Went to Slamdance, and all I got was renewed faith in the future of film

A word from Slamdance '26 plus my presentation ICYMI: The Radical Political Campaign of the NonDē Filmmaker

Feb 26, 2026

Getting to and from Slamdance from New England this week was a challenge.

It was…tedious. As evidenced here:

But, Anne Lamott once wrote that when something big and beautiful is trying to get itself born, a lot of things start going wrong all at once so you can be as distracted as possible and get out of its way.

Slamdance was that big and beautiful thing for me.

The room was standing room only, and while I thought most people would fall off by the end of the day, the room actually got more crowded as the day went on. Between presentations, the facilitated conversations, questions from the audience, and breakout sessions at lunch, it was effectively a seven hour set.

And my feeling was: there was so much more to say.

We were challenged to approach this new era of filmmaking with a radically new mindset from mavericks like Dan Mirvish, Sara's Soliloquies, Donny Broussard, and Kelli McNeil-Yellen of KLA Media Group.

We rewrote our guidelines for distribution and started to see the truth of how to execute it from industry veterans and path-builders like Jon Reiss-8Above, Ami Vora, and Annalisa Shoemaker.

We got new strategies, from press to coordinated action, for running theatrical exhibitions from the greats like Richard Rushfield, Lela Meadow-Conner @mamafilm, and jake S. weisman.

We grew up and away from tired, traditional models to imagine new ways to work pre-distribution, TV, streaming, and social from successful radical thinkers Peter Broderick, Keith Ochwat, tepper, Jon Stahl, and Adam Lesh.

We learned about real policy change and organizational tactics from incredible community organizers like Alex Rivera and Sanjay Sharma.

Throughout the day, I got to work with legends Ted Hope and Franklin Leonard as the three of us asked questions of the presenters, investigated their big ideas, and facilitated audience questions to make this a truly conversational, non-panel panel of almost 20 artist-thinkers.

And of course none of this would have happened if Ted Hope hadn’t begun writing about non-dependence three years ago and instigated all of us to add our own ideas into the mix. Nor would it have happened if Peter Baxter and the fearless team at Slamdance hadn’t invited Ted to curate a day full of dangerous and fun ideas.

Talk about coordination.

Talk about community.

Talk about action for a better future.

It was all of those things, and so much more.

Truly a pinch me moment to be in a room full of humans like that.

It’s easy to become very certain of yourself here on the internet. But in that room, we were allowed to be uncertain, question, consider, and remake our minds in the image of a better future.

I highly suggest going into actual rooms with actual humans to actually discuss (not just pontificate from behind a screen) as much as possible. It’s good.

For my part of the day, I shared a talk titled The Radical Political Campaign of the NonDē Filmmaker. While some may scoff at this sort of thing (and you’re allowed to), Elizabeth Joyce recently clarified this tactic as “consumer education”. We cannot get full industries, systems, and certainly not cultures, to change if we aren’t making the case.

So what follows here, and what I shared at Slamdance, is both the case for non-dependent film and nine strategies for how to make that case.

Sold out, standing room only, more packed as the day went on — this indicates what people want right now, which is: *something different.*

The Radical Political Campaign of the NonDē Filmmaker, my talk from Slamdance 2026.

We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.

Albert Einstein said that.

Another way to say that: To solve a problem, you can’t stay at the level of the problem. You have to rise to the level of the solution.

My name is Courtney Romano and I’m a writer/director. Like most of you, I have watched Hollywood solve the problem of: getting audiences to watch films and make money doing it — by staying at the level of the problem. It’s a business problem and they think like a business: big budgets, saturation marketing, safe bets on sequels, and even tax write offs.

Now, let’s talk about non-dependent filmmaking.

Non-dependent filmmaking wants to solve that same problem: get audiences to watch our films, and make money doing it. But it’s not trying to solve that problem at the same level of thinking that created that problem in the first place.

Hollywood only tries to solve it at a business level.

I believe NonDē film should rise to the level of the solution and solve it at a political level.

Before you get nervous that I’m going to get into the weeds of American politics, although I would love to, what I mean here is politics as a high level concept.

Thinking politically means coalition-building around a shared vision.

I believe that when we think politically — building a coalition of filmmakers around a shared vision — that we will make the films we want to make, get audiences to see them, and have materially economically sustainable careers because of them.

Where studios may use box office stats, saturation marketing, sequels, and tax write offs to solve the problem, as non-dependent filmmakers we know we can never compete with that kind of scale, plus it’s a race to the bottom. The studios will make more money that way, while the workers get less jobs, opportunities, and protections.

Where streamers may want to acquire eyeballs for their apps to solve the problem, non-dependent filmmakers want to develop reciprocal relationships with our audiences.

Where independent film may seem like it’s an alternative to studio and streamers solutions, if you’re lucky enough to get a distribution deal, once you sell your rights and exit your film, you’ve lost access to your audience and data, the two most pivotal parts of a sustainable career.

