The Pandemic Is Hitting One Part of Hollywood Especially Hard

Kate McLean and Mario Furloni have been working on Freeland, their first narrative feature film, for almost a decade. The writer-director duo had been inspired to make the drama—a melancholic examination of an aging weed farmer contending with a changing industry—early on in their careers, after they made the 2011 documentary short Pot Country. Years of writing and rewriting, of pursuing funding from film grants, of assembling a lean crew and heavyweight cast, paid off when South by Southwest, the annual music and film festival held in Austin, selected the film to screen in its 2020 lineup.

But then, on March 6, the Texas capital because of the outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The news gutted McLean and Furloni: They’d been looking forward to finally having , which they shot in 2018, play in front of an audience; to reuniting with their small cast and crew at the film’s world premiere on March 13; and, of course, to potentially finding a distributor for the film. The festival’s cancellation left their team and their film unmoored. “My first reaction was, ” Furloni