Steven Soderbergh-Backed, NFT-Funded Film Lands Global Sales Deal

“The Quiet Maid,” an upcoming feature film funded by the sale of NFTs, has secured a global sales deal. 

The film, a social satire formerly titled “Calladita” from the Spanish filmmaker Miguel Faus, sold its world sales rights to the Ibero-American entertainment firm FilmSharks out of Iberseries, the industry conference held this week in Madrid. Deadline first reported the deal. 

“The Quiet Maid” follows a Colombian maid’s lows and highs as she labors for an opulently wealthy and potentially deceptive Spanish family on the coast of Catalonia. It is based off a short film made by Faus, which was picked up by streaming service Max after a stint last year on the festival circuit.

Faus soon after leveraged the 15-minute film to sell NFT passes, in the aim of raising funds for a feature-length version of the same story. The NFTs were a success, raising a $750,000 production budget; they offered holders behind-the-scenes access to the film’s production as well as control, via a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), over a portion of the film’s eventual proceeds. 

In January, “Ocean’s Eleven” director Steven Soderbergh awarded Faus $100,000 to finish the film, from an on-chain fund established with Decentralized Pictures and designed to assist promising filmmakers open to non-traditional film financing methods.

While Faus is elated to have successfully gotten his film over the finish line with blockchain-backed financing, he believes the technology that facilitated the project’s realization can only take it so far, and cannot define its artistic quality. 

“I don’t think any success of the movie will come from the innovative and decentralized way it was funded.” Faus told Decrypt. “That was a success in its own right, but now the film has to find its audience and will appeal to them, or not, independently of how it came to exist.”

“The Quiet Maid” will have its world premiere next month in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia. It will compete in the First Feature category.