In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.
Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.
It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.
Photo by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash
Personally, our New York flights were cancelled. Our big screen premiere was scrapped. We watched and waited as distributors teamed up with cinemas to launch online platforms to stream films and save the local picture house. Virtual cinema was now the thing.
But still, we waited. We had a finished film but were uncertain how to proceed with things so volatile, people suffering economically, and the landscape for film distribution in upheaval. One could say things are volatile at the best of times when trying to distribute a micro-budget independent film. How do you attract an audience to your work with no money to market and how do you convince a person to pay for your tiny film when you are but a drop in a vast ocean of content? But 2020 was unprecedented. If Hollywood couldn’t work out what to do with all its wealth and influence, how could we?
Even most film festivals were moving online and we felt that defeated the whole purpose of the festival experience: the atmosphere, the networking, the thrill of meeting fellow filmmakers and seeing your work on the big screen with an appreciative audience full of cinephiles and peers. Why would I pay to submit my film for an online event?
We kept waiting. We were still in love with the romance of cinema. There is a thrill to watching your film in front of a live audience of strangers and feeling the pulse of the room; do they feel that emotion, do they embrace those characters, do they laugh and cry and pick-up the beats of the edit you worked so long to refine?
That experience of sharing a film live with an audience is one of my favourite aspects of making films. So we contacted a cinema in Malta. They offered to screen the film, at a fee, which was quite reasonable. But due to COVID restrictions, the cinema could only hold thirty people, so even with a low hire fee, we could not make our money back. We said no.
We were also getting offers from distributors to release the film for us. Some wanted to release the film on Amazon, others had their own custom streaming platforms they had built. We were wary of these offers as bad experiences in the past working with distributors made us cautious.
But how long could we keep waiting? We began filming In Corpore all the way back in 2017, wrapped production at the beginning of 2018, finally completed post production after two years (lack of funds, change of personnel, changes to the edit made it a very arduous post process), and now 2020 was coming to a close and we still hadn’t released the film. We owed ourselves, and our cast and crew, to get this film out there. So what was the best course of action?
Shooting our micro-budget feature film In Corpore on location at Chelsea Peirs, New York City. Photo Credit: Gabriele Holtermann.
We realized we had to swallow our pride. There is a ‘big event’ idea we romanticize when we release a film. We did so with Friends, Foes & Fireworks, premiering at Classic Cinemas in Elsternwick, in Victoria, drawing 150 people, seeing the film for the first time with friends and family, cast and crew, and a general audience. We would do a Q&A afterwards. It was an event and it is thrilling. But it was also a form of validation and ego. We had to let go of ego and accept in 2020 mass public gatherings and a packed cinema for our film was not going to happen.
So how could we premiere In Corpore? We could upload to Amazon ourselves and call it done. We could give it to a distributor and call it dusted. But neither of these options were ‘special’. So we began contacting cinemas in the US that had gone online. Many had teamed up with distributors to screen their catalogues so they weren’t interested in a micro-budget, independent film. The ones that were interested wanted a fee. For us, much like online festivals, paying a fee to stream our work made no sense.
It was then we had the idea to look at Melbourne. Our home city in our hearts, and where the journey of In Corpore began. Melbourne was going through a very severe lockdown at the time. Cinemas were shut, most in hibernation waiting for the lockdown to lift, but one cinema was more innovative than the rest and had built their own streaming platform like leading cinemas in the US. It was the team behind the Classic, Cameo, and Lido Cinemas, Eddie and Benji Tamir. The team that had organised the cinema screenings for Friends, Foes & Fireworks. We reached out to them about premiering In Corpore through their platform, Lido at Home, and they were open to collaboration.
This could work. This could be a way to give some support back to a cinema that had supported us in the past. This could be a way to bring In Corpore back home, full circle. It began in Melbourne, it would launch in Melbourne. And as the platform was for Australians only, there was an exclusivity to launching on Lido at Home that made it special.
As this article goes out, it is only a few days after In Corpore launched on Lido at Home. Whether it will be a success or not, we don’t know. But after delay on top of delay, question after doubt, and seemingly a different world come and gone since we began, our second improvised feature film has finally been released.