ARTICLE 7 : DIY distribution

When we were in the limo, we saw Canne’s glitters come back closer and closer. The driver dropped us off at 7am. We slept for a few hours, maybe three or less. But this question of how to make a film exist stayed with us. How to make it drop into someone’s hands ? It went with us through the festival and the suburbs.

Mark Borchardt is not the only one to have organized his own distribution and to have used resourcefulness and hacks to make his dream of cinema become reel. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for approximately $7.000 and used a wheelchair for the tracking shots and condoms filled with fake blood. In this project cinema was not the horizon while the direct-to-video market was his niche where the film could exist. VHS was a serious option for extreme independents. On the other hand, Kevin Smith the director of Clerks financed it for $27.575 by selling his own comic book collection. Both El Mariachi and Clerks finally found distributors but in their soul, they were built first on the idea that no one was coming to help. The DIY logic was not just an aesthetic, it was mainly structural. Those types of filmmakers make a film at all cost whatever where it will end.

In the early 2000s, the arrival of the internet marked a major change in independent distribution. The mumblecore movement brought a strong DIY (Do It Yourself) mindset to indie cinema: the directors decided to take ownership of every stage of the filmmaking process, from the funding (using crowdfunding platforms) to the distribution. They made their movies available online for free on platforms such as Youtube or Vimeo (dedicated to micro-budget cinema), in this way, the theatre ticket became a URL.

The link between Mark’s truck, Rodriguez's wheelchair, Smith’s comics and the mumblecore’s filmmakers is that all of them refused to wait for the permission to shoot, they showed that a handmade film is not a lesser film but one that chose to exist on its own terms. Mark never achieved to bring Coven to Cannes, but his movie is still out there, somewhere in few people’s collections. That is enough, and that might even be the point.

Investigating on Coven made us realize that Mark Borchardt was not only an unsuccessful director, but he is one of those artists on the fringes of classic production systems, passionate people who have done everything to answer an existential question for every independent filmmaker: how to make a film exist when passion is the main driving force?