This is a great continuation of the previous webinars I’ve done for Show&Tell and the D-Word. While this one is for Show&Tell members, you can request a free guest pass.

***

On June 12th, I quit my day job – a well-paid, coveted position as Sales Director at an advertising technology company. For the last four years, I balanced the editing, post-production, festival run and distribution of My Omaha while working this job. And I had reached a breaking point.

This position required (minimum) monthly travel with stressful quarterly sales quota and recurring commitments that fell outside of the usual 9 to 5. It required hustle to be successful.

I had to accept that I could not have it all.

I could not enjoy the security of this job’s income and meet my filmmaking expectations without suffering an immense toll on my personal life. The choice became clear when I realized the impact it was having on my capacity to create. I had no energy. And I needed a refreshed environment where I did not have to tolerate a resentful compromise every morning.

Subscribe now

Fortunately – divinely – the acquisition of My Omaha by Independent Lens1 led to some money that gave me not just a small financial cushion, but also the confidence I needed to commit myself as a working filmmaker.

But I knew I couldn’t live off this acquisition fee forever. So as I tried to envision a more sustainable way to earn money2, I gained some clarity from a conversation with a friend who works in distribution. I was telling them I wanted a new job, but I was unsure of how to break into the filmmaking world in a more steady capacity. They offered this food for thought: why not continue what you do at your job, but for filmmakers? Work for yourself. After pitching this idea to others in the industry, I was getting warm responses. The doc community has a lot of editors, for example, but I didn’t know any digital marketers.

My day job revealed how wildly behind and underrepresented the indie film community was on digital marketing expertise. And for an industry that is becoming increasingly DIY – but without the big budgets to hire an ad agency – I understood there was an opportunity to bring these skills to the world I loved and create a small business for myself while I keep making my own creative work.

So that is what I’ve done with the creation of “Knee Knocker Media.” I am open for business!

In future posts, I’ll wax further about my vision for this new, experimental entrepreneurial path. But for now, I want to highlight a few things I’ve discovered while working on some of my first digital marketing campaigns for filmmakers.

Prepare for verification

“Ads about social issues, elections or politics require a high level of transparency. To get authorized, you’ll need to provide additional information about you and who is responsible for the content and funding of these ads.”

This is direct language from Meta. Many documentary films fit into the ambiguous description of “social issues”, which calls for the extra steps of getting authorized. I’m going through this currently on our campaign for “Breaking The Silence”, a film exploring the little-known dark history of Indian boarding schools, which has been swept under the rug in the United States.

We are running ads to fund the production and post-production of the movie. And this obstacle was new to me, as my previous clientele in the travel industry never required this.

Getting verified basically means ID’ing the person running the ads and creating a “disclaimer” that says “Ads paid for by…” This is Meta’s attempt at reckoning with the massive amount of scrutiny for its past inflow of political ads by suspicious actors.

If you have a film that wades into activism or social issues, prepare for this step. You will need to have a Facebook page that can be registered for verification and someone on your team will need to validate their identity by submitting a photo ID. And if you want to go the extra mile and earn the “Confirmed Organization” label by Meta, prepare to submit documentation that proves the existence of your organization, including your LLC’s Employer Identification Number (EIN).

Sheesh…all that just to run some Instagram ads? Sometimes, yes.

Audience strategy requires creativity

Meta can be unpredictable with its audience targeting options. For example, most medical-related terms are not available. This presented a challenge for my campaign promoting the film Keys, Bags, Names, Words about memory care, as nothing populates when you search dementia or Alzheimer’s. We focused on terms related to neuroscience, gerontology, and home care as a work-around strategy. We also created separate audiences to target “adult parents” (parents with kids 18+) who would be the likely age group of people with affected loved ones. These tactics were validated when we started observing who was following the Instagram account from the ads: neuroscientists, international dementia organizations, and influencers active in the memory care space. In total, we saw more than 40 new Instagram followers after the ads started.

With my campaign for Rescued Hearts, a a powerful new documentary exploring the miracles, mystery, and science of healing with horses, we wanted to go beyond the horse lovers community that the team had already reached through organic means. We decided to expand with two outside-the-box audiences: “animal lovers” (excluding horses) and “nature enthusiasts”, and we saw a surge in results from both.

While the campaign was set up to maximize page visits to their film’s website, we were also measuring clicks on their website to their page by creating a custom event with our Meta pixel (labeled “Kinema leads”), where Rescued Hearts offered a 10-day premium VOD rental opportunity.

Those two niche audiences contributed to thousands of landing page views and nearly half of the Kinema leads from the campaign that we’re still tallying up.

Sometimes these audience limitations can lead to discovering sub-groups that you didn’t anticipate resonating with your story.

We still know better than the machine

As mystical as the ~algorithm~ can seem, it’s not perfect. You have to intervene with context to prevent its zero-sum hard-wiring from delivering results that look good on paper but are hollow in reality.

