How Director Lauren Caster Is Getting Her Movie Seen

When writer/director Lauren Caster finished her independent film “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” she thought the hard part was behind her. After five years of writing, producing, directing, and editing her passion project — a drama loosely inspired by her own experience growing up with a lesbian mom and meeting her biological father as an adult — Caster looked forward to getting her movie out into the world.

Caster took what she saw as a traditional indie approach to marketing her film, taking it to festivals before a limited theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles that she promoted on talk shows and in popular media outlets like Entertainment Weekly. Then, when “Rhythm Is a Dancer” dropped on VOD, the filmmaker realized that her work had only just begun.

“When we got our numbers back, it was really disheartening,” Caster told IndieWire. Her movie had been on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango At Home for about a month and a half when Caster got her sales figures and was shocked by how few people had watched it. “My jaw dropped to the floor. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, was I just really naive?” Her marketing budget had been exhausted long before, and the PR team she was working with had scattered to the winds, so Caster had to find a new way to make people aware of her film.

“I realized how insanely hard it is for one little indie movie to actually find its audience among everything on Prime and Apple,” Caster said. After throwing what she described as a “pity party” for herself, Caster looked at her Instagram page and came up with an idea. “At the time I had around 4,000 followers, and our numbers weren’t even that. I couldn’t even get my own audience to watch it! It got me thinking, what is the disconnect?”

Caster thought about indie filmmakers who had found huge audiences like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, and noted that the common thread was that they already had a following on YouTube. “I had always thought being a content creator and being a filmmaker were two different things,” Caster said. But with her movie disappearing amid thousands of other titles on VOD, she knew she had to change her thinking and find a way to raise awareness without a studio or a multimillion-dollar marketing budget.

“I’m not a content creator,” Caster said. “I literally just use my Instagram to post some pictures.” As she looked around social media, however, Caster noticed that the content creators who connected with their audience tended to address their followers directly, talking to the camera. “They’re telling you what they think, they’re telling you what to buy. They’re telling you what they’re doing, and people are following along.” With that in mind, Caster decided to try an experiment that would take her outside of her comfort zone.

“I decided to spend 30 days trying to convince strangers on the internet to watch my movie,” she said. The idea was that Caster would post a video diary every day in which she openly discussed the struggles of getting her film out into the world, while also sharing stories about the inspiration behind the movie and her case for why people should watch it. Caster shot her first video in mid-September and waited to see what would happen.

The response was instantaneous and overwhelming. One of Caster’s mentors, Vincent D’Onofrio, reposted the video on his page and the Instagram algorithms took it from there. “I don’t know what happened, but the algorithms started pushing it out to strangers — people who love films and watch films,” Caster said. Actor Juliette Lewis, who Caster had never met, commented on the post and shared it with her 1.7 million followers, encouraging them to watch the movie.

By the time the post finished bouncing around Instagram, it had 130,000 and over a thousand comments, and Caster made connections that led to other ways to promote the movie. “The actor Matthew Del Negro saw it, and I’m going to go on his podcast,” Caster said. While Caster says building an audience from scratch on social media might not be as swift as attracting one with a lavishly funded marketing campaign, it provides other satisfactions. “It’s been really humbling for me to do this, but it’s also sweet to see random strangers who are so sweet and supportive, rallying behind the movie.”

The experience has also taught Caster to adapt to a changing indie film landscape. “I’m a millennial, and Gen Z is so much better at this kind of stuff,” Caster said. “I’m learning that I have to let go of my old ways and adapt, because unless you’re lucky and get a studio with a huge marketing spend — which happens to very few people — your movie is going to get lost.”

Caster is now a week into her 30-day experiment, and still feeling her way through it. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I don’t have any other option at this point,” she said. “I love my movie, and I love everyone who worked on it, and I’m not just going to let it sit there in the dark. I believe in this film, and I know the audience is out there.”

“Rhythm Is a Dancer” is now available on Apple TV, Amazon Video, and Fandango at Home. You can follow Lauren Caster on Instagram here.