The publicly-available scoring leaderboard of the Sidewinder Films Award contest.
Like many filmmakers, L.A.-based director Hyunsoo Moon was looking for money to help complete his years-in-the-making feature documentary, The Americans, which follows the lives of refugees who work in the meatpacking industry in Iowa. In 2023, he heard about a contest sponsored by a new blockchain-based film company called Decentralized Pictures. In partnership with nonfiction outfit Sidewinder Films (producers of CNN’s Citizen Ashe and PBS’s Munich ’72 and Beyond), the contest promised US$200,000 in completion funds. Moon, along with 34 other projects, decided to apply.
“I wasn’t expecting much,” admits Moon. “And then my film got a lot of good ratings, and we put a lot of effort into campaigning for it and getting our friends and family to vote for it, and then we got first place [in the voting].” When the contest ended over a year ago, on February 12, 2024, Moon was expecting big things. First, he needed the contest’s hosts to decide on the winner.
But after months and months of waiting to find out if he had won the Sidewinder Films Award, frustrations started to pile up. Between Moon and several of his fellow filmmakers, they were disappointed in everything from the voting process to the ways the winners would ultimately be chosen to repeated delays about the status of the prize. “I think their intentions are good,” says Moon, “but for this particular award, it felt like a big fiasco: I didn't feel like they cared about us, and we were totally left in the dark."
Earlier today, Decentralized Pictures (DCP) finally announced the winners, Kachi Benson’s The Queens of Lagos (which came in 7th place in the voting) and Baylee Sinner’s Where the Rope Ends (which ranked 26th). The projects will split the prize pool for US$100,000 in finishing funds each, but the final results did little to quell many filmmakers’ grumbles. “Why even have a contest if you’re going to disregard the votes?” says Brian Tessier, producer of The Americans. “That’s not democratizing anything.”
What happened?
Founded four years ago, Decentralized Pictures is a nonprofit organization that gives awards to filmmakers through its platform based, in part, on the scores they receive from the platform’s users. The company—whose mission is “democratizing the film industry”—has some big supporters. In addition to filmmaker Roman Coppola and his family’s American Zoetrope studio, which helped found DCP, their board includes veteran indie agent Bart Walker and director Sofia Coppola. In 2022, veteran director Steven Soderbergh offered US$300,000 to Decentralized for a series of awards.
While some filmmakers who have participated in Decentralized’s contests have been enthusiastic about the company and the funds they’ve received, the Sidewinder Films Award revealed some deeper issues at the company. The delays, it turned out, were because Sidewinder Films and its parent nonprofit, the Foundation for Global Sports Development, were dissolved after the founder died in March 2023.
While Decentralized offers the promise of a new paradigm that many filmmakers are yearning for, particularly right now as traditional funders—from larger media companies to cash-strapped nonprofits—have cut back on supporting independent documentaries, the company’s Sidewinder “fiasco” also reveals the growing pains and uncertainties that often come with game-changing ideas and new technologies.
Cryptocurrencies and Algorithms
Understanding the way DCP works requires getting into detail about technologies that few filmmakers understand well. To enter one of DCP’s contests, filmmakers must first purchase the company’s cryptocurrency tokens ($FILM). The contests often have a sponsor or donor, from Sidewinder to Soderbergh to Fujifilm, or might be sponsored by Decentralized itself. Because of the fluctuations in the token’s value, entry fees also go up and down, ranging from just a few dollars to around US$100. Awards also vary, ranging from small $1,500 grants, a camera package worth $5,000, and Soderbergh’s $100,000 grants to Sidewinder’s $200,000 in finishing funds. Then, after enough projects enter a contest, a voting period commences, projects get scores from various voters, and a winner is chosen. Unlike The Black List, for example, which picks the “most liked” screenplays by the more than 500 film executives that participate, or crowdsourcing platforms, such as the faith-based Angel Studios, which simply offers up projects that supporters can invest in, DCP determines a project’s “score” based off a complex algorithm.
As Decentralized’s biggest award to date, the Sidewinder prize drew a lot of new filmmakers to the platform. “That amount could have completely changed the game for our film,” says Kristin Tièche, director of The Invisible Mammal, a documentary about a team of women scientists working to save North America’s bat population (which placed second in the Sidewinder contest, behind The Americans). Like Moon, Tièche and her producing partner Matthew Podolsky invested a lot of time, effort, and even money to support their entry. They treated it like a crowdfunding campaign, paying a social media manager, and leveraging many of the same people who already donated to their project to join Decentralized and vote on the platform.
Several filmmakers we spoke to had two main complaints related to the site’s voting process. The first is that voters, including rival filmmakers, would intentionally give bad scores to other projects to sabotage them—a practice known as “vote-bombing.”
One Decentralized employee shared their worries with a filmmaker last March based on complaints they were receiving about DCP’s voting. Documentary reviewed screenshots of staff conversations with filmmakers on the messaging app Discord. “We are really concerned about our reputation, being linked to crypto and everything,” the staffer wrote. “It’s that kind of thing that has the potential to make us look bad.”
Last April, a Decentralized staffer told one of the Sidewinder entrants that DCP was in the process of re-analyzing the results of the Sidewinder competition with the “review bombs omitted from the final scores.” He wrote, “I sincerely apologize for these actions of these few users—we’re trying to make DCP a safe place for all users to share their hard work. It’s unfortunate that people continually try to game the system, but it keeps driving us to develop a better platform for all.”
