The Possibility of More: A Conversation With Tikkun Olam Productions Member Only

The conventional distribution playbook—a festival premiere followed by an all-rights platform deal—has never been less reliable. For filmmakers who were never offered that playbook, resourcefulness was already the strategy. Tikkun Olam Productions, a nonprofit cooperative, built the grassroots audience for their 2023 film Israelism themselves before it reached No. 1 on Apple TV’s documentary chart. Their latest award-winning project Vs. Goliath—a docuseries about frontline communities fighting fossil fuel giants—has recently launched its impact and distribution campaign with a large coalition of partners. The collective's grassroots success has led them to support high-impact campaigns for films including No Other Land, The Voice of Hind Rajab, Life After, The Encampments, and American Doctor, while also producing campaign media for social movements, consulting filmmakers on direct distribution strategy, and producing the video podcast Beyond Israelism for Zeteo.

In this wide-ranging conversation with journalist and programmer Anthony Kaufman, four core members of the collective will discuss the practical architecture of their multi-modal model: what a direct distribution and impact team actually looks like, how release strategy shapes production from the outset, and what it means to build films for more than one outcome at a time.