BEING REJECTED FROM FILM FESTIVALS

This was originally posted in September 2014

When you make a film it can be a deeply personal and important event for you. When I made my short film ‘Lilly’ I put a whole stack of myself into it and I found the process of making it to be one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

I am very happy with ‘Lilly’ – I feel like we basically made the film that I wanted to and it’s one of the few things I’ve produced that I feel almost comfortable showing to other people. It’s still an anxiety inducing event to watch it in a room full of people though.

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I’ve still got a long way to go to get to the level that I’d like to be at.

Anyone who has ever screened a film for an audience will know the feeling well. You sit there, wriggling around in your chair like a mid-interview Tom Waits, anticipating a reaction from the audience. Where do the laughs come? Does anyone gasp? Does anyone cry? Do they sound bored? I’m not even sure what the sound of boredom is…

So, if you can get over the initial fear of actually allowing people to watch your movie soon comes the time to send it out into the world. For a filmmaker at my level I really had two options open to me: I could put the film online, promote it and hope to find an audience or I could send it to film festivals and hope it gets accepted and develops a buzz from there.

There are, obviously, pros and cons to each approach that I’m not going to explore in an in-depth way because, frankly, there are people far more qualified than I to do that. What I will do, however, is briefly touch on some of the elements that were most pertinent in my decision and what’s happened since.

Despite Lilly being a short film the final cut came in at 28 minutes. That’s not an ideal starting point for either online or festival promotion. Many film festivals prefer their short films to be at the very least under 25 minutes if not shorter, and everyone knows that you’ll struggle to hold or even draw in an online viewer for something over three minutes. 

I could have made cuts to the film to get it down to a more manageable length, and in retrospect perhaps I should have, but this was my first film and I didn’t want to lose any of the moments or space in the film because I’d landed squarely on my original vision for the piece.

Utlimtately I decided that I wanted to send Lilly to film festivals and see whether or nt we got a positive reaction. I suspect there was something in me that liked the idea of my film being shown on the same screen as some other more credible films. 

Because I also work a full time job I didn’t have the free time to research the multitude of festivals that are out there and then go through the long process of submitting. To overcome that problem I decided to hire in an external company to handle the process.

I ultimately went with Festival Formula, a company run by the lovely and knowledgeable Katie McCullough. She produced for me a list of festivals that might appreciate what Lilly was trying to say and handled the whole submission process for me. I can’t recommend this company or Katie enough. 

Any shortcomings that Lilly had in gaining entry into festivals are totally down to the film and my own decisions. The Advice Katie offered throughout was impeccable and perhaps something I should have taken on board in a bigger way - especially regarding the length of the film! 

This was always going to be a costly experience and after submitting to about 25 festivals I’d totally exhausted my finances, so, I sat back and waited for the responses to come rolling in. Then I waited some more – and some more. Then it happened! The first response. 

“Thank you for sending us the above film for consideration for the [Insert Festival Name] Film Festival. While we very much appreciated the opportunity to consider the film, unfortunately it has not made the final line up for this year’s festival.”

I very quickly became accustomed to this sort of response. Whilst I thought I had prepared myself for the inevitable rejections I don’t think I realised just how disheartening it would be to see your film rejected from all the festivals you were so desperate to get into. 

Like I said, this film was a bit part of me and it can be hard to separate the rejection of your work from being a rejection of yourself personally. But then, in rode the East End Film Festival to save the day!

The first festival acceptance for Lilly took me to London to watch Lilly being screened as part of The East End Film Festival’s ‘Britain on Film’ programme. It was wonderful to see my film screened alongside some really wonderful shorts and the short Q&A post screening was a fun, if nerve wracking, experience. I will forever adore The East End Film Festival for accepting my film. 

I had hoped that the EEFF screening might have been the start of a few screenings for Lilly but unfortunately that’s not the way it went. A combo of rejections came a few weeks later and its been much the same ever since.

I’ve seen other films that I worked on finding their way into some pretty prestigious festivals and that is heartening and I’m pleased for the filmmakers involved but it does kind ofcement in place the disappointment that my own work hasn’t found an audience. 

I think it’s important to remind yourself that this is something most people who pursue creative endeavours have to go through. Not everyone is going to ‘get’ what you’re trying to say and, furthermore, there’s no guarantee that what you create will every time be ‘good’. It’s a long process.

So, rather than get down on the fact that Lilly hasn’t found its place on the festival scene I’ve been trying to come up with the next move for the film and that took me back to my original two choices: online or festivals.

I’m not too proud to see that, for whatever reason, Lilly isn’t doing it on the festival circuit so to plow more money that I don’t have into more submissions that likely won’t be accepted doesn’t make sense to me. More and more I’ve been thinking about making the film available to view online. 

More than getting good reviews or seeing my film on a big screen I think the thing that is most important to me is that its viewed by people who understand what it’s trying to say and appreciate the themes that I’ve tried to flavour it with. 

The most encouraging thing that’s happened during Lilly’s short time out in the world is the response I’ve had from the audiences who have watched it. Quite a few people who watched the film took the time to tell me that the titular character really reminded them of strong women in their lives and thanked me for making the film. That felt amazing.

One person saying something like that to me was enough justification for making the film in the first place. Some people even cried. I had joked when making the film that all I wanted was to make someone cry with it. I guess that sounds sort of crass but all of the films I most admire make me cry.

Here I am, then, weighing up when and how exactly I put my film online. I could upload it to Vimeo or YouTube and try to promote it via social media and short film websites or I could look into VOD options. To be honest, I don’t think Lilly has the audience interest to do well on VOD. So, at the moment, I’m planning to put the film online, for free. 

