funding + nonprofit tax code

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US nonprofit cinema ecosystem

It’s an attempt to provide a quick and dirty answer to the “Why?” of it all: Why does this sector exist in the first place?

Here I want to dig a bit more deeply into the WHAT. What does the US Nonprofit Cinema Ecosystem (AKA USNCE) do? What are the unique functions of these mission-driven orgs and funders? What role does it play in the context of a market-driven entertainment industry?

The answer we often give is “market failure.” It’s shorthand for a case we make for the nonprofit sector writ large, that it exists to step in and provide the things the market fails to when left to its own devices. In the case of the United States, it can also stand in for failure of government to cover the essential needs of its citizens.

Even though the word “failure” is a knock on the market, I also think that it implies a second-tier status for the nonprofit sector. “Failure” suggests that market-driven success is the gold standard, and anything that relies on tax-exempt donations to sustain its business has missed the mark. I don’t personally love the terminology. My experience on the board of The Roxie Theater turned me into a big believer in the benefits of a healthy mix of earned (box office & concessions) and contributed (donations) revenue. Providing myriad ways for stakeholders to support an organization is good business practice; for a community-driven independent art house cinema, for example, donations are how a community demonstrates its support and enthusiasm. So perhaps we do away with “market failure” and instead focus on “public good:” after all, that’s what the tax exemption is for in the first place.

With that frame in mind, I think it’s useful to parse out the functions of the USNCE in an attempt to build a shared understanding that can then help shape conversations about its current and future role in a rapidly shifting independent cinema industry. Each one of these is a subject worth much deeper exploration on its own, which I look forward to shepherding in the future. But, for now:

Risk capital

I’ve often said (and others share this view) that philanthropic capital is the most extreme form of risk capital there is. The IRS provides tax incentives ostensibly to motivate the transfer of capital from a person that has more than they need (or can at least spare a little bit) to an entity that is performing a social good. Nobody is relying on a financial return on investment from charitable donations to pay their kid’s college tuition, home mortgage, or medical bills. The financial benefit is built in, guaranteed, and divorced from the market performance of the recipient organization or project.

With this pressure off, philanthropy can fund experiments that have very little to no current market value but possible future market uptake. Pilot tests can help take ideas from the white board into the real world, test hypotheses, and gather data. Learnings are incorporated into the design and decisions are then made if there’s a market “there there.”

Distribution Advocates FilmADE fund is a prime example of this type of activity in the cinema landscape. Distribution used to be where an independent filmmaker could derive a healthy income from the marketplace, but massive disruption has rendered that pathway much less lucrative nowadays. Distribution Advocates uses grants to support experiments in the present to spur healthy market-based distribution revenue for filmmakers in the future. FilmADE grants to run distribution experiments with future market potential, requiring grantees to share learnings via comprehensive case studies that benefit the field at large. Their work has inspired other funders such as Ford Foundation and Perspective Fund to also support distribution experiments, so we can look forward to a lot of learnings coming from this space in the upcoming months.

Creative independence

Imagine a world in which movies only came out of the corporate entertainment industrial complex, with the half dozen studio heads that have held those jobs for decades greenlighting projects they determine “the market” wants. In the nonfiction space, we would be served up a steady diet of self-executive produced celebrity docs, true crime series, and maybe – if we’re lucky – a film about a musician. The vast majority of these would go straight to streaming and the space for “cinematic nonfiction” (my love language) would shrink to near nonexistent.

Maintaining a protective shield from market pressure around a film for as long as possible - from development, through production, and even beyond – via grants and nonprofit artist support (see below) can help nurture artist visions deemed “risky” or “out of the mainstream,” and, for some, nonprofit film festivals (also, see below) become the first opportunity for these works to meet an audience. I could name so many examples, but here’s a recent one I’m connected to: what major studio exec or streaming doc division head would’ve said “yes” to Brittany Shyne’s pitch over 10 years ago when she embarked on the project that would become Seeds: a two-plus hour, lyrical, black-and-white immersion into the lives of Black farmers in the southern United States? A film that screened around the globe in 2025, picking up award after award, and landed on the Oscar Documentary Shortlist. Lucky for us, a collection of nonprofit funders and individual donors said “yes,” because they wanted this first-time feature director and her team to realize a unique creative vision, trusted they could pull it off, and believed there would be an audience who would love it.