Decentralized co-founder and CEO Leo Matchett defends the voting process as central to their decentralized and democratic funding goals. He says they’ve designed their scoring algorithm to give voters who have a better reputation—determined, for example, by being on the platform longer and supporting other projects—more weight in their scores. Scores that are in the median are also given more weight. “So someone giving a 0 score is clearly abusing and can be deducted reputation, so it is mitigation of gaming/manipulating,” he explains.
Documentary’s review of DCP’s scoring algorithm reveals additional unusual quirks. In addition to favoring ratings that are close to the median and higher user reputations, DCP weights individual ratings to favor early ratings and users who “stake” a higher percentage of their pool of cryptocurrency tokens on their rating. This algorithm thus rewards early users who can guess other users’ reception of the film the fastest, as opposed to favoring reviewers who might best evaluate a project’s market viability (such as the Black List), or triggering film production based on user stakes (like Angel Studios).
Even with all of the algorithm tweaks, DCP recognized that the practice of vote-bombing continued to meddle with the results in unfair ways. Several months ago, the company updated the platform so that users can no longer see the scores of projects during an ongoing contest, “so you don’t know who’s in the lead,” Matchett explains, “so there’s significantly less attacking because we don’t show the ranking until the award is completed.”
Centralized or Decentralized
The other criticism lobbied at the company from filmmakers directly addresses Decentralized’s ambitious goals of democratizing the film funding process: Some of the awards’ winners aren’t chosen democratically, at all. According to Matchett, they encourage their partners to let the DCP community votes pick the winner, but so far, Decentralized’s biggest prizes—Soderbergh’s Andrews/Bernard Awards and the Sidewinder Award—are ultimately selected by the backers themselves.
“It’s duplicitous,” says one filmmaker who participated in Soderbergh’s second Andrews Bernard award. “They’re supposed to be democratizing film, but if the democratic vote is not the final say, that’s very disheartening.”
Matchett argues that donors have every right to have oversight of their contests’ winners. “That’s their prerogative,” he says. “We’d rather create an opportunity that’s not 100% decentralized than not at all. Someone still gets money and resources to go make something.”
Even though the awards rules make it clear that the winner is not necessarily the top-placed finisher, filmmakers still feel like they’re being exploited to bring their communities to Decentralized’s platform, so they can get a good score in the contest. “If we knew that none of the top winners of the Sidewinder Competition would be given the award money, we probably would not have committed any resources or even bothered trying to win,” says Tièche.
Filmmaker Matthew Barber, whose project Casa Tem Dendê (The House with Flavor), about the Brazilian martial art form capoeira and ranked third for the Sidewinder Award, accepts the fact that there are no promises made to the top scorers. “But what was hard for me is the time and effort that we put into this,” he says. “All of us brought a lot of exposure to DCP—all of our friends and family and social media networks jockeying for position brought a lot of drama to basically just benefit them.”
“I’m embarrassed, really,” admits Tièche. Adds Podolsky, “We lost credibility. Our film production lost credibility, and our organization lost credibility, because we tried to convince so many people to join this thing for nothing.”
Filmmakers participating in the Sidewinder Award were also peeved by the lack of forthright communication offered to them about what was going on. First, filmmakers were caught off guard when Decentralized asked for a “rough cut and/or assembly” within weeks of the contest’s end. Kristen Kingsbury, who submitted a docuseries called PROCESS, points out the contradiction: “What’s the purpose of a completion award if you’re asking everyone for an assembly cut?”
After filmmakers scrambled to put together edits, DCP staff sent repeated text exchanges with filmmakers asking for updates and meetings. “I was trying to be as nice as possible,” Moon remembers. “When someone with a lot of money misses a meeting, you can’t get mad at them, but I definitely felt ignored, frustrated, and powerless.”
After providing tentative updates about a potential Sidewinder Films Award announcement in April and May of last year, Matchett Discord messaged one of the filmmakers in mid-June: “We’ve been pressing Sidewinder to speed up the process. We didn’t think it would go on so long. I’ve been told it is forthcoming. We'll be sending out an update next week regardless.”
“There was a lack of professionalism the entire time,” says Tessier, citing the repeated promises every few months of an imminent update that “never materialized, followed by radio silence.” “Leo and DCP have been given every opportunity over the last year to restore trust in their platform and the integrity of the contest. That has not happened. The Coppola family, the emerging filmmakers who participated in the contest, and the documentary world all deserve better.”
However, DCP’s hands were contractually tied because throughout 2024, they were trying to get the promised money out of Sidewinder and didn’t want to jeopardize the transfer of funds. For most contests, the prize money is already held in DCP’s accounts, as the donating entities give it to DCP, a nonprofit, for tax write-off benefits. Because Sidewinder was also a nonprofit, they had no incentive to transfer the funds earlier.
For all of the snafus around the Sidewinder award, some filmmakers who have participated in other contests remain champions of the company. Filmmaker Cutter Hodierne, whose fiction feature Cold Wallet, which placed 5th for the Andrews/Bernard Award and was selected as the winner of the contest by Soderbergh, says, “It all worked out beyond my best imagination.” The funding came in promptly, along with a “dream come true” meeting with Soderbergh. “Leo and the team are incredibly supportive and genuine in their mission,” he says.
Kristen Kingsbury, who has entered three Decentralized Pictures contests (one of which she won) had been an advocate for the new blockchain-based film industry known as “Film3” that Decentralized is a part of and was an early proponent of the company. But she won’t be coming back now. “They like to think of themselves as disruptors and claim that they are a solution to old Hollywood, but they’re just doing the same thing in a different way,” she says. “They still have their thumb on independent filmmakers and they’re still gatekeepers.”
Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to his Substack; film instructor at the New School and DePaul University; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.
Abby Sun contributed additional reporting.