Metropolitan Power Outage Could Starve You Out
I decided to venture out of the house. I could not hunt or pick fruits from a tree in my yard because I had no yard and no fruit trees.
I decided to venture out of the house. I could not hunt or pick fruits from a tree in my yard because I had no yard and no fruit trees.
The buyers are in Cannes because that is where the other buyers are. The system reproduces itself not because anyone decided to exclude the filmmaker from Burkina Faso but because no one decided, specifically and deliberately, to include her.
The distribution gap is not a romantic problem. Filmmakers who cannot distribute their work cannot fund their next film. Audiences who cannot access stories from their own cultural heritage lose something they may not be able to name but will feel across a lifetime.
A film made in Los Angeles has access to distribution networks, financing structures, and platform relationships that a film made in Dakar, Bridgetown, or Luanda simply does not. This is not because the American film is better. The variable is infrastructure.
A reflection on artists, writers, and filmmakers who created outside the mainstream—and what it cost to have their work seen across borders.