With so many streaming platforms out there, how do standout documentaries and indie features actually find the audiences who need to see them? Though many decry that “film distribution is broken,” Jolt is taking a bold new approach—and it might just change the game for independent cinema.


Join Tara Hein-Phillips, Co-Founder and CEO of Jolt, for a live online session exploring how her platform is using cutting-edge tools to solve one of indie film’s biggest challenges: discovery. Unlike traditional streamers, Jolt’s unique Interest Delivery Network uses targeted data to match films with viewers who are already passionate about their themes—no algorithms or guessing in the dark.


Jolt is the exclusive digital home to festival-favorite documentaries Gaucho Gaucho (Sundance Film Festival) and Zurawski v Texas (Telluride Film Festival), as well as Hollywoodgate and The Bibi Files, two films shortlisted for the 2025 Best Documentary Feature Academy Award.


Hein-Phillips will appear in conversation with the directors of Can't Look Away: The Case Against Social Media: Matthew O'Neill and Perri Peltz. The film follows a team of lawyers fighting for families whose children suffered devastating harm—suicide, drug overdose, and exploitation—linked to social media. The filmmakers will discuss their urgent doc expose and why Jolt was the ideal home for the film.


This event is part of Profiles in Indie Distribution, a larger Collab series on innovative new approaches to getting your film seen as an independent filmmaker.

Matthew O’Neill
Matthew O’Neill is an Emmy® Award winning and Academy Award® nominated documentary filmmaker and journalist. He most recently directed Surveilled for HBO and created the Emmy® winning HBO documentary news series AXIOS on HBO with Perri Peltz. Matthew and Perri also directed the 2019 HBO documentary Alternate Endings: Six New Ways to Die in America. Matthew has been making non-fiction films with Downtown Community Television Center, Inc, (DCTV) in NYC's Chinatown for the last 25 years. His earlier projects for HBO, ESPN, Disney+, Netflix and FRONTLINE have focused on everything from the Egyptian Revolution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American criminal justice system, and the School of American Ballet. His filmmaking has taken him to more than 50 different countries for films including Baghdad ER, In Tahrir Square and Wartorn. He has received two Academy Award nominations for Redemption and China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province and has been recognized with two Columbia DuPont Awards, a Peabody Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, five Emmy Awards and a Director’s Guild Award nomination. more...
Tara Hein-Phillips
Tara Hein-Phillips has spent more than two decades as digital product and technology leader, with a focus on the arts and education. She was the Chief Product Officer at Sundance, launching the first virtual festival in 2021 and was co-founder of Sundance Collab. As the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Jolt, she now leads the efforts to deliver relevant new audiences for extraordinary new independent films, films that need to be seen but that mass distribution overlooks. The Jolt platform engages audiences directly on a global scale, helping great films achieve their full potential for reach and monetization while filmmakers retain ownership, data, and all future rights. more...
Soheil Rezayazdi
Moderator | Digital Course & Event Producer
Soheil Rezayazdi is a Digital Course & Event Producer at the Sundance Institute, where he produces multi-session courses, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, and other digital programs for Sundance Collab. Prior to Sundance, Soheil served as the Nonfiction Programs Manager at the Gotham Film & Media Institute. He oversaw the Gotham’s core documentary programs: the Documentary Feature Lab, the Spotlight on Documentaries project market, and the Documentary Development Initiative in partnership with HBO Documentary Films. Soheil has worked with emerging filmmakers since 2015, when he began a seven-year tenure at the Columbia University MFA Film Program. At Columbia he managed the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival, and the Carla Kuhn Memorial Speaker Series. Soheil is also a freelance writer on film and pop culture with articles in Indiewire, McSweeney’s, Vice, Filmmaker Magazine, Documentary Magazine, Paper, Paste, and elsewhere. He has also served as an external reviewer for artist programs operated by Creative Capital, Kartemquin Pictures, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and the International Documentary Association. A native of Iran, he holds an MA in journalism and a BA in film studies from the University of Iowa. more...
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