Things only got worse since and independent filmmakers’ first effort should be to prevent their movies ending up in the steerage. If you are willing to travel to faraway ports, there are much better boats than US regional/specialized festivals. I am thinking about foreign national ones and, by this, I don’t mean Cannes/Venice/Berlin where your independent movie will be rejected, but the many others - especially the ones that have a film market and are far… far away. These offer infinitely more to independent filmmakers than US regional or specialized festivals where there is neither press nor industry.

My first narrative feature was selected at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa. This festival has a film market called Film Bazaar which used to be a separate entity. This is an important point because film markets attract film executives from all over the world - though these same people hardly ever attend regional or specialized US festivals.

India is a country that still reveres Cinema. There, my movie screened in sold-out theaters with a very attentive audience. The theaters themselves were top-notch, the Q&A moderators actually asked relevant questions, and IFFI gave me the only press conference I ever had - the other one was meant to be at the Moscow International Film Festival but got canceled for a reason that deserves its own post. Granted, it’s not as if politics were absent from IFFI, on the contrary this specific festival mostly served to tighten the ties between Iran and India, and that too deserves a full post.

Of course, you can find similar niceties at US festivals, so why make the effort to flight across the globe? To start with, IFFI paid for my plane tickets and stay at their luxury hotel which is something no US regional festival can afford. I wanted to come early, visit a little, and not be jet-lagged for my Q&As. They graciously changed my flight dates. And this is how I landed in Goa at the dead of night.

I stepped into the festival hotel’s lobby only to witness a top film executive from Europe making a huge scandal. Pounding on the front desk he was yelling at the female hotel employee: “I want the same room as last year! I refuse the room you gave me! I said the room with the sea view!”. The scared employee tried to explain that the hotel was fully booked so she couldn’t do anything, but the shouting continued.

Half-dazed by my eighteen hours of flight, seeing this white suit throwing a tantrum and verbally abusing the young employee of a country that was our host was surreal. I was about to tell him to calm down when she handed him the key to “his” room. He snatched it without a thank you in pure colonial fashion.

This Lobby-dude (his name from now on) wasn’t the only top executive attending IFFI/Film Bazaar. There were delegates from Netflix, Amazon, and a handful of major international networks, all lusting after India’s huge film market. And here is why attending far away festivals is interesting: at Cannes, Sundance, Berlin, or Venice, I wouldn’t stand a chance to talk to them, but in a place as far as Goa, I was among the relatively small number of Americans and Europeans in attendance. And as human nature goes, people from the same background tend to prioritize each other.

By the end of the week, I have had meetings with every single American or European delegate. The French, with their usual insufferable snobbishness, made me wait till the last day and answered only when I switched my emails to… English. The very last person to grant me a meeting was the Lobby-dude. He was also the only one to give me a meeting at the hotel’s pool.

I go there to discover him in his speedos. He was laying, sunbathing on a pool chair while typing on his laptop. He didn’t shake my hand, didn’t invite me to sit, didn’t put his shirt on, let alone his pants, he just kept typing, with occasional pauses to check if he was not burning.

I started talking about my film project since it was a pitch meeting, but it was obvious he couldn’t have cared less. I guess I should have felt humiliated, standing in my blazer, speaking to a beach towel, but instead, this scene from Miami Vice came to my mind:

Why this came back to me at this moment, I don’t know. Miami Vice is from my parents’ generation and apart from this opening, I never watched it. It must have been the whorish position pitching invariably puts you in. Or maybe because the Lobby-dude was sweaty like Arielle Dombasle and wearing Ray-bans like Don Johnson - though, on him, they looked comical. Or was it the vulgarity and ridicule of the situation? Or just the pool? Whatever the reason, as the Lobby-dude didn’t react to my pitch, I too started to wonder: is he asleep?

He was not. In fact, he was pretty awake and angry, not as me specifically but at ”American studios and streamers” which he started bashing in an interminable speech, almost shouting at me as if represented them. I believe this rant was his sole motive to have me come and pitch. I tuned out.

