
It’s been a minute… Year 25, month 1 of 12.
with Kenneth Barker, Ben Blaine, Cath Le Couteur, Arin Crumley, Eric Dubois, Elio España, Tom Fogg, Liz Hobbs, Chris Jones, the Lowes Family, Tom Swanston & Nic Wistreich.
On the evening of February 2nd, 2000, Wendy Bevan-Mogg, Tom Fogg and myself arrived at Dawn & Pete’s Peeping Toms Screening Night in Soho to unveil Netribution, having announced it to nice comments on Shooting People earlier in the day. This feels a time where some reflection may be helpful, so to mark this, Tom and I have decided to create this mini-site, and add things over the next year…



The Ghosts of Futures Past

The first Netribution office stunk of curry and rubber, I lived in it.
You reached it by groping through the tunnel with the smashed light between the tyre shop and Indian restaurant on a main road in Wembley. At the top of the dark stairs that climbed out the far end there was a narrow walkway along which a row of bright-blue industrial refuse bags that bulged with beer, wine and vodka empties marked the trail to the faded red door of a smoke-filled student flat behind which Nic and Tom dreamed about the future while I, one of Nic’s two flatmates, pulled on B&H cigarettes and loudly (and wrongly, as it turned out) defended the past.
We had all met as film students, Nic was excited about the expanding galaxies in cyberspace and the opportunity to connect filmmakers directly with their audiences. He grabbed a bottle of vodka from the freezer and talked energetically about a film studio in every bedroom and fridges with barcode scanners that would order new tubs of marge when you ran out.
“Don’t be silly”, I said, “buying things is not the reason that people go shopping. People go shopping to get out of the house, meet their mates and browse the racks, you can’t do any of that at home, on your own, sitting in front of your computer. That Amazon website is never going to take off”.
Previously on Netribution from Elio

Elio España
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…
Nic remembers this time well. I don’t remember.
It’s not that I can’t remember, I just haven’t.
Nic didn’t let it go, and so it has remained nurtured. When I left, I severed it at the root. That’s what I tended to do then. Not him. Netribution grew out of him, it was his creation, and so new growth continued off the main trunk; it grows still. And now he’s asked me to, to what?
To Commemorate. To Mark the Time, fill the gap in time? To show my respect for you, Nic. Yes, certainly that. But also to see who I was before I ended my involvement in the business, and for some years, our friendship.
Really though, 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.

Tom Fogg @ Netribution…
David Morissey
2025: Prime Target

I met David Morrissey through the tireless industry of Nicola Hollinshead at the Highgate Film Festival. Most of you will know him from Hilary and Jackie, Our Mutual Friend and more recently from his part as the young Nazi officer, Weber who befriends, betrays and finally spares the life of Corelli in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. A graduate of The Everyman in Liverpool alongside the likes of Ian Hart and Cathy Tyson and then Rada, Morrissey become an experienced director in between increasingly powerful acting roles.
I caught him at a bad time. He was coming to the end of what seemed a hellish period in post on a two one-hour feature he’s directed for the BBC, called Sweet Revenge. He’s working hard, later in the week I saw him on a panel at the Highgate Film Festival talking about the state of the industry from two inner points of view.
May Miles Thomas
2025: Still making films

Life’s too short not to make movies.’ So says May Miles Thomas, freshly acclaimed director of, One Life Stand which swept the board at the BAFTA New Talent Award at the end of November. In October, the film won Best Achievement in Production at the British Independent Film Awards and it doesn’t seem to be stopping there…
I liked the smell of this one so I made some calls but hit cul de sacs with every PR and distribution company. Then I had a mere whisp of an idea – ‘I know, I’ll look in my contacts file!’ And there it was, Elemental Films, phone number, producer’s contact name, email and web address – the works. Giddy with stupefaction, my best BT voice was met by a very polite young woman who informed me, “I’m sorry, he isn’t in” and “perhaps I could take a message?” I blubbered, “Yes indeed, what’s your position there?”
There was a sweet tasting pause before she stated, “I’m May Miles Thomas.” I roared with crimson delight at my own expense and, of course apologised for being such a dope.”
Mia Bays
2025: head of BFI’s Film Fund

This week I spoke with Mia Bays from The Film Consortium. It was conducted over coffee and a tall bourbon at The Global Café just around the corner from her office in Soho’s Golden Square and was an interesting and thoroughly relaxing 45 minutes in a horribly hectic day. (Thank you Mia!).
She had actually tried to take me to Titanic, the Marco Pierre White cardinal restaurant sin that caters for teenagers and football stars by night but, it was closed (yes!!). Mia insisted it was ‘nice in the daytime’ but I must confess to feeling slightly relieved at this.
I love Quo Vadis (see the Sarah Nissen interview) but my brother, Seb had warned be very sternly against the place after a disastrous evening involving ‘Posh ‘n Becks’ and some astoundingly poor service. Anyway, this interview will go a long way to explaining the National Lottery’s participation in our glorious industry and how a set up as large and established as the Consortium deals with unsolicited scripts!
Carnal memories
Happy Birthday to Netribution! 25 years mean a generation of creative folks have dived into independent cinema and exchanged tips and ideas about how to fund a film. How to fund a film, that title alone rings bells in the back of my head.
I remember meeting Nic on my third day in Glasgow. Being gently interviewed over dinner to make sure I could fit in the colorful community of our near-West End flat, proudly sitting on top of Corunna St. Many years later I would learn this area actually had a name: Finnieston, now a much desirable and gentrified spot. What I also didn’t know back then, is that Nic may also have interviewed me for another dark purpose named Netribution.

