Why I Gave My Film Away

It is true. I am giving away a feature film for free. I think it is a good idea, and by the end of this you might think so too.

Quick context on me: my name is Nick Platzer, I am a documentary filmmaker, and together with my partner Markus Mauthe I spent the last four years making a documentary called The Last Places. We put everything we had into it and then some. It was completely self-financed. We did not wait for permission, we just wanted to make it and we went.

Producing it was the best time of my life so far. I am still proud of what came out of it. And when we got home the film kept collecting people who believed in it: an actual composer wrote the score, Markus Reuter, and Carlos Cortés, who has an Oscar for best sound, did the sound design. Those two took our images somewhere we could not have taken them on our own.

Then came the part nobody warns you about. Selling the film has now taken longer than making it.

We started with local broadcasters, then TV stations across Europe. The big dream, of course, was one of the streamers: Netflix, Disney Plus, National Geographic, a proper licence fee, and then the next film paid for out of the last one. That was the snowball we thought we were rolling, and somewhere down the hill it would turn into an avalanche called our production company.

Instead we sat in Zoom call after Zoom call, and every one of them went almost identically. Great film. We love it. We can absolutely see it on our platform. But first: we would want it exclusively. Exclusively for the American market, or exclusively for Europe, or exclusively in the library of a German public broadcaster.

That part was fine with us. We did not think much about it. Exclusivity for a year or two, some money in, maybe the film picks up and travels further afterwards. We could have lived with that.

And then, almost every single time, came the same question.

Can you cut out the white people?

Nobody phrased it quite that bluntly. What they said was: you present yourself in the film as the European filmmaker, the white guy coming to Africa and documenting. Can you cut that part out? Can you cut yourselves out and just make a film about people in Africa living?

Here is why we could not. That part is not decoration, it is one of the pivotal messages of the film, and it is the truth. We were only in the position to travel to those places because of our European passports. It is not that we did not want to work with African filmmakers and protagonists as equals. I am fairly sure Markus would rather have hired somebody local than me. But most of them could not get into those countries in that time frame, and we lived that problem in the most direct way possible.

We tried, with Diaka, one of the film's own protagonists. First she was supposed to come to Angola. It did not work. Then Nigeria. It did not work. Then Cameroon, where she was already at the airport with a visa in hand, and got denied anyway. She arrived a week after us. She spent that week more or less living at an airport.

So for the people in those meetings, the injustice was not the problem. Naming it was the problem. They wanted it swept under the carpet, as we say in German, cut out and left unmentioned, so the film could pretend to be a floating camera moving through the world with unlimited access.

We refused. And once we refused, the excitement in those rooms cooled noticeably.

That is when I started asking a different question. Not who wants to buy this film, but who was actually excited that it existed at all.

The answer was never anyone in a boardroom. It was the people we visited and filmed. They went out of their way for us, gave us interviews, invited us into their homes, and were genuinely excited that somebody had come to tell their story, that it might reach further than they could travel themselves.

That is the audience. Not a person in Wyoming, or wherever the next Netflix subscriber happens to be scrolling. The audience is the people in and around those communities, and everyone connected to them. We went there to make a difference for those communities, and a film only makes a difference in a community if the community can actually watch it.

From that point on, the whole distribution question became one question: how do we reach them.

I did try the self-distribution route first. There is a platform called Filmhub where you can upload a film yourself and it goes out to the big stores, but the requirements are strict. Correct metadata everywhere. Subtitles for people with hearing impairments, done properly. As a dyslexic person I spent months on those subtitles, with a lot of help, and it was genuinely hard. Then all the metadata. I had everything filled in and I was one or two days away from pressing the button.

And in exactly those days I listened to an interview with the director of a documentary called Listers, a film about bird watching. He had released it on YouTube, and after it took off he turned down money from Netflix. His reason: while he was shooting it he was living out of his car with no money, and he wanted people like him to be able to walk into a library and watch the film for free.

That did not leave me alone.

Because there were two ways to actually reach the people in my film. The first is to go there with a projector and show it to them. That one is still on my list. I want to travel country by country with the whole team and screen it in the places we filmed. There was one day in Nigeria when we visited the governor and the streets were so full that our bus could not get through, like the Rolling Stones had come to town. Imagine showing that crowd their own film.

The second way, the one I could do immediately, is YouTube. Free, no borders, no ads, ever. Somebody's phone can carry it into a village. One of our fixers can show it. And the people in the film can see themselves in a real, finished film.

In the end there was no other option that I could live with.

So that is what this is. And it is also what I want to build from here: a filmmaker community that points the camera where it hurts and tells the ugly truths in a beautiful way, with the intention of helping people, helping the unheard, and creating lasting change.

If you want to be part of that and put a finger in the wound with me, the smallest thing you can do is write a comment. I read every one at least twice these days and I try to answer all of them.

If you want to do more: there is a Ko-fi link, buy me a coffee, since I do not drink beer. I sit here surrounded by everything I need to make films and I still spent more than I had on the last one, and I have not solved how to pay for the next one. A coffee buys me a bit more time on the next project, which is already shot and now just has to be shaped into something.

And if you really want in, there is Patreon and Steady. Members get the behind the scenes writing, and they get to actually take part in which stories get told. Suggest a topic, suggest a person whose story has to be told, or just be part of something bigger. There is not a lot going on there yet, but I will be waiting for you.

If money is not your thing at all, the most valuable thing you can give me is still free. Watch the film. If you like it, sit a friend down and make them watch it without their phone. In a world built entirely around scrolling away, ninety minutes of somebody's actual attention is close to a gift, and giving that feeling to somebody else is one too.