Back to the Roots of Storytelling: The Community-Based Philosophy of Folklight Film Club
by Liz Manashil
Liz Manashil is a filmmaker and the former manager of Sundance Institute’s Creative Distribution Initiative. She’s currently the senior manager of impact distribution at Picture Motion. Please feel free to reach out to her at liz.manashil@gmail.com.
Hi! It’s Liz again. You won’t see me much more on these pages, because I’ve left Sundance Institute and am now working at Picture Motion. But because of my previous work at the Institute and now being in the world of impact, I get to talk to a lot of excited people who are interested in disruption of the distribution status quo. Through my friend Olivia Dodd (another person with whom I’ve engaged in these distribution brainstorms), I met Brooke Tansley. Her company, Folklight Film Club, is fascinating: she wants to make movies locally and create a new, sustainable model to do so. I chatted with her about why.
What is Folklight?
The best way to answer that question is to tell you why I created Folklight — that will give you all the context you need to understand what exactly Folklight is.
Storytelling began as a prehistoric, worldwide tradition that brought communities closer together through sharing their stories, values, and wisdom. When the Hollywood studio system was created, that changed the fundamental purpose of storytelling. Instead of using stories to bind communities through authenticity, they focused on creating illusion (lots of Hollywood’s early stars had fabricated names and entire backstories), making money, building power and influence, and playing out their own personal fantasies. We are still in this system. As a result, it can take an Athenian effort to get film projects made that are more representative of the way people actually live and breathe in the world.
Box-office receipts and ratings show that people want art from more points of view. They want to see more of themselves reflected in the art. I think we can do better, and it makes all the sense in the world to do so. I think the world is rich with perspectives and experiences that we haven’t gotten to see nearly enough of. Folklight Film Club aims to create a new industry of storytelling through the medium of film and refocus on storytelling’s original purpose — bringing communities closer together through our stories, our values, our wisdom.
In practical action, Folklight is a subscription-based membership program. Our members, for $79 per quarter (for a two-year membership), attend events that keep them connected to the making of a narrative feature that’s inspired by their personal stories and identities.
It works like this: first, our members answered a series of questions that prompted them to share personal stories with our team of professional filmmakers — and then those stories served as the pool of inspiration for our screenplay. After we wrote the first draft of the script, members attended the table read in January and gave feedback. Right now, we’ve almost finished our shooting script, and we’ll be heading into production in the fall.
Essentially, Folklight Film Club functions like a wine club, but we make movies instead. (I married a sommelier in 2016, so I’ve come to learn a lot about wine!) A winery has club members that purchase the wine and attend members-only events at the winery. At Folklight, we make a film and members attend events, like the table read of the script and a panel discussion with the filmmakers. We have a total of nine member events that coincide with the development, pre-production, production, and post of the narrative feature film. Members who want a hands-on experience can also do one of our one-day member short-film shoots.
I consider our films to be the first works of “film terroir.” Terroir is another wine term — it refers to a wine that captures the qualities of a particular piece of land at a particular time. Our films will capture the spirit of our members in this time and in this place here in Sonoma County — and eventually elsewhere, as we have plans to open chapters in communities nationwide.
Our goal is to change the world by changing what stories we tell, why we tell them, and how — bringing the worldwide, prehistoric tradition of storytelling back to its roots in community. We want to create more opportunities for more people to connect and to bring people in communities closer together.
What inspired you to come up with the company?
Initially, my reason was really personal and small. I had made a spontaneous decision to move to Sonoma County in 2013 in the midst of a long, high-conflict divorce, during a few weeks here on a summer theatre gig, but I had no idea what I was going to do here. After my divorce was completed, I felt like I could either start at the bottom of a different industry as a woman approaching 40, or I could cause my industry to exist here so that I could continue to work in it. I had gotten to know Sonoma County really well and wondered if there was something I could borrow from the food and wine industries that are thriving up here and adapt it for entertainment.
I did a lot of thinking on these long drives on these beautiful country roads, and I started to see the opportunity I had to make my industry exist in a new place and in a new way. There are a lot of mechanisms of our current system that don’t make sense or are broken — independent film financing, indie distribution, a lack of true inclusivity, continued trope repetition, the not-at-all family-friendly nature of the business for working parents, the sometimes cruel push for youth and beauty. With Folklight, we have this glorious opportunity to imagine a world in which the current industry had never existed and instead we get to build it from a more constructive set of values. How incredible is that?
What does the title mean?
When I first had the idea to name the company Folklight, I thought I’d be shining a light on folks — but it’s really the other way around. It’s their light, their shining — it’s coming from them. Our logo is light around a slice of a tree. A tree lives its life and plants roots in one place, writing the story of each new year into a ring. That’s Folklight.
What problems in distribution are you trying to fix?