Where this especially matters is the environments in which your ads run. When you set up a “Traffic” campaign on Meta designed to maximize landing page visits, the platform is going to push your ads to the environments where people are most likely to click. This includes less valuable placements like “Facebook Right Column” placements and spaces where your creative is barely noticed.

When you run with these default pre-sets, your campaign will serve ads across ad slots on the Meta “Audience Network.” This is a sneaky way of placing ads completely off of the Meta platform and onto unknown websites. In short, you have to protect yourself from spam by making manual placement choices.

With Rescued Hearts, the team provided me two formats for the same video – a vertical video for reels and stories (1080x1920 - 9x16) and a horizontal format for feeds and profiles (1080x1350 - 4x5). I set the environment targeting to only target reels and stories for the 1080x1920 size. This was not only to protect the integrity of the impression, but also to minimize any cropping or presentation issues with the video. And while we likely received less impressions for our money, I’m certain the ones we got were of higher quality.

I plan to write more in depth about each of these films I’ve been working on, which all have unique and specific challenges. In the meantime, I hope you’ll join me on Aug. 27th for the Show&Tell webinar.

If you have any questions you want me to answer in our event, leave them below in the comments. And if you’re interested in working with me, let’s talk.

My trip to Washington D.C. for the Fourth of July began with the receipt of a break-up text. It was short-lived, but it was the most optimistic I’ve been about a potential relationship since living in New York. There was an organic, romantic spark that developed instantly. And though I started to detect the feelings were fading, the confirmation still stung.

But I was now on board a southbound Amtrak train towards another fantasy: the celebration of “America 250.” And the question I wondered was not if I could muster a sense of pride for my country, but why I felt so compelled to be there.

I wanted to visit D.C. this summer to see one of my best friends before they moved to Europe. But another part of me felt a need to see this spectacle – a compulsion to look my country square in the face and see if I’d flinch. I sensed an opportunity to witness a history that felt like the last of its kind. Something fleeting. Final.

Subscribe now

In the lead up to my trip, I was reminded of a book I read last year: “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson. It recounts U.S. ambassador to Germany William Dodd’s time in Germany from 1933 to 1937. And the rise of fascism and Nazi zeal is mostly told through stories of parties, balls and receptions. It’s a story of how unthinkable cruelty manifests and normalizes through a slow creep.

Upon arrival in D.C., the first thing I noticed were huge American flags draped across buildings. Maybe it’s unhealthy to compare such pageantry to the swastikas donned across Nazi Germany, but my mind goes there naturally. When the same building that was overrun by (pardoned) insurrectionists is now holding a country concert on its door steps, no thought feels like a stretch.

The main event in D.C. was the “Great American State Fair.” It’s a massive pavilion of booths that spans a large swath of the mall. They are stitched into a façade of fake stone-looking infrastructure that’s built to represent every state, governmental department and a few other conservative-coded designations: “Built in the USA”, “Family and Faith”, etc. The biggest lines I saw were for Florida and the Department of War.

There are plenty of not-so-subtle cues to tell you how to think about America, but as a whole, the fair symbolized a conservative caricature. One that I’m not even sure most conservatives would admit is accurate. To drill down further, I saw the expressions of a group that can’t accept it no longer holds cultural currency. It’s no coincidence that the music I heard – “Love Shack”, “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” – are the same songs you would hear at this event 25 years ago. These were symptoms of an America frozen in time – a live-action museum exhibit.

As I waited to enter the fair, there was a group of seminarians from the Society of Saint Pius X, the ultra-conservative breakaway faction of the Catholic Church. They had just returned from a widely publicized consecration of bishops in Switzerland, which led to the group’s formal excommunication by the Vatican. I spoke with one of the men, a young guy in his early 20’s who grew up in the society and was on the track to priesthood now. He told me he prays for the pope “every day” about the schism.

When you have all the answers, of course traditionalism feels like the only way. That’s what this all represented to me. The last gasp of a particular American society clinging desperately, defiantly, to their perceived sense of control.

I think part of my journey here was to admit that I crave this desire, too. I understand longing for a time and place where things feel less berserk. Manufacturing your own reality as a coping mechanism is understandable. It’s just dishonest.

Even amidst cultures and environments where I never felt like I belonged, at least the future felt…promised. My challenge now was whether or not I could see a future beyond the political-and-technologically-induced abyss that I’ve allowed to occupy its space.

The fair’s atmosphere reminded me of the carnivals I attended as a kid. But here, it was MAGA hats and shirts that said “never surrender” that provoked an implicit hostility. I realized how thick my New York bubble has become. But I also felt proud of how much New York represents a less fearful vision for the country’s future.

Zohran Mamdani has sparked the most effective political engagement with young people anywhere in the country. The city has united strangers in joy and ecstasy for the Knicks and the World Cup. I’m proud to live somewhere that seems to be one of a few beacons of light amidst an otherwise darkening picture. Can that spread, or at least be sustained?

