The impulse of nostalgia, for a return to normal, is what I hear most these days, dominating Zoom meetings, indie film panels, business articles in the trades. Forced to address the sudden and severe disruption of distribution and exhibition, the conversational focus often drifts to ... movie theaters and whether audiences will go back. What I hear industry vets say, repeatedly, is that the theatrical business will rebound but the window (the time before the film hits VOD) will shorten. Yes, this has been true for 15 years. And there is so much more we should be talking about. I’m writing th

Two of the metrics that we look at to see how well OVID is doing—to get a sense of whether we’re moving in the right direction, or have a chance of surviving—are Conversions and Churn. This information is generally closely held in the SVOD business. In fact, we are not aware of any other streaming service which has released this data.

A film programmer at Maysles Documentary Center and several film festivals including his own, Prismatic Ground, Inney Prakash has had the experience of turning his curatorial eye from in-person events to online programming reaching an international audience. During our conversation, he dives into his career path, a few of the films that have shaped his worldview, and the role of curation in social justice movements.

The scholar Paul Henley has published one of the best reviews of André Gide and Marc Allégret's film Travels in the Congo: "Travels in the Congo, first released in France in 1927 as Voyage au Congo, is without doubt the masterwork of French ethnographic cinema in Africa prior to World War II. And yet, in the literature on ethnographic film and the history of documentary cinema more generally, it has been strangely neglected. It does not feature, for example, in the extensive UNESCO catalog, Films ethnographiques de l’Afrique noire, edited by Jean Rouch and published in 1967. Although Rouch

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