Distribution:

Brazil has a considerable amount of legislation whose goal is to finance cultural production, including film, through tax return mechanisms (refer to Incentive Laws on page 8). Since we plan on fully financing this documentary using grants and tax-deductible sponsorships, and due to the pressing nature of the message behind our work, the production has decided to distribute the film with no profit whatsoever.

We plan on maximizing the total amount of viewers, both Brazilian and international, creating an international network of PBS’s to do so. This has worked with World Bank sponsored documentaries.

We will also distribute the film (and non-profit duplication rights for an HDTV quality master) over the Internet so as to get an additional boost and generate a positive image for the product and its sponsors.

Distribution in Brazil will consist of a three-pronged strategy: theatres, tv and schools. Quite a few theatres have special promotions with admissions at symbolic rates (less than a dollar)on specific dates and times. We expect no more than 20 thousand spectators, but plan on using this for media awareness purposes. Television, on the other hand, can get us quite some eyeballs. Brazil’s largest PBS station, TV Cultura, gets as many as 500 thousand viewers in São Paulo alone on some of its shows. While these are pathetic numbers by primetime standards, they are far from negligible when considering public television.

On the international level, we plan on substituting theatrical exhibition for film festivals. While festivals screen to even smaller audiences than we plan for Brazilian theatrical exhibition, these viewers are selected amongst buyers for tv stations. Additionally, we plan on approaching PBS’s worldwide directly with a proposal to air the film for free. PBS’s tend to have a chronic lack of quality programming and we are planning our distribution to address this issue.

We believe that we may reach a global viewership of 2 million people over a 3 year period. One of our partners was responsible for international distribution of the widely acclaimed “City of God” (2002) and we have developed an extensive distribution network, as well as a solid relationship with many high-end festivals.

The Internet has a potential viral disseminationthat makes it quite unpredictable. Free distribution, if it catches the public eye (the media’s as well), can give the total amount of spectators a serious boost. We will use the P2P (Peer To Peer) technology to make the film freely available in its HDTV version, and will also publish streaming video versions on sites such as Youtube. 2,000 copies will be distributed among public schools, universities and libraries in Brazil.