The Sundance premiere of The Dissident had all the trappings of a successful debut for a film seeking distribution: glowing reviews, the endorsement of personalities including Hillary Clinton and Alec Baldwin, and major industry figures populating the audience, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
But following the documentary's first Park City screening in January, director Bryan Fogel — who in 2018 won an Oscar for Icarus, which Netflix distributed in the U.S. — heard crickets from distributors. "Without going into behind-the-scenes details that I’m aware of, there was a unified front among the major global media companies, distributors, that they were not going to touch this film," Fogel says in December.
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