The Girl Walk Premiere

On Thursday night Kickstarter had the honor of hosting the world premiere of the film Girl Walk // All Day. The premiere wasn’t held in a seated theater for a polite audience. It was held in front of 1,200 dancing and cheering people at a music venue, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. Many in the audience were backers of the project.

Kickstarter has been intertwined with Girl Walk from its beginning. We watched that Staten Island Ferry video dozens of times, and both myself and Cassie (another Kickstarter-er) appear as dancers in the film (“dancer” in quotes for me). This is not unusual for us. We get emotionally invested in projects everyday — we look at them all — and our team is constantly backing projects. Many on our staff backed Girl Walk.

The crazy thing about Thursday was seeing that same enthusiasm from people that aren’t us. Girl Walk is an incredible film and a future cult classic. But is that enough to get 1,200 people to wait in an around-the-block line to see a movie with no marketing on a cold December night? And off the G train no less? Before the screening I ran into Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker and he was curious about the crowd. “Why are all these people here?” he asked. “Because it’s the internet,” I think I said.

But I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think us 1,200 people lined up to see Girl Walk for the same reasons we back projects on Kickstarter: because it was ours. What made Thursday unique wasn’t just that it was a movie premiere where people danced. Because of how it was made, because of its soundtrack, because it’s a film about not settling for the world as it is, Girl Walk was our movie.

Shared experiences like those are hard to come by. But everyday, in ways big and small, Kickstarter helps them happen. There aren’t always 1,200 people and throngs of photographers there to see them. There isn’t always a line around the block. But there’s always that huge buzz: “WE DID IT!”