The NonDē filmmaker isn’t just solving for the short game of getting people to one movie at a time. We’re solving for the long game. By holding onto our rights, profits, and data, and investing in the relationship with our audiences, we have a real shot at a sustainable career that never has to depend on a lucky break.

And we do that, by making paradoxical moves.

We do unscalable things.

Here’s what I mean:

We start by running a strategic field game. There are 9 components from politics we can apply to non-dependent filmmaking.

LANGUAGE. We use the term non-dependent. We position our projects as part of the movement. We add this word to our press releases, our pitch decks, and our bios. We say it with our full chest.
ALLIANCES. We create a bloc of filmmaking alliances. We forge partnerships with other filmmakers who believe in the same NonDē values as us. We go out of our way to hire & partner with the companies in this industry who are helping to disrupt distribution, marketing, & audience-building.
MESSAGING. We deploy content marketing for the movement itself. We write, and film, and articulate the values of non-dependence on social, in our newsletters, and as ancillary content for our films.
COMMUNITIES. We join forces in places like FilmStack or in coalitions like the one I’ve organized NonDē 50 Films Project. These are communities where filmmakers work side by side to share institutional knowledge, resources, and data with each other, while running coordinated experiments and labs to prove this model works.
CONSTITUENT RESEARCH. We enroll our audiences in what we’re doing from the beginning. We do market research by defining our audiences as early as development, and then interview those audiences about how they watch movies, where they watch movies, and what makes them click play.
DATA COLLECTION. We collect data and stay flexible. We run marketing, partnership, and revenue experiments. We make multiple and diversified efforts to get the word out. We use data to pivot mid-campaign and double down on what works.
CANVASSING. We go proverbially from door to door. We sync up with our local movie clubs, and institutions, and niche communities in our neighborhoods. We talk about NonDē early and often in real life.
ENDORSEMENTS. We build context. We position our work with other filmmakers. We create microlabels and multi-production company slates and roll out marketing campaigns of our films together.
STUMP SPEECHES. We repeat ourselves. We stump like any other politician, and repeat the message, and stay on message — we believe in ambitiously authored cinema, risk taking, economic stability, collaboration over competition, and a better cinema ecosystem centered on the artists, the art, and the audiences.

These are unscalable things for any one filmmaker to do alone.

When we do them together, THIS is when we reach a critical mass.

I don’t know who let me into this event, there must have been a mistake.

Politics is about forming alliances.

Right here, right now, you are in a room full of alliances just waiting to happen. People who can help you, and who you can help. We can look at each other, right here in this room, as the beginning of a wave.

We don’t need to compete with each other, we need to collaborate. And here’s why…

Look at politics— there are different districts, different states, different races. But there are coalitions of candidates across the country who share the same vision. They run their own race, but support and endorse their political friends.

We each have our own films, our own races, but when we work together as a political movement, people who believe in the same possible future, when we endorse each other’s movies, collaborate and share and borrow each other’s audiences, we lighten the individual burden and transform it into a collective mission.

THAT is how we scale unscalable things. THAT is where our power lies. It’s a people-powered movement.

And the leaders of that movement are in this room.

Today you’re going to hear lots of tactics, lots of ideas of how to implement your non-dependent career and build momentum. You will leave here with LOTS of things to try.

And when you leave this room of fired up, engaged, passionate folks, you may run into some cynical folks on the outside who say — that’s a pipe dream. That’s not how it works.

And your response, whether you say it out loud or not, will be: of course that’s not how it works. That’s the entire point.

We don’t operate from the level of the problem. We rise to the level of the solution.

This is how change happens.

So now ask yourself: what is your vision? what do you want? What do you want for your industry? Your career? For your world? For your future?

What is possible when you keep a little bit of hope alive?

There’s no reason we can’t have it.

It’s time we go build it, together.

Here’s a little bit of my recent "press tour for the NonDē Film Movement itself.

Check out these podcast episodes to get a clearer picture of how we’re working to build non-dependent filmmaking in real time.

Thank you to Jerry J White III of Bronson Creative, and Jane Gilmore of Females in Film and Television for having me on to talk about the movement, among other things!

Quick Ways to Get Started in the NonDē Film Movement

Subscribe to FilmStack Daily Digest and start getting your analysis and breakdown from thinkers on this platform with independent voices.
Read about the New Film Criticism and subscribe to a swath of amazing film critics who don’t just introduce us to new work, but also help us think and write about films in an altogether fresh, original, personal way. Check out Film Soup Zine run by KLA Media Group and Charlotte Simmons who will be reviewing specifically-NonDē films.
Join the NonDē 50 Films Project by signing up here and checking out the dashboard here.
Start talking about it. Let’s bring these ideas into the conversation. At first people will say we can’t do it. That’s fine, let’s talk about it. Let’s bring these big ideas into the rooms with us.
Discuss with your team. Be the leader on your production team and bring non-FilmStack filmmakers into the fold. Share resources and posts with them about how to do things differently.
Share about the NonDē Film Movement far and wide. A better world is inevitable if we make it so.

Read the entire NonDē series: