“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.”

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

As you probably know, I was a filmmaker before I became a curator. After spending the last few years programming movies and supporting independent filmmakers, I’m excited to get back into the director’s chair. And if you like entertaining movies,…

Read more

We’re excited to be kicking off our new Changemaker Q&A initiative with industry veteran Elliot Kotek, founder at The Nation of Artists.

JF:  You’ve had quite an exciting career.  Give us some of the highlights, and what led you to Nation of Artists.

EK: Thanks, Jon. I started The Nation of Artists as a side project when I was still running various media publications. It was my personal vehicle through which I could curate exhibitions, interview people I found interesting, and produce feature documentaries like Yaniv Rokah’s festival fave “Queen Mimi,” Frank Kelly’s “140” (the world’s first ever user-generated feature film), as well as Scott McDermott’s Nelson Mandela photography project, which became the short film “Raise My Hands.” 

For the past 8 years, it’s grown into an impact-centered, uber-collaborative creative agency and production company of which I’m super proud - we’ve worked directly for brands and major non-profits, and also for other media companies like Participant and CNBC - our motto is “Ideas + Empathy = Impact.” 

DP Eve Cohen near Keonjhar, India

Though we’ve managed to continue to invest time and talent into traditional documentaries, primarily, we’re helping tell the stories of impactful innovation and inspiration that are supported by brands like AARP, Accenture, Aflac, Amgen, California Almonds, Campbell’s Soups, CDC Foundation, CNBC and McKinsey & Company, the Fair Labor Association, FIRST Robotics, Hyundai Motor Company, LEGO Education, New Balance, Qualcomm, Walmart Health & Wellness, and Whirlpool & Habitat for Humanity. 

JF:  Please share more about the organization and your short term goals, and a vision for the long term?  

EK: Our goals are fairly simple, and best summed up by our attitude of “More, Bigger, With Good People.” We love what we do, we just want to do more, with increasing levels of impact, and we only want to work with others who genuinely share that outlook.

We’ve made everything from 6-second YouTube pre-roll clips about where teens find their place of belonging, to feature documentaries about grassroots innovation. We’ve made animated shorts about the relationship between honey bees and almond trees, and virtual reality / 360 projects highlighting the introduction of human-centered technology with indigenous communities in Asia and South America. 

We love collaborating with other creatives, too, and have worked closely with Sid Lee Montreal, with Carol Cone’s Purpose Collaborative, with Porter Novelli and Cone Communications, Stir Strategy & Story, Lightsail VR and with Freethink Media, with whom we worked on short form docuseries for the likes of National Geographic, Facebook Watch, FastCompany and others.

JF:  Can you share some project highlights, from your work with The Nation of Artists.

EK: Oh, man, those are fighting words - what are you trying to do to me!?!?!

There’s been some projects, e.g. Aflac’s My Special Aflac Duck, Amgen’s Webby-nominated “Innovation Squared,” and “for Tomorrow” with Sid Lee Montrea for Hyundai and the UNDP, that have stood out for their longevity - each of these projects have spanned about three years, which is a rare gift in a world where marketing execs only last an average of two years in their roles.

With Aflac, as part of the team that launched the My Special Aflac Duck, a social robot duck for kids going through cancer treatment - the innovators we worked with at Sproutel (now named Empath Labs), the comms and social responsibility teams at Aflac, the hospitals and professionals we worked with at Childrens’ Healthcare of Atlanta and across the nation, the families (especially kids) we met who helped provide feedback on the development of the robot, and all the agencies who contributed their talents to making this as powerful as possible, made this one of those super special projects that made a massive impact directly in kids’ lives, and also delivered the Cannes Lions, TIME Inventions of the Year, SXSW Innovation Awards, Top 25 Campaigns of the Decade, CES awards and other accolades that enabled the corporate case to also claim success. 

JF:  You’ve created quite a unique campaign for your latest project, Unzipped, which had a good festival run and is about to be released wide on streaming platforms.  Tell us more about it, how you came to this project and your goals for impact.

EK: I’ve known the director of “Unzipped,” Colin Keith Gray, and his sister/producer Megan Raney-Aarons, since their amazing doc “Freedom’s Fury” premiered at Tribeca back in 2005 or thereabouts. I was running Moving Pictures magazine at the time, interviewed them at the festival, then bumped into Colin at a Ralph’s supermarket in Venice Beach when I moved West.

You can’t not like Colin & Megan - they’re talented and kind - and kinda Canadian.

