Distribution (& Licensing) - Anyone?

[Tulpa]

Hello everyone,

I'm a long time lurker here and I have some fairly big questions that I'm hoping some here can help with.

I've been working on a documentary series 8 parts (all between 30-60 min) that is getting closer to being finished and am trying to understand how to get it seen.
I doubt that it will have an easy path towards broadcast or getting picked up by a streaming service due to the (unpolitically correct) nature of the content. It's nothing too crazy but lots of swearing and ethical issues around the nature of the rough characters.
I'm also flat broke now, so I can't get it to one of these agent types who can get it in front of a streaming service.
I also don't know how festivals would be able to show something like this.

Currently, the project includes short clips of unlicensed material taken from other films in China. These clips serve as a reference to songs that my characters just happened launch into while we were shooting that fir with the situation they were in. The (15) clips are no more than about 30 secs. I cut them into the project to see if they would work. At the time, I imagined that if I could find further funding, I'd be able to license the clips. But I've come to understand that it is a huge undertaking to get clearance on this kind of material. And having contacted one of the distributors, he told me that they don't license their material 'in perpetuity.'

Towards distribution - and as it seems like there are few other options - Naturally I've been thinking about both Vimeo and Youtube. I'd rather the project live on Vimeo as it seems like a better fit. But towards the 'unlicensed material'...  and from what I understand, Youtube will sometimes(?) allow us to use unlicensed material in our projects if we provide some kind of acknowledgement to the copyright holder. Correct? Any thoughts here? On the other hand, and as I understand, Vimeo doesn't allow for this. Correct?

On the Vimeo side, I currently have a Plus account but that (as we know) only allows for 5gb uploads and I doubt that will support the (30-60min) file sizes I'd want to upload. To get a Pro account seems like a significant expense over the years for what will be probably little return.
I've considered having to break the 8 parts into smaller parts so that my Vimeo Plus account can handle the 5gb uploads. Is this what some of you do?

The project was shot in 1080 and I'm on an old Macbook Pro that would probably take forever to export h.265 - given that that is a way to reduce file sizes. Is this what some of you would suggest as a way to get the file sizes down?

I'd greatly appreciate ANY and ALL insights.
Thanks!