While your chances of meeting top execs are greatly improved when afar, you might also get an unfiltered view of bad industry behavior. For those Euro/American delegates, far away festivals can be a bit like summer camps without supervision: they tend to loosen up and go off script. For anyone who enjoys observing human nature, it’s simply fascinating. The pool side anecdote is benign, some pitch meetings can be much more brutal or humiliating, but with what I saw in Goa, I have enough material to write a full length comedic satire. I love attending film festivals for this reason too: more often than not, the show happening outside of the theaters is as interesting as the ones inside.

The second post was from a screenwriter whose movie got into Sundance. I also looked that movie up: it is co-written by the director and writer of Finding Nemo and WALL-E. It has name actors, notably Rashida Jones. Last but not least, it’s produced by Jared Ian Goldman and Searchlight Pictures, which is part of the Walt Disney Studios. A neat little Hollywood package right there.

Most Sundance-selected movies, at least for the US competition, have a director/producer who already had a movie at Sundance, a name cast, a name in the above-the-line positions, etc. Selected movies also come from various labs, including Sundance’s own. They are mentioned in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter as early as pre-production. They are tracked for months by festival programmers, though I have the feeling that festival programmers are being tracked as much as they are doing the tracking.

Most rejected movies are just… easy to ignore. If the programmer doesn’t know you, they don’t owe your movie any particular attention. Many, mostly first-timers, still imagine festival programmers as some kind of Indiana Joneses, digging through the dust of ten thousand submitted movies (Sundance numbers) to discover diamonds in the rough. Not only do programmers leave the cold submission to screeners, but hundreds of sales agents, producer reps, festival board members, or even distributors are regularly bombarding them with their very polished gems. All year long, these people email, call, organize private screenings, in other words, push their movies on the head programmers’ desks to make sure they get a slot.

This is where filmmakers should learn not only the value of zero but also of negative numbers. If movies “with assets” are insistently proposed to programmers months before your cold submission, your movie is not starting at zero, but somewhere down the line of negative numbers. Submitting cold and on the last deadline is a bit like offering your movie as a sweet puff pastry after the programming team has had a five-course meal and coffee. They have no room for it. In general, unless you consider submission fees to be donations, do not submit cold to top festivals.

Instead, try to connect with programmers. After all, they are humans, and wary of all the movies funneled to them, they might actually put one eye off the beaten path. Granted, it’s not easy to talk to people who don’t want to talk to you, but anything goes.

The head programmer of a festival where I had naively submitted my first movie cold was active on social media. One morning, he wrote, “One of our screeners doesn’t know who Marlon Brando is, lol”. This dismayed me so much that I publicly commented: “I sincerely hope that the movie I just submitted will be watched by someone who knows who Marlon Brando is”. The next day, I received an email saying that the festival screeners were all very qualified and that the head programmer would personally watch my movie. A couple of months later, my movie was accepted. Many people have the key to the head programmer’s office, so don’t feel bad asking Marlon Brando or whoever you can find alive or dead to hold the door for you.

And avoid the ‘top-down mentality’, do not submit to Tribeca because ‘Sundance did not work’. Submit to Tribeca because you want Tribeca. Tribeca is a very unique festival, starting with the fact that it doesn’t even have the word “film” in its title. Most interesting festivals are unique, and you have to know what they are before submitting.

While attending them, ask yourself questions untethered to prestige: Is the head programmer the kind of person you want to have a conversation with? Do you find the choice of movies pertinent, or is the program shapeless? What kind of Press & Industry attend - if at all? Are the panels about the movies’ themes, craft, and aesthetic (please tell me where that festival is), or are they all about AI/distribution/diversity/and financing? Does the festival have a strong identity through its programming, or is it a government display case?

