Amazon Asks Underrepresented Filmmakers To ‘Duke It Out’

Amazon Studios has announced that it will launch a short film festival for underrepresented filmmakers. While I think this is a fantastic initiative — one that’s designed to cater to marginalized communities such as those of color, ethnic, gender or religious minorities as well as LGBTQ communities, veterans and people with disabilities.

I do, however, find it a difficult pill to swallow when you take into account that Amazon itself is one of (if not the) largest consumer goods conglomerate on the planet with a war chest that could easily buy the film rights to these narrative pieces produced by these underrepresented communities six thousandfold if it chose to do so.

A proper gesture of goodwill from Amazon would be to not ask these communities to compete against one another for the sum total of $25,000.

Instead, Amazon would find a bold gesture in addressing these communities in the following:

“Dear underrepresented communities, we at Amazon have enough money to buy your films and pay you licensing fees to display them on our streaming platforms. If you are interested in working with us please produce a piece of work at your own expense. Submit it to us accordingly and we will happily buy it off you because we are willing to take risks with our business decisions to give you — emerging filmmakers in underrepresented communities — a chance to become celebrated underdogs.

We believe that stories, powerful stories, exist in the unlikeliest of places and that is why we want to take a business ‘risk’ by investing in you and your stories.

In fact, it’s not much of a risk for us because the losses (should there be any) would be inconsequential to the goodwill that our investment in you means to us.”

This is the approach Amazon Studios should have taken when it decided to participate in such a philanthropic cause. Now I’m not pooh-poohing entirely their decision to engage with these communities — but I do think when you have so much money and so much power your responsibility becomes so much greater.

Better than nothing I suppose.