We’d all lived in Venice, Cali for a good while, and I can’t recall how it happened, just that at some point after they’d already done a fair amount of filming, we started to talk strategy. I have been fortunate enough to have found avenues to impact for a lot of our work, and to have collaborated with distributors and curriculum developers and, of course, brands, and just started to pull in as many pieces of the puzzle as I thought could be helpful.

For instance, I intro’d the team to Lindsay Guetschow and the Raben Group to help pull together thought leaders and stakeholders from the affordable housing community; I brought in the motion graphics firm And/Or to help with some of the visual language of the film; I brought the film in to Cargo Film & Releasing to rep the film’s sales; and brought Michael Kuehnert’s Video Project in to the mix who then brought in the curriculum writers. Obviously, my history with the Newport Beach Film Festival came in helpful for that screening, my relationship with Laemmle made our week-long run there super smooth and rewarding, a friend - Jillian Dunn- at CharityBuzz meant that a conversation with them on another activation made sense, and when I met Julie Davitz of Plus Media Solutions on one of Jared Ruga’s Impact Guild zooms, I just knew her Impact Plus hub would provide a super great solution to something we’d been looking to accomplish on the “Take Action” side of the project.

The Impact Hub came together super quickly and was customizable for the different communities seeing the film at different festivals, and was then able to be provided to Waterbear to accompany the launch on their platform. There’s a QR code at the end of the film that also takes people through to the Impact Hub. Colin was really intentional about wanting people in all zip codes to have a way to access housing solutions in their area through the amplification of this film - and that came together so seamlessly through Julie and her team.

While that sounds like a lot - remember with these kinds of projects - you’re doing what you can when you can over a span of years - and my small part is nothing compared to the relentless pursuit by Colin, Megan, producers Jamila Fairley & CJ Gronner, editor Davide Fiora and his wife Chiara, and the other myriad day-to-day’ers who have never stopped ensuring that “Unzipped” reaches as many relevant audiences as possible.

JF: TIPS:  Any tips for filmmakers looking to create social impact films or series?

EK: I have a process that I call “Internal. External. Eternal.” when it comes to maximizing impact around your projects:

• Internal: Come to a consensus internally about what’s important for your project to achieve. And who can you bring into the team to ensure you have the right combination of allies on the project to drive it in the right direction.

• External: Start creating lists - who are the external stakeholders who could use your project as a powerful asset. Let them know about the project. Empower them to identify the role they might want to play over the project’s lifecycle - when should they come in - do they know anyone who could be a great fit to be a subject in the film, a subject matter expert in the film, a financial asset for the film, an audience builder for the film…the more you can communicate with them during the project, the bigger allies they’ll also be in the film’s amplification; and

• Eternal: What kind of  sustainability can the film have?  And how can you put tools in place to measure the ongoing role the film plays in various communities once you’re done with production. Where will it live? How will you track its success? How will you stay involved with the people and organizations who were a part of creating the film with you, and what legacy and impact can the film have… on people, on policy, etc.

JF: MOVIE PICK:  If you had to pick a movie(s) to recommend to our readers, something that really inspired you, what would it be?

EK: Oh wow - As a kid, those movies that made my mind explode were Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue,” and Denys Arcand’s “Jesus of Montreal”; as a young grown up it would have had to be Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” and Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”; and as an adult, I was floored by Kurt Kuenne’s documentary “Dear Zachary” and everything by filmmaker Steve James. 

Is that one? I’m not great at counting :)

JF: I’ve seen all of these Elliot. Good taste, as to be expected.

Thanks for taking the time to share more about your projects, your words of wisdom, and this list of movie picks:)

We will be sure to remind our readers about Unzipped hitting platforms June 1!

To connect with Elliot, you can reach out to him here.

Subscribe now

Share

We’ve all heard the distribution catch phrases, or some variation. Alternative Distribution. Hybrid Models. Aggregation. Then there’s my favorite to describe the landscape, the overused Wild Wild West.

As you can imagine, they all have their place. It’s about finding the right formula to match your goals for the movie. Social impact movies don’t a…

Read more

Harry Belafonte (March 1, 1927 - April 25, 2023)

For those of us who have seen Harry Belafonte perform, on stage or on screen, we will all be forever grateful. So talented. So Charming. Truly original.

