First Festivals

PART 5: MAKE OR BREAK

Chapter 1
First contacts and festival submissions
written in 2018

Why do this before the narration?

In September 2017, I had a completed edit of the film with a stand-in voice for the narration, and I finally felt confident sending it to some festivals. Because of the cost of submitting to festivals (usually between 50 and 120 dollars for feature films), and given my limited resources, I initially submitted the film to four different US festivals: Sundance, Slamdance, Seattle International Film Festival and South by Southwest. Reading this now, it sounds a little overly ambitious, but I genuinely thought it was possible, and most people around me did too, even those working in the film industry. “Why not? You totally have a chance. Festivals want to be the first to reveal new talents. And honestly, I’ve seen worse films come out of there!” Seemed reasonable. And so, despite a healthy degree of caution, I went for it, thinking that maybe one of these festivals would accept my film, even just as a non-competitive wild card.

While I waited for replies, I presented my film to Nicolas Altmayer, the producer of Brice 3, who had shown some interest in my project and wanted to know when it was finished. And while he didn’t connect so much with the themes, he complemented the overall endeavor, the directing, acting, scope and production value. However, he didn’t see what he could do for it now as a producer, given that basically, it was already a finished product. He wanted to be involved in projects from the very inception. So he put me in touch with a few distributors he knew in Paris. I contacted them and while being recommended by Altmayer got me some replies, these companies weren’t interested. He had evidently sent me to companies that he was used to working with that distributed “proper” films around France and Europe, and my product was just too "small" (those exact words). So I continued looking up other distributors I thought might be interested, such as Oscilloscope in the US that had produced and/or distributed some of my favorite and lower budget films. But here as with the others I reached out to, I got no reply.

In the winter of 2017, the festival replies came in. Here’s the one from Sundance:

Same thing from SIFF. No reply from SXSW. At this point, my disappointment was mild as I had gradually been setting myself up to be turned down by the major festivals I had applied to, but I was still holding out for Slamdance, on the thought this was the DIY filmmaking home for my film.

This one was way more crushing and the doubts started rolling in: had I completely overestimated the quality of my film? Was it just not that good? Did I have to reevaluate what I was eventually going to do with it?

At the beginning of 2018, I flew to Los Angeles, hoping to make some connections and get things moving. I had put together a list of contacts – friends of friends, directors, agents, DP’s who I’d been put in touch with by friends and colleagues and who I hoped could help in some way. But over a week in LA, some of my meetings got cancelled, and the others turned out to be polite coffee-favors. That was a miserable week.

I had one last chance, one last hope I was clinging to. I had submitted psi to another festival: COLCOA, which is the French Film Festival of Los Angeles. I thought this had to be it: this is a fairly unknown festival (at least to the mainstream audience - I myself had never heard of it); it’s a festival that prides itself on connecting French and US culture, focusing on Paris and Los Angeles, and discovering new talents, so my project seemed to be right up their alley. I was even in direct contact with the director of the festival, who assured me he would take a look at the film himself and get back to me. We e-mailed back and forth a couple times, but then never heard back from him or anyone at COLCOA – not even to decline the film.

At that point, I knew there was something wrong, I just wasn’t sure what it was. Was it with my film? Was it too cheap? Too amateurish? Too weird? Too intellectual? Was my strategy for presenting all wrong? Possibly a combination of all that. Maybe I had also just aimed too high with the festivals I had applied to. But then where could I take it, really? How many interesting "low budget" feature film festivals are there out there?

Or maybe the problem was with everything surrounding the film: it had no industry support, no distributor lined up or sales agent pushing it, no famous director or actor attached, no media “buzz” surrounding it, no viral marketing campaign, community support or social media word-of-mouth. Maybe it was just not an attractive project on the whole compared to the competition?

That's when I realized I had to adopt a different strategy. Later that month, I left LA to spend some time with my Dad who had moved from Las Vegas to Reno, Nevada, and hatched a new plan I hoped would ignite new fire into this project: a Kickstarter Campaign.

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