What Film Teams Can Accomplish When They Work Together
Doc Society ran two collective distribution experiments. Here's what they learned.
Film teams often fly solo with regards to distribution. The idea that your film might benefit from traveling alongside someone else’s — that your audiences might actually be the same people, that your screening hosts might want to program a series instead of a single title — isn’t commonly pursued.
But lately I’ve been hearing more from filmmakers who want to band together in smart ways. NonDē50 is one example — 80+ filmmakers who’ve committed to making and distributing work in 2026 outside the traditional system. Sam Widdoes recently wrote about Filmmaker Collectives and A-Corps. Emily Best wrote about a feature film lab where filmmakers are sharing resources and learnings. The traditional path isn’t delivering, and filmmakers are starting to look sideways at each other and work together.
I wanted to speak about this with Megha Agrawal Sood, Co Executive Director of Doc Society, because she was responsible for two Filmmaker Collective experiments in 2025. The first was a screening series: Doc Society selected 10 films with a shared theme, created a programmed series, and gave the filmmakers resources to keep hosting screenings. The second went further: a cohort of five films working together to launch a collective impact strategy, organize screenings, share learnings, and build a brand around their collective.
In Megha’s words, “I can't help but not see why aren't these different films with similar thematics, in a similar distribution landscape, working together.” So she did something about it. Here she shares what they observed, what worked, and what the results were.
The Global Climate Playlist
The Global Climate Playlist was the first experiment to come out of the Doc Society Climate Story Unit, which has a mandate to not only support new climate narratives but also to build infrastructure that helps those stories actually reach audiences.
Megha and her team of Julian Etienne (Climate Story Fund Manager) and Samuel Rubin (Global Climate Playlist Community Manager) selected ten Climate Story Fund grantees to participate. All powerful climate-justice films, all award-winners that had completed their festival runs, but that were unable to easily reach global audiences through traditional distribution. Each month, Doc Society spotlighted one film in the playlist and, in partnership with Kinema, hosted a free live online screening with a Q&A featuring the film and impact team, and key participants.
As Megha put it at the time: “The Global Climate Playlist on Kinema will unlock these award-winning films’ ability to truly reach audiences around the world. These films are changing the narrative on climate issues, and Kinema’s unique features will transform the teams’ abilities to organize community-centered screenings in an engaging and accessible way.”
Attendees joined from around the world — U.S., U.K., Canada, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UAE, the Philippines, Kenya, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico — including from rural regions and smaller communities.
By the numbers:
10 screening events and live
Q&A sessions featuring 32 speakers — filmmakers, activists, scientists, policy makers and cultural leaders
54% average turnout rate for free events
These numbers are just one part of the story, though. Megha was quick to remind me that Doc Society isn’t a distributor, or even in the business of event planning so, while they learned a lot through actually hosting screenings, their main goal was to support the film teams and help them reach their audiences. On that front, she observed a few things.
First, the audience appetite was real. The film teams had interested audiences but didn’t have the infrastructure or plan to reach them. Film teams used this opportunity to support this direct distribution work — the emails, the organizational-relationship-building, the community coordination that doesn’t happen on its own. One of the Playlist grantees was the team behind Mrs. Robinson, whose approach to movement building we wrote about last year.
Second, filmmaker hesitation was real too — and then it wasn’t. There was initial resistance to the whole premise that Megha wasn’t expecting. But over the course of the year, Megha watched that shift. “The industry’s attitude towards self distribution really evolved over the year. The hesitation that I may have experienced at the beginning of the year versus near the end was crazy. Many Climate Story Fund grantees who were not part of the Global Climate Playlist are now excited to be on Kinema.”
What the Playlist demonstrated, perhaps most clearly, is the curatorial effect of grouping films with intention. Every audience member who showed up for one screening was in some way exposed to nine other titles. Hosts who booked one film learned about the others. The films loosely cross-pollinated each other’s audiences without anyone having to formally coordinate it. It wasn’t a cohort in the structured sense but the profile of each film was lifted simply by being part of something larger than itself.
That’s a replicable model. And it informed what Doc Society tried to do more deliberately with their second experiment.
The Indigenous Impact Alliance
Five North American Indigenous-led film teams were brought together as a cohort to form the Indigenous Impact Alliance and given agency to design their own shared approach. Each film was supported by a $25,000 impact grant, a $50,000 pooled collaborative grant, year access to Kinema, a digital hub on Plus Media Solutions, in person gatherings, wellbeing and care stipends, and the support of seasoned impact strategist Marianna Olinger. Their films ranged widely in distribution stage, from a Sundance 2024 premiere to a SXSW 2025 debut. Rather than treating that range as a mismatch, the cohort treated it as a resource: teams further along had things to teach; teams earlier in the process had a roadmap. The cohort was a learning environment as much as a distribution vehicle.
