To reflect on Netribution’s 25 years since arriving online, we’re publishing a year of issues reflecting on indie film and the web this last 25 years, and next 25.
An attempt to fess up to my biggest mistakes on this journey to the web we’ve got today.
No-one excited about the web in the late ’90s pictured what we have for the web now – an attention…
This isn’t how it was meant to be. No-one excited about the web in the late ’90s pictured an attention industry commodifying our consciousness to power a surveillance economy spying on us from birth, trading our data to segment & silo us, target adv…
“As with the printing press, if it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort…
On the cusp of evening the ants explore the surface of the table. Some of them sprout wings, of a sudden, taking off unsteadily to mingle with the midges. I don’t know what the other ants are looking for. Not food. I’m sure of that. I haven’t dined…
First the ActivityPub universe has gone from tech curiosity to something viable and used daily by millions. Second, mainstream monopoly tech – sacking moderating teams, trying to sway elections, and general indifference to the harms their huge power…
It’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication – just as most of the planet is focussed on funnelling their audience onto monopolistic platforms whose algorithms filter content like a dealer cutting attention-crack. If Tom and I…
With Netribution’s 25 years fitting into three 8-ish year acts (publishing, research & development) I’ve applied Syd Field’s screenwriting framework to this year of issues and realised this issue would be the end of Act One. That seems a good time t…
Self-declared ‘geriatric millennial’ Elena Rossini (@_elena) isn’t content to just make documentaries, self-distribute and market them thru a web of nicely designed sites – she’s pioneering in her use of tech away, and at home on the…
“There are some people who suffer from this ‘[Auschwitz] disease’ for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these eve…
“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans…
“I’ve never seen poverty on that level. A million people living in a very small space with no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, there’s a very high level of disease, HIV, and yet there’s that scene in the movie where the children come ru…
It’s not easy to quickly summarise award-winning Ugandan Dilman Dila’s work: he’s made Nepalese documentaries like The Sound of One Leg Dancing, published a short story collection A Killing in the Sun and acclaimed novels, made hit YouTube shorts li…
Returning up the house road one hazy afternoon I was curious about the little orchard walled in on the T junction. I’d only seen it as an olive grove but this day a clementine caught my eye. In we loped, to have a mooch about, off leash, before dinn…
Over 600 members of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Science have condemned the body’s response to the attack by West Bank settlers on the Hamdan Ballal, co-director of this year’s Best Documentary Oscar winner, No Man’s Land. Ballal reported…
The Palestinian co-director of the 2025 Academy Award winner for best picture, Hamdan Ballal has been attacked, arrested and is – at time of writing – out of contact. The Israeli co-director of the Oscar-winning Yuval Abraham said Ballal was attacke…
For host Gareth Evans the reason for this screening in this place, at this time seems obvious: Jimmy’s Hall is as much about the Hall – gathering space for a rural community struggling 10 years after the Irish Civil War against the church, state and…
Stephen Applebaum, the best film interviewer I’ve known, died on February 7 2024 after his cancer returned. Netribution was incredibly lucky to publish his work for many years both online and in our books. Scrolling his Facebook page, it’s impossibl…
“I had a very difficult time. I actually quit at least 4 or 5 times. I couldn’t get a job. I had done 30 plays in Los Angeles and I couldn’t get a job. I was getting little jobs here and there, but no one was really recognising what I thought I had…
Michael White: With Chuck and Buck I do think one of the biggest taboos, at least in America, is still men relating with other men in an honest, vulnerable way. It’s something you rarely see in anything, and I just find it amusing. It’s not keeping…
“When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’.
“So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m ve…
So where did it all start?
I can’t remember where it started. When I was very young I was always grabbing all my friends from down the street and making them put on plays with me. But I never, ever, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could b…
“I think if you put people, actors for instance, under duress, something suddenly happens: you get past acting. Kubrick did that when he was making The Shining. I had dinner with Jack Nicholson and he said, ‘He did 140 takes. It took two days t…
Would a film like The Devils be hard to make now?
It would be impossible. No one would finance such a film, I would imagine.
Hasn’t the British Film Industry improved?
Well I’m not so mad on the British film industry. It seems to just produce one o…
Before I dig down, trying to deconstruct the film’s foundations, first off, this was the most sensory impact I’ve had at the cinema in a long time. It sounds as big as it looks, and it looks breathtaking. Part of that must be the VistaVision, a 70-y…
They are in my care. I feed them once a day and walk them twice. I provide emotional security too, for their family is holidaying on other continents. This is why I am here. And they are too my living, breathing companions on this winter trip. Almos…
“I looked around the room which was rammed to the rafters and thought again that the numbers and the sentiment didn’t add up. If we all really agreed that this was over, why were we all there? A mass delusion?”
25 years ago tonight Wendy Bevan-Mogg, Tom Fogg and I arrived at Dawn & Pete’s Peeping Toms Screening Night in Soho to unveil Netribution. This feels a time where some reflection may be helpful, so Tom and I have decided to make a 12 x monthly mini-…
“He had the warmth of a fire at the end of the world”
Ben Blaine
It’s impossible to forget Les’s voice. The crisp yet calm confidence from a career in BBC Radio, but anchored in County Durham bedrock. He remains the only writer I’ve known who…
I met Leslie 20 years ago through Shooting People. We were both loud and opinionated voices and I think initially we argued, if only because initially I argued with everyone. Some took this to heart and seem to have considered me unpardonable ever s…
I want to talk to the young man I was from across time. I want to remember. Let’s start at where I met Nic. We were studying film production at Westminster Uni…
Netribution 1 grew in the fertile ashes of the dotcom crash – brimming with excitement about DV cameras and distributing films online. It turned 25 years old on New Years Eve. It wasn’t meant to be like this.
