Inside the Drive Community: Cinephiles & the Dilemma of Internet Piracy
In late January 2025, a Google Drive link began to circulate on X. Alone, the tweet had no caption, but the original poster quote-tweeted it with the poster for Best Picture nominee Nickel Boys—indicating that it was a link to download the film in full, for free. Nickel Boys, which was one of the most acclaimed films of 2024 and the winner of various critics awards, made $3.2 million on a $23.2 million budget. It had a limited theatrical release that December in New York and Los Angeles, and for long after its Oscar nomination that January, was not available anywhere online to stream or to purchase.
This tweet was screenshotted and posted by a Brooklyn-based film critic, who said: “I have to imagine that if I liked NICKEL BOYS enough to recommend it to someone else, I probably wouldn't pirate and distribute an underperforming film now in a crucial wide release after landing the nomination for Best Picture — but sure, this is also a choice”. The tweet amassed 3000 likes, but there was a dissent in the replies: “Okay…why don't you fly me to NYC or LA where Nickel Boys is currently playing, and also pay for my hotel tickets, food, other expenses, and also my flight back home, then I will stop pirating films.” Many tweets had this same sentiment, also garnering thousands of likes.
Amidst the chaos of discourse, the account that originally posted the Google Drive link went on posting. Every day to every few days, they would not only tweet more Drive links to download new films, but retweet them from other accounts—click on that user’s profile, and find another onslaught of links to download films, with more retweets of links from even more accounts, all of whom follow each other. Glancing at their following lists reveals a treasure trove of X pages, tweeting in English or Portuguese, with their own extensive catalog of films on Google Drive. Each user has a unique collection: one account focuses on Japanese cinema, another Iranian, Soviet, Brazilian, cult classics and so on. Altogether, they boast hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform.
The foremost of these accounts, with a growing following of over 90,000, is Cabana Drives. Speaking to FilmSlop, Cabana shares that among Brazilians, this network is referred to as the ‘drive community’. “I can't tell you exactly how it started, but it is pretty recent and began in Brazil, probably around 2019,” he says. “The most beautiful thing for me is that this community came together 100% organically. These pages started connecting with each other just because they were about the same subject, and most of them grew together. When I started doing this, I didn't know most of the pages, but some of them came to me and started messaging me pretty quickly.”
Cabana himself started his account nearly a year ago. “I was scrolling through my personal Twitter account and saw a tweet about Martyrs (2008), which is one of my favorite movies, and there was this Google Drive link in the comments. At that point, I had never used Google Drive in my life, so when I clicked on the link and saw the movie there, it was like magic to me. After this, I looked around on Twitter and saw a bunch of these Drive pages. One day later, I started Cabana”.
It’s easy to spot a common thread among the members of the drive community: one bio explicitly says “making cinema accessible—’cause art thrives in open hands”. When confronted with detractors, Cabana echoes this point about accessibility. “My philosophy is that people should be able to access any type of art without having to make monetary sacrifices or travel across the world to experience it. It's not that deep,” he says.
“The majority of the population in my country [don’t] live close to theaters, and even if they do, the selection of movies is pretty limited, and tickets are really expensive—not even considering the money someone would have to spend just to get to the theater. Blu-rays and normal DVDs here are extremely expensive, and one Blu-ray DVD often costs 15-20% of the salary most people earn. Most people's only option to access art here is through streaming (which is expensive too, and there are like a hundred of them) or digital rentals (which are stupid). Even so, most movies aren't available on streaming or for digital rental. So it's not just a money problem.”
According to a 2023 report by IBGE’s System of Cultural Information and Indicators (SIIC), cinemas in Brazil were concentrated in municipalities inhabited by 57.4% of the population. There are currently 3,481 cinemas operating in the country, compared to the 35,000 screens in the United States. 80.4% of residents from municipalities in the North Region, whose population amounts to over 17 million, had to travel on average one hour by car to reach the nearest cinema. IBGE also reported that the monthly per capita household earnings for Brazilians in 2024 was R$2,069 (359.36 USD), with salaries hitting an average as low as R$1,077 (187.06 USD) in some federations. Movie ticket prices can range from R$25-38 (5-7.80 USD), with extra fees for IMAX experiences. The cost to order official Blu Rays, DVDs and 4k discs from sites like Amazon can range from 15-40 USD, depending on the film and the box set.
“Most third-world countries lack the infrastructure to make art accessible and lack art education, making it not only hard to experience art but even harder to be an artist. It's really interesting to look at these countries and see that, even without incentives and limited access, people still crave art,” Cabana says. “So we see a lot of independent shops that sell CDs with all kinds of movies for a very cheap price. And this is something I've seen happen all over Latin America. There's always somewhere you can find a little store where you can buy a lot of movies and watch them on a DVD player, PC, or console. So, even when people don't have theaters near them, they're still searching for meaningful and accessible art. And there are people making a living by making art accessible where they live.”
