As NonDē Grows, We May Need to Decide What Success Means Now

For most of my career, success in independent film had a familiar shape.

You made the movie. You got into the right festival. A distributor bought it. Maybe it changed your career. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The dream was the windfall.

A film = a sale. One buyer arriving with a check large enough to validate the time, money, and emotional wreckage.

That version of success is becoming much harder to believe in. And this is no surprise to most of you; I’ve talked about this many times.

But it begs a question. Not one that’s about how we get the old system back.

No, the question is:

What do we need to define success as now?

Because we may not be the generation that gets paid mightily for selling our films.

We may be the generation that builds the conditions so the next one can. And realizing that is HARD.

When I was in Ukraine, people always quoted Ivan Franko’s poem “Kameniari”. It clearly and brutally served as a perfect example of the stakes. Paraphrasing, it comes out to “happiness will come to our children who walk on our bones.”

That is much less glamorous than the windfall. The work we do to lay the foundation will probably go largely unnoticed by the masses and your average Avengers-lover.

But that big headline was never the business. The business is whether the filmmaker can make another film without starting from level one.

Status ≠ Foundation

Independent film has spent decades confusing status with some sort of foundation. A festival selection felt like progress. A meeting felt like access. A famous person reading the script felt like progress.

And that’s not to say these things always lead to a dead end. But often, they just created a temporary glow around a project while leaving the filmmaker just as strapped for cash as they were before.

And the sad truth is that the industry actually benefited from that confusion.

It taught filmmakers to chase recognition while it kept the ownership, the audience data, the distribution relationships, and most (if not all) of the money.

That arrangement is simply unsustainable.

The legacy industry has become a bad messenger for American cinema because it is increasingly incapable of representing the culture that produces it.

Culture is a lot of things. Messy, regional, contradictory, occasionally offensive, etc etc.

And breaking news: Wall Street does not particularly enjoy any of that.

Wall Street likes predictability, scale, and cost reduction. It likes stories after they have been flattened into intellectual property, stripped of uncertainty (which usually means the culture itself!) and pushed through enough consumer data to resemble a fridge.

So the machine that’s been built extracts everything. That’s its entire purpose.

It extracts labor from writers, directors, actors and crews. It extracts attention from viewers (and, funnily enough, loses it on purpose). Then it uses the language of “creativity” to sell the output of a system designed largely to optimize those very creatives out of the process.

That machine cannot be the sole representative of our cinema.

But opposing the machine is not enough.

This is where independent filmmakers can become dangerously self-satisfied.

NonDē Has to Build an Economy, Not Just an Identity

We can build a movement around everything we reject. We can talk about independence, ownership, resistance, community, authenticity and the death of the gatekeepers.

Then we can make films nobody pays for.

That’s vibe. Vibe doesn’t sell.

The work has to sell.

Not because money makes the art legitimate.

It’s not as deep as that: Revenue allows the artist to continue.

A film that earns money could possibly create another film. It can pay collaborators. It can then build trust with investors. It can prove an audience exists. It can create a catalog with actual value. It gives the filmmaker choice. And THAT is what I think we’ve all been craving.

Success Is…

That means success can no longer be defined only by whether a distributor buys the film.

Success may be retaining ownership and recouping the budget through several smaller channels instead of one heroic sale.

It may be five hundred people who pay, show up, bring friends and follow the filmmaker into the next project.

It may be a documentary that never appears everywhere at once but travels for three years through theaters, universities, community groups, libraries, unions or faith organizations.

It may be an audience relationship the filmmaker owns instead of a temporary burst of attention rented from a platform.

The old infrastructure could place a film everywhere at once. Most of us building outside it simply cannot do that.

We’re not a large studio or distributor. We do not have giant marketing departments, global licensing teams, or algorithms capable of placing a title in front of two hundred million accounts because an intern pressed the big red button.

So, it’s important to keep in mind we can’t continue to measure ourselves against the one thing the old system still does better: scale.

Our advantage is concentration. Finding the space between the cracks.

We can know exactly who the film is for. We can reach them directly. We can turn that recognition into participation, and participation into revenue.

A paying audience. Not doom-scrollers.

That distinction matters.

A million impressions will not finance the next film. Twenty thousand followers who barely remember clicking the button will not build anything sustainable enough for the next generation. Cultural movements without something driving them economically eventually get absorbed, abandoned, or handed over to people who know how to monetize them but had nothing to do with creating them.

That is how movements get taken over.

They begin with artists and end with administrators, platforms and financiers who arrive once the risk has been removed. Which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

All this to say, fuck the gatekeepers.

If this new independent movement is going to matter, it needs to remain in the hands of filmmakers long enough to build its own structures.

Financing models that do not depend on one miracle investor.

Audience data filmmakers control.

Shared services that lower the cost of marketing and distribution.

A real market where films can earn money without first being approved by a shrinking group of buyers.

That is the foundation. And foundations are generational.

We may build the first rough version badly. We may make less money than the next generation who continue to improve on this foundation that we gave them.

That does not mean we failed.

It may mean we finally started treating independent film as an industry.

The goal is not to recreate Hollywood with nicer people who know what they’re actually talking about.

The goal is to build a system where cultural and financial value are intrinsically and systemically aligned.

Where a film can be difficult, personal, regional, or formally strange, and the filmmaker still knows who will pay for it.

Where success is not measured by whether the old industry temporarily lets us into the room.

WHERE THE FILMMAKER HAS CHOICE!!!!

That is what success has to look like now.

Not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The foundation.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, showrunner, journalist, and development executive. Pitchcraft publishes dispatches from the intersection of storytelling, and the business of making things. Subscribe now and get updates in your inbox every week.