“Sound of Freedom” is a watchable movie, but it’s not really what one would call high art. It wouldn’t even come close to making my top 50 list of the year’s best films.
Hell, I don’t even know what the full backstory of the smears this film has been getting — where exactly do we find this QAnon fella? What website must we type in to be showered with his, or her, crackpot theories? What in the living hell does that have to do with this movie? There’s been a lot of theories about this very subject, and I’ve been kinda just tuning it out because it sounds like a major rabbit hole.
Last month, I bought a ticket to “Sound of Freedom,” which was never press screened, and I found it well-directed, but fairly routine and conventional in the way it delivered its message. Artfully speaking, it’s not a gamechanger.
However, I have to call a spade a spade here. The media has amped up its piling on of this anti-trafficking movie ever since one of its crowdfunders, Fabian Marta, was arrested for kidnapping on Thursday.
Now, I’ve been meaning to tackle this story, but I haven’t had the chance until now. You see, what you’ll be reading everywhere is that this supposed anti-trafficking film, which somehow, for some reason, has gone viral and grossed $158 million domestically, had one of its founders arrested for the very subject matter that the film denounces: kidnapping.
Here’s the problem I have with such an assertion. The reason why this film was even made was due to its crowdfunding campaign of 6,678 donors who invested in the film. Credits at the end of the film show every single name.
The one person who contributed what Deadline called "an unidentified amount of money" to the crowdfund was 51-year-old Fabian Marta. He was "not a financier" of the film, as Deadline said. All in all, the film raised approximately 5 million of its $15 million budget on this crowdfunding endeavor.
So, wait, it gets worse, by the looks of it, Marta was not even arrested for trafficking. Deadline states that he was embroiled in a custody dispute:
Marta is a landlord for a woman who was involved in a custody dispute with her aunt. The circumstance is apparently what brought the charges against Marta. Marta has been provided living arrangements for the woman and her child.
“I don’t understand how they’re charging him with this,” Marta's lawyer told Deadline, “He has nothing to do with kidnapping anyone.”
This didn’t stop the media from saying that Marta was a “funder” of the film. Newsweek did exactly that. Pop Crave then tweeted that Marta was a "financier" of the movie. This all led to the arrest spreading like wild fire and then every single media outlet was twisting up the actual story.
And, know what? It’s a real shame that this is happening. Brushing off any of the political baggage, “Sound of Freedom” could very well represent a viable future for independent cinema in the way this film was put together and funded. I find that, since the very beginning, people have not been looking at the bigger picture and instead focusing on the politics and it all just feels rather strange and unproductive to do so.
Even “Dark City” director, Alex Proyas, who hasn’t had much success in greenlighting a film since 2016, has acknowledged that what the “Sound of Freedom” success means to him is a potential opportunity to make more movies:
What also fascinates me is how this movie was made. Angel Studios are paving the way with the power of crowd investing — a New Model for changing times perhaps? And not too different to the model I'm currently building and will tell you more about on Patreon. It's good to see filmmakers succeed with something so similar - gives me hope. That, and the legacy-media struggling to keep up. Ha!
Insider Jeff Sneider also gets it and he’s as puzzled as I am about the way Marta’s arrest has been distorted for political gain:
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.