When we talk about NonDe filmmaking, this movement of non-dependent cinema. I see it as this potentially beautiful network of mutual aid spreading out across the world.
-Aaron Strand
This past Thursday, I gathered with more than 50 other people to watch Aaron Strand’s feature film debut Withdrawal. From the outside, it looked like a simple film screening. But for those inside that room, we were witnessing something special:
The birth of creator-led cinema.
Many filmmakers have toured their films throughout the country. Filmmaking essentially began as a carnival attraction. But what is different is the sharing of what was once kept behind the castle wall.
We are witnessing the transition from filmmaker as a noble in a castle, to the organizer of a village. A role we never could have imagined years ago.
A CIRCUITOUS PATH
Aaron didn’t imagine himself in this position more than a decade ago. He began as an actor who traveled to New York to attend Tisch School of the Arts. But he arrived at NYU already in the grip of something he didn’t fully understand. He had started using prescription opioids at 15 or 16 years old, back when pill mills blanketed the South and these drugs sat unguarded in every parent’s medicine cabinet. By the time he landed in acting school, he was in full-blown addiction.
His opportunities grew quickly. He booked gigs around the city, debuted Off-Broadway and worked at the coolest nightclub in town until 6 a.m. every night. From the outside, he had arrived.
But the addiction was outpacing everything. He couldn’t make it two hours without going into crippling withdrawal. Slowly, then all at once, everything collapsed. He ended up homeless and eventually moved back in his hometown of Athens, Georgia, living in his childhood bedroom. He had reached what looked like the highest point and then watched it slip away.
But from death also comes life. And sitting in that bedroom, a new creative identity was born:
Becoming a filmmaker.
It wasn’t an easy road. Becoming a filmmaker never is. He spent the next ten years in a self-education — renting every addiction movie from the local video store, pouring his thoughts into journals, writing screenplays he called “truly atrocious,” and shooting little movies on his mom’s Canon 7D (the camera everyone wanted just a decade ago). He had false starts. He even shot a feature he couldn’t finish. But he was building the skills.
The money to make Withdrawal came from an unlikely place. Years earlier, Aaron had raised $50,000 from investors connected to a faith-based film. When his project collapsed, he tried to return the money. The investors, burned by their previous deal, told him to keep it for the next one. That $50,000 sat in a certificate of deposit for seven years while Aaron waited until he was certain he could get a film across the finish line.
Withdrawal explores addiction — but the craft insight that unlocked the whole thing was realizing that drug addicts are boring narratively. Addiction creates spiritual stasis as often, the characters don’t change internally. So Aaron relied on a different genre to tell the story:
A love story.
The relationship between two people is what we follow. The drugs are the antagonistic force. That choice gave the film dramatic movement and saved it from cliché.
He also knew he wanted the film to look and feel like the experience itself. He shot on four or five different cameras, each with a narrative purpose. Mini DV for the gritty present and a Blackmagic with Zeiss primes cropped to 2.33:1 for flashbacks — the cinema of memory. Along with a few instances of 16mm for texture. A Digital 8 camcorder with native night vision because he refused to fake it with a LUT (which was pitched by several post-houses).
The film had a good festival run. It premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival. Everywhere it was awards-eligible, it took home a major award. A 1.000 batting average. But here’s what happened behind those wins:
Aaron started receiving personalized rejection letters from top-tier festivals.
Programmers writing him individually, telling him how much they loved the film, how sorry they were it didn’t make the final cut. One or two of those is touching. After 10 or 11, you start seeing a pattern.
A film made for $60,000, with no recognizable name talent, mostly Georgia-based actors — the festival system, for all its rhetoric about discovery, couldn’t find a home for it. Because as festivals are struggling, they have come to rely on notoriety. And what brings in notoriety are recognizable faces.
Then the distributors came calling. They offered exactly what mid-tier, independent distributors often always offer: exclusive rights, a dump onto Amazon, and a “marketing campaign” that amounts to one Instagram post. The filmmaker never sees a dime. Aaron said no and made the only viable choice left for filmmakers like us:
Bring our films directly to our audience.
