Anti-Trumpists have emerged as a new and growing source of financing for embattled political documentary makers.
Richard Lorber, president of Kino Lorber, on Friday told a Toronto Film Festival panel on connecting audiences to non-fiction movies that progressive, or politically-oriented, documentaries are drawing on “civic-minded citizens with significant contributions, which allow them to get made and give viewers a chance to go to the theater.”
Beyond such “impact partners,” the TIFF: The Market panel centered on how to get documentaries financed and released as they make slow return to theaters after the pandemic. “The only thing you can count on in releasing quality art house specialty films is disappointment,” Lorber argued, even as he has had recent gains with theatrical docs like the Oscar-winning Mr Nobody Against Putin and the summer arthouse hit Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.
That theatrical success offered Lorber proof of “a ray of light that you’ve suddenly activated, a sleeper cell of fans who you didn’t know even existed.” mTuckman Media principal Michael Tuckman had his own recent success with the theatrical play for the Oscar-winning No Other Land, which has earned around $2.5 million at the box office, and the sleeper hit Secret Mall Apartment, now at nearly $1 million in cinema ticket receipts.
“For me, it was cathartic,” Tuckman said of Jeremy Workman’s 2024 documentary about artists building a hideout in the middle of a bustling shopping mall, as Secret Mall Apartment went on to outpace expectations with its theatrical release.
The documentary had a $40,000 opening weekend premiering in the shopping mall where it was set. “We set up a replica of the apartment in the lobby, so people were taking pictures,” Tuckman recalls.
CAA sales agent Amanda Lebow, who is at TIFF with two world premieres with Cheyenne and Bleeding Hearts, argued filmmakers are key to connecting their films with audiences. “With documentaries right now, the director usually is the main talking point of the film. I really encourage our clients to really give it your all when it’s that release time,” she said.
For Lorber, building audiences with a film often starts with a core fanbase. “We’re looking for films that have a certain specificity,” whether political, a filmmaker’s perspective, or an essay, he argued. “Once we find that, we look for the haystack that can grow out of that needlepoint,” he added.
Tuckman had oversized success with Penny Lane’s Wild Inside, a documentary about Flaco the eagle-owl at the Central Park Zoo that eventually found a wider audience beyond birdwatchers. “We went from an initial 12 to 15 cities with the birder community to now around 130 theaters and $250,000,” he reported.
Among the many challenges facing documentaries is less of an appetite among streamers. But CAA’s Lebow had success with the 2023 film by D. Smith, Kokomo City, a film about Black trans women that landed on Paramount+.
“It was such a great moment for us. We can still be up all night negotiating, it can be a crazy arty movie from a first-time filmmaker – let’s continue that momentum,” Lebow insisted.
