Bitcoin Season — Screening + Director Q&A with Netflix-Acquired Mike Nicoll
Details
Free Bitcoin Season screening + Q&A with Netflix & Apple TV director Mike Nicoll on filmmaking, basketball, culture, access and persuasion.
Join us for a special screening of Bitcoin Season, followed by an in-person Q&A with director Mike Nicoll.
Bitcoin Season explores the intersection of Bitcoin, professional basketball, business and culture, offering unusually high access to the people and institutions helping shape Bitcoin’s arrival in professional sports.
What is especially impressive about Bitcoin Season is how confidently it synthesizes so many sophisticated elements of contemporary documentary filmmaking without ever allowing the technique to overwhelm the story. The film moves fluidly between intimate observational access, character-driven storytelling, institutional and cultural analysis, carefully structured exposition, archival context, visual metaphor, pacing, music, humour and the tension of unfolding real-world events. It is operating on several levels at once—sports documentary, business story, cultural portrait, technological explainer and study of persuasion—yet remains remarkably accessible to viewers who may know little or nothing about Bitcoin.
That balance is difficult to achieve. Complex ideas are communicated cinematically rather than simply explained, while personalities and human relationships give the audience an emotional route into subjects that could easily become abstract or overly technical. The result is a film with considerable craft beneath the surface: sophisticated enough to reward filmmakers interested in directing, access, structure, editorial choices and nonfiction storytelling, but energetic and approachable enough to simply enjoy as a movie. Bitcoin Season demonstrates how advanced filmmaking technique can make a complicated subject feel clearer, more human and more entertaining rather than more complicated.
Mike Nicoll brings an unusually multidisciplinary perspective to documentary filmmaking. Before earning his MFA in Cinema & Television from USC’s prestigious School of Cinematic Arts, he studied film and psychology at the University of Michigan—a combination that is particularly evident in his ability to understand motivation, gain trust, read complex interpersonal dynamics and uncover the human behaviour beneath institutions and systems. Nicoll himself has described psychology as an exploration of character motivation, and that understanding of people gives his filmmaking a depth that goes well beyond simply documenting events.
That combination of psychological insight, rigorous filmmaking training and extraordinary patience for long-form documentary access has produced an impressive body of work. His first feature, At All Costs, was acquired by Netflix, while his acclaimed follow-up The Spoils: Selling the Future of American Basketball is now available through Apple TV after more than a decade of access to the rapidly changing world of elite youth basketball. His career has also included directing work for organizations including Nike, Facebook, 21st Century Fox and CNBC.
What makes Nicoll particularly compelling as a filmmaker is that he combines the instincts of a psychologist, the discipline of a USC-trained director and the persistence of an investigative documentarian. He is interested not merely in what happened, but in why people behave as they do, how power operates between them, and how those invisible forces can be translated into a story an audience can immediately understand and feel.
Following the film, Mike Nicoll will join us for a moderated conversation about directing, documentary access, trust, persuasion and the challenge of translating complex ideas into compelling cinema. We’ll also explore what made it into the finished film, what didn’t, and what Mike learned along the way.
The conversation will be moderated by a DGC BC member bringing lived experience of disability, adding an inclusive perspective to a broader discussion about access, whose voices are heard, and how filmmakers navigate powerful institutions.
Schedule
1:00 PM — Bitcoin Season screening begins promptly
Approximately 2:15 PM — Director Q&A with Mike Nicoll
Approximately 3:00 PM — Conclusion
DGC BC members receive free admission.
This is an independently organized, grassroots event and is not an official DGC BC production or endorsement.
Please arrive early enough to be seated before the 1:00 PM screening.