Scottish Documentary Institute

This is the final instalment of our guest blog from filmmaker Karen Guthrie, we hope you've found it enlightening! The self-distribution journey can be a challenging one but as Karen has pointed out the opportunities it affords can take you places you never expected. If more people taking distribution into their own hands means more great documentaries like The Closer We Get out there it can only be a good thing!

In the penultimate instalment of the guest blog Karen Guthrie recalls her experiences of taking The Closer We Get to audiences far and wide. The preparation, the travel, the money (or lack thereof) and the unexpected moments that make it all worth while!

In the second instalment of the blog Karen discusses the highs and lows she traversed after her film, The Closer We Get, moved on from the festival circuit. From distribution woes to the surprising benefits of crowdfunding Karen has great advice for all you indie doc-makers out there!

Karen Guthrie’s The Closer We Get won Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs in 2015. Karen is writing this blog for SDI to provide an insight into elements of her filmmaking practice. However, it’s not the artistic side of things that this blog will focus on, but the arguably less glamorous, murky world of outreach and distribution. In this first edition of the blog, Karen describes how she was thrown, ill-prepared into that world, after she received an unexpected international phone call....