With more Democratic Socialist candidates making their way into congress, prepare for “communism” to sit front-and-center in the culture wars. It was already littered throughout Trump’s weather-delayed Fourth of July speech. As the movement grows, the reactionary panic to it will, too. Especially from the left.

How quickly the light can fade.

Every 30 minutes-to-an-hour a military flyover happened over the mall. It reminded me of the air shows my parents took me to near Offutt Airforce base growing up. Raw patriotism. Each flyover turned the crowd into zombies staring up at the sky. I can admit that a F-16 Fighter Jet doing tricks in the air makes for a remarkable show.

The celebration in D.C. was headlined by its much-anticipated fireworks display and the promise of detonating a world-record 850,000 shells. I watched every explosion with reverence. Perhaps the festivities are working on me.

“Dr. Hegseth or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fireworks.”

Subscribe now

As I listened to Trump’s speech, I wondered aloud to my friends how anyone from the future will know what he said to be real or AI? I once naively assumed that someone in power with regulatory authority would ensure that our sense of reality is protected.

But could that be the tipping point that actually saves us? Maybe the proliferation of AI can unite America to hear and touch and smell one another in the physical world to cultivate a sense of community that’s not dependent on the weakness of choice, but the strength of necessity?

Or am I guilty of nostalgia for a past that is never coming back? Of longing for a culture that will never not be dependent on – and thus diminished by – the technology of the internet?

This is my delusion to reckon with. And maybe it’s what ultimately drew me to D.C. for America 250. Even amidst the ugliness, at least it’s real. Whether that’s better or worse than what lies ahead represents the ultimate question going forward.

On my train ride home, rain dotted the windows and brought the heat down below 100 degrees for the first time in three days.

Sometimes I feel like the best thing about milestones is when they’re over. I used to take comfort during “ordinary time” at church growing up. No build up to Christmas or Easter. Just time. Maybe because when you’re not distracted by something exceptional, you absorb the overlooked details that actually define your life.

Time also gives you the space to dream. And what more are dreams than the manifestation of hope?

I’m quietly comforted when I meditate and see a flashback to a moment of my younger self. It’s often something unremarkable but sensory – like the neighborhood pool or the elementary school music room. The smells and sounds come back in my mind when I close my eyes. How amazing it is to me that the person I was then dreamed of being the person I am now.

May I have the courage to dream again.

I have a vision of taking MY OMAHA on tour across Nebraska. For example, starting in Scottsbluff and heading south towards I-80 East, I would love to organize screenings in North Platte, Kearney, and Grand Island, go north to Columbus, Norfolk and Wayne, and host events anywhere else in the state that would have us.

There’s something uniquely American about the road trip. And within MY OMAHA, road trips appear throughout the movie, including two major moments in the end of the film. Getting on the road to show this movie is something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

With the midterms coming up, including a fascinating race for a Nebraska senate seat between Pete Ricketts and Dan Osborn, there’s never been a more urgent time to discuss what it really means to see the opposing side. What does it look like to have dialogue in such a fractured and despondent moment in time? I want to have those conversations. (Speaking of the senate, I have been trying to reach Ben Sasse about our film for the last few months. If you’ve followed the news, you know why. Suggestions welcomed)

I have met many people in Omaha who grew up in small towns and continue to reckon with a widening gap of disconnection and misunderstanding with their loved ones back home on a multitude of issues. MY OMAHA was made to facilitate this exact kind of reflection.

The problem is that my connections in small-town Nebraska are limited. To make this idea a reality, we need to form partnerships in each town to co-host these events.

Do you have friends, family or coworkers in other parts of Nebraska who would partner with us? We’re looking for churches, community centers, theaters – any place that can host an audience – and organizations who share our mission and can amplify our event throughout the community. If you have ideas, please let us know. I’ve created this Google Form to collect submissions.

Subscribe now

A great example of what’s possible is that we are bringing the film to Creighton on September 30th for students, faculty and staff. The same model applies to any organization, small or large.

I’m also looking for sponsors who can help us pay for travel and other logistical needs to pull this off. My goal is to make these screenings free to maximize turn out and engagement. We’re open to any and all ideas in this department. And if you feel personally inspired to contribute yourself, we take tax-deductible donations through our fiscal sponsor here.

I hope to see you on the road this Summer or Fall!

You can listen to the My Omaha soundtrack on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music and other platforms.

Collaborating on the score for My Omaha was a creative highlight for me in this long, roller-coaster ride of moviemaking. I was extremely lucky to work with composer Sarah Lynch, who had just recently completed the music for the beautiful film Joan Baez I am A Noise, directed by our consulting editor Maeve O’Boyle. Maeve did a lot of the heavy lifting by choosing strong temporary tracks to shape our edit. Now it was time to replace them with our own original music.

To begin the process, I shared a playlist of music from film scores I liked with Sarah. It was an intimidating starting point. I wanted a score that felt urgent, operatic and distinctly American. In the end, I believe the music is one of the strongest factors towards the emotional weight of the movie.

