Distributing Films Politically

Several Futures is a one-man film distribution company in the United States run by Graham L. Carter. With a focus on “auteurist and anti-imperialist work,” Several Futures has brought numerous important films into circulation for the first time in the US, including several films about Palestine and Lebanon. Benjamin Crais spoke to Graham about the economics of independent film distribution, the category of “political cinema,” and the importance of the Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour. 

Your website describes Several Futures as “film distribution with a focus on auteurist and anti-imperialist work.” Perhaps we could start with those two categories, ones not always held together. What do they mean to you and how do they inform your decisions about what films to distribute?

I think in general a lot of cinephiles push any politics beyond liberal humanism into the background. Conversely, activists or people interested in “political film” probably don’t care much about who made a film or maybe even the conditions it was made under. But I’m sure there are many people, like myself, who care about both! I’ve never thought of didacticism as a dirty word or as out of place in art.

My original goal for Several Futures was to release films that wouldn’t be otherwise. One of my favorite filmmakers, Axelle Ropert, had never had her films distributed in the U.S. Or a gorgeous restoration of Aloïse (1975), which came out the same year as two other great feminist films with Delphine Seyrig—Jeanne Dielman and India Song—or the films of Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab. These films were just sitting there. Now the fact that they are all women could play into why they weren’t distributed…

But at the end of the day it is just about which movies I love and would want to spend months or years working on. The admiration I have for every film I have released has only grown deeper as I work on it or watch it again with a crowd.

You’re a one-man film distribution company. How did you get the idea to start?

I’d always thought of myself as a filmmaker, but I had kept delaying making my second feature. Then, during the pandemic, I started making more money than I ever had thanks to unemployment benefits from the city. I began toying with the idea of shifting into distribution because there were a lot of interesting films that weren’t being released and, in 2022, I started reaching out to sales agents and trying to set up an LLC. That was the beginning. 

Can you explain the economics of independent film distribution?

It’s very important to be open about the financial side of all this. My initial investment wasn’t all that much: I was able to acquire Axelle Ropert’s films for about $8000—a lot of money for the average working person, but not in the grand scheme of the film industry. The upfront is called an MG (minimum guarantee), which you pay to a sales agent. Petite Solange (2021) was the first film I ever licensed and, four years later, I’m only just now close to breaking even. What that means is that I haven’t had to pay the sales agent anything because I paid it to them up front; it’s only after I make over the initial investment that I have to start splitting everything with them. 

But there are various models you can use. For instance, the next movie I worked on after the Ropert films was Alain Kassanda’s Coconut Head Generation (2023). I was directly in touch with Alain and we basically just split everything. I didn’t pay anything up front and got a little money from Unifrance to pay for his flight here. The only expense was making a new poster. 

Describe that film for those who don’t know it? 

Coconut Head Generation is a documentary about a movie club at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. They put on screenings and then discussed the films afterwards. The club becomes a kind of safe space for the students to talk about politics and comes to coincide with the #EndSARS protest movement. So Alain, as he’s filming this club, comes to document young people having political awakenings and relating to film as a starting place for conversation. That’s very important to me and what I hope to do.

The founding of Several Futures only slightly preceded Israel's latest and ongoing genocidal campaign. You have since distributed films about Palestine and Lebanon, including Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves (1984) and Jocelyn Saab’s The Razor’s Edge (1985). How is your curation informed by the contemporary political situation?

This relationship isn’t coincidental, but it’s not completely planned out either. For instance, Heiny Srour was one of the first filmmakers I reached out to because I loved The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), a documentary about what’s sometimes called the Dhofar Rebellion when the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Gulf (PFLOAG) rose up against the Sultanate of Oman. They established an autonomous zone and built their own schools, roads, and hospitals while under bombardment from the British. 

