Frank Jaffe is the founder of Altered Innocence, the US film distributor specialising in “edgy and artistic foreign, queer, and coming-of-age cinema,” including WW-programmed films Sextool and She Is Conann. Originally from Pennsylvania, Frank moved down to Florida for high school and college, where he studied fashion merchandising (“very Legally Blonde”) and made his first steps into cinema and festival programming. In honour of our screening of She Is Conann, from Altered Innocence favourite Bertrand Mandico, we spoke to Frank, fresh from Cannes, about his path into film distribution, his label’s ethos and a wee bit on our favourite film of 2024, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker.
[WW] How do you describe Altered Innocence?
[Frank ] My simple explanation these days is it’s kind of a boutique film distribution company specialising in LGBTQ and coming of age cinema. That’s the logline. When I was younger, working at Strand Releasing and I formed this company, it was kind of like a way to put out movies I knew were never going to come out. And also I’m a Blu-Ray nerd, so there were certain movies Strand would pass on and I would watch them and be, like, “Oh, my God, this is so gorgeous. I get why this can’t maybe get a theatrical release, you know, it’s kind of a smaller title, but, oh, my God, this looks so good on my TV, with Blu-Ray.”
So, that’s kind of how it started off. And then kind of filmmakers naturally got in touch with me, like Yony Leyser for Desire Will Set You Free. And then I distributed his documentary Queercore. So, it kind of started off more coming of age, beautiful cinematography like Violet by Bas Devos and Concrete Night by Pirjo Honkasalo, and then it evolved more LGBT because I am queer, so, that was kind of what happened. And essentially the label’s just been movies I like, and usually movies I like are movies other cinephiles like as well. So, I’m usually able to just connect on that level. And I don’t put out movies I don’t like. So, usually there’s a trust that is getting built with people that like the brand. And I think it’s also about just forming a community, finding other like-minded cinephiles and building that cool queer community.
And then, later on, I got into theatrical releasing and the company’s just expanded a lot. But originally it really was just very boutiquey, very, like, me hanging out in the aisles of Blockbuster, looking at all the weird coming of age films from labels like Picture This and TLA and Strand Releasing and things like that. So that’s kind of the aesthetic, you could say – it’s just modernised a little bit.
[WW] Did you find your way to it via your film festival work?
[Frank] It’s actually even simpler than that. We had a cinema on campus. It was about 300 seats, stadium seating, 35mm projection. And we would meet every week to programme it. I started this gay and lesbian film festival while I was there at college. And then one summer I interned at both Strand Releasing and Regent Releasing, which is now closed. That was part of Here TV. So I was very, very interested during college. And then, when I moved out to LA, I somehow got a job at Outfest for a season, for their film festival. And then right after it was over, somehow there was an opening at Strand Releasing, and that’s how I got in. You know, you always joke, with these small little distro companies, you kind of have to kill someone to get in. But it just so happened that one of the employees was leaving and it was just right place, right time.
[WW] Was your role at Strand similar to what you do now?
[Frank] I mean, a little bit. I was more in the home video department, so I was at the base processing orders. We literally had a warehouse attached to the office, and I would send DVDs to Amazon and to all our wholesalers and everything like that. I was also in charge of setting up each home video release, making sure the art… you know, eventually doing the art. I learned on the job how to do DVD and Blu-Ray authoring and helped out a little bit with acquisitions. Ultimately, Marcus and John, who run the company, were the main acquisitions people, but there were certain films I begged them to acquire, one of which was Yann Gonzalez’s first film, You and the Night. I begged them. I was like, “No, we have to do it.” And then, of course, they didn’t even give it a theatrical release. They just put it out on DVD and VOD, which was a little sad. I see where they were coming from a little bit, but I also disagree with it because I would have put that out in cinemas.
[WW] And now you’re in a position to put a film out in cinemas only because it deserves to be?
[Frank] Oh, yeah. Absolutely, I do, and the most difficult thing I am finding these days is that, when I started the company, it was very easy for me to tell sales agents and filmmakers, “I don’t do much theatrical, so this is only home video, but it’ll be a great home video release.” But now, because everyone knows I do theatrical releasing, the hardest thing I found is sometimes I think a title is probably just more suited for home video and I’d probably lose quite a bit of money on the theatrical, but it’s hard for me to tell the filmmaker. I think it has impacted some of my decisions, unfortunately. But I’m trying to get back to that and maybe just be more honest with the filmmakers. And if they hate me, they hate me. But I think I do want more films to get a release. Maybe I do have to be more honest. I don’t know!
