Milestone Films is a small but mighty distribution company dedicated to discovering works that have been lost to history, restoring them and reintroducing them to anyone willing to watch. It has been run out of the New Jersey home of Amy Heller and Dennis Doros for the last 25 years, but now both are preparing to retire.
“One of the things we’ve come to realize is that we are not immortal,” Heller said. As the company’s sole workers, “we are it. It’s the two of us and we want it to continue.”
How to keep it going after they step down is something they’ve been discussing for a decade, and now they’ve hit on a novel solution. They’re giving the company away, to Maya Cade, the noted programmer behind the Black Film Archive.
Heller and Doros said that last summer they had discussed with Cade, who volunteered herself, the idea of simply handing over their company.
“When we met Maya, we just thought, ‘Oh, well, we found her,’” Heller said. “We found the person who we really love and trust and can enthusiastically make this move.”
Heller and Doros started Milestone Films in 1990 in their one-bedroom New York apartment shortly after marrying. Since then, it has grown into an internationally recognized distributor that helps bring lost or little-seen films back to prominence. For the last 18 years, the company has been focused on work by and about directors who are Black, Native Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. or women — artists from segments of the population that are underrepresented in the canon.