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  - a nature documentary distribution platform built for independent filmmakers. 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 vaquita porpoise - world’s most endangered marine mammal. Sea of Shadows won the audience award at Sundance in 2019 and was picked up for distribution by National Geographic.

The Sea of Shadows cast and 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 documentary 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.

Cast and Crew for The Invisible Mammal at the film’s sold-out DocLands premiere.

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 wildlife and nature documentary distribution channel designed to address the growing glut of high-quality independent films without major distribution deals. Our mission is to make these films widely accessible to audiences, while ensuring filmmakers receive meaningful compensation for their work.