Her films had never been distributed in the United States, even though they had new restorations. I reached out to her and learned that she felt like she couldn’t get distributed after October 7th. Her sense was that she had been kind of dropped because people were afraid to support Palestine publicly and one of her major films, Leila and the Wolves, is a history of women’s resistance in Lebanon and Palestine across the 20th century. 

Distributing Heiny’s films led to a fortuitous encounter with Yaël Halbron of Revenante, a curator and sales agent in Europe. Because I had released Leila and the Wolves and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, she reached out to me about Ghassan Salhab’s Phantom Beirut (1998), a film she was licensing. I didn’t know the film, but I watched it and loved it. It was both politically and formally very strong. Ghassan is a cinephile who had made a film interviewing Jean-Luc Godard during the making of Notre Musique (2004) and Phantom Beirut struck me as one of the few films to demonstrate that its director has actually internalized and processed Godard’s work, not just aped him. I told Ghassan this and he was like, “Yeah, in Arabic we have an expression that’s like, ‘We don’t just eat our food, we digest.’”

You mentioned that Heiny Srour had encountered obstacles getting her films distributed post-October 7th. Have you encountered any hurdles in distributing these films?

I didn’t really encounter anyone who was resistant except one venue that basically said, “As much as I support and agree with this, we can never show it.” Otherwise, people have mostly been excited. I’m especially glad to work with political groups. There were about ten screenings of Leila and the Wolves coordinated with fundraisers for Palestine. Lorena Alvarado’s film Lost Chapters (2024)—a narrative film set in Caracas—also played at IFC and we donated everything we made to earthquake relief in Venezuela. I’m not an organizer, so I’m very grateful to be able to use my interest in cinema to help raise money in this way. Ideally, my work in film distribution leads to more than just some films being seen.

Those screenings of Leila and the Wolves have been particularly special. I think it’s heartening for people to see that the struggle has been ongoing. Many people don’t know the history of women’s role in resistance in Palestine and Lebanon throughout the 20th century. For me, the most important thing is remembering that we are acting as part of a long history of struggle, that we each have to do our part to keep it moving forward. It’s always good to be reminded.

[book-strip index="1"]

The description for Several Futures on the website that sells your DVDs includes a quote from Srour: “My loyalty is always with the oppressed.” Can you say more about her importance as a filmmaker and how she came to be making these films?

Heiny is really unlike anyone else. Before she made The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, she studied social anthropology at the Sorbonne and was a student of both Maxime Rodinson and Jean Rouch. She was always politically active, but a turning point came when she heard from a representative of the PFLOAG about how the revolution would not be successful if women were not immediately given equal rights. She became fascinated with this group and ended up walking 500 miles with a cameraman and sound man (each using solar power to charge their batteries) to Dhofar.

Unlike many documentaries at the time, the film was shot with sync sound so that the people there could speak for themselves. It opens with some context about the political situation—e.g. why certain social groups have been oppressed, how the British are bombing because of their desire for oil—but then you get to hear from the people themselves, their feelings and day-to-day activities in the zone. They’re farming and building irrigation systems, hospitals, and schools. The children are involved in a very radical form of education, questioning their teachers and coming up with their own lesson plans. It’s an incredible portrait. If that was her only film, she would still be important for film history.

What did the initial circulation of that film look like?

The film was selected at Cannes, with Heiny becoming—the wording is, you know, a little awkward—the first woman from the Global South to have a film shown at Cannes. When it toured later, apparently people would start bringing medical supplies to the cinema, asking her to take them to the people in the film. Those who saw the film felt a need to act.

How did Leila and the Wolves come about?

