Trust the Audience.
Serve the Audience.
Reach the Audience.

Audience Alliance was established as the culmination of the lifetime of filmmaking and media experience of its founders. The first public announcement concerning the company’s bold mission was issued by co-founders Kieth Merrill & Peter Rancie at Park City, Utah (home of Sundance Film Festival) November 16, 2006. Audience Alliance was founded on the premise that audiences really do know what they want, and they certainly know what they don’t want. The oft-repeated mantra is “Trust the Audience. Serve the Audience.” Since seventy percent of movie-goers in the USA say that Hollywood is out of touch with their values, Audience Alliance has made a clear stand on its values and the way these will be expressed in film. The company is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is represented in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA.

Kieth Merrill won an Academy Award for his feature documentary, “Great American Cowboy”. He was nominated again for his IMAX film, “Amazon”. Kieth Merrill’s filmmaking record, which includes a number of successful feature films, documentaries, short form television, and many IMAX films, in a career spanning almost 40 years, stands for itself. He has received both critical and audience acclaim and established a body of work which few independent filmmakers have achieved but to which many aspire. He is therefore extremely well qualified for his ‘professorial’ role in nurturing young filmmakers for generational change.

This idea of ‘generational change’ by working with young filmmakers is the key to the Audience Alliance mission of ‘changing the world of motion pictures for good’. Creative development and production is one side of filmmaking. Balancing creative issues with fundraising, marketing and distribution to a global audience are the domain of CEO Peter Rancie. He has spent three decades developing and managing leading edge advertising & marketing agencies, building client brand recognition, and generating client revenues. Audience Alliance now consists of a dedicated team of financial, legal, business development, filmmaking, marketing and distribution professionals to wrap the projects of young filmmakers in a sustainable program of development from concept to distribution. The movie Broken Hill has served as a kind of incubator program for the past two years and provides a prototype for finding and qualifying more young filmmakers to enter the Audience Alliance Academy.