Coming soon...
Educating our community on worker cooperatives and their application in every stage of the film industry.
Every other week for the first half 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 given show under their own self-determined LCA (Limited Cooperative Association entity type) structures.
For each piece of media, we'll have a set of questions, and a facilitator helping each cast member use the chance to answer the set of questions fully, individually, before group reflection and audience participation. Some weeks, we'll bring in outside guests to help facilitate; some weeks, we'll be studying with our slowly rotating core group. With a bit of structure around individual sharing this way, we hope to hear from more reserved individuals in ways a modern conversation 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 as well as currently operating cooperatives working 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 half of the show, we'll ground this firmly in reality, taking three genre films by willing writer-directors (a sci-fi, a horror, and a dramedy, since these are three very different sets of established networks for funding and distribution) from funding to production to distribution/exhibition under worker cooperative structures.
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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