Allow me to take you behind the curtain on four tracks and how we approached them.

“My Omaha” – the main theme has a big job to do. We have to open the film, set the tone for the movie, and introduce the musical sounds that would recur throughout. Right away, the strings in the opening minute introduce a heavy weight to these opening shots. Juxtaposed with a seemingly happy VHS home movie memory and my personal introduction, we’ve set up the central struggle of the movie. After the swell around the 1 minute mark, when the title comes up, we needed to launch forward into the story. We’re seeing protests…it’s 2016…there are people in the streets…I love the momentum that Sarah generates with this powerful mandolin riff. The fast-paced tempo pairs well with the energy of the visuals. It’s a sound that will come up again and again later to signal the struggle of the tale of two cities. There is something vintage in the sound that accentuates the timelessness of this American struggle.

“Anointed” – This is my favorite piece on the soundtrack. The anointing of the sick scene is one of the most emotional moments of the film. Our editing team did a masterful job of cutting the scene down to a point where it’s an atmospheric experience – the natural sounds from the priest, the faith group, and the close-up on faces tell the story. I wanted to introduce an element of the divine with the music for this scene. I was having a spiritual experience and I wanted the audience to feel that, too. I also wanted to convey the pain of the unspoken: that we we were forced to confront the harsh reality of my dad’s diagnosis. I fell in love with the symphonic power that Sarah created with these strings. There is something mystical to it that still gives me chills. These instruments help make an intimate, family moment feel larger than life. For a long time my note to Sarah was that I never wanted to come off the high that the cue launches from, I selfishly wanted it to keep that going forever. But gracefully, she gently winds the track down into a genius transition.

One of the most challenging parts of the editing process were the transitions between scenes at home with my dad and scenes in the city with Leo and other participants. Coming out of this anointing scene, we needed to give the audience a moment to breath. In this next scene, we’re going to learn a lot more about Leo. It’s a scene with some of the most exposition in the movie and it was important to maintain our rhythm underneath it. I love the light percussion that Sarah brought into the second part of this track that keeps us moving along. The subtle, underlying mandolin brings us into another powerful swell with the big strings when Leo reaches the climax of the scene: speaking directly to the people on his live stream. I remain in awe of the scope of what Sarah achieved with this single track and how it enhanced the connectivity of the movie.

“Saved the City” – This is about Leo’s moment. The track’s title says it all. By this point, we have set the stage for this scene and its gravity, I simply wanted to elevate the moment without overshadowing it. The cue begins with a dark tone as we see protestors in the distance, vandalized buildings, and learn that Jake Gardner was not charged for killing James Scurlock. Nobody in Omaha knew what was going to happen next in the wake of this chaos. I wanted that sense of unease and anxiety to come through in the lead up to Leo’s speech.

Once we get to the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, the cue shifts from dark to light. There is hope in the air from Leo’s message. I particularly love the vibrations that echo in the background underneath the strings. But it is short-lived. The music comes back down to the earth right when the visual transitions us back to “normal” (a fade cut from a street filled with marchers to a street filled with usual traffic).

At the very end, the mandolin riff comes back in full form to remind us that the tale-of-two-cities struggle endures.

“The Truth” – My visit to Lambertville, N.J. to see Bill Jersey married our two storylines together – the story of Omaha and the struggle between me and my dad. This scene is about enlightenment and catharsis. I love that Sarah begins the cue with what sounds like a lightbulb moment going off in my head. It was the perfect music to prepare the audience for one of the most direct and important lessons of the story (hence the track’s title).

Subscribe now

It was important at this point in the film to signal we are reaching the end. This is one of the many masterful touches that consulting editor Maeve O’Boyle and editor Jordan Montminy brought to the edit with their work on the film. Once I get back on the road, the score charges us into the next scene and sustains a propulsion that was important in bringing the film home (literally and metaphorically). Ironically, one of the things Bill said to me off camera was that one of the biggest challenges I would have in my film was how to wrap it up after my dad passed away. Well, thank you Bill for helping us with our third act!

I’d love to know what you think of the music. Take a listen and share your thoughts in the comments. I can’t wait to go through this process again on another film.

It’s no secret that the traditional methods of distributing a film are no longer viable for indie filmmakers. The institutions that were once relied on to reach audiences have either disappeared or greatly diminished. So in this new world of “self-distribution”, the model is to own the process from the beginning and learn how to do things yourself: crowdfund, keep your rights and distribute directly to your audience.

But what about marketing your movie? If you manage the improbable feat of completing a feature film that is good enough to get into a notable film festival, that movie still won’t sell itself.

So in a world where the filmmaker is expected to be an expert on every stage of the process, I possess a unique advantage having balanced a parallel career in the digital advertising industry. I’ve worked for nearly ten years managing social media marketing campaigns for the travel industry while making my film My Omaha. I applied those skills to marketing my film’s theatrical run and I want to share the lessons I’ve learned with other filmmakers who are on their own distribution journey.

