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.
—
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.
