"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." ―Samuel Beckett
This week, I received the final film festival rejection for “Helter Shelter in Place,” a short film I shot in 2020 and edited earlier this year. It’s an experimental documentary, or as one friend described it, “It’s like a documentary filmmaker made an art film.”
I knew this final rejection was coming. In a weird way, I’d been looking forward to it; even had it on my calendar. It’s a perverse sense of accomplishment to be rejected by every single film festival you apply to. A clean sweep!
Now I’m free to rip that film apart and make something else out of it. Or not.
This week’s rejection came from the biggest, best-known festival on the list: Sundance. I wasn’t going to bother submitting to it, but my friend Gena, who really loved the film, was so sure it was “Sundance material” that she insisted on springing for the $45 entrance fee. (That’s a lot of money for someone who allocates every spare dollar to her travel account and to feeding the homeless people on her block in Los Angeles.) It would have been great to have been accepted for Gena’s sake, but “long shot” doesn’t begin to describe the odds of a Sundance acceptance after being turned down by all the other, smaller festivals beforehand.
Gena was the first person to watch the film at the roughcut stage. Ninety seconds in, she was weeping. Then laughing. Then ooooing and ahhhhing. It was delightful to watch someone experience all the feels, totally engaged for the whole 19 minutes. Sitting next to her, I was convinced I’d created a masterpiece.
The premise of the film is simple: “How I spent COVID.” From March 2020 to March 2021, with California in off-and-on “lockdowns,” I was alone on seven acres in Joshua Tree, California. I shot almost daily time lapse videos of the ever-changing sky and listened to too much news. I also spent a great deal of time thanking my lucky stars that I was in such a wonderful place during such a dreadful time.
In post production, I layered in news soundbites and other “found” audio from that crazy year. I cut it as a month-by-month progression; a diary of sorts. With music by Kyp Malone and a few additional tracks by Aaron Alden of Robot Repair, what’s not to love?
Plenty, apparently.
No doubt there are hundreds—maybe even thousands worldwide—who’ve made films (or are currently trying to finish films, poor things) with the very same “COVID year” premise. This was obviously going to be the case, but the advice I was given early on was, “So what? People will be litigating that year through art for a very long time to come.”
Therefore, in my film festival failure post mortem, I figured Problem #1 was most likely a crowded playing field. Problem #2 was that COVID didn’t neatly restrict itself to one year, as we’d hoped. When I started submitting to festivals in May, COVID seemed to be on its way out. (Whoops.) Problem #3 was that maybe the project itself failed as a film, though it seemed like a good idea to me. (And to Gena.)
All this has made me think about the concept of failure, and by extension, success. By one definition, this experimental short film went down in a blaze because not one single festival I applied to accepted it. By another measure, it was successful because it made a handful of people feel some stuff they might not have otherwise felt. I loved shooting it, I love the music Kyp made for it, and I enjoyed editing it. Working on it kept me from completely losing my marbles. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.
As I say, I may rip it apart and make it into something else, but for now it’s a time capsule of 2020, as experienced from one spot. But, as with all time capsules, it might be better 50 years from now. (Though the one encased in concrete at the Yucca Valley Water District has a better chance of surviving than anything digital.)
By the way, the film did get into one festival, but not one I’d submitted to. I’d missed its deadline by two weeks because I was still editing. The programmer saw it when it was done and sent a link to the program director, who loved it and made space for it in their lineup. But I turned them down because I’d already spent a lot of money on submissions to festivals that had potential conflicts: exclusivity rights and premiere status bullshit. I’d created a masterpiece that was going places, you see. I needed to keep it free of encumbrances. Whatever…
While I regret not going with that first festival, you know what they say: hindsight is… 2020.
Here’s the trailer for Helter Shelter in Place.