Artist support

As far as I can tell, the bulk of filmmaker support and development happens in the nonprofit sector. Seems the financial ROI for labs, fellowships, training, networking and community-building just isn’t there, so market-driven entities aren’t incentivized to devote resources to these activities. Nonprofit organizations often form as interventions, addressing lack of opportunity for artists from underrepresented populations by fostering community and career pathways. Initiatives that center artist affinity such as women and gender nonconforming, BIPOC, Indigenous – just to name a few – specifically work to provide resources and mentorship to bring these filmmakers’ stories into existence, and one day shift the balance of the industry at large.

I put “artist-led professional support networks” in this category, too. The past 10 years has seen the rise of organizations like Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Fwd-Doc, the Documentary Producers Alliance, and A-Doc, among others, that are either standalone 501c3 organizations or fiscally-sponsored projects that can take tax deductible donations to power the work they do for their members and the field at large.

Distribution

My first encounter with the doc film world took the form of an introduction to Diana Barrett in May 2014. Some readers may recall Diana as the founder of the Fledgling Fund, a private foundation that from 2010 to 2019 made grants to documentaries in support of their impact campaigns. I suspect other organizations and individuals engaged in similar work long before Fledgling’s launch, but in my mind that date signals a moment when the idea to use philanthropic dollars in service of film distribution that includes social, legislative, or cultural change goals really started to catch on. The Global Impact Producers Alliance history is also, in large part, the history of how impact producing came to be.

Because the goals are primarily mission-driven, impact campaigns are almost entirely funded by grants. Both film-focused organizations like Perspective Fund as well as “issue funders” (groups that work in the domain that the film addresses, like climate, reproductive rights, racial justice, etc.) support the work with the belief that engaging with the story will move the needle on the issue presented in the film.

While impact may not look 100% like traditional distribution, they both use a lot of the same tools to reach audiences, such as theatrical exhibition (including four-walling), direct-to-audience platforms such as Gathr and Kinema, and placement on other streaming services. In a time when traditional distribution pathways for independent film are becoming scarcer and less remunerative, I’m curious if philanthropic capital will play a larger role in distribution: both in supporting issue-based change and in the broader public good of indie cinema writ large.

Exhibition

My totally unscientific hunch is that the vast majority of film festivals – especially regional and special-interest fests – are nonprofits or programs run by umbrella 501c3 organizations. It seems the bigger and more “market-driving” they get, the higher likelihood they are corporate entities, with one major exception being Sundance. For some percentage of independent films, their festival run is their theatrical run, which means that portion of the film’s distribution is subsidized by US taxpayers.

Another absolutely unverified guess is that over three-quarters of US independent arthouse cinemas are nonprofits. In a time when megaplex theater chains are struggling and shuttering, more eyes are on these standalone cinemas as the keepers of the in-person movie-going experience in communities across the country.

Notable here is that professional organizations supporting festivals (Film Festival Alliance) and art houses (Art House Convergence) are also – you guessed it! – nonprofits.

Extremely Imperfect

This is as good a place as any to wrap up this little tour of the USNCE. Like the system itself, what I’m sharing here is imperfect, but I hope it is at least helpful in getting a conversation started. I’ve refrained from evaluating the work (there’s plenty of time for that) in service of describing it. I believe it’s important to have clarity about the WHAT before engaging in an analysis of the HOW.

The beauty of this exercise is that this picture can continue to develop over time with your input. So, tell me: does this resonate with you? Is there something missing? This is a funder-driven analysis; if that’s not your perspective, how do you see it? Please share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you!