[WW] How self-conscious is your curation now? Like, is there a distinction between “an Altered Innocence film” and a “Frank” film?
[Frank] It’s all Frank, Altered Innocence, it’s both, intermingled. It is me, so… I mean, there’s a couple films I’ve picked up where I’m just like, “Oh, I might not love it, but it does fit the brand. I think enough people will like it.” I have done that a few times. There’s certain films where, if I watched it at home, I’d probably be like, “Eh, three stars. I won’t watch it again.” You know, “Three out of five, it was fine. Whatever.” But because it does fit the mold a little bit more and could help the bottom line, help me release other cooler films, yeah, I’ve picked them up and I’ve put them out and, uh… They’re not bad films, but, yes, I have done that a little bit.
[WW] Have you got to the point of anyone pulling your sleeve with films you have to put out, as you did at Strand?
[Frank] Yeah, I get recommendations all the time, and some of them are really good recommendations. I mean, 100%, absolutely. I’ve even gotten pitches from filmmakers, randomly. That’s how I got A Dim Valley. That was a film I loved and I hadn’t heard of it. And the filmmaker emailed me, Brandon Colvin, who’s the biggest sweetheart ever. He just pitched it to me, I watched it, and I was just like, “Damn, this movie is so good.” And that’s happened. So I’ve gotten a filmmaker pitch and that was great.Yony Leyser was the same way. I’ve gotten tons of recommendations from other people, and that’s kind of motivated me to look for, like… Or it’s a film I’d seen a long time ago and then somebody who reminds me about it, and that motivates me to be like, “Okay, let me look for the rights. Let me see if it is available.” And of course, sales agents, when I go to these big film festivals, they’ll pitch me a title that I wouldn’t normally, like be like, “Oh, 100%, I’m going to watch that.” And then they convince me and then I watch, and I’m like, “Oh, no, they’re right,” you know, “that was that was pretty good.”
[WW] What is your process for sourcing / selecting titles for distribution? How much it is based on festival research, say, versus screeners you’ve been sent, existing relationships, independent research and/or films you’ve always loved and had in your pocket, so to speak?
[Frank] I think literally it’s kind of 25% across everything you’ve mentioned. Like 25%, it’s filmmakers I’m tracking, 25%, it’s sales agent pitches, 25%, it’s old films that I’m just like, literally, I’ve seen this film. I love it. So now I’m researching who the heck has it, where can I find it? And then the other 25% was sales agent pitches. When I go to these big film festivals, they send me the emails, like, “Here’s our slate.” And I’ll look for the gay titles or the, you know, cool, like… I always love seeing a still image that actually has like good cinematography. I’m like, “Okay, that’s that’s interesting to me.” And unique sounding scripts. I’m definitely more of a script guy – script and cinematography – than anything else.
And then, with Bertrand, because I’ve been following him for a while, I’m just constantly salivating for whatever he’s putting out next. I mean, he’s just one of the coolest guys working in cinema today. And so whenever he has another film, I’m extremely excited. Like, even for this one, the premiere was somewhere I couldn’t go. I knew the sales agent pretty well, I’d worked with him a few times and he’s the kind of sales agent that really wants you to see the film on the biggest screen possible. He doesn’t really want you to watch it on a screener. So for this one, She Is Conann, it was crazy, we actually organized like a private screening in LA, just for me. It was, like, insane. I probably can’t mention the cinema that did it for us, because they basically let me do it for free, which was so cool as well. We’ve got a great cinema culture in LA and there’s a lot of great theaters here that know that I’m doing small films and definitely sympathize with that. And so they just let me watch it at like noon on a Tuesday in their theatre. It was so cool.
[WW] What’s the most fun part for you? Is it hunting for rights?
[Frank] Hunting for the rights is pretty fun. I like meeting all these new people and finding avenues for collaboration. I think I just enjoy getting everything put together – you know, finding the perfect artist to work on the front cover art, and I always love the process of of massaging the trailer because I love trailers. I love coming up with a really sexy trailer. There are certain trailers where I’ll commission them and I’ll just know, at the end of the process, I’ll be like, “Wow, this is a trailer I’m probably going to watch like 200 times in my life, and I really enjoy it.” The best recent example’s probably The Wounded Man trailer. That’s a trailer I watch a lot. It’s a great one. But I have a lot of other good trailers. Concrete Night, Violet. I have this one trailer editor, I went to school with him, and he always creates great trailers for us. I don’t know, I kind of love the act of finally getting the Blu-Ray authored and then popping it into my player and watching it. That’s always really cool. It just looks so good. The final package. I like just seeing it all finally be, like, “Okay, it’s on my TV, it’s real.” And imagining other people doing the same thing, which is always really cool. That was such a big part of my childhood, DVDs and Blu-Rays, so it’s always cool to have that feeling of contributing to that culture.
