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Resilience Beyond the Market: Community Distribution with Impact

Business Meet visionaries from community-led organisations including GARUWA, Ashoka, AFLAMUNA and Unquiet Collective who are forging pathways outside of the limits of market-driven distribution. Their groundbreaking models enable filmmakers to amplify their social impact and catalyse cultural, environmental or social transformation.

Access to stories from communities at the frontlines of critical social, environmental and political issues is more urgent than ever. As inequality, ideological clashes and climate crises escalate, community-led storytelling offers vital solutions and opportunities for audiences to connect, engage and build solidarity.

With dominant market forces often sidelining the voices that disrupt entrenched systems and dominant narratives, this session explores how filmmakers are forging alternative distribution pathways outside of market-driven structures. These new pathways create access to independent, impact-driven documentaries, reaching audiences that are critical to catalysing change.

Moderating the panel is Genevieve Grieves, Co-Creator & Creative Director of GARUWA, a First Nations-owned social enterprise and producer of community-funded film Motherhood in the Colony (forthcoming), created in response to the crisis in Gaza. The panel features key voices in community-grounded and impact-driven distribution: Amelia Hapsari (Ashoka), Stephano Mendelek (AFLAMUNA) and Alex Kelly (Unquiet Collective).

 

Image credit: Water Night dir. Mohanad Salahat, 2024, image courtesy of AFLAMUNA

 

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