Here are my five key lessons to advertising an independent film online.

Organic social media is not enough

You know the term “pay to play"? That’s the reality of getting reach in the social media ecosystem. These free platforms are economically powered by ads. If you want to be seen by new people, you have to pay for it. But beyond this truth, organic social is also a massive time commitment for independent filmmakers. Creating a single post can take hours. As creatives, we tend to get too precious with the content we make to promote our movies. This trap can lead to missed opportunities during your release window. Because unless you are manually churning out a message 7+ times, you are not doing enough. Research from the Journal of Advertising Research shows that at least ten exposures are necessary to maximize someone’s purchase intent.

Following the “time is money” logic, organic social vs. paid ads is “time vs. money.” But EVEN IF you have the time and enjoy the process of making organic posts, you are still playing the long game of growing a social media following from the ground up while throttling your reach to the mere dozens or hundreds of people who follow you. This is in contrast to the thousands or hundreds of thousands of new people you can reach by investing in ads.

The beautiful part about ads on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube is that they don’t feel like ads. Promoting your trailer genuinely just feels like a discovery when it reaches the right person, who won’t say “I saw your ad.” They’ll say “I found your film on Facebook.”

“Boosting” posts is not an advertising strategy

There are levels to social media marketing. To truly maximize your advertising potential, you need to set up a paid social campaign. In Meta, this means making sure your Facebook and Instagram accounts are connected to a Meta Business Suite account. From there, either you or a professional marketer can set up a campaign in Ads Manager. This is where you can really get granular. It’s how you set your budget, goal type, targeting, pixels, and ad creation. This is where you ensure that your campaign is set up exactly for your goals and to reach the precise type of person you have in mind.

When simply “boosting” a post, which Meta allows you to do from within your regular Facebook account, you are handing over your money to the platform without giving it any true guidance. Building a campaign gives you the decision making power to invest your marketing money where you want it to go.

When you are setting up a campaign on Meta, you have the ability to target people based on their interests, career, demographics (age, gender, language) and more.

When running the Meta campaign for My Omaha in Chicago, I only targeted people in Chicago who: like documentaries, are interested in Nebraska and who identify as a community organizer or activist. This led to a 15% click-thru-rate on the ads (1-2% is considered the general benchmark, which we blew out of the water).

You already have your ads

If you have film stills, you have ads. If you have a trailer, you have a great ad. If you can cut a 30 or 60 second snippet from your trailer, you have an amazing ad. By combining this material with pull quotes from reviews or a call to action (“playing at x theater on this date”) you have everything you need.

Meta also has the ability to expand on this further for you. If you allow it, the platform will generate additional headlines and descriptions and test these out on different audiences. It is like having your own personal copywriter that is making daily tweaks based on what’s working.

Ad generation with your existing assets can occur in a matter of seconds.

It’s less expensive than you think

If you are just one film, you can get a lot of mileage from a modest advertising budget.

When promoting My Omaha in Chicago for our run at the Siskel Film Center, I put $200 dollars to work on Meta. Targeting only the Chicago area, we reached 23,000 unique people with 3,854 link clicks to the page to buy tickets. Our ad was shared 30 times, “saved” 29 times, and I added 3 new followers to our Instagram page.

The My Omaha Instagram only has 449 followers. For the same amount of money it cost to print 250 post cards and 10 branded hats, I was able to reach thousands of people interested in movies like mine.

In this example, we are talking about the minimum potential impact. When it comes to promoting roadshows, campus tours, and multi-city theatrical runs, you should be investing at least this amount per city if not more. And for a T-VOD release, crowdfunding campaign and awards campaigns, it is best to take a burst approach by loading up a significant investment into 1-3 months to maximize a limited opportunity that only comes around one time.

There will be times when you are competing for attention against other advertisers where investing more budget is also to your advantage. The bigger you scale the more results you will get.

Subscribe now

Working smarter not harder

Every director’s goal is to find someone who can take this kind of work off our plate so we can focus on making the next movie. So how do you find that balance of making the most out of your premiere window while not suffocating in busy work?

Remember when you’ve been at a film festival and marveled at that one director who really went the extra mile to promote their movie? The person who is stapling posters to every blank surface and handing out cards to strangers on the street. We all admire this hustle. So why aren’t we applying the same energy to digital strategies that are dramatically more efficient and effective?

The beauty of advertising online is it’s backed by data. When you put up a flyer, you are hoping that the location and timing of your placement is giving you the most bang for your buck. With online ads, you don’t have to guess. You already know that the people you’re reaching are your best bet.

The internet is the ultimate source of discovery. There are people looking for movies just like yours and they will be excited to find your work. Will you give them the opportunity?

I’m excited to join Keith Ochwat of Show&Tell on May 7th for a webinar to discuss social media advertising in deeper detail. You can register for this free event here.

