Rachel Leah Jones is the co-director of Advocate.

My co-director Philippe Bellaïche and I had thought for a long time about documenting Lea Tsemel, who is a unique figure in the Israeli political and legal landscape. We always figured that someone else would come along and do it. But no one did. One day, Philippe said to me, “I think that someone is US.” The rest is history. It was more or less that simple. Lea spoke truth to power before the term became trendy and she’ll continue to do so after fear makes it unfashionable. As such, she models an engaged form of citizenship that we’re hard pressed to preserve in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere.

Our primary goal was to tell Lea’s story, i.e., to look at who she is and what she does. Initially, we had an Israeli/Palestinian audience in mind. When we discovered that it would be difficult to finance the project at in Israel and found that it generated great interest abroad, we started to rethink our target audience to include international viewers too. Beyond closing our budget and then getting people to see it, we didn’t really have clear goals other than “make a good movie.”

We hoped to air on various international channels (we have aired on more than we’d hoped) and to screen in theatres internationally (we have screened in less than we’d hoped).

Festival Premiere

We were fortunate to premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, which was our first choice. We had screened our previous documentary there and it felt like a homecoming. It was also the external deadline we needed to get the film finished, no matter what. We reached the festival gasping for air from working so hard and didn’t really have time to court potential buyers or send out screeners for review in advance of the premiere. Our PR and Sales teams did their best—our goals were critical acclaim and sales interest, but we had a weak festival in terms of press and buyers. The audience response was great, though.

We had good dates and times, starting on the first weekend. Our first screening was at the Egyptian, which was nice (though the fact that it coincided with the main HBO event posed a challenge to getting all the people in the room we had hoped to).

Most of the audience outreach for Sundance was handled by our sales agent. Some was handled by our publicist, and some by our co-producers and us. Phillipe and I handled all social media (mostly Facebook, little to no Twitter, little to no Instagram)—to the extent that we had time to—seeing as we delivered the screening master a mere week before the premiere. As I mentioned, we did hire a publicist, but we would have done well to have hired a social media person too. Also, our publicist was limited in what she could do, because we couldn’t provide her with a screener link to pass on to critics in the three to four weeks leading up to the festival.

Much to our surprise, having gotten three trade reviews during our previous Sundance (2012), this time we didn’t get a single one (they followed in the subsequent months). The impression we got was that there were fewer people on the ground in Park City than in previous years, and that documentaries, foreign ones in particular, were at the bottom of the trade editors’ food chain.

Sales Agent

Distribution before, during and after the premiere was handled by our sales agent. We worked with Philippa Kowrsky of Cinephil for the international market and our respective co-producers worked with their go-to distributors, namely Sister Distribution in Switzerland and Filmoption International in Canada. In most territories, deals were made directly with broadcasters. In the U.S. we signed with the distributor Film Movement.

Pre-Sundance Deals

Pending Deals

Most of our sales to date were made during production and we were happy to get what we could so as to finance the film as we made it. A few deals have been made since the film was finished, and our main consideration has been, more or less, to sell to the highest bidder.

Deals after Sundance

After Sundance, the film’s journey on the festival circuit was well under way, but six months out of Sundance, we still hadn’t signed a deal in the U.S. We had a few offers from companies that have a history of handling non-English language “political” docs. We chose to sign with Film Movement for a number of considerations, which I won’t detail here. At that point, we started the dual process of focusing on a theatrical release in the fall to augment our Oscar® campaign (more on that later), and closing a broadcast deal with PBS’ POV.

But to understand the full picture of what happened with the film, we need to back up a few months.

In April, Docaviv, the Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, unveiled the 15 features titles that would be participating in its Israeli Competition. The winner of the Competition would receive up to 150,000 ILS (US$41,357), allocated by Israel’s Mifal Hapais Council for Culture and Arts (Israel’s state lottery company), to mount an Oscar campaign for the best documentary category. Advocate ended up winning the competition at the end of May, but within one month, the Council announced that it was pulling funding for the festival prize, after a pressure campaign from a small group of bereaved families coaxed by the right-wing vigilante group Im Tirzu gained national attention, and was putting the grant under legal review.

To our surprise, the entire arts community stood beside the film. Writers, actors, fine artists, theatre folks demonstrated in early July at the entrance to the Mifal Hapayis building in Tel Aviv to protest the national lottery’s decision to stop the award of the cash prize. Then, after artists withdrew their candidacies for top literary awards, resigned from selection committees, and returned unspent grant money, the Council—in September—retracted its revocation and reinstated the funds back to DocAviv so they could be used for Advocate that year, as well as funding for future films.

At the same time, while all this was going on, we had gotten excited about the chance to do the Oscar® campaign that came with the award. It was right around the time that the money was being taken away in Israel when we signed with Film Movement in the U.S., not really knowing what we were going to do in terms of the campaign. We knew we wanted a theatrical, even though our awards from the Thessaloniki, DocAviv and Krakow film festivals would have Oscar®-qualified us without a week-long engagement. But we hesitated because we now didn’t have the funds in place for the Oscar® campaign and didn’t want to self-invest in something that we didn’t fully understand.

But several colleagues told us to just “go for it” that we would learn new things and meet new people, that we’d get to know our field, our industry, better. And they were right. Finally the Israeli award money was reinstated, and it all worked out. In mid-December we were shortlisted for the Oscar®. Film Movement had wanted to book the film theatrically in the Fall, but we were late to the game and no one had the space, or a strong enough inclination, to give the film a run. But after the shortlist, the bookers got back to Film Movement and the film opened in early January 2020. We were reviewed in the New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg and in the Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan. We were (and still are) 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and had 3-4 week runs at The Quad Cinema in NYC, and at Laemmle’s Monica Film Center and a few other of their theaters around LA, and then around the U.S.

So, in the end, the film did well both at home and abroad despite the protestors, and did better in the U.S. as a result of the shortlisting. While this didn’t translate into cash money, it did boost our careers and it led to me being invite into the Academy. So, there were many silver linings to all of that drama!