What makes us even more thankful are his contributions t…

Read more

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Ideas are everywhere. Open a newspaper. Scroll through digital magazines. Read a book. For filmmakers seeking their next project, it typically starts with a idea, an issue or a category. Another concept we hear a lot is know your audience. Here is a graphic that combines issues and audience interest. Human Rights,…

Read more

As you know, April is Earth Month.  While we take time to celebrate all the amazing things about our planet, this presents an opportunity to recalibrate our personal efforts in saving it.  All it takes is the viewing of any one of the films in this month's Earth Day Showcase to see the challenges we face. And yes, it can be overwhelming.  

And how can on…

Read more

Many of you reading this substack are filmmakers. If you want to master the art of creating impactful films, like many we recommend, then this webinar is for you!

As you know, these are the projects that will educate, entertain and inspire audiences,

Register HERE. It’s free!

Date and time

Wednesday, March 22 · 11am - 12pm PST

"Filmmaking has become t…

Read more

The music documentary has been around for many years. See Bob Dylan at the ripe old age of 23 in Don’t Look Back (1967). An Oscar winner and box office hit in 1970, Woodstock kicked off the collaboration between co-director Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. And a few years later, George Harrison, Leon Russell, and Billy Preston joined an …

Read more

As we know, the Oscar Nominations were announced yesterday and it’s great to see an abundance of socially relevant movies on the list. Again, as mentioned in our last piece, most of these filmmakers are not making films to win awards, but the more attention these movies generate, the greater the awareness of the issues they focus on. Thanks to the Academy, this is yet another way to celebrate these changemakers, as well as the heroes presented in the powerful stories they tell.

Here in 2023, seven out of ten Best Pictures Nominees made the social impact list (for the full list, visit the Academy site).  To learn more about each movie and see where they’re streaming, click here.

Best Picture
All Quiet on the Western Front 
Avatar: The Way of Water 
The Banshees of Inisherin
The Fabelmans 
Tár
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking 

Noticeably absent from this list are films financed or acquired by the streamers.  Flashback to 2022, when Apple ponied up 25 million to acquire CODA at the Sundance Film Festival, and then spent an estimated 10 million on the Oscar campaign.  Both gambles paid off, as CODA became the first film with a predominantly Deaf cast to win Best Picture, and Troy Kotsur was the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar. Oh, and Apple became the first streamer to take home the Best Picture Oscar.

Here’s a fun fact - CODA is based on La Famille Bélier (2014), which you can now see on Apple.  The film earned over 72 million dollars in 29 markets around the world.  CODA was closer to 2 million, but again, it was acquired by a streaming service. Different model and AppleTV saw a nice bump in subscriptions, and more industry cred, after the win.

Social Impact in Other Categories
While the Best Picture category gets most of the attention, there were a number of other cause-related titles that earned nominations, largely based on the performances.

Aftersun (Best Actor, Paul Mescal)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Actress in Supporting Role, Angela Bassett)
Causeway (Best Supporting Actor, Brian Tyree Henry)
Living (Best Actor, Bill Nighy)
To Leslie (Best Actress, Andrea Riseborough)
The Whale (Best Actor, Brendan Fraser)

To see where these movies and other Oscar nominees are streaming, EW has the list and links here.

Documentary Impact
This genre continues to gain momentum, year after year.  We’ve been singing their praises, along with Indiewire and other outlets.  Here are the 5 nominees, where you can see them.

All That Breathes 
Still in theaters.  Click here to see locations and get tickets. The film will be available to stream on HBO Max on Feb. 7.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Still in theaters.  Click here to see the location and get tickets. 

Fire of Love 
Available to stream on Disney+.

A House Made of Splinters 
This film doesn't currently have a home entertainment distributor in America. The film can be watched through BBC's iPlayer service with the help of a VPN.

Navalny
Available to stream on HBO Max.

The Doc Snubs
There were 144 documentaries submitted for Oscar consideration this year, which was then narrowed down to a shortlist of 15.  They can’t all make the final list of five Nominees, but that doesn’t make them less worthy, or less valuable in our joint mission of filmmaking for change.  From The Territory to The Janes, Descendant to Retrograde, there are a number of powerful stories that should be seen, and shared.

The countdown to the Oscar telecast (March 12) is officially underway.  All of the nominees listed above are worth your time and consideration. But don’t stop there.

The Park City madness is finally back in full swing this week. Yes, Sundance and Slamdance will be together again, with a full lineup of premieres, parties, and likely acquisitions. And while these fests are known as platforms of discovery for emerging artists and for providing networking opportunities, let’s focus on another important aspect. The co…

Read more