Creative Distribution 101

Adele Free Pham is an activist and filmmaker whose work has appeared in over 20 film festivals, on HBO, PBS, and The Smithsonian. Her feature documentary called "NAILED IT", about the genesis and culture of the Vietnamese nail industry, premiered on PBS in May 2019 and is the highest streamed film of the documentary series " America Reframed". She's also Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow.

Leah's career in film began in Hawaii working in the marine department for the tv show LOST and HAWAII. She's a director and producer and her first feature, called FINDING HILLYWOOD won multiple awards and screened at more than 65 festivals. She gave a TedX talk entitled "How Do You Cope With The Trauma You Didn't Experience?" Her 2016 feature film, called Big Sonia, features her grandmother, Sonia Warshawski, who is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City and one of the only survivors there who speaks publicly about her wartime experience.

The film has screened around the world and was praised by critics in the New York Times, NPR, and more and is currently available for educators and digitally on Amazon, Vimeo on Demand, and Kanopy.

Deia Schlosberg made national news in October 2016, when she was arrested and charged with 45 years' worth of felonies for filming the #ShutItDown pipeline protest in North Dakota. She is currently directing the docuseries Bootstraps about universal basic income and her feature documentary The Story of Plastic, just premiered on April 22, for Earth Day, on the Discovery Channel. Previously, Deia produced the Sundance film, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change, directed by Academy award nominee Josh Fox. She also co-produced Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock distributed on Netflix, among many other environmental projects.

Caitlin is the new Director of Industry and Education at DOC NYC, North America's largest documentary festival. Before that, she founded and spent a decade at the helm of Film Sprout, a grassroots distribution and audience engagement firm which paved the way for a lot of the campaigns we see today. She has worked on so many award-winning and impactful documentaries, that I recommend you to watch, such as, The Invisible War, Vessel, The Hunting Ground, Fed Up, Where to Invade Next, Unrest, Whose Streets? And Trapped, which premiered at Sundance in January 2016 (and not 2015, quick correction for the following interview). Please note that this conversation took place before the pandemic hit.

Mia is the founder of Fourth Act Film, where she works with filmmakers and content-creators on distribution strategy, sales, and innovative marketing tactics. She has worked on distribution and impact campaigns for award-winning films, including Sundance hits like The Game Changers, The Great Hack, Always In Season, and indie gem "306 Hollywood", which was a recipient of the Sundance Creative Distribution Fellowship.

Heidi Nel is a social impact strategist and producer. As the head of The Raben Group's Impact Entertainment division, she provides pro-social consultation to leaders in media, entertainment, and philanthropy, including the American Film Institute, Beachside Films, The Fledgling Fund, Fuse Media, Google, One Community, PBS, Peabody Awards and Media Center, Sony Pictures TV, STX Entertainment, and YouTube, as well as independent artists, filmmakers, and change-makers.

Heidi has developed impact strategy and led successful engagement campaigns tied to award-winning films, such as Batkid Begins, The Best of Enemies, Food Chains, Happening, The Human Experiment, The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War, Newtown, The Return, Racing Extinction, and The Rape of Recy Taylor. Currently, she is working on Just Mercy featuring Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

She has guest lectured at American University, Boston University, and George Washington University, and was an adjunct instructor at Duke University in the Sanford School of Public Policy. She has been featured in Variety, Real Screen, Screen Daily, Washington Life Magazine, and HuffPost. She has been recognized by the Case Foundation as a "Millennial Leader to Follow" and received the Media Impact Award from the PVBLIC Foundation and the United Nations Office for Partnerships.

Sarah Mosses is the founder and CEO of a fast-growing company, called Together Films. Together Films is a Marketing, Distribution & Data agency, specializing in Impact Distribution Strategy. They have worked on campaigns for amazing, award-winning films such as Sundance hit The Hunting Ground, on sexual assault on college campuses, the Oscar Shortlisted documentary Unrest, by Jennifer Brea, the HBO film The Tale by Jennifer Fox with Laura Dern and Common, and they also handled the US distribution for the award-winning film Roll Red Roll by Nancy Schwartzman, tackling rape culture, among many other projects. Together Films also manages marketing campaigns for film festivals such as the Human Rights Watch Festival and Doc NYC. they are currently helming the campaign for 2040, by Damon Gameau, an award-winning film on solutions to reverse global warming, and the film "For Sama", by Waad al-Kateab, a documentary about the Syrian war, which won Best Doc at the Cannes & SXSW Film Festivals and was nominated for Best Documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning actress, writer, producer, and women in film activist. Naomi wrote, produced, and starred in the 2014 indie feature film, Imagine I'm Beautiful, which took home 12 awards on the film festival circuit. Naomi's second feature film, Bite Me, is a subversive romantic comedy about a real-life vampire and the IRS agent who audits her. The film premiered at Cinequest, and then went on to the innovative, paradigm-shifting Joyful Vampire Tour of America in summer 2019, a 51-screening, 40-city, three-month, RV-fueled event tour that involved Joyful Vampire Balls, capes, a docu-series and a whole lot of joy.

Naomi shares her distribution journey with radical transparency to create a new distribution model for independent films.

Naomi's first book, The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, will be published by Beacon Press on February 4, 2020 and is now available for order on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, IndieBound, and Beacon Press.

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, an entertainment platform building a new studio model, with fair and transparent business practices, to provide every filmmaker the opportunity to create a sustainable career, no matter where they live or what they look like.

Seed&Spark has curated streaming platform, which is fed by its crowdfunding platform, which has the highest campaign success rate in the world. An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. In 2011, she produced the feature film, Like the Water, starring Caitlin FitzGerald (Masters of Sex, UnREAL). Since then she has served as executive producer on a host of film and virtual reality projects that have played at festivals from Sundance to SXSW to Tribeca and beyond. Most recently she co-created and co-directed the web series F*ck Yes!, which Refinery 29 called, "The sex education you wish you had in high school." Emily was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Woman of Influence, was included on the 2015 Upstart 100 list, and graduated from the 2016 class of Techstars Boston. She has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding, and rewards based crowdfunding, and contributed to over 300 crowdfunding campaigns to date.