It is not "you need both" or "start with one and then the other." The real answer is that it depends entirely on your distribution strategy, and that strategy should exist long before your film is finished.
Most independent filmmakers come to this question too late. They finish the film, they start submitting to festivals, and somewhere along the festival route, they realize they need to figure out distribution, but by then, the decisions they should have made in pre-production are already made for them, and not always in their favor.
Selling your film starts much earlier than a festival screening. And understanding what a sales agent and a distributor actually do is part of building that foundation.
What a Sales Agent Does
A sales agent represents your film and sells its rights to distributors around the world, territory by territory. They are not releasing your film to audiences; they are selling the rights to companies who will. They travel to the major film markets, Cannes, AFM, and the European Film Market in Berlin, and they use their existing relationships with buyers in dozens of countries to license your film to broadcasters, streaming platforms, and distributors in specific regions.
They typically work on commission and take a percentage of what they sell. Some also charge recoupable expenses, meaning their costs come out of your earnings before you see anything.
A sales agent is not going to fall in love with your film. They are looking at genre, cast, budget level, comparable titles, and whether they can see a return. That is not personal; that is the business, and the sooner you understand that, the better prepared you will be when you walk into that conversation.
What a Film Distributor Does
A film distributor releases your film to audiences. They take on the practical work of getting your film in front of viewers across a specific territory or set of platforms, whether that is theatrically, on streaming services, through TVOD, AVOD, or other models.
Where a sales agent sells rights, a distributor exercises them. They handle delivery specifications, marketing materials, platform placement, and release windows. Some distributors are strong on theatrical. Others specialize in digital. Some do both, and some are a hybrid of distributor and sales agent, meaning they sell rights internationally and handle releases domestically.
But Do You Actually Need Either?
No, you do not automatically need both. And depending on your strategy, you may not need either in the traditional sense.
Many filmmakers hold the rights for the territory their film comes from because they already know that market. They have built a local audience. They understand how to sell their film to their own community, industry, and platforms. A sales agent makes sense when the territory is unfamiliar, when the relationships do not exist, when the language, the market, and the buyers are unknown to you.
One of our users inside Ramiro AI did exactly this. They made an American action film, and instead of handing everything over to one company and hoping for the best, they built a deliberate territory strategy from early on.
For North America, their home market, they brought in a distributor for the theatrical release. But they held onto their streaming rights and their events rights for that same territory. Because they knew their audience and market, they wanted to keep generating revenue directly through their own screenings and events while the distributor handled the theatrical side. Both revenue streams are running simultaneously in the same territory without stepping on each other.
But for the rest of the world, territories like Germany and the UK, where they had no existing relationships, no market knowledge, and no network of buyers, they brought in a sales agent. The sales agent had the connections they lacked. The sales agent knew those markets. And so that is who they trusted with those rights.
What this filmmaker did was essentially draw a map of their film before it was released, territory by territory, and decide for each one: do I know this market well enough to manage it myself, do I need a distributor to release it, or do I need a sales agent to sell those rights to someone who can? That is a distribution strategy. A deliberate set of decisions made early about who controls what, in which territory, and why.
Most filmmakers never have that conversation with themselves. They finish the film and then figure it out. But the ones who build strategies like this do not find themselves in a reactive position when a distributor or sales agent comes knocking, because they already know what they are protecting and what they are willing to give.
The Mistake Filmmakers Make Most Often
They go looking for a sales agent when they are already on the festival circuit, hoping that a good screening will attract representation, and sometimes it does, but the filmmakers who get the best outcomes are not the ones who find a sales agent at a festival. They are the ones who already understood their territory map before the film was finished, who knew which rights they wanted to hold, which markets they needed help in, and what kind of partner they were looking for in each.
Approaching a sales agent too late, without a strategy, puts you in a reactive position. You are hoping someone picks you rather than choosing who you want to work with and why.
Where to Start
If you are at the stage where you are asking this question, the most useful thing you can do right now is build your distribution strategy. This is an actual framework that maps your film to the territories, platforms, and partners that make sense for it.
That is why we built our Film Distribution Strategy Template inside Ramiro AI. It walks you through the decisions you need to make before any conversation with a sales agent or distributor, so that when that conversation happens, you are prepared, know what you are protecting, and know what you are willing to give.
Download the template here and start building your strategy today.