Those of us making and watching movies in the United States do so in a unique economic context. I think there’s a strong case to be made that our version of capitalism inhabits the extreme edge of shareholder profit maximization, monopolization, rampant resource consolidation, and financialization of just about every aspect of life. In the film world, this is manifested by tech companies treating entertainment divisions as loss-leaders, the collapse of the theatrical business, the few remaining studios milking tired IP to pump out one derivative movie after another to please their private equity overlords, an oligarchic entanglement of deep-pocketed executives with the current presidential administration – and anyone not working in those spheres scrambling to find a business model that works. I’m not breaking new ground here; in fact, most of the media I consume about the movie business is understandably covering these market-driven topics minute-by-minute.

For such a blindingly wealthy country, the United States government underinvests in arts and culture. We consistently rank at the bottom of the list of OECD nations in both per capita and raw number federal arts and culture expenditure. This has always been the case, but is particularly true today thanks to the gutting of the NEA and NEH, as well as the rescission of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

When it comes to philanthropic spending, however, the US always sits at the top of the list. Our tax code that exempts certain organizations and individuals from paying taxes in exchange for performing public good is particularly robust by comparison to other nations. Whether this way is “better” or “worse” than another way is complex and far beyond the scope of my interest. Instead, I accept that it exists and remain forever fascinated by the who, what, where, when, how, why – and how much – of it all.

Late stage capitalism + no federal arts funding + nonprofit tax code

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US nonprofit cinema ecosystem

This is a simplistic overview of the conditions that create a distinctly American sector – and the focus of TheBacklight – nonprofit cinema: The 501c3 organizations that provide artist support, fiscal sponsorship and grants; nonprofit film festivals and arthouse cinemas; public media entities that commission and distribute documentaries; and the foundations and individuals that fund them. These entities operate within this beneficial structure because they ostensibly put something else ahead of profit; for now we’ll call that “mission.”

The line between the non- and for- profit cinema industries is far from firm: a filmmaker supported by Sundance (nonprofit) labs goes on to direct big budget Hollywood movies (hi, Ryan Coogler!); a majority grant-supported documentary scores a festival acquisition by a streamer; a major streamer exec founds a nonprofit that “supports and empowers mid-career POC creators and artists to make commercial film and television across genres that reflects our multicultural society — to propel narrative change, advance racial equity, and create cultural impact;” a nonprofit production company’s doc series has 3.3 million YouTube followers. I find this permeable membrane, this mix of mission and market, infinitely fascinating.

In the zeitgeist, the focus is on the market. TheBacklight is a space where the focus is on mission. There is so much passion, work, care, and creativity going on over here that is undervalued, under-appreciated, or simply invisible. Is it perfect? Hardly. Do we have it all figured out? Not at all. But its very existence bears more attention, examination, and celebration than it’s getting. I can see why it’s not a great beat for a commercial media reporter to cover; by comparison to Big Hollywood, we barely register on any standard measure: box office receipts, share price, subscriber growth, production budgets.

But just because something is small by comparison doesn’t mean it has no value. In fact, within the nonprofit cinema ecosystem is where some of the boldest work is made by a more diverse array of makers, where community thrives at festivals and in cinemas, and where distribution follows paths forged by partnerships and meaning-making. There is a lot of territory to explore here, starting with questions like:

• What is the special role of the nonprofit cinema ecosystem in the context of an economy driven by profit?

• Where are the most interesting projects, experiments, and collaborations happening? And what can we learn from them?

• What in the sector is working and why? Also: what’s getting in the way, and how can we clear those obstacles?

I have been active in this corner of the film industry since 2014 primarily as an independent funder: of documentaries, artist support and exhibition organizations, and artists directly. Along the way I sat on the board of a nonprofit arthouse cinema, The Roxie, from 2019-2026. My orientation towards the work has always been first and foremost as a grant maker who believes in supporting independent filmmaking for its intrinsic value. I’m definitely not alone in this belief. I’m someone who learns by writing, so this is a space where I will share some of what I’m noodling on and, someday soon I hope, what you’re noodling on, too.