Age of Obama: Indie Filmmakers Turn to Crowdsourcing to Fund Projects

Welcome to the Age of Obama, independent filmmakers.

This month’s Tribeca Film Festival, the annual event co-created by Robert De Niro, will feature a number of films made by directors who turned to the public for their funding.

Many of the filmmakers behind the 89 films that were selected from 6,000 submissions for this year’s festival were grappling with the downturn on a more personal level. 

“Filmmakers are changing, because budgets are different than they were five years ago,” [Festival Executive Director Nancy] Schafer said. 

…programmers said that more of their filmmakers are funding their films through crowd-funding and on online fund raising sites like Kickstarter. They did not have statistics readily available about how many of the festival entrants had raised money via the internet, however.

Hmmm. Could it be that the industry’s preferred politician hasn’t been able to restore the economy as he promised?

Sounds like prime fodder for a muckraking documentary or a fictional story ripped from the latest headlines. But the folks behind the festival say we shouldn’t expect any such “agitprop.” This is an election year, after all, and a few dozen films calling direct attention to the ailing economy would certainly do an incumbent president little good.

The economy is there, but it’s really in the fabric of these films,” Genna Terranova, Tribeca’s director of programming, said.

“It’s not an agitprop approach … it’s now gone into the background,” she added.