There’s a very important figure named Tahar Cheriaa [the documentary Tahar Cheriaa: Under the Shadow of the Baobab (2014)  is coming soon from Several Futures], considered to be the father of Pan-African cinema, alongside Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Cheriaa set up the first ever film festival in Africa and mentored and championed a lot of people now considered to be the great African filmmakers. Heiny was someone he was close with and he basically called her up one day and was like, ‘It’s been ten years since you made a film, quit resting on your laurels and go make something!” He was going to help her get a grant and basically told her to write a script so they could submit it—but for next year’s deadline, because the deadline for that year was in a week. And she basically holed up and wrote Leila and the Wolves and sent it to him. He was shocked that she wrote it that quickly. She then got the money and made the film, which is a more fantastical, narrative film in which a woman walks through the 20th-century history of Palestine and Lebanon. So we go from seeing the British arriving in Palestine through the Lebanese Civil War (during which Heiny was in Beirut). I think Heiny developed politically in the ten years between the films and was even more committed to feminism, hence the subject matter.

Leila and the Wolves is her best known film. She’s made a few others since, but none of the others have had proper releases. I’m trying to work with her to get some of those later films distributed.

Another filmmaker who has a major place in your catalog is Pierre Creton.

Pierre is, I think, the greatest working filmmaker. His identity is politicized as a gay man, and I believe he identifies as a communist, but his films may not seem overtly political in the way that The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived does. But with Pierre, his art, life, and politics are very intertwined.

If I remember correctly, either he or Vincent Barré (Creton’s partner in art and life) once described his films as a “cinema of degrowth.”

Over the last ten years, the films that are most exciting to me are often quite small—like those of Creton or someone like Hong Sang-Soo. Both have done the opposite of a traditional film career, in which a small film is just a stepping stone to your next project that will be bigger and more expensive. They’ve made a really sustainable model of how to make films. A film set is such a polluter; there’s so much trash and energy use in all this stuff, especially plane travel. Pierre even felt bad that he flew to New York to promote his movie about the environment; I don’t think he will ever travel here again.

Godard famously advocated for making films politically (rather than making “political films”). Is that how you understand this model of film production?

Exactly, yeah. The films are made politically, not just because Pierre is presenting queer life in a rural setting, but also because his production model is self sustainable. He would never need or probably never even want millions of dollars to make a film.

What would you say to someone who might suggest this marks a retreat in ambition, an abandonment of any attempt to encompass or confront the contemporary world in its totality? 

That could be the case, but I’m not sure that many of the bigger films are really doing that in the first place. I think Pierre comes closer to reckoning with the totality of everything than somebody making a huge movie. For example, one of his most recent films, Still Life Primavera (2025), is a structuralist film where the camera records one minute of one hour from the same vantage point overlooking Pierre’s garden. We see animals and how the light changes, but it’s also about how at that very moment Israel is bombing Gaza.

In our conversation, you’ve mentioned a few moments in which a film screening has become a site for some kind of political discussion or activity. What is the importance of film here (e.g. as opposed to a poetry reading or simple discussion group)?

Film can only be a springboard for action, but a screening is also very communal and organizers are probably looking for as many ways as possible to bring people together. So it's a chance to say we’re going to watch and hopefully learn something together.

What’s next up for Several Futures?

The next big thing I’m working on is a film called In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, which just premiered at the New York Film Festival. It was written by Arundhati Roy—technically, the first thing she ever wrote for the public was this film. It’s about students at an architecture school trying to pass their thesis. It's basically an existential  hangout comedy. I was looking at the Letterboxd reviews and it was nice to see young people talking about how they’re dealing with the same issues now. Not to mention that India has had nationwide student protests this year!

Arundhati Roy is someone whose politics I really admire. I heard about the film because she was at the Berlin Film Festival to be on the jury, but also because this restoration was premiering there. She quit the jury because Wim Wenders said he didn’t think film is political. And I think she said something like, “Then what are we even doing here?” I read an article about it and buried in there it mentions that she was there because she wrote about a film. I didn’t know she had a whole film career, I just knew her as a novelist and political essayist. I think a lot of people in America don’t either, so I’m excited for people to discover this film.

Besides her book with us, is there another Verso title you’d particularly recommend to those reading this? 

Everyone should read Walter Rodney!

[book-strip index="2"]