The World Needs to Change along with Indie Film

I was thinking about how the independent film industry's need for major change actually closely reflects the world's need to change in order to survive. Alex Steffen in Good Magazine's "One Big Crisis" suggests ways of solving our "planetary crisis" that sound strikingly similar to how we need to be approaching the transformation of the indie film industry:  "If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to not just do fewer bad things: we need to do different things altogether. We need to reinvent the way our whole society works. We need bright green upgrades to our cities, our energy systems, industrial design and technology, farming and forestry—everything. It all needs to change, essentially immediately. That will take millions of people transforming their lives to pursue new solutions, to become more effective and innovative citizens, business people, investors, community leaders, and so on. We need people to actually step up and do big things. We need people who change their thinking and not just their light bulbs."

In the independent film industry, we need to come together on a macro level and commit to make the necessary changes that will allow us to survive. I believe our survival as filmmakers will be very similar to our pursuit to survive as human beings. Just as every human being needs to think about and change how they live so we can save the planet and ourselves, every filmmaker needs to commit to the fact that we need to change how things are done in our industry and work hard to implement those changes. We need to:

• work together and smarter
  
• share resources and knowledge
  
• assess and work hard to connect to and build audiences
  
• embrace and continue to advance technology
  
• mentor upcoming filmmakers
  
• take responsibility for selling our films 
  
• take control of our careers and our survival
  

In other words, Take Action! 

Steffen believes, "there’s another political force growing fast, and that’s the politics of optimism. It’s a politics that says transformation is not just a duty, it’s an amazing opportunity. We might, instead of doing nothing and leaving our kids a ruined planet, decide to build them an awesome future and spend the rest of our lives enjoying it. That’s the choice we wake up to every day now: cynicism or change."