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Veda Tunstall remembers the first time film people started poking around her hometown asking questions, and it wasn\u2019t for the documentary that became \u201cDescendant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tunstall, a subject in Margaret Brown\u2019s movie about the search for a long-lost slave ship near a community called Africatown, says that years before Brown showed up, other filmmakers wanted to make their own movies about hunting for the Clotilda. That didn\u2019t go well. The community\u2019s needs were never in mind and the story being told wasn\u2019t their own; it was the ship\u2019s.<\/p>\n
The investment of time and attention that Brown and production company Participant put into \u201cDescendant\u201d felt different. The film also follows actual descendants who live in Africatown and examines how their ancestors\u2019 actions can be traced across generations. The search for the slave ship was only half the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were just trying to figure out how to find other descendants, not necessarily thinking about trying to tell the story, but just trying to find our family,\u201d Tunstall told IndieWire. \u201cI still can\u2019t even tell you when I actually realized that I was a part of a film. It was so organic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unifying the community and telling the history of the Clotilda has long been the mission of Tunstall, her fellow descendants, and producer Participant. The producer-financier saw an opportunity to capture the bigger picture about systemic racism and the erasure of African-American history with a prestige documentary and its complementary impact campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always felt that it was a film that would grab you because of the enormity of the story, but also how much of an analogy it is for the rest of for this country,\u201d David Linde, Participant\u2019s CEO, told IndieWire. \u201cWe believe everything that we make should be not just part of a conversation, but should elevate that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As it turns out, discussions among Participant involving Africatown began years before the documentary materialized. \u201cDescendant\u201d failed to land an 2023 Oscar nomination, but its work in Africatown continues as part of an impact campaign long after cameras left.<\/p>\n
Participant hosted screenings with a special video from the Obamas and had a meeting at Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019 office. It sponsored the #DescendantChallenge encouraging others to share their own family\u2019s oral histories and launched \u201cThe Descendant Cookout\u201d web series, which highlights locals who preserve hometown recipes and other marks of their heritage. The company even rallied some of its past connections at the EPA (formed on the 2019 film \u201cDark Waters\u201d) to help Africatown residents address major environmental concerns.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a lot of time and money for a movie that will never have the reach of a blockbuster, but the investment Participant makes with films like \u201cJudas and the Black Messiah,\u201d \u201cDark Waters,\u201d and \u201cSpotlight\u201d creates sustained value. The ongoing advocacy of \u201cDark Waters\u201d in particular paid off last year when the Biden administration finally restricted chemicals known as PFAs that star Mark Ruffalo had been calling attention to since the film\u2019s release in 2019.<\/p>\n
According to Linde, a great impact movie happens only if you build a level of trust with those involved. Continue to build that trust and the activists who live the work before, during, and after the production will help bolster the work long after it\u2019s gone into the library.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re only going to be able to do the work that we do unless you\u2019ve built that trust already,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t just snap your finger and say, \u2018Hey, trust Participant. Here we are. We\u2019re going to tell your story, or we\u2019re going to do an impact campaign, or we want to support you.\u2019 It just doesn\u2019t work. We don\u2019t just disappear. They still have our number, and we\u2019re still going to provide guidance and perspective. And we do move on after a while, but the hope is we\u2019ve helped them build capacity in a way that they have even more capabilities than they did before we showed up on their front door.\u201d<\/p>\n
Participant\u2019s director of communications Rosalina Jowers said the company has similar relationships with nonprofit organizations that never had a relationship with Hollywood. \u201cAs a first step for many of these organizations, they didn\u2019t have a website, they didn\u2019t have the capacity really to fundraise online, and we knew that was critically important. We also knew that was important for them to be media trained and have the ability to share their stories with reporters.\u201d<\/p>\n
None of this comes cheaply and Linde is the first to acknowledge that Participant is a for-profit company. Not only do these movies have to be profitable, but as Linde pointed out, \u201cif nobody sees your movie, then there is no impact campaign.\u201d Linde said Participant\u2019s box office since its launch in 2004 represents $3 billion across 130 films, half of which are documentaries.<\/p>\n
The 2019 Warner Bros. release \u201cJust Mercy\u201d starring Michael B. Jordan, which had an impact campaign in collaboration with the film subject\u2019s Bryan Stevenson\u2019s Equal Justice Initiative, grossed $50 million worldwide against a $25 million budget. That same year Focus Features released \u201cDark Waters\u201d with Mark Ruffalo; it made only $23 million worldwide.<\/p>\n
On the streaming end, Linde said he was very encouraged by the viewership of the Participant-produced \u201cRoma\u201d and the company extended the film\u2019s impact campaign for domestic workers well into the pandemic. The 2022 \u201cKeep Sweet: Pray and Obey\u201d spent two weeks on Netflix\u2019s Top 10 \u2014 the same week \u201cStranger Things 4\u201d debuted \u2014 and subscribers watched 31.1 million hours of the docuseries in its first week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more people that connect to the film or series, the more potential for impact and relatedly, the more valuable for our distribution partners,\u201d Linde said.<\/p>\n
Not every Participant film gets an impact campaign, but Linde said streamers and distributors are getting wise to the idea that they increase engagement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe power of shared experience is more valuable than facts,\u201d he said. \u201cWe do pursue an economic value in making the content that we make. We\u2019re not making it to give it away by any stretch of the imagination. But more importantly, we\u2019re making it so audiences will embrace it. What these distributors now recognize is that we\u2019re actually expanding the commercial breadth of the film.\u201d<\/p>\n
Companies like Picture Motion or Think Film in Europe also invest in projects with an impact edge, to varying degrees of success. Neon, which worked with Participant on 2022\u2019s \u201cAll the Beauty and the Bloodshed,\u201d recently hired an executive who works on impact. The Emerson Collective also invested in Macro, Concordia, and Anonymous Content with the belief that stories are better at inspiring change than other activism work alone.<\/p>\n
Participant will follow a model similar to \u201cDescendant\u201d for its upcoming Netflix Shirley Chisholm biopic starring Regina King. The roots of that project go back to voting rights connections created while working on documentary \u201cRBG.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ll remember me saying in the film, \u2018I don\u2019t want us to be a part of it. I want us to be it,’\u201d Tunstall said. This is the kind of thing where we\u2019re being it. We are going to decide which way this community goes.\u201d<\/p>\n
View this article at IndieWire<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tough Film to Market? Participant Knows How to Find the Activism Audience: Veda Tunstall remembers the first time film people started poking around her hometown asking questions, and it wasn\u2019t for the documentary that became \u201cDescendant.\u201d Tunstall, a subject in Margaret Brown\u2019s movie about the search for a long-lost slave ship near a community called
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