It’s OK to be rejected. It is not the end of the world and I don’t think it’s the end of the journey for your film, if you believe in it.

All I really want is for people to have the option to see the film if they choose to. I say it all the time but I don’t think a film exists until it has an audience. With that in mind, watch this space for updates about where Lilly will be available to view and if you’d like to help promote the flick, that’d be lovely.

WHAT I LEARNED AT THE BERLIN WALL

In 2014 I visited The Berlin Wall for the first time. I found the whole experience kind of amazing and adored the way that a microcosm of creativity and feeling lived along it. It was like its own little ecosystem of art, music and ideology.

I was reminded of this when I spotted an old Buzzed article about the impressive work that adorns the wall, I recommend checking it out here if you fancy getting a glimpse of what some of the large scale works of art look like.

For me though, the parts of the wall that really spoke to me were the hand written slogans that passers by had left. I guess some people might argue that these little phrases are pithy or trite but I saw them as artefacts of real people trying to express their deepest thoughts or desires in a space they somehow felt connected to.

For instance, there was this one story that was written on paper and taped to the wall that I thought was properly, honestly, beautiful. I was absolutely transfixed by it. It read:

“Me and Melker took a walk right there our last night together, and if I remember right I think I told him about my dreams. I did not love my future sambo and Melker did not love his boyfriend. He still does not but the time goes by and it’s safe, for sure.” - Elektra T.

When I got back from my trip I decided to try and search out the writer of this story and through a bit of Max & Nev style Googling I found her blog. I tried to get in touch with her but didn’t get a response. Regardless, I’d recommend checking it out, it’s not been updated for a long while but she’s a wonderful, captivating writer.

Around the gems like this were the kinds of sentiments you might expect to find, as the one below, but even these simplistic and seemingly naive statements make you pause for thought at the wall. The Berlin Wall is a space where, for me at least, anything seems possible and we still have a chance of fixing the world. I don’t know why - but it’s how I felt.

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My favourite bit of graffiti, if you can even call it that, was something written apparently in haste with a felt tip pen:

“Live without dead time.”

This is a statement that instantly grabbed me, the second I saw it. There was a time, when I first left University, that I found myself not doing a great deal with my time. I convinced myself that wasn’t the case but it most certainly was. I have long long regretted that wasted time and seeing this made me feel very vulnerable. It also made me feel inspired.

That trip I took in 2014 has been a springboard for the rest of my life and these moments still sit with me today. I continue in my quest to try and remove dead time, sometimes to my detriment, but I won’t rest and I won’t waste - it’s all about progress and making!

WHERE DO YOU FIND AN AUDIENCE FOR YOUR WORK?

If you’re artistically minded one of the key driving forces behind anything you do is probably the indescribable desire to make things. There’s something fulfilling about taking a part of yourself, turning it into something else and then putting it out in the world. 

The simple act of making something can provide a rush or a release that you don’t get anywhere else. For some people this is a primal act that they don’t understand and have no desire to. For others though, their work is an attempt to be understood or to connect with other likeminded people in some way.

That’s where an audience becomes important. A lot of people say that they don’t care if just one person enjoys what they do but the truth is, that after a while, if you consistently put out work that doesn’t find an audience, it can start to feel liked a rejection.

And that’s not just a rejection of your work but more pressingly a rejection of you, the person who created it. Why is your world view not connecting with people? Are you wrong? Do you lack the talent to be understood? Or is it that you lack the capacity to connect with people?

Often, I think, it can be down to the simple fact that the world is flooded with ‘content’ on a daily basis so getting in front of the potentially small group of people who might relate to what you’re doing, can be a challenge.

I work mainly in creating films and videos and I’ve had a little bit of exposure at film festivals with my short film Lilly and on YouTube and Vimeo with my other work - but the base of people who watch what I make is, realistically, tiny.

I do appreciate every single person who watches what I make. That anyone would spare a few minutes to make what I’ve made is heartwarming. It can, though, occasionally feel like it’s impossible to break out of the small group of acquaintances and friends who view my films. 

No one wants to be the loser churning out work that has people questioning why they bother or ‘who does this guy think he is?’ You have to be self aware enough to know that what you do is not ‘important’ to anyone but you.

I don’t have a right to an audience. No one does. It has to be earned - I know that. I guess it’s just disheartening when you keep on trying to make interesting and connectable work and it doesn’t seem to catch anyone’s gaze. 

I suppose this is a crisis that all creative people face? When is it time to give up and when is it worth battling through the doubt and just keep making the work that is true to you?

I’ve recently been working on a travel series that I shot last year and I’ve put a lot of hard work and time into making a series of films that I think try and explain how life changing seeing more of our world can be. I’m on episode three now but the truth is that the views on each episode are becoming fewer with each release.

So, is this down to a failure of content, a failure of marketing, just bad luck or something else I’ve not even considered? I can’t say for sure. The feedback I have had back has been good but it’s very often from people I already know and I can’t help but feel that they’re somewhat obliged to stroke my ego! 

It’s heartbreaking (in that way that only a young privileged white male can be heartbroken) when you put all of your true self into something, launch it out into space and then get no message back. 

It’s all too easy to grumble and moan about these things and it does seem silly when there’s so much important stuff going on in the world but I suppose each of us do live in our own subjective little universes where it’s our own outlets of expression, whatever they may be, that mean the most to us. 

I always say, and I think it’s broadly true, that art doesn’t exist until it has an audience so if you do, by some chance, want to see any of the work I’ve made that has lead me to this crisis of confidence, you can find it on this site.