[WW] Do you enjoy the sense of curating someone’s evening?
[Frank] No, I actually have a disconnect with how people run their lives, to be honest. So that that is not the exciting part for me. Literally, I’m so disconnected. I’m in my own little cocoon world, so picturing that, that doesn’t excite me, but I guess I just get excited by the idea of people enjoying cinema and, especially on Blu-Ray, enjoying really high quality. Basically, like, being in a cinema, is the quality. Not to brag, but I’m a really good video encoder and I actually pay a lot of attention to… I’ve kind of got one of those eyes that if there is compression artifacts, it bothers me. Low video quality really bothers me. That’s why I’m always shocked that people still can watch DVDs. You know, maybe I should wish for that eye, the eye that ignores all the issues. Some people live their lives blissfully ignorant of compression artifacts and things like that. Like, whenever a scene goes to dark and there’s all these blocky… I’m, like, dying. Like, I feel like it’s bullets riddling my body. And there’s a lot of Blu-Rays out there that are really badly encoded. I don’t want to name names, but a lot of people who put out movies, they kind of just hire a random Blu-Ray authoring place and they just do a really bad job. And it just, urgh, it bugs me.
[WW] Some people don’t even register wrong aspect ratios, when characters’ faces are not human shapes…
[Frank] I had that with Wild Reeds. That was a victory for me. André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, I put that out from StudioCanal. I always notice that – because the HD master had leaked a long time ago, somebody had put it out in France. I looked at it, and I was, like, “That doesn’t look right. That aspect ratio…” The faces were, like, squashed. They were like a little pencil-y. And so when I picked up the rights to it, convincing them so hard. I was like, “Can you please look at it?” And they were like, “The aspect ratio is correct.” I’m like, “Yeah, the bars are correct, but that doesn’t mean the aspect ratio’s correct.” They’re like, “Fine, we’ll go and we’ll look at a release print,” but they hated me. Then they got back to me a week later and were like, “You are correct, it is wrong. We are redoing it now.” And I was like, “Yes! I knew it!”
[WW] How do you judge success otherwise? Is it peer approval, sales…?
[Frank] Sales are great [for judging success]. A good example of sales making me excited and feeling like what I’m doing is good is my release of Equation to an Unknown, which me and Yann Gonzalez worked on very closely together. And, you know, we can’t quite figure out what it is – besides the fact the movie is very good – but sales of that one, it’s one of my top-selling titles, and it’s just so weird, because it’s this sadboi gay porn arthouse film, and it just keeps selling and we’re very, very, very thrilled about it. We think it might just be a good word of mouth title. We even got Slant to review it and they gave it a positive review. So maybe it’s just like a kind of wild card, kind of “it’s a porno film, but it’s arthouse. It’s arthouse porn!” And there’s very few of those, to be quite honest. But compare that to the Halsted set, which has only sold okay, I would say, and the Bressan Jr films, which has also just sold okay. And I’m like, “Well, Equation to an Unknown sold so well, why can’t the others?” So, trying to recreate that magic is sometimes difficult. But, yes, very satisfying to know that certain titles that you’re, like, “Well, that’s just something fun we’re doing and we know we’re probably not going to make that much on it, but whatever,” and then all of a sudden it does great, and you’re just like “Amazing, fabulous,” you know? And then we screened it at the New Beverly, you know, which was crazy, and we had a sold out crowd for that. It’s been a blast.
[WW] Distributors don’t always make it easy to book their films, particuarly in Europe, but you seem to make a point of it.
[Frank] Yes. Well, it comes from booking films, because when I did the film festival in college, I was doing the direct booking for that, and sometimes it was a little silly. Like, there was a short film fee and it was, like, $200 from a European distributor. I remember one time, luckily the college paid for it, but I remember for Norway, we were trying to get a film from there, and they were charging us, like, $1,000. It was also a wake up call just talking to these small town, small LGBT organizations and they just want to screen a film for 30 people, you know? And I’m going to try to let them. Obviously, I still need to make a little bit of money on it, but try to do that in the easiest way possible, because I want the films to get out there. And if you’re trying to start a small, little micro cinema, charging $5 tickets or $7 tickets, then I want you to grow that. I don’t want to stop you from growing. The more they succeed, the more I succeed. So that’s where it goes. And they’re small films. I don’t have this weird personality that it’s, like, “Oh, these are huge films! If you want them, you got to pay for them!” You know, they’re small.
