“The fact that your movie doesn’t find distribution doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an audience,” producer Juan de Dios Larraín (A Fantastic Woman, The Eternal Memory) concluded this afternoon during a panel on the second day of Karlovy Vary’s industry forum.
“Every movie has an audience; maybe it’s 10 people, maybe it’s your family, schoolmates, or some friends. Perhaps it’s just 100, 1000, or 10,000 people, but if you don’t have a way to connect your movie with those people, how can you monetize your work?”
Larraín told the Karlovy Vary audience that it was this conundrum that birthed the idea for Pijama, the indie streaming platform he launched with his brother, Pablo Larraín (Jackie), for undistributed films.
The platform allows filmmakers to upload and sell their films to consumers around the world, with 80% of the revenue returning directly to the rights holders. Filmmakers choose which territories they wish to make the film available in and can set any price between $4 and $9 for their project.
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Larraín said he realized the international distribution market for arthouse titles had been irrevocably damaged and needed a new player after he struggled to sell Sebastián Lelio’s 2025 feature The Wave.
“The film went to Cannes, sold a lot of territories, but not the UK. But Sebastián has made two interesting and popular commercial films in the UK; we understood that something is wrong here,” he said.
“We tried to find a distributor with FilmNation to do a distribution deal. We didn’t even want any MG, but we didn’t find anyone, and that’s the moment when Pijamas was born in our minds.”
Pijama launched earlier this year with several Larrain-directed titles and Sebastian Lelio’s Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman. The veteran producer said after early success the platform is already ready to expand its functions.
“We’re learning how to promote films now, and we’re also taking the next step into acquiring, with three big films that didn’t get distribution with great talent,” he said. “We’ll do a big campaign with this talent.”
He added: “We were born in Chile, so for us, making movies has been difficult since we were kids, so we’re ready to run marathons, and this will, of course, be the case with Pijama.”
Larraín was joined on the panel by Steffen Kottkamp of Directors Collection, an AVOD platform for arthouse and festival titles. The pair were asked whether they believe festivals should have a greater role in expanding the lifecycle of films. Larraín offered an interesting perspective and used his experience with Sundance, where Pijama was first launched, to illustrate his point.
“I know the people behind Sundance are very worried about what’s going on, because the movies that go to Sundance are getting less distribution opportunities, so they feel responsible for launching these films and then seeing them vanish,” he said.
“Is Sundance responsible for the future of the films that they bring to life? I don’t know. Can they do better? Yes. How? I don’t know again, but if there’s a way to understand the question, I would say that the answer is that at some point Sundance will need to be, as Karlovy Vary is here, a distribution platform.”
The Karlovy Vary Film Festival has its own distribution arm, KVIFF Distribution, which was expanded in 2021 after the festival acquired a stake in arthouse Czech distributor Aerofilms. Sundance doesn’t have its own dedicated distribution arm but has multiple distribution funds and grants for filmmakers.
Karlovy Vary’s industry forum runs until July 9.
