The Founding Chapter
Three festival programmers, one tired of the algorithm.
Chapter I — 2019, Brooklyn
Filmxa was founded in 2019 by three people who had spent the previous decade on the other side of the velvet rope: Elena Vasquez, a former Sundance programmer; Marco Lefèvre, an IndieWire alumnus and features editor; and Priya Anand, then a Variety staff critic covering international cinema. They launched the site in a converted warehouse on Kent Avenue in Brooklyn with a single promise — write about film the way working critics talk about it after the press screening, not the way aggregators paraphrase press kits.
Chapter II — The First Year
The first twelve months were 312 reviews, four festivals on the ground, and a daily editorial newsletter that became the publication's spine. By the end of 2019, the team had filed from Cannes, Toronto, and Telluride, and the readership had grown to 38,000 weekly subscribers — almost entirely through word of mouth from cinephile forums and film school mailing lists.
Chapter III — The Member Pivot, 2021
In 2021, after two years of chasing programmatic ad revenue and hating what it did to the writing, the masthead made a deliberate choice: turn off the ad network, fire the SEO freelancers, and ask readers to fund the work directly. The membership program launched with 4,200 paying members in its first quarter. By the end of 2022, that number had passed 19,000.
Chapter IV — 2026, Today
Today, Filmxa operates from a fourth-floor office on Kent Avenue with editorial bureaus in London, Tokyo, Lagos, and São Paulo. The team is 65 full-time editors, critics, and producers; 47 staff critics and 18 regional correspondents file across 71 countries. 218,000 readers receive the Weekly Reel every Thursday morning. 41,000 of them pay for it. The site has published 14,800 reviews and 6,200 longform features since launch, and was named Best Independent Film Publication by the Online Film Critics Society in both 2023 and 2024.
