This Week at IFP: Lana Wilson, Martha Shane and Film Presence Discuss ‘After Tiller’ and Documentary Outreach
by Erik Luers on May 4, 2014 in Uncategorized
Billed as a “case study in documentary outreach,” IFP held a unique panel discussion exclusive for members this past Monday evening. Proving that it’s no longer enough to make a film and hope it effortlessly finds a welcoming audience, filmmakers Lana Wilson and Martha Shane looked to various sources to help get the word out on their extremely topical documentary, After Tiller (a selection in Independent Film Week’s Spotlight on Documentaries program in 2012). Teaming up with Film Presence, a company that specializes in marketing and outreach for independent features, Wilson, Shane and Film Presence’s Sara Keiner and Merrill Sterritt were on hand to discuss new and innovative ways to reach a potential audience.
“We didn’t have much experience, and it was such a controversial subject,” Wilson admitted about After Tiller, her documentary that deals with the status of doctors who carry out abortions in a post-George Tiller era. “It was hard for us to get any grant support for the film. What we did right from the beginning, which ended up being a big part of our outreach, was making this massive list of every board member and every organization related to health, to reproductive justice, feminism, anything like that in New York City….Then we cold-called all of these people and tried to meet them and to have coffee with them, not just to say ‘hey, can you donate to this film,’ but also to pick their brain and get ideas for how we could engage that whole community from the get-go, before the film was even made.”
Kickstarter, a popular crowd-funding resource used for many creative projects, proved to be a worthwhile source for the filmmaker. “Our Kickstarter [campaign] was good,” Shane recalled, “because we started reaching out to a lot of blogs and the feminist community in New York and the reproductive justice community here. There were a lot of people willing to Tweet about it. It was kind of amazing to us. This was the early days of Kickstarter, before people had started raising $1,000,000. We thought ‘oh God, $9,000! That’s going to be a [very hard goal to reach].”
The film’s journey would cross paths with IFP in the Fall of 2012. “We did IFP Film Week’s Spotlight on Documentaries,” remembered Shane. “That’s where we met with Cinetic, who we wound up going with, and other sales reps. For Oscilloscope [an independent film distribution company], we had lunch with them before Sundance, and then they saw the film at Sundance and it went from there….”
Film Presence touched base with the filmmakers after the Sundance premiere to create a strategy for the film’s roll-out post-Sundance; a six month campaign was subsequently created. “It’s important to be strategic when you have press,” Shane noted. “We had an article in the Huffington Post that was forwarded around a bit. A foundation then saw it and gave us our first major grant that helped us fund a huge chunk of production, definitely. Maybe even almost all of production. That probably also got it on the radar for a lot more people.”
Even after all of the documentary’s success thus far, the filmmakers haven’t lost sight of their hunger to find excitingly independent ways to get their work seen. “I think we always had in our mind a kind of worst case scenario, a ‘we’re going rogue’ kind of plan,” Wilson announced, “that we self-distribute and tour around like a rock band, earning money by showing the film on corners, an agitprop kind of thing. I think we would have done that….[laughs].”
“If we hadn’t got into a big festival and we didn’t have a distributor,” Wilson continued, “we did still have all these partners who we had met. We knew who the audience was. We really knew people were excited to see the movie and who they were and how we thought it could be positioned to each of them. I think we would’ve gotten some people to see it…”
After Tiller will be available on home video Tuesday, May 13.