Self Distro Summer ’25: Filmmaker A Madden & their short doc A Spell For Queer Home
This summer, I’m following two independent documentary filmmakers interested in finding new alternatives to the classic distribution system. The film industry is changing, so filmmakers must change along with it. Feel free to follow along on Instagram via the hashtag #SelfDistroSummer25 and my @CastelliniFilmSchool, as well as here on Medium, where I’ll be checking in with them and helping share their insights ahead of an end of summer virtual panel!
Who are you and what do you make?
My name is A Madden (they/them) and I am a queer filmmaker and facilitator. I work primarily as an editor and director of narrative, nonfiction, and experimental work. A few grounding values shape my work: 1) art is a revolutionary strategy, 2) film is a portal to seeing and being seen, 3) experimentation and curiosity are the wisest guides, and 4) creativity and community depend on each other. Everything I create seeks to queer both process and content through embodiment, collaboration, and magic in the processes and stories I steward. I explore my own story in my work knowing that my transformation is interdependently connected to yours. My films are spells, ways to imagine, hold complexity, offerings to community, and models of emergent and caring approaches.
Tell me about your documentary!
A Spell For Queer Home braids together embodied exploration and stories from queer and trans folks across the country into a meditation and reflection on the question — what does it mean to be at home as a queer person? How do we know when we have arrived? How do we build and create queer home? How do we know in our bones that it is already happening?
I made this film after living in New York for 11 years and then returning to my home state of Utah in 2020 with big questions about my own sense of queer belonging. In the summer of 2021, I was a resident artist at the Home of the Brave residency in Cisco, a ghost town in Southern Utah, that was bought by a queer artist and transformed into a queer home in itself. I spent 3 weeks there alone, meditating and wandering and exploring the questions, in landscape and body, letting the wild and sacred space of the ghost town guide me. I called 18 queer and trans friends across the country and asked them about queer home. I edited for a year. The film became a queer home in itself for me and led me to a trust in our collective wisdom and a belief that queer home is possible, radical, and happening.
What does success look like for your doc, in your ideal world, even beyond this summer?
I released the film in 2023. I submitted it to film festivals and it has played at a handful over the past couple years. I also hosted several community screenings. These were particularly special because I invited in community activists and organizations, musicians and poets to share and perform before the screening and we had discussions after. Now I am kind of at a standstill. Success for this film for me would look like finding a permanent home where the film could live — an online platform that makes the film accessible but is also a curated space, perhaps with options for viewers to pay for the film or make donations. Most importantly, I would like to use the film to continue hosting community screenings and facilitate multiple ways of engagement around the film for continued conversation.
I have mapped a unique impact/distribution plan for the film. This would include a grassroots screening and engagement tour, production and distribution of 2 seasons of The Queer Home Podcast, and creation and distribution of a zine, The Queer Home Community Reflection Guide. The tour would visit 15 locations across the US. Each stop will include an event: tabling by local community organizations, performances by local queer musicians, artists, and activists, screening of the film, and a facilitated community discussion about queer home, belonging, and advocacy. The following day, I would conduct interviews with community members for The Queer Home Podcast. Season 1 of the podcast will take the original raw interviews from the film and extend them into thematic episodes, including new interviews with participants reflecting on their first interview and their queer home journey since then. Season 2 will use interviews from the tour. The zine will be produced in collaboration with queer and trans artists and will serve as a guide for communities to reflect on and explore queer home together including discussion guides, individual and group reflections, poetry, somatic practices, spells, and resources.
What’s your current distribution plan for summer of 2025?
I am planning to spend time this summer continuing to search for a permanent online home for the film. I want to explore platforms like Kinema and Gathr.
As for the impact campaign, I applied for one grant (which I didn’t get) but I would like to continue looking into resources that would make the tour, podcast, and zine possible. I have a $35K budget outlined for this distribution plan. I plan to research impact grants and try to make connections with potential investors.
What are the data points you’ll be particularly concerned with?
Concrete data points will include interest and participation of zine/event contributors, audience attendance at each tour location, how many zines are sold, the number of website visits/interactions, participation in podcast, number of downloads and listens/views of podcast, listener retention rate, audience reviews and ratings, and number of followers and engagement on social media. Additional indicators could include podcast festivals and competitions and press coverage.
That said, I am most interested in building community and creating space for dialogue with this film so I think the most indicative data that the distribution plan is effective will be feedback directly from participants and attendees, that the film, events, and resources are contributing to queer and trans people feeling more connection, safety, and belonging, and creating space for communities to come together and deepen.
Walk me through the plan- what are your hypotheses, where did you get the idea to try this particular strategy, and has this plan changed at all prior to putting it into practice?
My focus has always been on creating community around this project. My goal has not been to make any money or reach the widest possible audience. For me, it is about depth not breadth. The film highlights the importance of queer safety in rural spaces — this, along with the success I’ve seen at smaller community screenings, is what inspired the tour. The podcast idea emerged because I have so much content that didn’t make it into the film, hours of interviews that are powerful and significant. I don’t want these to get lost on the cutting room floor. I am also fascinated by the way films and the people in them change over time. I know circumstances and beliefs have shifted in big ways for a lot of folks who were featured in the film. I think, by having continued conversation with them, there is an opportunity to show that queer home building is an ever evolving journey, as are we. The zine idea came from wanting something that can be passed along after the film has been screened and is more of a direct resource that can be utilized anywhere, anytime, whether or not you’ve seen the film.
My original plan was just to submit the film to festivals and hope for acceptance into a larger festival that would then lead to more visibility for the project. That didn’t really happen. I’ve gotten feedback that the film is difficult to program in festivals, because it is too long, because it is too experimental, because it is not experimental enough, etc. I’ve spent $2K on festivals and while the handful of screenings I’ve been able to attend have been fun and engaging and I’ve gotten good in-person responses to the film, it hasn’t had the deep impact that I believe in for it. Thus, the tour, podcast, and zine ideas came up because they feel like opportunities for more direct connection and impact.
What do you hope to learn over the course of the summer, success or not?
I hope to learn more about distribution plans for short films but mostly, I hope to learn about the radical and community-based ways films can have impact. I am one person and I haven’t been able to get any grants for any of my projects, even though I’ve been trying for 10 years, have received and integrated a lot of feedback, and am confident that my writing and ideas are strong. I am pretty disillusioned by the industry and have felt pretty let down by it overall. That said, I am forever committed to making my art with the most integrity possible and doing my best to get it out to the people who it will resonate with. Even if this is just a handful of people. I am not interested in maxing out credit cards or using all my savings on films — I need this work to be sustainable and also to recognize my value as an artist. Because I haven’t had any resources, I have been scrappy in the making of my work (for this film, I produced, wrote, shot, and edited it myself because I couldn’t pay anybody). I will do the same in distribution if I can’t find support. This might be as simple as making the film public on vimeo and sharing it on my website. It’s also hard because time and resources are limited and there are so many stories to tell. I am currently working on my first feature doc which is about queer birth, parenting, and family building. It’s hard to know how long to keep investing in the short or when to let it be and move on to the next thing. I hope this summer I can at least find some direction and clarity around next steps.
Follow their independent distribution journey on Instagram with the hashtag #SelfDistroSummer25 and the @CastelliniFilmSchool account! And find more from A and their film on the official website https://www.amandacmadden.com/
Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com
