That time of year
Dear friends,
On weekends leading up to Christmas, my wife & kids & I are running a ridiculous candy & spice shop, and during the plentiful lulls I get to catch up on email and newsletters from afar. It’s that time of year when Sundance, which is the first big festival of the calendar year, announces its program for January. Though I’ve recently stopped applying with my films to Sundance, I always give the program a look-see, and friends check in to see whether I might be attending. (No.) I’ve been to the festival a few times to speak on panels and that sort of thing. I liked being in the mountains and running into friends, but my affection for the festival more or less stops there.
As my occasional rants have surely made clear, I have long puzzled over my relationship to the film industry, and at a film festival it doesn’t take long to see why. You get people in queues clutching their lanyards with the words “priority” and “industry” on them, jostling to get access to this or that; you stop to chat with someone on the sidewalk, and they’re looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important might be coming along; you feel the thrum of name-dropping, and you can tell that the younger filmmakers feel a bit of intimidation, wondering if they really belong here. That’s maybe the biggest part of it: you can spend an inordinate amount of time trying to belong, while also wondering if it’s where you want to belong.
For some reason, my thoughts about film festivals are entangled with my thoughts about New York City, a place I lived for most of my early filmmaking years. Maybe it’s because New York is a hub of the film industry; in Brooklyn at times it felt like you could swing a dead cat and always hit a documentary filmmaker. Or maybe it’s because the same culture of exclusivity and name-dropping thrives more readily there than it does, no surprise, on the coast of Maine.
I left New York City in 2013, and to my surprise my years since have been my most productive and generative phase of filmmaking. Is it because I’m out of earshot of a lot of the posturing nonsense that pervades the hubs of film culture? I loved my time in Brooklyn, and my colleagues there, but there was also something quietly toxic about the environment. I remember always comparing myself to other filmmakers, wondering if I’d been left out of this or that, and pedaling as fast as I could to chase a success I could not name.
Life since hasn’t been a clean break from all that. Social media fuels these stupidities afresh. Insecurities haunt me still. But living & working in my home landscape has shifted my sense of where the center lies. Put another way, it’s recalibrated my definition of what’s valuable.
I used to default to the definitions of success scattered all around me: who was winning which award, who got highlighted on opening night of the film festival, who was invited where, etc etc. These things still matter; I respect a lot of the gatekeepers who help sort through the mad pile of films every year and highlight what they find special. My team and I love being selected to premiere at a film festival, we are proud to win awards when we can, and will never turn down a chance to stream or broadcast our films to millions of people.
But these are peripheral enchantments now; they don’t sustain me through the years. The center now is something else, something admittedly harder to name and quantify. (And indeed, I think it is necessarily so.) Maybe it’s just the sense that my filmmaking aspires to a sense of place, an origin, thereby striving to be original in that sense of the word. It’s not memes, it’s not trying to fit into a box. That’s part of what I mean.
The other part involves sharing my films with a live audience, no matter how big the crowd. This experience centers me. You never get everyone in a crowd to love your film; that’s not what matters. What matters is the sharing. If I’ve made a film that’s authentic and original, then I’m sharing something from inside myself with the wider world. And by gathering a group of people all together in a room, we’re sharing an experience, we’re wondering what other people are thinking, we’re responding and communicating and asking questions. It all feels somewhat like democracy, or what democracy would be if it weren’t the moneyed & media-mediated idiocy of politics.
And so let’s return to the film festival. At its best, it’s this in a nutshell: original films shared in a room with strangers. For these moments, you can shut out the hype and the posturing, the industry forces that can, if wielded carelessly, suppress creativity and crush spirits. I’ve grown particularly fond of smaller film festivals, and for some reason Wicked Delicate has enough films in circulation that most months we have some film or other showing in some film festival somewhere.
Once a year, Camden and its neighboring towns host a film festival started twenty years ago. The occasion has become a little complicated for me. On the one hand, I love it, almost everything about it. I love seeing films, friends, I love going to the parties and panels, I love hearing pitches. I’ve probably shown more films at this particular festival than any other filmmaker on the planet, which is not a claim to fame, but it’s a way of saying that this festival has contributed to my own growth as a filmmaker, so I owe it a certain debt. But on the other hand, as the festival has grown, the presence of the film industry has grown too. The gatekeepers! Many of these people are friends and allies, and meeting up with them in Maine is fun. But collectively the film industry brings to town, even our small town, an inescapable whiff of something I think I’m trying to escape: the culture of exclusivity, status, and money stitched into the DNA of the entertainment industry.
And so sometimes you have to step away. This past September, during the film festival I stepped away with my family for a day to go see an old friend and teacher in Vermont at the Tunbridge World’s Fair, a wonderful and ridiculous county fair. The afternoon was hot, and we found shade near the grandstand, where 5-year-olds were competing in a pedal-powered tractor pull. Most couldn’t make it out of the gates, as it takes a bit of raw strength just to get going. But once in a while one of the kids would get a bit of momentum going, three feet, ten feet, twelve feet, and when their energy would start to wane, the crowd’s energy would rise, and roar, and soon we were all on our feet, cheering insanely for the bewildered 5-year-old to pedal a toy John Deere tractor the last few feet across the dusty finish line and lo! They made it.
Driving back to the Maine coast, we lingered awhile at a riverbank, the boys hopping among the stones smoothed by years of river flow. My younger son, bewitched by a small waterfall, grew rather uncharacteristically sincere: “This is the best place in the world, Dad.” He paused, thinking a moment. “This and that arcade in New York City.”
I suppose I can’t wait until my kids are old enough to don a lanyard and go to the Camden Film Festival with me & Amanda. Immersing in the films is inspiring - so many voices, approaches. You go home energized. I have no idea what these future films will mean to my kids, but I hope the films retain the weirdness and uniqueness that we need to keep our minds alive. I hope by then that film festival programmers will agree that we don’t need film festivals to show movies by & about celebrities and the like — that those films will have no trouble finding audiences, that we should instead give the risk-takers their hour upon the stage.
But I quibble, and I know I’m a quibbling minority in an industry fueled by fame. Next month, during Sundance, our candy & spice shop will be hibernating until next holiday season, and I’ll be working with a colorist to prepare our new film, Observer, for its TBD film festival premiere later that spring. We’ll make a poster, which I’ll frame & plunk in the stairwell with the others, some fading from too much sunlight, most of them peppered with laurels from film festivals you’ve never heard of, but which meant, doggone it, all the world to me.