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Gigantic Releasing had been a distribution platform working with digital arm Gigantic Digital. The company already had released (theatrically and online) acclaimed documentary Must Read After My Death.

With today’s announcement, the company will concentrate on online exhibition instead of distribution.

The company will work with distributors, producers and film organizations to offer content to broadband users in the US, with publicity and marketing support.

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Digital video and audio cables, similar to the ones that already connect TVs to DVD players, cable boxes and receivers, will soon come with a new capability: connecting those devices to the Internet.

Manufacturers said Thursday that version 1.4 of the HDMI standard, for High-Definition Multimedia Interface, includes a data networking feature.

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My friend Brian Devine has had a dream for well over a decade: build a NY-based indie film and music ‘studio.’ A place where filmmakers could, nestled within the most supportive and collaborative environment, develop their films, shoot their films, score their films, post produce their films and distribute their films. Indie film and music merged with grace and elegance. When Brian phoned me near the end of 2007 and asked me to launch Gigantic’s film releasing company, all of the other pieces of his dream were in place or nearing completion. The question for me was: did the world need another indie film distributor? The answer, of course, was an emphatic no.

Unless that company had a mandate to generate dynamic new ideas for bridging the indie distribution gap and fearlessly execute on those ideas. I’m excited to report that we took on that very mandate. The stunning results demand that we enter the exhibition arena and offer all comers the keys to the Internet.

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Gigantic Releasing, which recently debuted the critically acclaimed documentary Must Read After My Death, may be an ironic name for the new arm of the Gigantic Group, since only indie vet Mark Lipsky and an assistant are behind the wheel. But the concept for this new independent distributor, if not gigantic, certainly encapsulates big intentions, a grand vision and, says Lipsky, “an industry-changing paradigm.”

In fact, Gigantic boasted the first ever national theatre/online day-and-date release, with its GiganticDigital.com website offering viewers high-quality streaming of the film—actually the highest resolution that a viewer’s broadband connection can handle—at a manageable $2.99 for a three-day viewing window while sparing them disruptive, annoying ads.

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At its heart, and there is a great heart to be discovered here, Morgan Dews' documentary "Must Read After My Death" is a searing and intimate account of an unconventional woman struggling not to lose her identity or her sanity in the rigid 1950s suburban world of stay-at-home moms, well-behaved children and sparkling-clean houses.

It is a family seen through the prism of Allis, Dews' grandmother, not the one he knew growing up but the one he discovered in the more than 200 hours of home movies, 50 hours of tapes and 300 pages of transcripts in a file labeled "Must Read After My Death."

This is Dews' first feature-length film, and he has done exceedingly well distilling all those pages and hours into a story so compelling and so taut in its construction that it is virtually impossible to look away; the images on-screen sit in almost complete opposition to the story we hear.

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Morgan Dews dearly loved his grandmother Allis, but never really got to know her until after she died in 2001. That’s when he discovered a treasure-trove of audio recordings she made in the 1960s that shed light on her painful personal life.

Dews has turned the confessional tapes -- and Allis’s collection of home movies, letters and photographs -- into a searing documentary called “Must Read After My Death.” It’s one of the most candid, wrenching family portraits ever seen on film.

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The remarkable, award-winning new documentary by Morgan Dews, "Must Read After My Death" made its historic national premiere Friday, February 20th. For the first time in movie history, a film opened in theaters in NY & LA and since that same morning, everyone in America with a broadband connection has been able to watch it digitally - and for only $2.99! $2.99 buys you a 3-day, unlimited viewing ticket and we stream all of our films at up to HD quality (depending on your available bandwidth and hardware setup) and commercial-free.

Soon we'll be upgrading our Player so that you will have the ability to dial up or dial down the quality of the stream so that you'll be viewing the film at the best possible quality for your particular setup.

Thanks for your support!

Here is a cry from the grave. A woman who died some 10 years ago at the age of 89 left behind about 50 hours of audiotapes, 200 home movies and 300 pages of documents, a record that all ended, 30 years before that, on the death of her husband. The cache was labeled, in bold marker on a manila envelope, "Must Read After My Death." What an anguished story it tells, of a marriage from hell.

The woman was named Allis. Her grandson, Morgan Dews, has created this film from her archives, and understandably represses her family name. She met her husband, Charlie, when they were both married to others. What she wanted was a nice little house with a white picket fence, where she would bear his children, whether or not they were married, because she knew they would have beautiful children together. They were married, and until death did not part.

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The best film opening in Chicago this week can’t be found at the multiplex, or Facets, or the Gene Siskel Film Center, or in the private projection booth whirring continuously in your brain, the one your doctor keeps urging you to do something about.

It’s called “Must Read After My Death” (3 1/2 stars), a bloodcurdling 75-minute diary assembled from an astonishing stash of audiotapes and Dictaphone recordings, cries and whispers out of one documentary filmmaker’s family history. It opens in limited theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles. Everywhere in between, director Morgan Dews’ film goes out digitally as a “broadband cinema” offering.

Beginning at 9 a.m. Friday, (Feb. 20), the doc is yours for three days of unlimited viewing for $2.99 at www.giganticdigital.com. Mark Lipsky, president of Gigantic Releasing and a former Miramax Films marketing head as well as an Independent Film Channel alum, acknowledges that “anybody can throw a movie up on the Internet and call it a ‘release.’ But we’re a bona fide distributor.”

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A drunk, Tomcatting father, an unfulfilled, restless mother and four children who pay the price.The family in filmmaker Morgan Dews’ Must Read After My Death could have been just another unhappy family locked away inside their Hartford, Conn. colonial. Except that Dews’ grandmother Allis channeled her frustration and abject happiness into the kind of obsessive documentation that would have done Richard Nixon proud.

Some families bequeath photo albums to the next generation, but Allis, who died in 2001 and was the architect of her family’s history throughout the 1950s and ’60s, bequeathed hours and hours of voice recordings and hundreds of 8mm home movies to her grandson Morgan Dews. He clearly saw the psychological mother lode locked inside this archeology of family. And so he did what any 21st-century documentarian would: He made a family memoir.

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