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| Lad: A Yorkshire Story |
In 2012, filmmaker Dan Hartley made Lad: A Yorkshire Story, a film about a boy whose friendship with a park ranger gives him a new chance in life after the death of his father. Like many independent filmmakers, he distributed it himself. But despite his own feelings about the film, he never expected it to get as strong a response as it did. Now he's campaigning to get it recognised properly by the IMDB.
Taking the film on a world festival tour, Hartley found that it receive a positive response from audiences in many different places. He worked hard to promote it until he felt he'd done as much as he could - but then, a month ago, he discovered that it was on YouTube and was delighted by the comments viewers had left. "Seeing it get taken up like that with no publicity and no promotion was quite remarkable," he says.
The film wasn't only reviewed well on YouTube, but also on the IMDB, where it has 8.5 stars. "I realised that the rating would place it in the top 100 films," he says. The highest rated film on the site is The Shawshank Redemption, with 9.2 stars. But there's a problem. In order to qualify for the IMDB charts, films need to have received ratings from 25,000 users. Hartley feels that this is an unreasonably high barrier.
"A film can only officially chart if there are enough votes behind it, so it's weighted towards films with a big marketing budget... corporations are servicing their structure and audiences come second," he says, arguing that viewers are not getting everything they want from big productions alone.
"I want to campaign to have the rating officially recognised to bring it to the attention of the broader industry," he says of his own film. He's encouraging people to watch the film for free and leave a star rating on the IMDB afterwards, and he believes that if his film can break through like this then the IMDB might be willing to change its policy and give smaller films a better chance of competing for attention with the big players.
Eye For Film asked the IMDB for comment but, at the time of writing, has yet to receive a response.
