SYNOPSIS:
Who Still Pays Attention? Journalism and independent film are confronting the same problem: there is more content than ever, but meaningful attention is increasingly difficult to earn. On Opening Night of Nukhufest 2026, filmmaker and Nukhu founder Sanjay Singh sits down with journalist, critic and filmmaker Valerie Complex and genre journalist and media personality Xero Gravity for a candid conversation about journalism, cinema and the attention economy.
This is not a panel about mourning the death of journalism.
This conversation asks what comes next. What happens when clicks and impressions become more valuable than depth? Can independent journalists build sustainable audiences outside traditional publications? Does becoming a personality strengthen a journalist’s relationship with audiences or compromise the work? What happens to ethics when attention itself is monetized? And whose stories are still considered worth paying for? Then, the same questions are being brought back to independent film.
Do filmmakers actually need the biggest possible audience, or the right intentional audience?
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SYNOPSIS:
Independent film doesn’t survive on individual talent alone. It survives through infrastructure. Sometimes that infrastructure isn’t a studio, distributor, school, funder or festival. It’s another filmmaker sending you a job. A community sharing a grant. Someone introducing you to a producer. A colleague reading your cut. An organizer creating a room where collaborators actually find each other. A network supporting filmmakers when traditional institutions don’t. This conversation aims to venture beyond “networking.” What actually makes a filmmaker community a community? Who is it responsible for serving? How do communities distribute jobs, knowledge, funding and access? How do identity-specific communities preserve the reasons they were created while collaborating across organizations? And what could filmmaker communities build together that none of us can build alone?
At Nukhufest, LaChelle Chrysanne moderates Community is Infrastructure, bringing together people who are actively building those ecosystems:
Brittany Franklin, founder of Minorities in Film; Brandon Nick, filmmaker and host of Film Festival Friends; Kitty Hu, documentary filmmaker and A-Doc Steering Committee Member and Prerana Thakurdesai, producer and co-founder of Bitchitra Collective.