[WW] Sometimes their rationale is because the film’s so small, that’s why they need to charge so much, because it’s their only chance to make money.
[Frank] Yeah. That’s not really my business model. I somewhat see where they’re going with that, but I think you can only charge that if it’s something so specialized that you just know people will pay for it, because “it never happens” or blah, blah, blah. I remember one of the hardest films I had to distribute, a few years ago, was Stop-Zemlia, which was a Ukrainian film. And of course, I distributed it right before the Ukrainian war started. So when the war started, I was getting so many requests to donate the film. And I had to balance that. I did, like, half donations, half, “Come on, just give me a little something,” like, “I don’t want to be a war profiteer here, but at the same time, I can’t give all the screenings away for free.” So that was a tough one to distribute and I still have not made money. That’s a film I’m very much in the hole on, unfortunately. Great film! I knew it when I picked it up that it probably was never going to make money, and it didn’t.
[WW] Is there something you wish people understood better about what you do?
[Frank] No. I’m fine. As long as people keep watching the films, I’m very happy. One of the fun things about this company is I don’t want to be an A24 or Neon. I want to stay small. I don’t like dealing with… How to say it? I guess I was just imagining A24 having, like, 500 employees. I’m like, “I don’t want 500 employees. I don’t want to deal with those lawyers and things like that.” You know, The People’s Joker was… I’ve had enough time with lawyers in the past year where I really, don’t want to do that anymore.
[WW] On The People’s Joker, when did you first realise it was something you wanted to release? Did you see it at Toronto?
[Frank] No, I remember I heard about it a little bit at Toronto, because one of the stars of the film is actually someone I worked with for years at Strand Releasing, Nathan Faustyn. So it was crazy, because I heard he was in this film, and then I heard it got pulled. When I was hearing about it, I didn’t dismiss it, I just remember thinking, “Oh, that sounds really cool. I’m sure some big distributor will do it. I’m not going to even think about it.” And then it literally disappeared from my mind. And then Outfest said they were going to play it. And that was kind of the comeback tour, Outfest, technically the US premiere. I got a ticket to it and I just watched it. And as I was watching it, I was just, like, “Oh, damn, this movie’s really good.” It felt dangerous and underground, and it felt like a movie that not every person would get, but the right people would get 100% – 110%. I’d heard that maybe there was a distributor, but then Vera, at the screening, was like, “We don’t have a distributor.” And then I was like, “Okay, I need to try.” And then me and Vera met up and we have very, very similar taste in movies and culture and, you know, anarchist ideas. And so it was pretty much, you know, a match made in purgatory. I don’t wanna say heaven. Movie heaven. And then we decided to work together.
And, you know, I was a little afraid, but not that afraid. When I was watching in the cinema, I was just, like, “Oh, my God, this is such a parody.” Like, “I don’t know [yet] if technically, 100%, legally, it is a parody, but for all intents and purposes, the filmmaker just, you know, made a parody film. So, I don’t see why this is an issue.” And, yeah, we just started working on it and it’s had its ups, it’s had its downs. But right now, we’re just so thrilled with the response. I’m usually not trawling Letterboxd every day. But during the theatrical release, I was trawling Letterboxd every day. Just every day, just quickly checking, like, “Was I right? Okay, I was right.” Then the next day, “Was I right? Okay. Yes, I’m still right.” Because I was just always worried that, somehow… Because we did a tiered release where we started one week only in New York, then we went to eight other major cities, and then we went to, like, 30 and then we went to, like, 80. So every time a new week came, I was just, “Oh, the smaller cities, they’re not going to get it.” Or, “Somehow, the DC heads are going to hear about it. They’re all going to go to the theater this week and hate it,” or something like that. But it never happened. Every week, we just constantly get positive reviews. And if people hate it, they’re shutting their mouths about it, which is what Vera always says at all the movie screenings. Like, “If you love it, tell all your friends. If you hate it, just don’t say anything.” We’re still trying to figure out international distribution. Obviously, we want everyone to see it, so it’s still a bit of a journey to go. It’s definitely not over, but it’s been really fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Weird Weekend presented She Is Conann on Friday 31st April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow.
Find out more about Altered Innocence’s latest theatrical and disc releases here. Follow them on Instagram here.