I am telling filmmakers all this because I, too, used to believe in Indiana Jones programmers, and my first festival run came close to being a disaster. Through sheer luck, it ended up being a short, weird, and very interesting run. No “festival strategy” here, just the blind luck of a total newbie with no connections.

And yet, despite countless rejections, I never resented programmers. I always thought about them having to say ‘No’ to so many filmmakers, and eventually to someone they personally know. And what about having to say ‘No’ to someone famous? I’m sure you have heard about Jim Jarmusch's rant against Cannes. The festival selected his last movie, but declined to give it a competition slot. Jarmusch took his movie to Venice instead. “I’ve been in Cannes many times,” he said, “That’s not appropriate to me”, as in: a competition slot is due to me. Jarmusch’s movies were selected in competition at Cannes eight times, he won the Grand Prix once, and his last movie opened the festival. He definitely has his card for the club, but is that a reason to claim a dedicated parking spot, I mean, competition slot? What about the thousands of established film directors who think likewise that a competition slot is due to them? Or did Jarmusch actually do a good thing by showing that film directors can choose as much as they are chosen?

Regardless, I am wishing a very good end of the year to all the filmmakers submitting to festivals, to all the festival programmers who haven’t forgotten their inner Indiana Jones, and to all the screeners who know who Marlon Brando is.

“Dépassé” is a French word that deserves a spot among the small handful of Gallic expressions adopted by American English. It’s as good as Déjà-vu, and pretty close to it in meaning. Think about it as déjà-déjà-déjà-vu, something seen so many times that the uncanny feeling that you have experienced this situation before turns into boredom and irrelevance. In French, the word can also describe a car passing another, with the one being dépassée shrinking in your rearview mirror until it disappears completely.

This is the sense I had watching the past month’s releases, which included Caught Stealing by Darren Aronofsky, Highest 2 Lowest by Spike Lee, One Battle After Another by P.T. Anderson, and Honey Don’t by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. Only Richard Linklater, with Blue Moon, overtakes being dépassé by making it the very subject of his movie.

All of these film directors are Gen Xers, but being dépassé has nothing to do with biological age. One can be quite old and still create something completely in tune with the present.

Nor does it depend on the era in which a film is set. These directors may huddle under the protective shield that the past affords white male filmmakers in the age of cancel culture, but this is not why their movies feel old. Whether set in the 1990s (Caught Stealing), the 2000s (Highest 2 Lowest), or a vague pre-computer time (Honey Don’t), the problem is not period setting.

The issue is rather that these movies are filmed in a dépassé manner and spirit. They do not engage with the reality we live in, and even less with how we deal with it. In doing so, these film directors disregard one of the artist’s biggest responsibilities: to give shape and words to our times.

Justin Chang reviewed it in the New Yorker, writing that PTA’s One Battle After Another “doesn’t simply meet the moment (...) it forges a moment all its own”. Forging the moment is surely the stuff of great art, though Chang seems to imply that having an antifa group fighting for immigrants in a white-supremacist state is what “forges the moment”. Subjects matter for documentaries, not for fictions. So if anything ‘forges the moment’, it might just be Leonardo DiCaprio being asked “What time is it?” and not being able to answer. That, at least, is acknowledging being out of time.

Relevance has also nothing to do with public success; a film may flop because it’s ahead of the Zeitgeist and later be recognized as a cult classic, and vice versa. But there is no such thing as “too late.” Caught Stealing, Highest 2 Lowest, and Honey Don’t are cluttering today’s train car with their clunky luggage from another time. Only Linklater seems to sense, and maybe unintentionally so, that we are at a turning point. He made the most specifically dated movies, 1943 for Blue Moon and 1959 for Nouvelle Vague, and yet the most relevant ones.

Blue Moon is not about creativity and loneliness, it is specifically about being dépassé - and being painfully conscious of it too. Linklater’s main protagonist, Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, is watching the train leaving the station without him. He is witnessing the end of his own creative life, which, in turn, is announcing the end of the musical theater era. Blue Moon is about being a great artist and understanding that the times are ripe for new great artists.

