About

Educating our community on worker cooperatives and their application in every stage of the film industry. 

For the first season of the show, we'll gather to discuss a chosen piece of media - movie, podcast, lecture, etc. - that illustrates some aspect of how any given production may more successfully operate a show under their own self-determined LCA (Limited Cooperative Association entity type) structures.

For each piece of media, we'll have a set of reflective questions. A facilitator will help 4-6 community members answer the questions they're most interested in talking about, individually, before group reflection and audience participation. Some weeks, we'll bring in outside guests to help facilitate. With a bit of structure around individual sharing this way, we hope to hear, mindfully, from more reserved folks in ways our familiar conversational habits may not usually encourage - much like the structure of a coop, itself.

Some of the topics we'll cover: 

• Discussing what worker cooperatives are, the principles behind them, formation details, and speaking to active worker coops here in Oklahoma and elsewhere

• Historical examples of collectively-minded filmmaking groups as well as current worker coops in the film and media space

• Examining the nitty gritty from professionals in the production, investing, legal, accounting, granting, distributing, and exhibition spheres

• Creative solutions to logistical and cultural challenges for running productions in this way

• Identifying realistic pros and cons to options regarding sweat equity, capital equity, financing, principal photography time management, and more, to help empower each crew to choose for themselves 

• Examining federated cooperatives and their support for an industry, and what kind of needs a federated cooperative for filmmakers could fill to help other productions wanting to go worker-coop

THEN

In the second, third, and fourth seasons, we'll ground this firmly in reality, taking three genre films - a sci-fi, a horror, and a dramedy - from funding to production to distribution/exhibition under worker cooperative structures. We'll check in with the crew each episode, about how they're navigating the material we learned in season one. This way, we can show that even with very different networks for funding and distribution, a cooperative format is viable - for this complicated industry, and others. 

It’s our hope that creating a space for this dialogue builds structures that bolster and empower workers in our changing industry for years to come.

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