Any really neglected niche audiences?

From Glen Pitre's Yellow Fever.

Well, so mainstream actors like Greg Kinnear and Nicolas Cage are appearing in Christian movies. A gay film, Call Me By Your Name, was made for a mainstream audience.

Is there any audience so neglected by the mass media today that it would gratefully accept the work of a zero budget filmmaker?

The B movie director Edgar Ulmer started out in the '30's making "race films", movies with an all Black cast, and made Ukrainian-language movies for Ukrainian-American audiences. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,500 for the Spanish language home video market. It was shot in 16mm and $7,100 went for filmstock and lab costs, so, theoretically, if it had been shot in digital video, it would have cost only $400.

I have a couple of Spanish-language DVD's, and they're terrible. I can see why Rodriguez was confident he could break into that market. He was still in college when he filmed the movie in Mexico. His plan was to go back to school and, when people asked what he did over the summer, he would tell them he made a foreign film.

But from the late '70's to the 1980's, Hollywood made nothing for Black audiences. There were some low budget attempts by independent producers to fill that void, but they didn't take off. An article in a radical film journal discussed this at the time. Filmmakers were trying to adapt Third World Cinema for a visually sophisticated Black American audience used to Hollywood movies.

In the 1950's, there were reportedly 16mm color silent films being shown in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Glen Pitre made a number of Cajun language films in Louisiana.

There used to be a question in Trivial Pursuit or somewhere. There are more Polish-language newspapers in the US than Chinese-language newspapers. Do Polish-speaking Americans need their own movies? Hollywood movies are presumably shown in Poland---are Polish-dubbed Hollywood movies available in the United States? If not, are Polish immigrants so hard up for entertainment that they'd sit through a zero-budget movie just because it was in Polish?

It's not like there's any shortage of movies in the world.

There seems to be a growing number of people who believe the Earth is flat---at least they're making it into the news. What about a nice drama or science fiction movie aimed at them? Would they care?

What about the Amish?

Paul Schrader grew up as a Calvinist. He was seventeen before he snuck away to see his first movie. I think he said it was The Absent-Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray. He was terribly unimpressed. So just because you've never seen a movie, it doesn't mean you're an idiot.