Edito, continued…
In the last few days, a theme of ‘home’ has emerged. Maybe it’s on my mind – in the middle of moving house – yet the two pieces to arrive before copy deadline were from people I lived with in the two incarnations of the site…
The first came from Elio España, who I shared a student flat with, and author of Netribution’s first interview – with Steven Soderbergh. He’s one-half of one of the hardest working documentary duos you’ve probably never heard of (making over 100 feature docs) and brings good insight into the last 25 years for indie film distribution.
The second is from Eric Dubois, who moved into my Glasgow flat as Netribution 2 was taking off – on an adventure before settling down as an art professor in Paris. He ended up illustrating every Carnal Cinema satire interview, and all of the regular writers.
25 years ago we’d cockily call ourselves ‘the home of UK film’, which I later attributed to Private Eye after they’d copied the phrase on their links page, in cheeky self-promotion. But after that Web 1 era of home pages was fully replaced by Web 2’s algorithmic home feeds, it’s hard not to wonder whose home, exactly, independent creators ended up in?
The heart of this update, however, is in tribute to Leslie Lowes, know to many as James MacGregor. originally our Northern editor – but known across Shooting People, Moviescope and the Film Finance Handbook. Les played Claudius to Alun Armstrong’s Hamlet at school (and beat him to the role of King Lear), and later was the voice of BBC Radio Shetland, and helped run Radio Riyadh. Thanks to everyone who shared memories – especially his son Robert. My planned memorium for Stephen Applebaum unfortunately must wait until next month.
– – –
We’re in this strange point as a species. The speed of change seems to accelerate while we’re over-informed about a climate emergency we’re mostly incapable of impacting. Wealth inequality is growing while the web deepens division by reinforcing bubbles of belief, making the co-operation we need to improve stuff seem less likely than ever. It feels (thinking of my young kid) it’s simultaneously hard to picture we all get thru this, YET *essential* to believe we do: we get thru this, or we’re done for.
Maybe Jacobean Londoners said the same, having in one generation gone from watching the premiere of The Tempest to surviving civil war, the decapitation of the king, the bubonic plague and the fire of London. The world must have felt almost over, but it wasn’t. Each of us are the surviving descendants of billions of generations of survivors, who got here bringing out a new release, evolving, trying again. If we only look back thru time, the odds seem ok.
Discussing these last 25 years with Tom this last six months has awakened in me a sense that this is a good time to look back. Netribution was born between the forest fire of the first dotcom crash, and the exponential growth of Web2 & smart phones, out of its smoldering, fertile soil. It feels we may be in a similar transition era – a time of shepherding the new and hospicing the old, to use the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops Model lingo.
Tom has a wonderful idea to launch a podcast interviewing everyone we interviewed or knew back then on the lessons of the last two and a half decades. The challenge is time, the story, as ever, is working unpaid: because the funding model still isn’t solved.
*Will it be? Can it be?*
I’ve only really had one question in relation to the web, publishing and film – can we fix web1’s major bug of paying creators without needing a paywall? A few years ago I got incredibly hopeful that we could, just before America split in two over the events of Jan 6, and Russia invaded Ukraine, then October 7th. The web is wilder and more fragmented now than it’s ever been.
But the reasoning that a medium billions of people gaze at and stroke rhythmically for hours every day shouldn’t be exclusively in the hands of a few unpredictable techno-feudal demigods has never been more clear. What happens next, though, is anyone’s guess.
Still, **We get thru this or we’re done for.** So, for what it’s worth, here’s a kind-of issue, or one 12th of an issue at least. Til next month…

Cory Doctorow on AI art, Hollywood writer’s strike
“The Hollywood writers’ strike was, at root, about the studio execs’ dream that they could convert the “insights” of focus groups and audience research into a perfect script, without having to go through a phalanx of lippy screenwriters who insisted on explaining why they think your idea is stupid. “Hey, nerd, make me another ET, except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars” is exactly how you prompt an AI.”
Bridget Jone director Baroness Kidron’s speech speech in the House of Lords on the new AI Act
“The Prime Minister cited an IMF report that claimed that, if fully realised, the gains from AI could be worth up to an average of £47 billion to the UK each year over a decade. He did not say that the very same report suggested that unemployment would increase by 5.5% over the same period… The creative industries contribute £126 billion per year to the economy. I do not understand the excitement about £47 billion when you are giving up £126 billion.”
Three plot twists in a minute? No problem for ReelShort’s cheesy dramas.
Can you shoot 100 episodes in a week? Three plot turns per minute? Then ReelShort, the Chinese top 10 AppStore App that’s neither TikTok or DeepSeek might have a job for you.
Ian Dunt on ‘How to Resist the tech overlords’
“I wanted to watch all the films by Mike Leigh recently.. But incredibly, his earlier work is not available. Secrets and Lies, Career Girls and the rest were not on Google video or on Amazon Prime. I’d veered very slightly off the beaten track and found myself in a wasteland. I don’t have a DVD player anymore. Like a fool I figured I didn’t need one. So that’s it: no more options. You literally cannot watch the film.
“Streaming gives you convenience, but not freedom… We actually have less control than we used to, while assuming things are the other way round.”