Got questions? Looking for help marketing your movie? I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment or email me at nick@omahadoc.com. I’ll be sharing more insights on Substack about advertising for independent film.

Share Nick Beaulieu on Substack

Chicago! My Omaha is coming to a screen near you.

I will be at the Siskel Film Center April 3 and 4 for post-film Q&A’s. Leo Louis II will be with me, too.

We have amazing moderators, including Friday and Sylvia Ewing on Saturday.

Friday night, we will have a post-film mixer with help from our great partners at Kartemquin Films.

To my Chicago network, I hope I see you there. Please tell a friend and help us spread the word. You can get tickets here.

Chicago was the destination for one of the out-of-state family vacations we went on in my youth, and I have fond memories of Wrigley Field, The Willis Tower and a pilgrimage to see the Michael Jordan statue outside of the United Center.

Shoutout to Jim Browne at Argot Pictures for making this booking possible.

In other “My Omaha” news, 2026 has been a fruitful year for community engagement. So far we’ve had nine community screenings, mostly in Nebraska. Our partners have included UNMC, UNO’s department of Black Studies, UNO’s English Department, Second Unitarian Church of Omaha, Big Mama’s Kitchen, Countryside Community Church, Notre Dame Sisters, UNL Department of Ethics. And there’s more on the way!

If you want to bring the film to your community, we are actively booking screenings with the help of Carrot Impact. Fill out the form here to explore this opportunity.

I’m learning a lot about the spectrum of distribution – from owning the process with tools like Gathr, to opportunities in the legacy media space that we’re excited to announce soon. Much more to share on all of that soon in future posts.

Cheers,

Nick Beaulieu

At the 2019 edition of Sundance, one of the films I saw was “David Crosby: Remember My Name.” Crosby died in 2023, but he was there that night and his presence brought down the house. Much of the Q&A focused on the activism in his music. He was key in helping Neil Young get “Ohio” from the studio to the radio in a flash – creating an urgent protest anthem that still packs a punch.

That night in Park City, Crosby said “we need a fight song for today.” It gave me chills. It was true then and it’s damn true now.

From “Ohio”, released 56 years ago.

Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down

Should have been gone long ago

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?

Rest in peace Renée Good, Alex Pretti and all victims of this ongoing state-sponsored terrorism. Here is a link on how to support mutual aid groups in Minneapolis.

***

I want to tell a story about a key shift in the making of “My Omaha” – my solo trip to Sundance in 2019.

The night before my flight to Salt Lake City, I was at the home of my cinematographer James Zanders. We were experimenting with song choices for a teaser I wanted to have with me at the film festival.

I have never shared this teaser publicly, but I want show just how much the vision evolved from the earliest days of inspiration. And also, as a peak into my headspace entering this trip. Back then, the film had the title “How much sleep have you lost?” You’ll hear it in the teaser from Project K.N.O.S.E. founder Robert Wagner.

Behold…the very first footage ever assembled for what later became My Omaha.

At Sundance, I was in full networking mode. Meaning…I would talk to anybody. People in line who had no choice but to talk with me. Volunteers (many of whom are aspiring filmmakers). People on the shuttles (I met Ciro Guerra’s son this way). And people in the cinema itself. Shamelessly, I used to choose my theater seat based on what appeared like the best networking opportunity.

The first film I saw was “Native Son” by Rashid Johnson. And to my amazement, the person I sat next to worked at a company that funded social issue documentaries. “This is destiny!” I thought to my astonished self. While this person was only mildly interested in my project, he was kind enough to share his contact info, and when I followed up, he shared tickets with me for the film he was there to support - “Always In Season.”

Subscribe now

Basking in this stranger’s generosity, I attended the screening and managed to meet the director of that film, Jackie Olive, for three seconds amidst her post-premiere frenzy. It was enough time to thank her for her incredibly moving film and get her business card.

Jackie would go on to be a key voice for me, graciously sharing advice when coming through Omaha for the Omaha Film Festival. And again, years later, when we ran into each other at Hot Docs in Toronto near the end of post-production.

Jackie’s most prescient message to me was a challenge to figure out what I wanted to say with my film. It felt almost like non-advice at the time. But I was continuously reminded of her words when various editors asked me the same thing during our edit…when it became clear how often I didn’t know what I wanted say.

Most of my Sundance experience in 2019 was a humbling reality check. Coming out of Omaha, I was isolated from the film industry. I had not yet found online communities like the D-Word. Besides a few friends with the same experience as me, I was on my own. I’m grateful for Brooke Masek, one of my old colleagues at Film Streams, who encouraged me to take this trip and joined me halfway through.

But for most of the time, I was a lonesome soul wandering the streets of Park City, hoping for some chance encounter that I thought could change my film-life. I see now how flawed that mindset was.

My luck, and my joy, began to shift when I discovered another film festival happening on the same street. Enter: Slamdance.

