FFCC chair Hans Morgenstern spoke with Miami-based filmmakers Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch about their new documentary The Last Resort. Here’s what they had to say about signing a distribution deal with Kino Lorber and how they went about signing with them.

Before winning awards and audience’s eyeballs, a movie needs connections to movie theaters via a distributor. It’s really the ultimate goal for an independent filmmaker. The Sundance Film Festival is often thought of as the gateway to such success. But Miami-based collaborative documentary filmmakers Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch found global distribution for their new movie, The Last Resort, right in their own backyard.

Scholl, who is also ArtCenter/South Florida’s president and CEO, spoke via phone while driving to this year’s Sundance. “We chose to put the film into the Miami Jewish Film Festival as our world premiere with the idea that if the film was well received, there were very wonderful indie distributors out there that paid very close attention to that festival, and obviously it worked out because we won the festival,” says Scholl noting the film’s Audience Award in 2018.

The movie captures a period in Miami Beach when the city became a mecca for New York retirees, especially Jews, to settle down for their final years. Two young local photographers, Andy Sweet and Gary Monroe, took to documenting this elder generations’ way of life in the area. The mixture of insight into the artists’ differing approach to the subjects and the vivid representation of the lives Sweet and Monroe had captured made for a multi-layered documentary that had more than one distributor interested. “We had three or four offers for distribution,” reveals Scholl, “and we chose Kino Lorber because they are a long-standing indie distributor that doesn’t do just Jewish film…”

(Read the rest in Miami New Times)