This year’s 11th edition of Locarno Pro’s StepIn think tank was held under the banner headline “What’s The Deal with Independent Cinema?” to discuss the current state of the independent film industry.
In a discussion before the closed roundtable brainstorming sessions, film distribution and content strategist Arianna Bocco, who spent almost 17 years at IFC Films before suddenly stepping down as the company’s president this spring, suggested that the film industry is at a crossroads and “very ripe for – you can use a lot of different words – an overhaul, a revolution, a reset. There are many ways to frame it.”
Bocco explained that, as someone who spent their whole life working in the field of distribution, “my job was to help artists and facilitate a business model that enriched artists and helped their voices to be heard and seen and hopefully make a little money in the meantime.
“Coming from independent film in the United States,” she continued, “my personal goal was never that we are going to make a ton of money because we didn’t.”
Rather, Bocco said, it was about how one could make art and business work for everyone – a model she suggested is now broken. “It doesn’t exist [anymore]. Maybe it never existed and we were going along with a secondhand notion of a studio model that we were mimicking.”
Bocco joined IFC Films in 2006 and spent 14 years as head of acquisitions and co-productions at the New York-based company, before becoming president in December 2020. Under her leadership IFC Films acquired, produced and distributed hundreds of films including Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Armando Iannucci’s The Death Of Stalin and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.
Addressing the current state of theatrical distribution, Bocco observed: “Covid only sped up a train that had already left the station: prior to the pandemic, the writing was already on the wall that theatrical would be in trouble.”
The former IFC executive argued that factors contributing to this state of affairs included competition from other forms of entertainment such as gaming and television, younger audiences becoming alienated from the theatrical experience, the need for many cinemas to make their facilities more inviting, and the thorny issue of windowing.
On the subject of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, Bocco said, “Until we actually change the leadership to make it more reflective of the artist community, nothing will change. Currently that is where we are, so I’m not entirely hopeful that we are going to see some mass shift or resolution or revolution because the leadership remains the same.
“From a woman coming from a senior position in distribution, I frequently was disheartened, frequently felt the system does not work for someone like me.”
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