Promoting a doc w/ less than two weeks to go before the opening

I heard about new doc on Haiti - The Forgotten Occupation - from the filmmaker around 12/31/25. The movie was opening in LA starting around 1/10, and he wanted to get the word out more about the doc plus get attention from media, reviews for the doc. I signed on to help and got a few useful things done in a short time.

We did an interview with Chicago film critic Ian Simmons - a video interview that's also a review (there may be a written review of the movie from Ian in the near future also): 

I did posts on my social pages - Twitter/X mostly, plus Facebook.  Plus I did posts on this blog, also BlueSky, maybe 1 post on Instagram. And I texted a lot of relevant people about the opening - including film critics.

We started contacting 100 influencers and media orgs using a list that I created, also others who may be interested in the film (note - some promo work for the movie was done long before I heard about the movie, so, in some cases, the contacts were re-contacts about the movie).

Templates were created for contacting media orgs and others and sent to the filmmaker (perhaps useful, perhaps not - but generally those templates can give promo workers some useful ideas). Orgs and people getting contacted directly by the filmmaker is useful in some cases. Specially community orgs that the filmmaker is a part of.

We started contacting 100 film critics about the movie. By the time the movie opened I had personally contacted over a dozen critics plus overall perhaps 30 or more media orgs, influencers, blogs, podcasts about the movie, and 5 or more reviews are on the way as of now. E-mails are going out to other critics now or were sent out 12/31/25 - now.  The movie's promo work happening over the New Year's holiday plus the 1st week or January (some people still not back at work) was a little bit of a challenge. 

The movie opened on 1/9 and had a special event on 1/10. The special event was sold out - at a theater that had 250 seats - which is an amazing success for a documentary at a movie theater w/ low promo and a low promo and distribution budget. The success was mostly thanks to local/LA area based Haitian groups who got the word out about the doc in the community.