Ha — how much space do we have for this answer? I know that we have a broken system. I know that many independent filmmakers who secure distribution can’t get even as much as a statement from their distributors that tells them what was spent and what was earned, let alone payment. I know that the more traditional independent film financing path of “get investors, make film, pay back your investors so you can make another film” doesn’t work for a lot of filmmakers. So I don’t want to rely solely on that.
How will you fix them?
This first membership cycle is really about learning how to put the mission into action and having everything we need to show what this concept is, so we can communicate with the public about Folklight and scale up our membership. We’ll have our first film completed, people will be able to see that it’s a real movie, and we’ll have footage of all our member events to show the membership. For two years, it’s just been me running around Sonoma County saying, “We’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that and it’s gonna be great!”
Our first membership group is an intimate 62 people, and Folklight is designed to become sustainable at a thousand members. For the next few months my focus is on fundraising — getting accredited investors on board and accepting donations through our fiscal sponsor and through corporate sponsorships that include brand integration and product placement in the film.
The thing we’re focusing on over the next three years is growing our membership base, because the membership is a revenue stream that isn’t typically available to an indie film company. Concurrently and more long-term, we’ve identified 51 communities nationwide that fit a set of specific criteria where we think a Folklight chapter would be a good fit. Once we scale up, we’ll have chapters open nationwide full of people who have a personal connection to our mission, vision, and work, and we’ll be making 51 or so films per year, using our own nationwide boots-on-the-ground network for distribution, both in the form of theatrical runs and festivals of our work wherever we have a presence, and streaming to anyone anywhere who wants to see a Folklight film.
What does a success story look like for Folklight next year? In five years?
Success next year will mean completing our first feature and membership cycle, looking at everything we’re learning about how to execute this idea, implementing those changes and additions as we look toward beginning the next membership cycle in fall 2020, adding a full-time membership and events director to the team, and celebrating together at our members’ red-carpet screening and concert of our original soundtrack.
In four years, we’re planning on expansion to five more communities.
How will this be sustainable? What are the financial results you’re looking for? What about the emotional results?
In addition to film sales, we have revenue streams available to us that are atypical, or happening in atypical ways. We’ve touched on the membership. Another revenue stream is anti-bias work — industry-specific anti-bias standards, tools, trainings, and a certification. We’re working with Luna Malbroux at Soul Bird Consulting to develop this work and program so that we can be sure we’re creating characters and telling stories that are more representative of how people actually live and breathe in the world. We’ve all been immersed in the same world — whether we’ve been making the art or consuming it — and I don’t think any of us are powerful enough on our own to do the trope-purging we need to do and to take off the dominant lens. We’ll be able to use these standards, tools, trainings, and certification help anyone wishing to unpack a century of bias in film and do this work.
Another revenue stream is stock footage. We have a plan to partner with tourism agencies, economic development boards, chambers of commerce, and small or tourism-focused businesses anywhere we have a chapter, because we’ll be able to give them affordable access to beautiful stock footage of their community.
The emotional results we’re looking for? I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for places to put the love that I feel, wanting to help people heal and feel together, either through laughter or tears. It’s been a powerful thing to acknowledge with people that there are no Hollywood bigwigs saying to them, “Who are you? What’s important to you? I’m listening. We care.” I think we all want to be seen and loved. That’s what I hope people will feel. For me, I want to love the world in this way. I was once reading building codes to see if I could build a commune (I know, I know!) and I saw that a structure will be evaluated by its “best and highest use.” I think Folklight is the best and highest use of me in the world. I want to feel that old Boy Scout adage, “leave the campsite better than you found it.”
Why are you doing this? What pushes you forward?
I have a real opportunity to make this industry a better place for the people who make films and for the people who enjoy films, and we have an incredible need to grow empathy in this country. My dear friend and college roommate, writer Angelina Burnett, says, “Stories are empathy machines.” She’s right. She wrote this incredible piece on Medium — it’s a call to action for storytellers to use our talents to create change, because it’s all-hands-on-deck time. We can help solve this empathy crisis.
So much of the pain we’re expressing in these big, cultural conversations right now were fires burning in our individual bellies — and they were either going to burn us alive or come out of our mouths and become these big conversations. Helping people feel and heal together is why I first stepped on a stage in Annie as a child and why I get up and sit at my computer making stories happen today.
How can people get in touch with you and join in?
Our website is folklightfilmclub.com. Go there, and please follow us on all the social media! My email is brooke@folklightfilmclub.com.
Club membership right now is only open to residents of Sonoma, Napa, and Marin counties here in California, but anyone who wishes to support this big refocusing is abundantly welcome to become a donor through our website. Accredited investors should reach out, industry professionals who feel moved by what they’ve read here should reach out, folks nationwide who want a Folklight chapter in their community should reach out, and folks who’d like to have me come speak at their community, arts, or industry event should reach out to me. Let’s do something new together.
