Even the tl;dr version of this is too long, but here goes:

Five years ago I made a documentary film. A small distributor came to me and said they wanted to release it. I signed an eight-year contract, they promised to spend up to $20,000 distributing and promoting the film. (Any expenses over $20k required my written approval.) All of the revenue would go to pay back their expenses first, and once they were paid back we'd split the rest 70% to me, 30% to them.

The film came out and it took a long time to make back the $20k. It finally did just as Netflix licensed the film for two years. The license was for $36,000, so I expected to get 70% of that.

Instead, the distributor refused to give me anything, claiming I had violated the non-disclosure agreement and they threatened to sue me. I got scared and spoke to a lawyer who looked at all of my evidence and said there was no question I was in the right and that they owed me money, but that the amount was so small that no lawyer would take on the case.

Once the Netflix license ran out, the company dissolved and I regained the rights to the film. The guys that ran it are no longer in the film business but they still owe me about $22k.

Is there anything I can do to get what they owe me?

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They are based in Washington DC, and I currently live in Paris. The DC lawyer I spoke to said that I could always sue them myself, but it would require me flying over to appear in court, and they could always ask for a continuance and delay the hearing, and she predicted I would spend more than the $22k, and that even though the evidence was in my favor there was still a chance I would lose.

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So that was the short version, here's a little more detail: The real reason they refused to pay me is that they were trying to cheat me a different way and I called them out on it and they got annoyed. First, they spent over $22k distributing the film but didn't ask for my approval. Then, instead of putting all of the early revenue to pay back their expenses, they were taking 30% off the top and only applying 70% to pay back the expenses. In other words, when the film had made total revenue of $22k, instead of giving me 70% of $2,000, they said the film was still in the red for $6,600. So I wasn't going to start seeing my first penny until the film made about $31,430 in total. (At which point they would have profited $9,430). This payment structure was in clear violation of the contract. I pointed this out to them and they fought back. Then I showed them an email I sent before we signed where I expressly asked if 100% of the total revenue would go to pay back their expenses before we both started seeing a profit, and they said yes. When I showed them that they agreed to restructure things in line with the actual contract. When the next quarterly report was due, I didn't hear anything, so I wrote to them saying they were late and again in violation of the contract, and that's when they told me they were tired of dealing with me, that I was difficult, and that I had violated the contract by breaking the NDA, so they weren't going to give me anything.

The bit about me breaking the NDA is because I'd seen some shady numbers in one of their quarterly reports. They had claimed expenses that didn't seem right to me. So I contacted the same vendor and asked them to give me a quote for my next film, for the exact same services, and the quote was $2,000 less than my distributor claimed they paid. I pointed that out to the distributor and they claimed that I'd gone around them and made them look bad.