As Doc Society put it: “In an industry where films on similar subjects released within a short span of time are positioned as competitors, the Indigenous Impact Alliance has shifted to collaborative impact work. The impact teams behind ‘Bring Them Home,’ ‘Remaining Native,’ ‘Singing Back the Buffalo,’ ‘Sugarcane,’ and ‘Yintah’ experimented with an innovative model that honored each film’s individual goals while committing to shared impact.”
One of the goals the cohort identified was to amplify Indigenous stories through strategic collective distribution and engagement. What they decided to build together was a joint in-person screening tour, running from September 30, 2025 — Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada — through November, timed to coincide with COP30. They did ultimately extend their tour through December. All five films were made available for in-person community screenings simultaneously, through Kinema.
Over three months, the tour produced:
249 in-person screenings
179 individual hosts
44 hosts who booked more than one film (24.6% of all hosts), with some programming all five
An estimated combined audience of 15,896 people
Those 44 repeat hosts are worth pausing on. Nearly a quarter of all hosts didn’t just book one film — they came back. Some built programming around the entire slate. Organizations aligned with Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice didn’t have to evaluate five separate asks.
As Jade Begay, Impact Producer of Sugarcane and leading Indigenous rights organizer, shared: “When Native filmmakers, impact producers, and strategists come together in kinship, they create powerful spaces to share knowledge, bridge diverse struggles, and strengthen collective strategies rooted in land and liberation. This initiative is a direct challenge to the gatekeeping that has long siloed our stories and solutions — instead, it centers collaboration, access, and cultural relevance.”
Feedback from participating teams reflects both the practical and relational dimensions of what they built. One team noted that having access to a shared infrastructure was “crucial” for reaching audiences in territories where they hadn’t yet secured formal distribution. Another spoke to what the relationships themselves produced: “Every person we collaborated with and met as part of this project feels like not only an incredible professional asset, but also introduced us to great friends with whom we hope to work with in the future. We have leaned on these relationships for advice, support, introductions, and more throughout the project.”
Megha’s takeaway, perhaps unsurprisingly: “Having five films working together raises the profile of all of them. Making them all easily accessible through one medium allows for community organizations to actually be able to program continuously.” The launch video of the joint screening tour is a great example of this. With these film teams working together and the amplification of some key partners, the video got 3.5M views across social channels in its first weekend.
Takeaways
A few things stand out from year one.
Same theme and audience is enough to organize around. The Alliance’s five films weren’t at the same distribution stage. And it didn’t matter because they had shared audiences and goals.
Sharing audiences and resources means no one is starting from zero. Films cross-pollinate. Audiences who show up for one film get exposed to others. Relationships built by one team become available to the group. And you’re not doing this alone.
A “slate” solves a problem for hosts. When organizations — universities, nonprofits, advocacy groups, cultural institutions — can build programming around multiple films at once, you’re giving them a series instead of asking them to evaluate and fill five individual events. That’s a more useful offer, and the ~25% repeat hosts from the Alliance suggest organizations responded to it that way.
The mindset shift is part of the work. Not every filmmaker came into the Climate Playlist ready. Some engaged minimally. But over the course of the year, Megha watched attitudes change toward direct-to-audience distribution and toward collaboration. Creating the conditions for that shift is valuable.
For Filmmakers
The organizations in your ecosystem, the ones that have supported your work in development and production, that care about the same issues your film addresses, may be available to support your distribution. The question worth bringing to them isn’t “can you post about my film?” It might instead be, “is there a cohort of filmmakers you work with who are doing something similar, and is there a way we could go to market together?”
For Organizations
If you fund or support filmmakers and your goal is for their stories to reach audiences, distribution is a place where structured support can make a material difference. You don’t need to replicate what Doc Society did. You need to ask whether the filmmakers in your portfolio are working in silos when they don’t have to be.
Doc Society will be publishing their findings, including filmmaker reactions, on both programs in the coming month. We’ll share them here when they’re available. Many of the film teams from both programs continue to be available for screenings and/or rentals on Kinema.
Yes Ami, Ted Hope was talking to me about this in terms of a festival with political stories about women, like LILLY. LMK if Kinema is interested in curating such a series. Thanks for all that you do.