Every year I write an essay for the Slamdance film catalog. This year, I decided to write about something filmmakers (and artists in general!) know a lot about: Failure.
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Here we are. Another year at Slamdance with the crème de la crème of indie filmmakers. We, here, are all winners! We are the 1% of American filmmakers! We are deserving of distribution offers, industry acclaim and invitations to the most exclusive parties!
Yeah right.
Party invitations will happen- even the most hardened grump is forced to socialize, and here in Park City you can’t shake a stick without hitting someone brilliant and connected. But, industry acclaim and a distribution offer…? Not a guarantee. Enter everyone’s favorite fear: Failure.
With such an intimate understanding of your film’s complex birth, and flush off the high of having been included in the first place, it becomes a strange sort of deflation when nothing much happens at the festival, itself. You start to feel powerless, unable to advance. You hear about the amazing parties where so-and-so met so-and-so, and the buzz around the hot new films at Sundance. And you start to feel, frankly, like shit.
When you get laid up with the inevitable mid-week Park City flu, and are shivering in your static electricity-heavy condo unable to sleep, knowing that somewhere on the mountain there is an awesome party going on that you weren’t invited to, I would invite you to consider these words: This is normal. This is part of the process, for independent filmmakers. You are working in a system that is designed to keep you out, and a lot of that is out of your control. Instead of aspiring to be the person throwing the party that no one can come to, I would invite you to turn your sense of outsider-ness, of failure, into a sort of commitment. Commit to doing it differently. Commit to failing at the system, ’cause the system is failing you.
Most importantly – put away that half-assed daydream about abandoning the film world altogether, get your ass in gear and go f*ck sh*t up. Make it happen, in your own way, acquisitions execs be damned. Turn failure into a new model. And make that model a success.
From Wikipedia: “The Pygmies are a broad group of people who live in Central Africa, especially in the Congo, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. Music is an important part of Pygmy life, and casual performances take place during many of the day’s events. Music comes in many forms, including the spiritual likanos stories, vocable singing and music played from a variety of instruments. Some of the Pygmies [...] are particularly known for their dense contrapuntal communal improvisation.”