A GROWING CONNECTION
Connections come through random actions. After attending a few NonDe 50 Films Meetups, I decided to reach out to Taylor Lewis and Courtney Romano . We had a one-hour conversation and realized we are trying to create the same infrastructure for filmmakers as a whole. And also, we were better working together than separately. Taylor introduced me to Aaron, who I met with for an hour on Zoom. During that conversation, we discovered we were already connected.
Aaron went to school in New York with Evelyn Lorena and Emily Marquet. They were some of the few people who maintained connection with him after his addiction. I met Evelyn after deciding to attempt to make a short film after a decade of getting in my own way. The short film failed, but my connection with Evelyn grew. I produced a short film Gabriela for Evelyn, which had Emily Marquet use her skills in art direction to build the world. Emily would go on to shoot Aaron’s film Withdrawal, deferring her acceptance to AFI’s master’s program so she could be there on set.
She graduated just last month.
None of this happens without each of us deciding to take a different direction. To not see failure as the end or stick to what we’re “supposed to do.” Aaron could have given up after moving back home. Evelyn could have not tried her hand at becoming a writer and filmmaker. Emily could have remained an art director. And I could have continued waiting to start or given up after the first short film fell through.
But we decided to keep going, to keep creating. Because we know that is what matters. And now we are all connected. Working together to build those networks of mutual aid. A system that all filmmakers will need in order to transition to this next phase of creating cinema.
THE FILMMAKER AS ELDER
What is different about this era of filmmaking in the non-dependent space is this:
We are no longer hoarding secrets.
Filmmakers have long operated as individuals. We do what is best for our films and best for us. Believing that the opportunities to tell stories are limited. And someone else’s opportunity is taking up a slot that could be ours.
But this era is different.
The non-western tradition of the human being is to not continually chase relevance. Our role is to prepare the next generation as we get older. In the non-dependent space, we are embracing that tradition. But earlier in the process. What Aaron, Courtney, Taylor, myself and so many others are doing is taking up the mantle of elder while learning ourselves. Leaving behind blueprints where others can learn from our mistakes as well as our successes.
Aaron’s Substack, Broke Sober and NonDē, is a real-time collection of data on how to distribute a film yourself. He publishes his actual ticket sales. He details what works and what doesn’t. An act that is both gratifying and energy-draining. But one most filmmakers will have to embrace in order to ensure our films find an audience.
And he’s not just documenting. He’s building. At a screening at the Frida Cinema in Orange County, Aaron found a local filmmaker named Lisette Mendoza on Instagram. She was raising money for her film Finding José. He screened her teaser trailer before Withdrawal. And at the end of the night, he Venmo’d her every dollar of merch profit toward her fundraising campaign. “The joy I felt that I could Venmo another filmmaker at the end of that screening,” he told me. “That’s just one little step closer to her getting her movie made.”
That is mutual aid in one sentence.
The tour itself is relentless. Aaron travels fast. He flew into LA that afternoon, screened the film, and returned to Georgia the next morning to pick his kids up from daycare. He’s profitable by about a thousand dollars. And he counts that as a win. “We are profitable. We’re not operating in the red.” And he was 24 screening dates remaining.
He also learned something that every grant application gets wrong. When they ask you who your audience is, they want you to name a demographic that’s magically going to show up at a theater they’ve never been to. But the tried-and-true demographic of people who go to see a new movie in a theater is this:
People who go to the theater.
We have realized that the only one to save us is us. This has transitioned from a selfish act into a generative one. What’s beautiful is Aaron is part of building a new, independent film scene that is not limited by the town you live in. Aaron still lives in Georgia and many of us live across the world. Yet we find ways to connect both online and in-person. Doing what we can to build a community.
I was entranced while watching Withdrawal this past week. Not just the quality of the film and the craft behind it. But the audacity in what Aaron and everyone in that screening is doing. It reinforces my belief that a film is an excuse to gather like-minded people to create a new way of living. If you want to see this model in action, find a filmmaker near you hosting a screening and show up.
Like the plot of the film. We are getting the poison of the Hollywood path out of our system. And taking steps to find something greater.
But this time, we don’t have to do it alone.
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