Public screenings

If your documentary is video-based, another way to showcase your documentary is to organize a public screening. This would involve securing a venue (which could be a university, a local theatre, or even an outdoors location), and promoting the screening (e.g. on social media).

The following articles have advice for organizing a screening (some of the articles have advice specific to the UK, but much of it is generally applicable):

• How to Organise a Film Screening, on 20bedfordway.com
• Film Screenings 101, by Katy Kelly, Communications and Outreach Librarian at the University of Dayton
• How to Show Movies on Campus, by Daria Zavorokhina. Contains information specific to organising a screening at a university
• Best Practices of Film Screening in Libraries
  • Summarized based on Hobbs, R., Deslauriers, E. & Steager, P. (in press). Library Screen Scene: Film and Media Literacy Education in School, Public and Academic Libraries. New York: Oxford University Pres
• 10 Tips for Setting Up Local Screenings of Your Film, by Gina Graham Scott.
• How to organise a film screening, by Mark Norman
• How Do I Organize My Outdoor Cinema Event in 2021?, by Julia Charles Event Management.

Classrooms

Another possibility might be to show your documentary in a classroom. To do this, you may want to reach out to instructors at your university or at other universities who might be interested in screening your documentary as part of a class.

Following up with your audience / Q&A, online surveys, discussions

You may want to interact with your audience after they have seen or listened to your documentary.

For example, if you are planning on organizing a screening of your documentary, you may want to set aside time for a post-screening discussion session where the audience or a panel could talk about the documentary. The handout Best Practices of Film Screening in Libraries contains suggestions for how to organize this discussion structure.

For getting feedback or comments from your audience, you may want to include contact information in your documentary and/or in the description fields of the online platforms where you will be publishing the documentary. For example, you might include a sentence along the lines of: “If you have any questions or comments about the documentary, contact us at name@exampleaddress.com.” If you have a website for your documentary, you could also include a contact form on your website for visitors to send you comments. WordPress, for example, lets you add contact forms to pages.