The conference is organized by industry veterans representing organizations large and small from every corner of the country, and offers both expansive conversations like that between Jackson and Duncan, as well as a full slate of panels ranging from the practical “The Art of Facilitation,” to the high-minded “Which Should Lead: The Numbers or the Vision?”, to the just-plain-fun “Let’s Make Movie Merch!” There was the usual endless coffee and bubbly water, the beloved “Trailer Wars” pitting in-house custom content in a live winner-take-all tournament at a local bar, the annual survey results of “Art House Audience Trends,” and the usual distributor presentations from major indie players like MUBI, Neon, GKids, Sony Pictures Classics and a special screening of Sorry to Bother You with director (and Art House Theater Day ambassador) Boots Riley holding court. 

Art House Convergence began in 2008 as an annual conference, held in the Utah mountains the week before the Sundance Film Festival (and forged by Sundance Institute’s Art House Project). Like Sundance, the gathering eventually left Utah, but the conference still exists in the years between the larger IND/EX events. These days, the independent non-profit organization—with approximately 2,000 members across North America and Western Europe—serves as a year-round advocacy organization for indie exhibitors.

I’ve been attending the Art House Convergence gatherings for eleven years. First, as a wide-eyed note-scribbler easily awed by the golden sparkle of the smallest bits of insight, now as a hardened prospector in search of the rarest gems of knowledge, but always grateful for the community conversations that reinforce the work and confirm our collective purpose.

This year felt different than any previous post-pandemic year. There were plenty of challenges shared by the programmers, executive directors, and arts workers gathered together to learn, connect, and let loose. Yet the mood was distinctly positive. The existential anxiety of a public health crisis, work stoppages, and the threat of couch-bound streamers had waned enough to open headspace for conversations like “Which Should Lead: The Money or the Vision?”

That panel discussion featured four art house leaders: Cara Ogburn, artistic director of Milwaukee Film; Emelyn Stuart, owner of the Stuart Cinema Cafe; Jamie Webb, development manager at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival; and Lani Simeona, operations and programs supervisor at The Cary Theater (the panel was moderated by Justice Obiaya). Their conversation ping-ponged through the eternal challenge of mission-driven work: How do we prioritize challenging art, audience accessibility, and nurturing new voices while being faithful financial stewards in an industry where money is always tight? Programmatic balance, for one, they suggested. As art houses become critical third spaces, leaders argued that playing big films for local audiences was part of the mission and an important part of building the financial cushion to take other risks. Likewise, they pushed back against the idea that playing classic repertory hits was lazy programming. In their eyes, this was effective audience recruitment. “Know the bangers that work,” in the words of Cara Ogburn, Artistic Director of Milwaukee Film; get new faces through the doors with recognizable films and then introduce them to more challenging work. 

Good box office returns seemed to be underlying much of this tone-shift as plenty of indie exhibitors and festivals were seeing numbers comparable with the pre-pandemic before times. More than one boasted record attendance during the previous year. But this shift wasn’t guided solely by playing bigger titles—it was driven, in part, by the very thing Jackson and Duncan talked about: no matter where I went, I couldn’t escape the sense that everyone was talking about spending endless time and energy into “eventizing” their programming. 

As both a documentary film producer and nonprofit cinema director, I know exactly what they meant. To “eventize” a screening has become common verbiage for acknowledging the value of post-screening dialogues, committed buy-in from community partners, and FOMO-driven crowds. I’ve dropped the word plenty of times myself, often to mean vastly different things. 

One thing is clear: Event cinema isn’t a new phenomenon. But it seems the verb-ing of the word is—you won’t find eventize in the dictionary. The noun, of course, comes from the Latin “eventus,” meaning “occurrence, accident, event, fortune, fate, lot, issue.” More helpfully: “The consequence of anything.”

That feels appropriate to the current state of documentary exhibition in particular, where connecting the dots backward from wide-ranging results can often feel like a fool’s errand. Everything from hard work, good (or even bad) luck, happenstance, persistence—or outright fate—results in outcomes ranging from sold-out screenings mid-week, paltry sales despite a big-name draw, to middling returns on a surefire hit. It’s hard to know what is ever working. Our fortunes are the consequence of anything, or perhaps everything.

The IND/EX attendees, like documentary filmmakers, know first-hand the feeling of organizing a great event, as well as the exhaustion of rebuilding the wheel over and over again. This desire to find a replicable model for singular successes was the center of many of the conversations at the conference. 

Here are some of my non-exhaustive takeaways from my time at IND/EX, gathered from stimulating panels, mostly business meet-ups, bleary-eyed conversations in the coffee line, and hasty reunions over evening drinks.

1. Audiences Are Growing 

On the opening day, the Art House Convergence set the stage by sharing performance results and takeaways from the most recent National Audience Survey, in partnership with Avenue ISR. Box office revenue was up 9% at participating indie theaters in 2025 compared with the prior year. New audiences at these theaters were hyped as driving some of that growth, with 25% of these new patrons saying they first started attending their preferred theater in the last three years, and the average new respondent was 40 years old—11 years younger than the average arthouse moviegoing patron. Across all respondents, 73% agree that the theater “creates a forum for important community conversations,” which is good news for doc makers. But there’s bad news in the data too: patrons 40 and younger were more likely than their older peers to be interested in all 14 surveyed “genres” except one: documentary.

2. Youth-Centered Hope Springs Eternal 

Those young audiences were a hot topic. In a discussion titled “Vibe Check: Harnessing the Power of Gen-Z,” a group of IND/EX volunteers including Charlotte Hensley, Jessica Dortch, and Josh Peterson (all former CineYouth interns at Chicago International Film Festival) held court about the motivations of these new audiences, offering firsthand experience that went beyond the statistics and numbers that so often define them. An overriding interest was a rejection of an overly digitized world. Film prints, shared gasps and laughs in theaters, even small things like punch cards and mementos from screenings, were singled out as key draws for attending in-person screenings. One thing that could help doc filmmakers reach this audience? They respond to word-of-mouth from Letterboxd friends and Instagram Reels, as well as to printed fliers posted in their neighborhoods—things that register as honest, authentic markers of interest from their communities. 

3. Self-Distribution Is Gaining Traction

At “Meet the Distributors?” distributors from Sony Pictures Classics to Greenwich Entertainment manned tables to pitch their films to the circulating programmers. It certainly seemed like fewer documentaries were represented by the established players than I remembered in years past. Perhaps with this in mind, IND/EX also embraced eventizing to present a special one-of-a-kind pop-up event (with great snacks and direct human-to-human networking potential!) called “The Booking Fair,” a joint initiative with Kinema, the tech company looking to facilitate filmmaker-led distribution. The event aimed to boost the profile of 10 film teams (5 documentary and 5 narrative) working without a traditional distributor by putting them in a room with dozens of programming decision-makers. Vibes seemed good, with cheerful film teams giving rapid-fire pitches to circulating programmers, who cautiously expressed a desire to support these projects if they could. 

It wasn’t all traditional distributors at the aforementioned “Meet the Distributors.” Fiction filmmakers like Fucktoys’ Annapurna Sriram and theatrical bookers like Jessica Rosner (Hundreds of Beavers) were also in the room for the second year in a row, still pushing their films for theatrical play, a sign that demand was still strong. Yes, these two films are natural crowd-pleasers, but they did an incredible job of taking the work seriously without taking themselves too seriously. Not everyone can lean into costumed beavers at screenings or tongue-in-cheek sex-positive marketing, but everyone can build genuine relationships with their intended audience. The film teams made themselves available to audiences and created real-world and online communities around their films, all of which extended the theatrical life of their films.