I was in a very long line for pizza – a line that I believe never ended – when I turned to the group behind me to chat. It’s how I met programmer Brian Ratigan, the mastermind behind non films and the ever-important DarkRoom screening series in NYC. Brian took me under his wing and welcomed me into his pack, where I met other Slamdancers and immediately felt at home. I never looked back. I saw some of my favorite films ever here, including the phenomenal Desolation Center by Stuart Swezey.

But it was the fast-and-loose style and camaraderie that made the biggest lasting impression. No one asked for my badge when I snuck into the filmmaker happy hour. No one cared that I was crashing on the floor of their rental the same day I met them. I had finally found what I had been looking for, but didn’t even know I needed: a sense of community.

Before I left Utah, I still had Sundance tickets. And I felt pressure to maximize my time at the center of the indie film universe. In line again, I struck up a conversation with the significant other of a filmmaker. By a massive stroke of luck, I actually knew this filmmaker…who later joined us in line. I met them in 2016 during my Film Streams interning days as they came through town to show their film.

It had been three years now and our initial encounter was a much bigger deal to me as an aspiring filmmaker. But given the moment, I eagerly told them what I was working on. I pitched the original origin story for “My Omaha” – the tale of two cities, the struggle for racial justice, the profiles of tireless activists. As I rambled, with the newly-minted false confidence of a 25-year-old white guy, I will never forget what happened next. Very casually, they asked: “why are you the person to tell that story?”

Beyond citing Omaha as my hometown, I didn’t have a very strong answer – not only for the blindspots and biases in my perspective, but, truly, for what made my voice unique to this story.

When I went back to my room that night, I kept unpacking this exchange in my head. “Why am I the guy to make this movie?”

It was from this experience that I began to seriously consider making “My Omaha” a personal film.

***

I had a phone call with my dad when I was in Utah for the festival. It was memorable… not because of what we said, but because of what we couldn’t say. I was staying at a hostel in Salt Lake City for $30 a night. I had to take 45-minute Ubers to-and-from Park City to be at the festival. I had a lot of time to kill.

In this phone call, I can still hear the dead air between our turns to speak. It was as if neither of us was expressing any emotion at all, but the wrong word might trigger all of the emotion to pour out. Three months later, he was diagnosed with Stage-4 Pancreatic cancer. And the film I was supposed to be making really began.

Fast forward five years: I don’t get into Sundance. A disappointment, as much as I tried to pretend it wasn’t. No matter the prospects, it’s most filmmaker’s dream. I still remember donors from across Omaha asking “when are you playing Sundance?” as if it was a foregone conclusion.

But more fittingly, in what still feels like divine intervention, I got into Slamdance – the festival that took me in when I was lost and trying to find my way. “My Omaha” was not a film born out of a documentary lab program or nurtured by advisors attached to a major grant. It was made off the track, if you catch my drift. It is a Slamdance film. And bringing it into the world at their first-ever edition in Los Angeles is my proudest artistic achievement to-date.

The humbling lesson of 2025 was learning how to take festival rejections on the chin and not let that define how I perceived my own movie. It was a necessary coping strategy for a five percent acceptance rate.

But you only need one to feel the love and respect you deserve for completing a feature film. And I got that at Slamdance and at the amazing Ashland Film Festival and Middlebury New Filmmakers Film Festival. And better yet, bonding with all of my fellow filmmakers who had gone through similar struggles has led to some of the deepest friendships I have.

No festival should define the quality of your film. But the right one can reveal where you belong.

I’ll be attending Slamdance next month like I did Sundance in 2019 - without a film in the program. But this time feels more like a homecoming than a voyage into the great unknown.

And those big questions – like “what do you want to say?” – haven’t gone anywhere as I think about the nebulous nature of my next film.

As Doug Block wisely told me once, it never gets easier with each film. You just know more people.

More people to annoy, that’s for sure.

If you see me in line, you’ve been warned.

I have been stuck since My Omaha was released into the world. That film was the obsessive centerpiece of my life for nearly 10 years. And now that it’s finished, I’m struggling to decide where to go next. No story has felt mighty enough in comparison. I’ve started and stopped pursuing several ideas, knowing deep down that it’s not because the concept is bad, but because something is holding me back from diving into the well again.

A few months ago, I got a message that was too loud and too direct to ignore. Two nights before our premiere in Omaha, I had a dream with my Dad. These dreams happen, and when they do, they’re emotional. But this was the most vivid of them all. It was more like a visitation. I can still see him now. And even though I can’t remember all that happened, I felt a warmth, a love, and an excitement that has stayed with me. I believe it was my dad giving his blessing as I nervously prepared to release “My Omaha” to our hometown, where so many friends and family would be seeing it for the first time. There is one thing he said that was crystal clear: “Don’t stop writing.”

How convenient I have to concede, as I attempt to defend the existence of another Substack launched into the online infinity. And it’s true that I have sleep issues – falling asleep, staying asleep, sleep talking, which often involve hallucinations and mutate into the worst extreme: sleepwalking. It’s not lost on me that this visit from Dad may be the manifestation of a message I simply want to hear. But if that’s the case, I accept that. In fact, please, brain, give me more of this if that’s true! I love being told what to do.

