This article appeared in the March 7, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Illustration by Yuri Kavalerchik

Here at Film Comment, we live by Serge Daney’s motto: “Cinephilia is not only a particular relationship to cinema, it is a relationship to the world through cinema.” We love moving images because they nourish, entertain, and educate us, and also because they reveal our innermost selves—our deepest desires, fears, and fantasies. 

For today’s edition, Abby Sun helps navigate the ethical labyrinth around pirated films. Submit your questions for the next round here.

Dear You’re Projecting,

On social media, it’s not uncommon for individuals involved in film preservation, criticism, or distribution to upload digital copies of films and share links to them publicly. Recently, one such individual responded to current discourse surrounding a documentary without U.S. distribution (No Other Land) by leaking a screen-recorded copy of the film online. After being challenged by others over this, the individual contested that leaking the film would not prevent it from finding a distributor; upon the request of the filmmakers, the link was then removed. My question is: in what circumstances is piracy a worthwhile form of film preservation, and when is it a harmful, destructive act? 

Sincerely,
Baffled by Bootlegs

***

Dear Baffled by Bootlegs,

This thorny question is really an ethical one. Who is film piracy harming? What is it destroying? And are those entities ones that you care about? Anyone could spend hours writing through the different scenarios, but here, I’m putting out just a few provocations.

If a programmer, film writer, or preservationist says they’ve never benefited from a pirated film before, they’re either lying or skirting the truth, or they work at an institution that has an extraordinary collection. (In which case, I’m jealous!) Not all of us are uploading films and posting links publicly. Most likely, we’re watching an unauthorized download from a file-sharing or torrenting website, or even simply watching a rip on YouTube, to research new titles or fact-check writing. These uses are usually free from a personal profit motive, and when done in a professional setting, they can help draw more attention to films and make them more attractive or urgent to a commercial market. This practice doesn’t seem to harm or destroy very much.

The other question to consider is: where is the piracy is occuring? In many countries, even Hollywood studio and big streaming platform titles aren’t available on home video or in theaters, whether due to government censorship and import quotas, or by design of the studios themselves. Through a practice called “windowing,” studio titles and prestigious festival films are mostly first released in the U.S. and other Western countries, before a slow rollout in Asia, South America, and Africa. In the ’90s, this is why tens of thousands of informal VCD parlors showing (and charging tickets for) public screenings of pirated fare proliferated across Asia. When multinational conglomerates and manufacturers collude (as they did in the 1990s, by forming the DVD Forum) to maximize profits by withholding a product, they are already valuing certain audiences over others.

No Other Land’s distribution status perfectly reflects the complicated reality of film circulation for new releases. There are multiple dimensions to distribution deals: films may be only available in certain territories, for certain time periods, in certain formats, and on certain platforms, because that’s how the filmmakers chose to make the deals—or because those were the only deals that were available to them. No Other Land, for instance, has distribution in many countries, each with its own patchwork of theatrical, broadcast, and streaming conditions. For months, it’s been available to rent on Amazon Prime in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand thanks to distributors Dogwoof and DocPlay. As of this past weekend, it’s also free to stream in the U.K. on Channel 4. (VPN aficionados elsewhere can also rejoice!)

To make matters more confusing, the film’s team has used the lack of global streamer distribution as part of their Oscars campaign, while also theatrically self-distributing in the U.S. in 100 cities and counting. That is, the No Other Land team decided that the paltry U.S. distribution offers they received were no better than doing it themselves, and their U.S. theatrical box-office haul shows that they were probably right about that. Back to your question: No Other Land and films that are struggling with distribution aren’t often in danger of being lost immediately, and so the act of uploading a pirated copy doesn’t have much film preservation utility. If broadening access is your goal, depending on your capacity, consider educating others on tools to cross digital borders or working with the rights holders to organize your own screening.

Finally, many political and experimental works derive their power specifically from limiting access, and not all of it is based on maximizing profit. Relatively common real-life examples include screening fees that benefit the community the story was extracted from (as with the 2022 restoration of Nanook of the North); requirements that filmmakers travel with the film to project, contextualize, or politicize it (experimental filmmaker Helga Fanderl insists on projecting her work—specially curated programs selected from over a thousand shorts made in-camera—herself); and removing films from circulation because screening them causes harm to vulnerable communities (Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North). If you don’t have enough resources or connections, or the luck of being alive when the filmmaker in question is traveling with their film, then you may not be able to access these works. But pirating them might actually destroy their larger political or artistic purpose.

As you can see, the question is context-specific. But to assume, in a blanket manner, that we have the right to own whatever we want and watch it whenever and however we want seems awfully colonial to me.

Sincerely,
Abby Sun

Abby Sun is the editor of the International Documentary Association’s Documentary Magazine.