Meet the Team - Matt Podolsky

Matt Podolsky handling a California condor in 2008.

I’m Matt Podolsky, one of the co-founders of Wild Commons. I’ve been producing documentary films for the past 18 years, starting when I lived in Arizona and was working as a California condor field biologist. My first film, Scavenger Hunt, was focused on California condors, and took me four years to complete. As I was nearing the end of work on this project, I founded Wild Lens, the non-profit production company that I’ve been running ever since.

In the years since 2011, when Wild Lens was incorporated, I’ve been involved in the production of numerous film projects, which span from ultra low budget short docs, to multi-million dollar feature film productions. My low budget short film, Bluebird Man, received a national PBS broadcast and won numerous awards during its festival run. This was the project that put me on the map as a filmmaker, and led to my involvement in Sea of Shadows, a feature length film about the world’s most endangered marine mammal. Sea of Shadows won the audience award and Sundance in 2019 and was picked up for distribution by National Geographic.

The Sea of Shadows crew on stage for our Sundance premiere. Matt is center right holding a the large vaquita cut-out.

I was convinced that my role as a co-director of Sea of Shadows would lead to funding and distribution opportunities for my next project, but the opposite turned out to be true. The next film that I produced, the feature doc, The Invisible Mammal, struggled to secure funding. It was clear to me that it wasn’t the film itself that was the problem - The Invisible Mammal premiered at the prestigious DocLands Documentary Film Festival where it won the audience award. The problem was the industry itself. In the years after our Sea of Shadows premiere at Sundance, the bottom fell out of the independent film industry. There have been very few documentary sales at Sundance these past few years, and filmmakers are beginning to accept that self-distribution is the only viable option for many projects.

While it is deeply frustrating to be working as a documentary producer at a time when mainstream distribution is out of reach, there are opportunities that are unique to this moment. This is where Wild Commons enters the discussion. Wild Commons is a distribution channel that aims to take advantage of the glut of high quality wildlife and nature documentaries that haven’t signed with a major distributor. Our goal is to make these films much more widely accessible to the public, while providing meaningful compensation to the filmmakers.