Making a film is hard enough, but if it doesn’t get picked up by a distributor then getting it screened in cinemas and seen by audiences can be an uphill battle. In this blog, documentary filmmaker Luke McManus shares what he learned about DIY distribution from “releasing” his 2022 film North Circular.
Being in a cinema watching and listening to a packed house respond to your film, then talking about the work with the audience afterwards is a special thing for a filmmaker.
But the transition from shooting and post-production of your film into the whirl of promotion and interfacing with cinemas and the people who work in them can be a tricky journey to navigate for filmmakers. Though if it goes well, it is a remarkably fulfilling one.
I released a film in Irish cinemas in December 2022: North Circular is a feature documentary musical about a road in inner city Dublin and it has been the most satisfying and rewarding experiences of my career to date.
My career up until then had encompassed many things, including directing a lot of documentaries and factual television, as well as narrative shorts and web series, and also occasionally producing other people’s films.
But now I had finally made my first feature film as a director. I was all too aware that the next stage was getting the film in front of cinema audiences. I couldn’t get a distributor to take a chance on an arthouse black and white documentary musical so it was going to be a DIY release. We had a small war chest from the film’s funders for exhibition support which meant it wasn’t a totally shoestring budget but it was limited enough.
I’d had a little experience of this before, with a feature doc called The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid which had managed a decent theatrical run in Ireland and a solid festival run internationally.
So now I was set to do it with my own film. This is what I learned about making a film work in the cinema, from the perspective of a filmmaker.
Don’t release your film!
We first released the film in Ireland on 2 December 2022. My target was to have the film still on screens by Christmas and to exceed €30,000 at the Irish box office.
I’ve just confirmed a screening for 18 March 2024 at the Irish Film Institute, bringing the film into its third year of its run since its world premiere. A screening at the Light House Cinema’s Screen 3 sold out in December 2023, making it the longest-running Irish doc in the history of the cinema. We have played on more than twenty screens around Ireland and grossed around €85,000 (a significant amount in a market less than 10% the size of the UK’s) and we are close to €100,000 in global box office. We’ve played around 50 film festivals and won eight awards.
We’ve also done some micro-releases – a week in New York City, a tour of Scotland, several screenings in London and I’m about to come back to the UK for a four-city tour of the North taking in Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester as well as Bristol.
It’s been a special experience and it is one that I am keen to share with other filmmakers and also with cinema staff. There is a gulf between exhibitors and filmmakers that has traditionally been bridged by distributors. But in a DIY era where multi-skilling is more and more common there are going to be films that don’t have a distributor acting as an intermediate.
The first thing I learned is “DON’T RELEASE YOUR FILM”.
Wait, what? I thought this was advice on how to release a film? It is! To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t screen your film in the cinema. My problem is with the word “release”.
I think it is out of date, inaccurate and needs to be retired. The word “release” suggests films have their own agency and energy and ability to fend for themselves. But they really don’t.
So don’t think of your film as a self-reliant creature that you just “release”. Think of them as newborns that need to be guided, fed, wiped clean, encouraged, cared for, nurtured and defended until eventually they learn to crawl, walk and are able to look after themselves.
Films always needed marketing, publicity, visibility. But in the past they were one of the few forms of entertainment available. Every film got guaranteed attention from newspapers and radio stations and, ultimately, the public in the traditional media landscape. Of course there are great advantages to the new landscape now, you can make your film available to the entire world very easily and cheaply now. But that is ultimately often a hollow experience for all concerned and it competes with all the other content out there to cut through.
Getting someone to pay for a ticket and give their evening over for your project is hard.
So don’t merely release your film. Give birth to it! Parent it! Hold its bloody hand until it is ready to walk.
I learned very quickly that nobody cares about your film. It might be demoralising, but understanding this fact is key. “Nobody cares about your film” is a realistic basis from which to begin your efforts. Making people care is now your job as a filmmaker.
Luckily though, as the proud filmmaker/parent, you are the best advocate for your film. Authenticity is prized in the world these days so be prepared to put in the hours to make your film relevant.
The friends you haven’t met yet
You also need to be prepared to make the case for the cinema experience generally.
Talk about the cinematic experience and how much better it is to watch your film in a dark loud room with other humans in that temporary community that is a cinema screening. People will ask you for links to the film. Unless they are journalists who will help promote the film, or other professionals (sales agents, exhibitors etc.), tell them no! But do tell them the date, time and place of the next screening.
With North Circular, part of the case we made was that it doesn’t really work on streaming. It’s black and white, deliberately paced, highly cinematic with an immersive sound mix. It carries emotional weight in a way that many documentaries don’t. So it was 1000% better in the cinema than on a phone or laptop.
One of the biggest convenient lies that tech companies have spread is that “content is content regardless of platform.” We cinema lovers know that is nonsense, and so too do most people once you scratch their surface. Give them a compelling case to come back to the cinema and they will.
Luckily you have natural allies here that you don’t even know yet… another thing that I learned from my experience is that cinema staff are (in the words of a cheesy Irish tourism slogan) not strangers, just friends you haven’t met yet.
They are as invested in the success of your film as you are. Sometimes twice as much depending on the terms agreed! So treat them like you treat your cinematic collaborators: be warm, friendly, polite and open to what they require. If they have suggestions try to row in with them. Make it easy for them to help you and your film. They are a whole new team you are going to be working with. Be warned, they are busy, and they get a lot of emails, so be prepared to go back to them with follow-ups. “Just circling back on…” is one of my favourite email phrases at this point!
