We Should Have Known Better: A $2,000 Lesson in Indie Film Promotion

This is a difficult blog to write. It exposes an embarrassing situation for us, an error of judgement we should not be making after almost twenty years in the film industry. Quite simply, we put our trust in someone we shouldn't have. And we got burnt. Badly.

I first became aware of Sujewa Ekanayake via filmmaking and distribution groups on Facebook. He was a proponent of cinema releases for indie films and would post regularly about screening films in theatres and why filmmakers should explore that path. As a fan of screening my work in a cinema myself, having real interaction with the audience, getting feedback, getting early reviews and press, I saw that we shared the same philosophy.

So when we were organising European cinema screenings for our latest feature, ForeFans (known as Watch Me in the US), I got in touch with Sujewa to see what might be possible in New York. He was based in Brooklyn, where he ran the 3I/Atlas Film Festival, and had experience organising independent film screenings in the city. The cost was $4,000: $2,000 for seven screenings at a cinema in Brooklyn, and another $2,000 for marketing and advertising. Sujewa would also act as the liaison with the cinema and manage the screenings. The promotional plan was detailed in an email and sounded extensive: 250 media contacts in the New York area, emailing a 3,000-person indie film mailing list, working with another festival to reach their audience, updates across his filmmaking blogs, Facebook and Twitter promotion, Instagram advertising, targeted advertising in Brooklyn and YouTube videos. In a later email, he estimated he would undertake 70–100 hours of promotional work over the course of a month. He also assured us that all work and expenses would be documented.

On paper, it sounded impressive. At the time, we were organising a screening of ForeFans in London and finding a cinema willing to do a single screening for less than £1,000 was difficult. So seven screenings in New York for $2,000 seemed like a great deal. We had also worked with plenty of PR agencies on previous film releases, and another $2,000 for a month-long marketing campaign was very reasonable. In fact, we'd paid considerably more to professional PR firms in the past without them moving the needle much at all.

Still, we didn't immediately say yes.

Our initial contact with Sujewa was in March 2026. At the time he was preparing the 3I/Atlas Film Festival in Brooklyn, which included several week-long runs for independent films. He told us he would send through the results and audience numbers once the festival was over, giving us some current data to look at while we considered whether to work with him.

Then that data came back. He emailed: “During the last 2 weeks we had at the venue… 1 event w/ 150 people, 1 event w/ 30, 1 event w/ 40, rest w/ 10–20 people. Got some good ads and a couple of reviews out of the fest.”

He had also given us data for a previous film of his, Cosmic Rene, which had screened for a week at Film Noir Cinema (the cinema we would end up booking) in 2024 and averaged 20–30 people per screening.

None of these were extraordinary numbers, but they seemed realistic for independent cinema and in line with what we had experienced ourselves with a previous cinema release for our film After the Act. We weren't expecting to sell out seven screenings in New York. If we could get 20–30 people into each screening, generate some press and reviews, and establish the film in New York ahead of its wider release, we would have considered that a success.

So two months after initial contact, we decided to go ahead.

I did have some reservations about Sujewa's way of doing business. Early on, there were messages along the lines of, here's my Zelle, send the money. I'm naturally cautious about that sort of thing and wasn't comfortable sending money to someone I'd never met based on an email exchange. We insisted on having a proper agreement first, with the venue, costs, responsibilities and promotional work clearly laid out.

Looking back, I already suspected that Sujewa was somewhat chaotic. But I didn't necessarily see that as a bad thing. He had a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and I was willing to try something different. Instead of another polished PR company sending out press releases, this would be more of a grassroots campaign run by an indie filmmaker who seemed genuinely passionate about getting independent films into cinemas.

To his credit, he also made it clear that we didn't need him. We could book the cinema and organise the promotion ourselves if we wanted to. Working through him, he said, would mean less work for us because he had produced a lot of screenings in New York. That actually made me more comfortable saying yes. It didn't feel like a hard sell.

Or perhaps that was just how I justified the warning signs to myself at the time.

But there was another reason we decided to work with him: we were overwhelmed.

At the time, we were organising ForeFans screenings in London and Madrid, while our previous feature, After the Act, was preparing for its digital release in June. There was a lot happening at once. The idea of handing New York over to somebody local who could deal with the cinema, organise the screenings and take responsibility for a month of promotion was incredibly appealing.

So on May 12th, we signed the agreement. And once we did so, the emails started coming. Lots of them.