Cabana’s own love for cinema would not have come to be without piracy. “My relationship with movies started really early when my father began to download movies that he liked and started showing them to me. I was probably around seven or eight years old. My family hated it, but in hindsight, I think it helped shape my personality. When I was in middle school, I started downloading movies that I thought were good and burned them onto CDs for my friends…if I had to find the reason behind this, I would say it's because movies moved me in a very profound way, and I wanted my friends to have the same experience.”
While cinema’s power to bring people together is undisputed, more and more in the cinephile space there is a push to access films legally, whether in the theater, on a streaming service or with Video On Demand. The fear is that if creators are not compensated, especially indie filmmakers, it may impact their ability to finance or profit from projects, as evidenced by the Nickel Boys debacle. Film-lovers with this (understandable) mindset may view rogue, online networks like the drive community as jeopardizing the future of moviemaking.
Responding to this, Cabana references a 2019 quote from director Werner Herzog: “Piracy has been the most successful form of distribution worldwide.” Cabana continues: “The thing about the money argument is that indie movies with a low budget often don't leave festivals or U.S. select theaters. The only way they get wider distribution is by being successful, not only in theaters but mostly on social media. I would love to ask these people how they started watching anime because the reason why it's so big today is primarily because of piracy.”
In their way, the drive community have asserted themselves into the world of film distribution, turning it into a sort of cultural re-distribution. In a time where algorithms determine what art gets made and who gets to see it, this grassroots movement puts value not in box office returns, but in how cinema connects people across continents, closing digital divides. This mirrors the words of indie Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who said in an interview in 2013: “Personally, I am not against piracy: piracy is part of the cultural revolution in our country. You see, there are a lot of films that circulate only on pirated DVDs in the Philippines, and the pirates are selling these DVDs for one dollar each. Among other things, you can buy Tarkovskij in the streets for one dollar. You can buy Sunrise (1927) by Murnau for one dollar, if you want. It’s a cultural revolution, it is very socialist, very equalitarian. Pirates are granting the masses access to films, pirates are bringing films into people’s homes. If it wasn’t for piracy, how could these films reach people in the Philippines?...That’s why I love the pirates: they are more into cultural revolution than the people in the academy or the status quo critics in the country.”
It is through piracy that the drive community shows solidarity for various revolutionary causes: being from Brazil, many share films related to the plight of Brazilians under military dictatorship; several accounts also share films from Palestine, often with the added comment of ‘PALESTINA LIVRE’. On his page, Cabana has shown similar support; to him, they’re “ethically interconnected. It just doesn’t make sense to support people's right to accessible art—not only as a means of entertainment but also for education, attention, creativity, and free thinking—and not support other people’s right to freedom, dignity, and justice after decades of displacement.” From internet pirates, to displaced indigenous peoples, can we truly blame the disempowered when they take unfair matters into their own hands?
Despite all this, Cabana recognizes that this subject has layers: “I really think it's a deep conversation, and we should discuss it with more nuance…I will always be up for debate because I don't think it's just about being right or wrong. It's a sociocultural conversation.”
At the end of the day, the failures of the modern film industry cannot squarely be placed on the shoulders of our piracy kings. Among a myriad of issues, the theatrical window for releases nowadays is particularly glaring: in the post-COVID era, films are given on average 30 days before they’re sent to streaming. In his DGA award acceptance speech this year, Sean Baker advocated for the theatrical experience: “Let’s do whatever we can do to expand that theatrical window. Demand it. We make films for the big screen. Let’s expand it to at least 90 days […] Let’s get it back to the way it used to be.”
In a since-deleted poll he put up on his X account months ago, Cabana asked his followers if, considering a new release was playing near them, would they pirate it or go see it in the cinema? 82% of respondents, he recalls, voted for going to the movies. “So, I really think people who say this are lacking understanding or even empathy…[they] act like everyone is a bastard eager to pirate movies so the movie can lose money. It's not like that.”
When asked to propose a solution himself, Cabana gives his two cents: “First of all, larger distribution for all movies. This is one of the most important issues and the easiest to fix. Distributors have gotten into the habit of buying a big international release that can reach a large crowd and then doing nothing with it outside of releasing it in NY and LA to please elitist audiences. The other problems are much harder to solve because they can vary from country to country and require more investment in the arts and culture sector.”
If the filmmaking industry went through a magical shift, and all these issues were suddenly addressed, would that put an end to Cabana’s work? “Yes,” he says. “I don't know if what I do is temporary or not—I just feel the need to do it. As long as that feeling is there, I will continue.”
To be clear, ripping movie files and spreading them online for free does not result in film workers being deservedly compensated for their labor. But the reality is, our current system robs millions of people of the chance of seeing these films at all. What do we miss out on when we exclude the rest of the world from important conversations? Is one only worthy of seeing a film when they come into means? Does the circumstances of one's birth—class, home country, disposition, ability—bar them from satisfying their craving for art? The next great generation of filmmakers may not be found in the film schools of New York or London, nor in the numerous theaters of Los Angeles; they could instead be young, wide-eyed X users from anywhere in the Global South, downloading movies on Google Drive, eager to kindle their passion for cinema in the only way they can.