The NonDē movement grows

Good time to grow our capacity for complexity.

Hey, hi, welcome, you belong here.

As the NonDē film movement grows, the “takes” are only gonna get hotter.

Some folks will get it and support it.

Some folks won’t get it and will ignore it.

Some folks will get it and, because they get it, will try their level best to diminish its significance.

Spurred by this growing visibility, people will start chiming in with the “right” way to exercise the principles of the NonDē movement. Some people will choose to exercise the principles through the NonDē 50 Films Project or other similar group-oriented projects. Some will choose to observe the movement from an intellectual distance. Some will choose to spend major sweat equity on persuading the seemingly un-persuadable.

There is no singular verifiably correct tactic for “how to NonDē” because the movement requires us to come at it from all angles. In political movements, some people run for congress, some canvass, some put a bumper sticker on their car. Your style of showing up for the movement doesn’t diminish my style of showing up, and vice versa. Variety enriches.

That’s one layer of complexity.

Here’s yet another:

Everyone will have their own definition of NonDē because everyone has their own definition of dependence, independence, and non-dependence. What’s freedom to me might not feel like freedom to you. But here’s the important thing we miss when we are so hellbent on defining the movement the “right” way: both ideas (yours and mine) are integral and important to furthering the cause at large.

Please don’t confuse multiplicity for lack of vision.

They’re not the same.

Both/And Thinking, the ability to hold multiple truths in your head at one time, is a significant cognitive skill. And that skill evolves into actual material power when we organize those multiple truths toward a better, more optimistic, more inclusive future for all.

How do we achieve all we want to achieve when our ideas are so complex and unwieldy?

Why do we need optimism, and those feel-good attributes of positivity, encouragement, warmth, good will, and kindness to enact material change in the world?

Simply: because people don’t sign up to be chided.

Life is already tough as it is. We can be angry at systems, at the abuse of power, at injustices. In fact, we should be angry at those things. I am all-in on righteous, healthy anger. But when we point those angers at each other’s stylistic differences, calcifying our own self-perception as right and others’ styles as wrong, it all becomes so wildly ineffective. In that case, those holding the material power will never be confronted. Control will never be ceded. The tides can’t turn if stroking our egos eclipses doing the work.

Alternatively, going toward something with collective joy is a show of strength. The cellular-level energy we can experience by doing something radically optimistic together (like oh gee idk building a whole new infrastructure for how to make films and diversifying the voices making them and reconstituting how the economics work) keeps our engines running.

What we’re doing with the NonDē film movement will sometimes feel like pushing 14 Sisyphean boulders up Lombard Street with a toothpick.

It’s a big task. We’ve got to stay loose.

So what does Both/And Thinking and Unlimited Optimism get us practically?

As mentioned at the top, the takes are only going to get hotter. And no matter how many times you may explain to folks that a new cinema ecosystem has to be built from cognitive skills like Both/And Thinking and an unlimited supply of optimism for the mythological task at hand, some folks really need specifics:

“But what are you actually doing?”

It’s not my favorite question because it begs for a binary answer (right action vs. wrong action), but look. Part of our job is to articulate the answer over and over again in many different ways to many different potential allies. How we explain it might not always click¹ with everyone.

BUT! I also never met a question I didn’t like, so while I’ve been answering this in one style up until now, let me pivot and take a whack at another style of answering the same question…

What will the NonDē Film Movement actually do?

If the NonDē Film Movement engages with its complexities and variety of styles, and walks the road ahead with unlimited good will, it is perfectly poised to do these things:

• 6 films coordinate to secure slate financing

• 10 films book a 10-city national tour of microcinemas

• 3 films hire a whole team of partners at a group discount and work as a larger group to distribute all three films at once

• 11 films table read each other’s work to create a non-dependent development process

• 16 films eventize their digital screenings together

• 32 films coordinate a NonDē saturation marketing campaign

• 50 films track data and come up with a digital playbook for non-dependence they can update and iterate on every year

• 50 films getting made catch the attention of taste-makers, critics, and other cultural icons who move the needle on audience growth and impact

• disparate groups in the movement with shared values join together and cross-pollinate their ideas

• we create an alternative space to screen NonDē films and disseminate institutional knowledge and support filmmakers

• we create international campaigns for free speech, the dignity of human-generated work, and economic freedom

At first glance, perhaps “6 films gathering together to get slate financing” sounds like the win. But you allow for the complexities of collective action to collide with a sense of optimism, and all of a sudden, that sounds like small potatoes next to “international campaigns for economic freedom.”

There’s no straight line to trace from here to there. Not yet, at least. We’ve gotta keep showing up, full-hearted and clear-eyed. The films who coordinate most successfully will have a good variety of personalities, many shared values, and the same acute particularity of goals.

NonDē is diverse in action, purposely. “How do we all do the same thing?” The answer is we don’t. And we don’t try to. Because we don’t need to.

Multiplicity allows for surprise. Control what you can control, but don’t forget there’s strategy in loosening our grip on a narrow outcome.

This is called X-factor.

All we’re left with are the fruits of our actions.

Next year, we won’t remember all the words we said, but we’ll have whatever’s left in the wake of what we did. We’ll have to honestly ask ourselves:

• Did we do everything we could to be additive to the movement or did we subtract from it?

• Did we prioritize people in everything we said and did?

• Did we gas someone up when they were ready to quit?

• Did we increase our endurance by rejecting transactionality and getting into collective, supportive action?

• Did we convince the world of our movement’s inevitability by being the first to believe it was inevitable?

Not every day will feel good. As someone who is personally in a season of struggle, I feel bad at least 87% of the time. But I can hold multiple truths at once: I’m feeling deep personal pain and I’m incredibly optimistic about the future.

So I leave you with this…

Recall December of 2024. Did you predict exactly where you’d be right now in December of 2025?

Did you engineer your success within a fraction of its life? Or did life shake you around and rattle the loose coins from your pockets like the big bully it can sometimes be? We can’t know exactly where this movement will take us, but that’s part of its beauty… We can’t know exactly where this movement will take us!

Multiple styles of community-building work.

Multiple ideas of how to exercise the non-dependent principles are valid.

Multiple group projects can add to the success of the overall movement.

Multiple actions can push the ball down field.

And most importantly, we won’t get to a better world by following dogmatic rules prescribed by one voice; it must be all of us contributing.

The gains will only come when each of us identifies our own responsibility in this movement. That’s how we carry on.

I know I keep saying it, but we all have a role to play.

The best thing for the movement is for you to decide what role is yours, and then, with good will in your heart and optimistic winds at your back, get to work.

1. I’m old enough to know that probably 42.6% of what I put out into the world will be misunderstood. Being misunderstood is not my favorite thing, but it’s not the worst thing either. Paradoxically, once I decided to make peace with its inevitability, I more easily found my people.