When we finished Residuum, we didn’t take it on a festival run. Instead, a friend of ours went to Cannes and shopped it for us, and for a little while, it felt like the door might finally open. Then the offers came back, and I read the first one twice, because I thought I had misunderstood it.
The distributor would take $100,000 first. Only after they recovered that, plus their fees and whatever they spent selling the film, would we start to see anything. The next offer was the same. So was the one after that. Some asked for $40,000 or $50,000; others asked for $100,000. Almost every single deal worked the same way.
For a film we had made with almost nothing, it meant one thing. We would probably never see a dollar.
How the deals actually work
If you’ve never seen one of these contracts, here is what nobody tells you when you start. A distributor doesn’t pay you for your film. They take it, they sell it, and they keep the money until they have covered “their own costs,” whatever that means. Those costs can include festival fees, marketing, deliverables, and a long list of expenses you never agreed to in your head, even if you signed them on paper. And the contracts often tie your film to them for years, sometimes seven or more.
We had seen this before. With In the Woods, we did the festival circuit ourselves, paying every fee out of our own pocket, and the film won Best Feature at the Detroit Windsor International Film Festival. It was one of the proudest moments of our lives. But the distributors we met along the way all handed us the same kind of contract, and the “marketing” they promised usually meant putting your film in a catalog and hoping someone picked it. You might wait years and see a hundred dollars, maybe a thousand.
That’s when it stops feeling like business and starts feeling personal. You pour years of your life, your savings, your sweat, and your blood into a film, and then you watch someone else hold it, with your name on it, while you get nothing back.
You pour years of your life into a film, and then you watch someone else hold it while you get nothing back.
Then Amazon locked the door
For a while, Amazon Prime was the one place that worked for us. We had three of our films there, and it was the only place we ever saw real money from them. It was nowhere near what the films had cost to make, but it was something, and it was ours.
Then Amazon moved independent filmmakers to a new system called Slate, and somewhere in that change, we were kicked out. Some of our films are still on Prime today, but we can’t get into our own account. I have written to them more times than I can count. Nobody answers.
It is a strange feeling, watching your own films on a platform that won’t let you in.
So we built our own door
At some point, Greta and I looked at each other and asked a very simple question. What’s the point?
Why work so hard on something, only to hand it to a distributor who takes everything, or to a platform that can lock you out overnight? If we were going to struggle either way, we wanted to struggle for something that belonged to us.
So we put our films on our own website. Ten years ago, that would have been almost impossible for a small company like ours. Today, the technology finally exists. You can build a site that streams your films beautifully, protects them from being copied, and lets people pay you directly. On coloredfilms.net, you can rent any of our films for three days or buy it to keep forever. There is no subscription and no middleman. You can rent Residuum for $6.99, and our other films for $5.99, or get all three earlier films together in the Colored Films Collection.
When someone watches one of our films there, the money goes to the people who made it. That is the whole idea.
The honest part
I would love to tell you that it’s working beautifully, but I promised myself I would be honest in these articles.
We only just started selling our films on our own website, so we haven’t seen much money yet. And to be completely truthful, our films have not made a profit. We are still in the red. Every film we’ve made, we made because we believed in the story, not because we knew it would pay us back.
Owning your films also means owning the hardest part: finding the people who will watch them. A distributor at least has a catalog. We have to find every single viewer ourselves.
Building the audience first
That is why you are suddenly seeing so much of us online. We are building our audience on social media, starting almost from zero, and we are doing it the only way we know how, by giving away what we’ve learned. Every day, we share a free filmmaking lesson from the films we’ve actually made, and we offer consultations for filmmakers who want help with their own projects. Starting in mid-October, we plan to go live every day across all of our social media to answer questions.
And in January, when we start our next film, we want to show it to you as it happens, every day: the good, the bad, and the ugly. No polished behind-the-scenes, just the real thing. I think people are tired of being sold a fantasy about filmmaking, and I think that honesty is what will bring the right people to us.
What I’d tell any filmmaker
If you are about to sign your first distribution deal, please read every page. Get an entertainment attorney, even if it costs you money you don’t think you have. Unless you have the right connections and the right lawyers, it is very hard to get a fair deal, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you will get ripped off, and it hurts in a way that’s hard to describe, like someone stole your sweat and blood right out of your hands.
And here is my best advice. I know it sounds backward, but build your audience before you make your film. Today, being a filmmaker also means being a creator, someone people follow and trust. If I had understood the power of YouTube twenty years ago, I would have started then. I didn’t, and I wish I had.
But it’s never too late. You can always start fresh. That’s exactly what Greta and I are doing.
So if you’ve ever wondered how to support independent filmmakers, it’s simpler than you think. Watch their films where they sell them themselves. Every rental tells them to keep going.
Watch our films Watch Residuum
Written by Vilma Zenelaj. Residuum was written and directed by Greta Zenelaj and Vilma Zenelaj.