Sujewa was full of ideas. Some were relevant, some were interesting, and others seemed to have very little to do with what we'd actually hired him to do. There were ideas about Kickstarter, promoting our back catalogue, fundraising, YouTube interviews and establishing me as a filmmaker with the New York press. Then there were proposals to expand the release beyond New York, with screenings in Chicago and Los Angeles, accompanied by requests for additional money to make those happen.

At first, I took the enthusiasm as a positive. Before long, though, it became exhausting. There were so many emails, so many ideas and so many different directions that I was spending an increasing amount of time just trying to keep track of what Sujewa was proposing.

Which was ironic. One of the reasons we'd hired him in the first place was because we were already overwhelmed with work.

By the end of June, our other screenings and releases were behind us, so we turned our full attention to New York. By this point, a lot had been promised. Not much had actually happened.

The emails had become a recurring cycle of promotion that was always apparently just about to happen. On June 24th, Sujewa told us the Watch Me promotional work was being done and that he would send us links later that week. On June 27th, he told us our promotional interview we had filmed with him over Zoom would be online in a couple of days, along with clips, while he spent the weekend organising the rest of the promotional work.

The interview was never released.

At the same time, Sujewa was working on and promoting his own feature, 53 Spaceships: The Code Breakers. This started to concern us too, because we were seeing the same pattern play out with his own project: ambitious announcements followed by deadlines that came and went. He had announced premiere screenings for his film in both New York and Los Angeles, booking dates at cinemas, promoting them on social media. Neither screening happened because he failed to finish his film in time.

That mattered to us because we weren't simply watching somebody struggle to promote our film. We were watching somebody make increasingly ambitious promises across multiple projects while repeatedly failing to deliver.

Then, on July 9th, the promises became considerably more ambitious. Sujewa emailed us with the subject line “1000 promo posts going up” and wrote: “Over next 7 days posting up 1000 promo posts for WM release + 53S, other films at 53+ blogs and sites. Will send links.”

One thousand promotional posts. In seven days. It was completely ridiculous.

However, by this stage, we were becoming less interested in what was about to happen and much more interested in what had actually happened.

There had certainly been some activity. Sujewa had posted about the film on his DIY Filmmaker blog and shared it several times through his social media accounts. But those posts generated no visible engagement or very little. More importantly, we weren't seeing evidence of a promotional campaign remotely approaching the scale being described in his emails.

On July 11th, I checked the Eventbrite analytics for our Watch Me screenings in New York.

11 page views.

This was the ticket page Sujewa had been adamant we needed to launch back in May so there would be plenty of time to promote the screenings. We were now less than a month from the first New York screening, and the page where people could actually buy tickets had been viewed just eleven times.

Whatever else was supposedly happening, that number was difficult to ignore. So one thing became increasingly urgent to us: driving more traffic to Eventbrite. And the quickest way we knew how was with paid advertising on Meta.

Sujewa had repeatedly told us that Meta advertising was going to be launched. We wanted it running because the Eventbrite numbers showed that almost nobody was reaching the ticket page, proving any promotion he had done up to that point was ineffective. But, like so many other promises and parts of the campaign, the ads were always about to start rather than actually starting.

On Saturday, July 11th, we were told the Facebook and Instagram ads would go live on Monday.

So we waited.

Monday, July 13th arrived. The ads still weren't running. Instead, the deadline moved again. Sujewa told us: “Should have both done by end of Mon - late night. If not it will be Tue or Wed.”

At that point, I got tired of waiting. I already knew how to run Meta ads and had achieved a great cost per click with previous campaigns for the film. Setting up another campaign was quick and easy because I already had the assets from those campaigns, which I had also sent to Sujewa. But the ads still hadn't been launched, and with the screenings getting closer there seemed little point in losing another day or two. So I simply launched the campaign myself at $10 per day as an initial test to see if it would convert.

I expected the response from someone being paid to promote the film to be fairly straightforward: great, the ads are running; I'll concentrate on everything else. Surely this would be the response of any rational PR person?

Instead, Sujewa took offence. His response was: “That’s not the plan.”

What happened next caught us completely by surprise. Sujewa suddenly wanted to pull the plug on the arrangement, talking about cancelling the screenings, stepping away from the promotion, getting a refund from the cinema, and returning the promotional money. We made it clear that wasn't what we wanted: the screenings were booked, the US premiere was approaching and the screenings would be going ahead. We wanted him to stay on and continue the work we had hired him to do and we made this clear in our reply to him. The only thing we had taken into our own hands was the Meta advertising.