Many people come up to me after seeing “My Omaha” seeking wisdom to address their own situation. Alongside community activist Leo Louis II, it’s been moving to connect with audiences right after they see it. The film speaks strongly to parents and children who have a relationship that echoes the one in the film. But I had an edge. My dad’s cancer created a pressure that we took advantage of when we began rekindling our relationship. Had that never happened, there might not be a “My Omaha.” In the absence of such a blatant inciting incident, the only advice I can give anyone is to simply begin. You have to start from somewhere. I’m finding that now is a moment when I need to take my own advice again.

I’ve learned that when you break from one of your parents, not only are you prone to more conflict, you also jeopardize the foundation you were given in favor of something less-developed and unproven. It’s the price you pay for independence. In my interview with the legendary director Bill Jersey from “A Time for Burning”, he said it quite well in one of the moments that didn’t make our final cut:

“Your struggle is to think for yourself, not to throw off the old thoughts that you got from your parents just for the sake of throwing something off, but for the sake of promoting you to think new. And that can be a lonely enterprise. That can be a scary enterprise because all of what held you to the ground, all of what rooted you to a sense of reality and a sense of purpose and a sense of wellbeing, you’re pulling out all your roots. And the tree’s gonna wobble. When the roots are weak and the wind blows, the tree wobbles.” -Bill Jersey

I can be envious of friends who share the same politics, religious beliefs and overall philosophies of their parents. ‘How simple and easy life must be from them’, I speculate from a place of jealousy. But I’ve learned that this is part of what makes me who I am. And the journey of trying to understand myself and where I come from is perhaps the most motivating factor in my work. Accepting this, rather than fighting it, has given me more peace in the present and allowed for more grace towards a past that I continue to grapple with.

But it is exhausting to maintain an ongoing analysis about the big questions. There is a certain immaturity in wallowing constantly. And too often, this anxiety creeps into other areas of my personal life and wreaks havoc. I would like to arrive at some of life’s great insights through present, natural experience. Maybe it’s time to grow up a little. Self-flagellation is no more noble, either. Sometimes you simply need to tell yourself to shut up.

Subscribe now

Another challenge of my post-premiere life has been maintaining optimism about the American divide. As someone who dedicated so much time towards this, I can feel guilty about the hopeless feelings that bubble up about our collective future.

Back in October, I drove from Omaha to Des Moines for our 70-plus-theater IRL Movie Club premiere. On my drive, I saw what looked like a pirate’s flag on someone’s property that said “avenge Charlie Kirk’s death.” It was a chilling reminder of the response that had disturbed me deeply after his killing. It brings to mind a provocative, but wholly justified, question: how do you act when many on the “other side” have declared that they are at war with you? In the most simple terms: you have to listen to them.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not equipped for any type of physical conflict. But I’ve resigned to the reality that we are trapped in a “us vs. them” powder keg as long as Trump is in office…and perhaps much longer after as we reckon with the MAGA doctrine. I trust that there are millions of Americans with different politics than mine who I’m capable of connecting with. I will do my best to prioritize compassion over skepticism. But you can’t underestimate the consequence of leadership and the chilling foresight from witnessing the consent of cruelty.

Recently I’ve been volunteering with an organization called 826 New York that offers creative writing programs for kids. In December, a second grade class was bused in and the students were given two hours to come up with their own original story. I enjoyed facilitating the creation of “Pete the Super-Hotdog.” But what stuck with me was witnessing these kids beaming with positivity, untethered from technology, capable of direct criticism, willing to listen and share with one another. They were model citizens in the pursuit of any endeavor.

Is the secret to surviving all of this learning how to be a kid again?

My first love was with a novel at the age of 8. I’ve created this Substack because I miss writing. Beyond my desire for a more frequent creative outlet, one of my goals here is to provide an insight that is missing in the realms of Indie and NonDē filmmaking : how to advertise your movies online.

Anyone who has made a feature within the last 10 years knows that for 99% of us, you have to take distribution into your own hands. But what about marketing your movie online? I’ve worked for ten years and counting at a digital advertising company while making “My Omaha”, and I plan to share what I’ve learned to help filmmakers market their world premieres, theatrical runs, crowdfunding campaigns and VOD releases. I also have a lot to say about the costs and benefits of making a film while balancing a full-time job.

I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t interested in the creative challenges that await. I’m working to rediscover my voice. But I’m already battling thoughts telling me this is a futile, pointless endeavor.

Why toil over a sentence when AI can generate thousands in a minute? Why offer something that takes five minutes to read when people can’t concentrate for three?

Why do anything anymore except sleep, eat, and doomscroll into a blissful, numbed sedation?

“Don’t stop writing.”

Maybe being wrong is the only human contribution we have left.

My time has finally come.