Your Attention Please Budget

What Is the Budget of Your Attention Please?

Your Attention Please is an independently financed feature documentary, and its exact production budget has not been publicly disclosed by the filmmakers or their backing organizations. The film was budgeted and managed end to end on the Saturation production finance platform, one of two SXSW 2026 premieres run on Saturation from pre-production through delivery, so its costs were tracked as a live production budget rather than estimated after the fact. Like most issue-driven documentaries that debut at a festival before securing distribution, it was assembled outside the studio system, drawing on a boutique production company and mission-aligned foundation support.

The production was led by Vagrants, a Boston production company founded in 2017, under its Vagrants Originals banner for story-driven narrative and commentary work. It was made in partnership with the Human Change Foundation and presented by Human Change, with additional support from Attention Rebellion and The Film Collaborative. That structure, a small originals-focused studio paired with a cause-based foundation, is typical of digital-wellbeing and public-health documentaries, where financing comes from grants, advocacy partners, and impact backers rather than commercial investors chasing a box office return.

Director Sara Robin first conceived the project in 2009 and began production in earnest in 2023. That long runway, combined with no attached studio money and a distribution deal still being sought at its premiere, places the film firmly in the low-budget independent documentary range, where total costs are typically measured in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Because Your Attention Please is a documentary built on access, expert testimony, and animation rather than sets and stars, its spending profile differs sharply from a narrative feature. Tracked inside Saturation, the budget concentrated in these areas:

• Multi-Year Production and Field Shooting: Filming spanned roughly 2023 to 2025 across multiple locations, following subjects like Kristin Bride over an extended period. Long-arc verite shooting drives crew, travel, and equipment costs even on a lean documentary.
• Expert and Subject Interviews: Coordinating a high-profile roster including Tristan Harris, Frances Haugen, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Sherry Turkle, and Cal Newport requires scheduling, travel, and professional interview setups across the country.
• Hand-Drawn Animation: Original hand-drawn sequences by COLA Animation visualize algorithms and difficult subject matter without traumatizing viewers. Bespoke animation is one of the most cost-intensive line items in a modern documentary.
• Archival and Licensing: News footage, social media clips, and music clearances carry rights and legal costs that scale with how much third-party material appears on screen.
• Post-Production and Editing: Writer and editor Jack LeMay shaped the film through an extended cut, including an in-person edit retreat the team credited with sharpening focus. Documentary post is long and labor-heavy by nature.
• Original Score and Sound: An original score by PHAR (Raphael Dargent) plus mix and sound design round out the finishing costs.
• Festival and Impact Campaign: The SXSW premiere and the coordinated "Stand for Their Attention" launch represent marketing and outreach spend aimed at advocacy reach rather than ticket sales.

How Does Your Attention Please's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

Documentaries about technology and social media rarely publish budgets, so the most useful comparison is production and distribution model rather than dollar figures. Against its closest peers, Your Attention Please sits at the grassroots, foundation-backed end of the spectrum:

• The Social Dilemma (2020): The genre benchmark, a Netflix docudrama that reached tens of millions of households within weeks of release. It shows the ceiling for mainstream reach, but its hybrid drama format and platform backing put it in a different financing tier than a verite documentary.
• The Great Hack (2019): A Netflix documentary on Cambridge Analytica that, like most streaming acquisitions, never disclosed a production budget. It illustrates the streaming-first path Your Attention Please is positioned to follow if it lands a platform deal.
• Childhood 2.0 (2020): A low-budget documentary on kids and social media distributed largely free online for advocacy reach. It is the closest structural match in both subject and grassroots distribution strategy.
• Screenagers (2016): Delaney Ruston self-distributed her screen-time documentary through community and school screenings rather than theaters, a model that mirrors the impact-campaign approach behind "Stand for Their Attention."

Your Attention Please Box Office Performance

Your Attention Please had not reported any box office figures as of its premiere. The film held its world premiere in the Documentary Spotlight section at SXSW 2026 on March 12, 2026, and was actively seeking nationwide distribution rather than playing a commercial theatrical run, so no domestic or worldwide gross exists yet.

For a foundation-backed advocacy documentary, theatrical box office is rarely the goal or the measure of success. The likeliest path forward is a streaming acquisition or an impact-distribution release through The Film Collaborative, paired with educational, community, and school screenings. Within that model, reach and policy influence, not ticket revenue, define the return, which is why the production paired its premiere with the coordinated "Stand for Their Attention" launch across the digital wellbeing movement.

Should the film secure a distributor, any future streaming minimum guarantee or impact-campaign funding would represent its primary financial return. Until then, its budget and box office fields remain open because the figures have not been publicly reported.

Your Attention Please Production History

Director Sara Robin, a German filmmaker based in Boston, first conceived the project in 2009 in the early years of Facebook, drawn to the question of what the new social platforms were doing to human connection. Her own experience sharpened the idea: she initially resisted Facebook, then felt professional pressure to join Instagram as a filmmaker, and watched the same pull reshape the people around her. The cultural success of The Social Dilemma and the isolation of the pandemic convinced her that audiences were finally ready for a deeper conversation, and she began production in earnest in 2023.

At the center of the film is Kristin Bride, whose son Carson died by suicide in 2020 after anonymous cyberbullying through an app layered onto Snapchat. Bride channeled her loss into reform, founding an advocacy effort in Carson's name, helping establish a national remembrance day for children lost to social media harms, and testifying before the U.S. Senate in support of the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act. Her legislative fight gives the documentary its spine. The Boston-based Massachusetts production company Vagrants built the rest of the film around her, following reformers, researchers, and young innovators pushing back against the attention economy.

To handle wrenching subject matter responsibly, the filmmakers commissioned hand-drawn animation from COLA Animation to depict abstract ideas like algorithmic targeting without re-traumatizing viewers. Writer and editor Jack LeMay shaped the material over an extended post-production, including an in-person edit retreat the team credited with improving focus and quality. On the eve of the SXSW premiere, the production launched "Stand for Their Attention" on March 11, 2026, a synchronized trailer release uniting organizations, educators, and advocates across the global digital wellbeing movement.

Awards and Recognition

Your Attention Please made its world premiere in the Documentary Spotlight section at the 2026 South by Southwest Film and TV Festival, the program SXSW reserves for high-profile documentary debuts. Selection into Documentary Spotlight is itself a notable recognition for a first-time feature from an independent team, placing the film alongside the festival's most anticipated nonfiction titles.

Because the film premiered in March 2026 and was still seeking distribution, it had not yet entered the awards-season circuit or accumulated festival jury prizes at the time of its debut. Its early recognition came instead through the scale of the "Stand for Their Attention" coordinated launch and the breadth of the experts and advocates who lent their voices to the project.

Critical Reception

Early reviews out of SXSW were largely positive, though Rotten Tomatoes had collected only a handful of notices and had not yet posted an aggregate Tomatometer or audience score. Leslie Combemale of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists called it a "studied, engaging, albeit terrifying documentary" and rated it 4.5 out of 5. John Stark of Mac the Movie Guy scored it 90 out of 100, writing that it is "so captivating it will help you ignore the 47 push notifications you'll get from your social media." Megan Loucks of Geek Vibes Nation rated it 7.5 out of 10, praising its marshalling of real-world evidence of social media harm.

Several critics framed the film as a rallying cry, with outlets describing it as "a mighty call to action" and "essential viewing." The most common criticism was structural: a few reviewers felt the documentary occasionally lost focus, repeated its talking points, or leaned selectively on the most alarming framing of social media. The consensus, even among skeptics, was that the film succeeds as an urgent and humane argument for building technology that serves people rather than captures them.