It’s no secret Karina and I have been advocates of Joe Swanberg’s films since his debut, Kissing on the Mouth, hit festivals two years ago. In light of the recent debate about conflict of interest in the film blog community, I think it’s a good time to clarify our relationship as critics/fans versus the sponsorship/distributor ventures we’ve been getting into, most recently with Butterknife.

For Spout, some may say it’s a conflict of interest for a company employing ardent supporters writing about Swanberg to then distribute his work online, as if our support has been engineered for two years to help Butterknife. So, before the record is even bent, I’ll set it straight.

We have felt since seeing Kissing on the Mouth that Joe is a filmmaker to watch. Trying to spread the word about his movies is what we do. There was no talk of distributing his work until recently. That said, after Spout’s promotion of Four Eyed Monsters in June, Joe contacted me and said he had an idea for a web series he would be shopping around later in the year. In September, he shot the first four episodes of Butterknife and showed me a rough cut. It was unanimous here, everybody wanted to show it and we bought the Internet distribution rights.

So, we officially switch hats here. We will be promoting Butterknife on SpoutBlog in the coming months. I think we’d be covering it anyway as we have all of Joe’s work, but it is true we now have more than an altruistic reason to promote it.

And now… a shameless promotion: Sign up to get notified when Butterknife is released at butterknife.spout.com.