Sometimes you need a big start to a film’s run. I had a first London date for the film at the London Irish Film Festival a few weeks before the film’s theatrical release in Ireland. I asked an old friend who is now a very prominent comedian and TV presenter to do the Q&A with me. He said he would love to, but he was out of town in Cambridge doing a show.
Ah well…
But then I thought, maybe we can do a Cambridge matinee show (it was a Sunday) with him instead?
He was up for it, and when I pitched the cinema staff at the Arts Picturehouse they really got behind the idea of Dara Ó Briain doing a Q&A in the cinema, even it was for an obscure documentary. We got a solid crowd in, as well as tweets from a man with millions of followers which got the film’s name out there. We were up and running…
Long tails, slow burns
Luckily my film had many faces which meant it could be marketed in numerous ways. A big appeal for Dara was the Gaelic sports and the focus on All-Ireland Final day. The folk music in the film meant we could partner with Cambridge Folk Festival. But there’s a lot about history too: our upcoming Leeds screening is in partnership with Irish History Month. Having a multi-faceted film means you can present it and attract different audiences in different places. And that meant our film had a few lives.
Q&A conversations were key, and it’s important to set the right tone – you want to bring the same energy and values to your exhibition of the film as you did to the making of the film. Nobody likes a self-important humourless Q&A – get a few jokes or anecdotes into the mix, see what you can do to make the experience enjoyable, not just educational. It helps if your film has many layers to untangle – I feel that a cinema documentary, unlike a TV documentary, should be a little bit mysterious and complex in order to support conversation afterwards. It makes for a satisfying and stimulating cinema experience.
The abysmal impact of COVID and the slow chipping away at cinema audiences by streamers means that exhibitors need your love. And it also means that they are open to innovative thinking, fresh energy, and new faces. The cinemas have changed too – many films now have long tails rather than massive one-off releases.
We didn’t get open doors from every cinema. A lot of chains said no, or gave it a week and then pulled it when it didn’t perform. But the chain experience for a documentary like North Circular is a dismal, impersonal one. I had to fight to do a Q&A in one chain in Dublin. We had to organise our own microphones (I hustled someone else into paying for them, but still).
Three months later we came back to the local arts centre in the same Dublin neighbourhood. We sold it out (250 seats) and sold more tickets in one night than we had in a full week of screenings at the chain cinema.
Some films come in super hard with a big spend and then fizzle out. We were the classic slow burn that kept going. The typical pattern is World Premiere – Festival Run – Cinema Release. We had our premiere in March 2022 in Ireland, then an International Premiere at Sheffield DocFest, then… not a lot of festivals. It was a bit unnerving to be honest.
But then we won two prizes at some Irish festivals, then did the theatrical release and our PR managed to get the film in front of The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw who gave us a super strong review. The Irish release in December went great and that got our festival run going – we won a Grand Prix at FIPADOC in Biarritz and then we went on to our US premiere and the momentum kept building. And everything reinforced the success of the film – from awards to sold-out screenings to personal feedback.
Now your job is selling tickets
Having a social account to control your own narrative is key to amplifying and telling the story around the film but ultimately nothing beats being there in the room. As a wise person said “90% of success is showing up” and that is what you need to do – show up. If you are shy and unconfident, then you need to figure out ways of overcoming those hurdles because it is show business ultimately. If you just can’t face speaking in front of a room full of people, find someone on the creative team or from the cast of your film who loves to do it to front it up.
There’s always ways to make an impression. In 2022 at Sheffield DocFest a filmmaker called Charlie Thorne handed me a cool sticker for his film Ramble On. It looked like a band logo and the minute I saw it, I knew I wanted North Circular stickers – so I got 5,000. They were handed to cinema staff, audience members, stuck to poles and utility boxes and pub toilet hand dryers all around the world. Having a modest gift for people makes a big difference to how they think of you and of your film. I stuck Charlie’s sticker to the side of my amplifier, and I see the words Ramble On every day as a result. That could be your film!
Once your job was making a film. Now your job is simple: it’s selling tickets. The sooner you grasp this, the better. Personally invite people to come to your screenings. Tell them how much it would mean to you. Add local talent to the cinema lineup in the form of post-screening moderators and panelists with a bit of a following on social media, or with a strong personal network.
There’s no point doing marketing or getting publicity if there are no tickets to sell, so make sure you always have your next show lined up. We set up a Google Sheet for all of our upcoming screenings that we still keep updated. We also created a tinyurl.com link to it that is easy to type (it’s tinyurl.com/ncscreenings) – it costs nothing and is very effective.
You can’t sell tickets if the film isn’t screening! I was asked to speak at a doc festival about campaigning and how to support a film’s release last year. I only agreed to do the talk if they put a screening of the film on so I could get my talk audience to watch it afterwards.
In March 2024 North Circular is playing Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, New York, Buenos Aires and Dublin again. Later in the Spring, Pau in France, Trento in Italy and the Orkney Islands – hope you can make it along to one of them…
Luke McManus is a documentary filmmaker based in Dublin. He has made acclaimed films for Netflix, BBC, NBC, Channel 4, ITV, RTÉ, TV3, NDR, Virgin Media Television, Al-Jazeera and TG4. His work has won four Irish Film & Television Awards, the Celtic Media Award, the Radharc Prize, the EBU Connect Award and the Grand Prix at FIPADOC.
