Multitude Movies, the manufacturing firm behind social difficulty documentaries together with Life After and Pray Away, is shifting to a nonprofit mannequin underneath new management.
The corporate’s co-founder, producer Anya Rous, will step into the president position after serving as vice chairman of the corporate for eight years. Rous will lead the corporate in its new 501(c)(3) iteration alongside a first-ever board of administrators, which can embrace Middle for Constitutional Rights advocacy director Nadia Ben-Youssef, Documentary Accountability Working Group director Natalie Bullock Brown, Curiosity Capital CEO Felipe Estefan and 4th World Media co-founder Tracy Rector.
The board will provide strategic recommendation and management as the corporate strikes ahead as a nonprofit, Multitude Movies stated.
“Our core ambition persists,” Rous stated in a press release, “to produce courageous documentaries and mobilize culture change strategies in service of cultural transformation and a more liberatory future. As a nonprofit, we will expand and sharpen our commitment to collaborate with partners both within and beyond the film community, working with organizers and movements to build long-term narrative power.”
The management change arrives after founder and former president Jess Devaney moved to Perspective Movies, a manufacturing shingle launched by the Perspective Fund.
“Anya has been a key architect of Multitude’s strategy, programs, and body of work,” Devaney stated in a press release. “She brings a rare combination of political clarity, creative instinct, and disciplined leadership, and a deep commitment to the filmmakers and movements we engage.”
Launched in 2016, Multitude Movies has produced a lot of social justice-focused titles which have landed on Netflix, PBS, Peacock and HBO Max. The corporate’s 2022 movie Lowndes County and the Highway to Black Energy, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard, was nominated for an Emmy. Its 2023 brief How We Get Free, from Gandbhir and Samantha M. Knowles, was shortlisted for an Oscar and 2025’s Life After, helmed by Reid Davenport, gained a U.S. documentary Particular Jury Award on the Sundance Movie Competition.
However it’s a tough time within the documentary market for the social-issue fare that Multitude Movies makes a speciality of. Main streaming platforms are actually routinely focusing extra on superstar, sports activities and true crime initiatives of their unscripted choices than on points like racial justice or local weather change, whereas the demise of Participant Media in 2024 eliminated a serious backer from the house.
In its new type, Multitude Movies will proceed to push forward with this justice-focused work, the corporate stated in a press launch, supporting underrepresented filmmakers and specializing in work with a robust social affect part “to ensure bold cinema can contribute to systemic change.”
In that spirit, the model’s upcoming animated documentary alive!, directed by Pray Away helmer Kristine Stolakis, follows two younger ladies beginning over after affected by extreme, life-threatening consuming problems.