But his decision was to quit. On July 14th he wrote: “Keep the screenings. I am off the promo and shows management project - do that work yourself if you think you know what will work better. Good luck.”

We were stunned. This wasn't the culmination of weeks of arguments or disagreements. There hadn't been some ongoing battle over how the film should be promoted, and I can't recall us rejecting any of his promotional ideas. As far as we were concerned, we were all working towards the same goal. Then, at the first sign of even a minor disagreement, he quit. Over a $10 Meta ad.

Rather than simply allowing the filmmakers themselves to contribute to promoting their own film (something I would have thought any promoter would welcome), his response was to walk away entirely, less than a month before our US premiere. It felt wildly disproportionate, and it left us scrambling to take over work we had already paid somebody else to do.

But there was a second part to his July 14th email. Sujewa said he would be in touch on Thursday with “refund info for promo work” and asked us to send our ACH details for the money transfer.

Okay. Fine. He was out. Maybe he had realised he'd bitten off more than he could chew. Maybe quitting was his way of escaping a workload that, judging by everything we'd seen over the previous few weeks, he simply couldn't keep up with. We couldn't know. It was far from ideal — our on-the-ground promoter in New York had just walked away with barely three weeks until the first screening — but at least he was offering to return the promotional money. If we had the money back within a few days, as he seemed to be promising, we could put it directly into advertising and try to salvage something from the situation ourselves.

So we sent him our bank details.

Thursday came.

The refund didn't.

Instead, we entered another cycle of promises and moving deadlines. On July 18th, Sujewa told us that money would start coming our way on July 20th, with “all $s due” to be paid that night or soon after. But in the same email, he added something that made the situation considerably more concerning: “waiting for some large transfers related to clear at my bank - should be done by mon afternoon.”

I didn’t know what had happened to our money, and I still don’t. But I found that statement troubling. We had paid $2,000 specifically for marketing and advertising our film. Much of the promised work hadn't happened, he had now quit, and yet returning whatever remained apparently depended upon unrelated “large transfers” clearing into his bank account.

It inevitably raised a question in my mind: if our marketing money hadn't been spent on our marketing, why wasn't it available to return?

That raised more uncomfortable questions. Was that why he had reacted so disproportionately to us launching a $10 Meta ad — because we would naturally expect the cost to come out of the $2,000 marketing budget? Was that why the Brooklyn Paper advertising he had told us he would organise and pay for never happened and we had to do it ourselves? Had the money already been spent elsewhere?

Of course, I couldn’t be sure. But when someone tells you they need to wait for other “large transfers” to clear before they can return money you gave them for work that wasn't completed, those are reasonable questions to start asking.

All in all, between July 2nd and August 26th, 2026, Sujewa raised or promised the return of our money on eight separate occasions. Yes, even before he quit, he was telling us he could return the $2,000. But deadlines came and went. New deadlines replaced them. As I write this, we still haven't received a cent.

Even on August 7th, the day of our first New York screening, Sujewa wished us luck with the shows. I told him I was now in New York and offered to make the refund as easy as possible: “Tell me where you are and I will come get the money from you.” I never heard back.

So we went ahead with the New York screenings alone. They were poorly attended. By then, after our previous releases, PR campaigns and the cost of travelling to New York, we had very little money left for promotion. And our $2,000 marketing budget remained in the hands of someone I now considered a dodgy cunt. So, almost inevitably, the New York cinema run was a bust.

By late August, after the screenings were over, we'd had enough of the back and forth with Sujewa. We engaged a lawyer, who sent Sujewa a formal Letter of Demand on August 26th, demanding repayment of the $2,000 marketing fee.

Sujewa responded within hours but for the first time, his explanation changed. After weeks of telling us he would calculate and return the balance, he now claimed: “Client kept rejecting promotional work ideas about a month prior to screenings, so stopped work for them, as the path they were taking for promo work would not produce good results.” He said some promotional work had been completed, that he would calculate what remained by September 2nd, and that “Will send the balance by 9/15.”

This was news to us. I couldn't recall repeatedly rejecting his promotional ideas at all. In fact, the emails from the time showed the opposite. During the argument over him quitting, I had explicitly told him: “We are committed to the screenings. We want you to promote them, and I also want to help promote them.” He quit anyway. Now, six weeks later and only after receiving a lawyer's letter, our supposed rejection of his ideas had suddenly become the explanation for why he stopped the promotional work and quit.

Dodgy cunt.

As we consider our next steps, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we got this so wrong in the first place.

We've been making films for almost twenty years. You'd think by now we'd be pretty good at judging character. And we've certainly had our share of difficult characters along the way. We've dealt with people trying to hold our film festival hostage because we didn't cast their wife in a short film, egomaniacs becoming vindictive over perceived slights, contract disputes, lying distributors, and all the other weird dramas that seem to be par for the course in independent filmmaking.

But most of that was years ago, in another country and another life. Somewhere along the way, we became pretty good at spotting people who were likely to bring unnecessary drama into our lives and quietly avoiding them. These days we value our peace. We pride ourselves on working with professionals, treating people well and being careful about who we trust with our films, our money, and our time.

So how did we get it so wrong with Sujewa?

I think part of the answer is that he was offering us something we desperately wanted: someone else taking responsibility.

Cinema screenings are bloody hard work. We knew that from experience. Booking the venue is the easy part. Then comes the advertising, press, listings, ticketing, posters, social media, local outreach and the constant anxiety about whether anyone is actually going to turn up. Doing all of that from the other side of the world makes it even harder.

So when someone based in New York came along offering to manage and promote the entire run for us, it was incredibly appealing. For once, we could hand that responsibility to somebody local, pay them to do the job, and concentrate on everything else we had going on.

It turned out to be too good to be true.

The other mistake was even more basic: we didn't do our homework.

Whenever we consider working with a distributor we haven't dealt with before, we research them extensively. We look at their history, search for complaints and, most importantly, track down filmmakers who have actually worked with them and ask about their experience. It's advice we've given other filmmakers countless times: don't trust the pitch, talk to people with experience.

For some reason, we didn't follow our own advice here. Sujewa was a fellow independent filmmaker, he seemed enthusiastic about the film, and the idea of having someone local take responsibility for New York was so appealing that we let our guard down.

Had we done even a little more digging, there were things that would have raised questions. His GoFundMe for 53 Spaceships: The Code Breakers currently displays $32,113 raised from 39 donations, but almost every donation shown is marked “Offline”. Many are also unusually labelled, including “Long Term Merch Sales Project Set Up 2025 Money” for $12,000 and “Additional BB Money” for $5,000. Offline donations are manually entered by the fundraiser rather than processed through GoFundMe, meaning GoFundMe itself provides no evidence on the page that those amounts were actually received.

Much like our refund.

There were other warning signs too. I had seen Sujewa arguing with people on Facebook before. When someone questioned his views about cinema or filmmaking, he didn't seem particularly good at letting the disagreement go. What might have been a minor difference of opinion could turn into a series of long posts defending his position and arguing his case. Any criticism, even minor, did not seem to be something he handled particularly well.

Further, the films of his that I saw were very rough on a technical level, with basic production values and poor sound, and usually revolved around ancient spaceships, immortal time travellers and his own theories about extraterrestrial life. None of that bothered me at the time as filmmakers are allowed to be weird, and I respect the hustle of just getting things made, but some of our conversations left me genuinely unsure where the science fiction ended and his personal beliefs began.

All this might seem minor, but combined and looking back, we probably should have taken a closer look at the person we were trusting with our film and our money.

But we didn't. We ignored the exact advice we routinely give other filmmakers, and we paid the price.

I've also spent a lot of time wondering whether Sujewa ever deliberately set out to screw us over, and I actually don't think he did. My own theory (and it is only a theory) is that he seems to be chronically unrealistic about what he can accomplish. He seems to make commitments based on what he intends to do rather than what he is actually capable of delivering. Then, when the gap between those two things becomes impossible to ignore, he reacts badly and finds a way to rationalise what happened.

That would explain a lot about our experience with him. The endless ambitious promises. The constantly moving deadlines. The extraordinary reaction to a $10 Meta ad. And eventually, the rewriting of events to suggest that we had been the ones preventing him from doing his job.

Ultimately, we made a mistake. After almost twenty years in independent film, we ignored our own instincts, failed to do the due diligence we normally do, and trusted someone we shouldn't have.

We got burnt.

Embarrassing as it is, hopefully, by writing about it, another filmmaker won't make the same mistake.

Written by Ivan Malekin