On the contrary, Nouvelle Vague is about beginnings. It is very telling of our times that Linklater is bringing both movies to the public in the same year. Something is ending, something else is beginning. Linklater doesn’t know what, but he feels it’s coming. Nouvelle Vague is looking at both the past and the future; it’s more than nostalgia for a cinema that once was new; it’s a joyful announcement that says: cinema will be new, again.

I don’t know who these 300+ anonymous film market professionals are, but I find that their answers pertain to another time or another place than what we have to deal with today in the US.

Unable or unwilling to properly market and distribute independent films1 and fairly give a share of profit to filmmakers, they put the blame on the movies and the filmmakers rather than acknowledging their own business fiasco and the industry's failure to build sustainable models for independent cinema.
Here are their answers and my answers to them.

Why your film can't secure distribution (from 300+ brutally honest film market professionals)

1. Your film lacks recognisable talent.

If you are a truly indie filmmaker, good luck getting a name actor on board. They simply don’t do that. Also, it’s been a while since talents could secure an audience. Sure, a name actor will help with foreign sales, but as Stephen himself wrote in a past post, “we don’t see a strong correlation between star power and box office performance”. Film market people know that too, so saying ‘your film lacks recognizable talent’ is an easy way for them to brush off films they know they will have to work very hard to sell.
Verdict: laziness.

2. Your film’s packaging and presentation materials are not strong enough.

I totally get this one. Last week, I wanted to re-read Nabokov’s Lolita, but the image on the cover was so vulgar that I cut a new dust cover with craft paper to hide it. Regardless of the effort you put into your film’s packaging and presentation material, your distributor will do the same but in reverse: take your beautiful Muji-style craft paper cover and replace it with an ultra close-up of a nubile mouth showing a bit of tongue.

Film markets are the places where you’ll find the worst packaging and presentation material ever. They’re museums of horrors where films are sold by the pound and plastered with 80s-looking posters invariably featuring Nicolas Cage. No one cares about ‘how they look’, everybody knows they will get bundled with other movies and lost in whatever platform they’re dumped in.

Now, if we are talking about presentation and packaging material needed when you first contact a sales agent, this doesn’t matter either. In two seconds, they will gauge what your film is. For all indies without talent names and a top festival win, the answer is: worthless.
Verdict: irrelevant.

3. You're ignoring mainstream tastes and audience demand.

Whoever said this is imagining himself working for big streamers, which, in passing, have almost entirely stopped buying indie movies. They produce their own ‘products’ in-house, and they do follow mainstream tastes and audience demand. If you try to compete with them on the same ground, your small indie movie stands no chance. You'd be better off doing something different and not catering to mainstream tastes and audience demand.
Verdict: Blanche DuBois syndrome.

4. You have not thought through your festival strategy carefully enough.

This is typical industry newspeak. How can we filmmakers have a ‘festival strategy’ when we don’t have any control over anything festivals do? Top festivals select about 3% of the movies submitted to them, below Harvard’s admission rate. Hence, festival programmers are subject to many pressures, including political, ideological, and, of course, nepotistic. Small filmmakers don’t have the cards. Film festivals don’t work for us. They often don’t even work for ‘the art of cinema’ or ‘discovering new voices’ as they claim. They just work for themselves as institutions and answer only to whoever sustains them, be it corrupted governments or the old ladies who make donations and attend festivals for the free vodka at ‘‘meet the filmmakers” events. I have funny anecdotes about both, but this will be for another post.
Verdict: disingenuous.

5. Your marketing and distribution strategy feels like an afterthought.

Ask an architect to conceive and draw a house’s plans, buy the plot with his own money, dig the foundations, build the house with his bare hands and a few on and off friends, do the wiring and the canalizations, install the windows and the roof, paint the walls and pave the floor, design and build all the furniture, create every object from the grandfather clock to the porcelain plates, plant a garden and bulldozer a path to the main road, then advertise it, find clients and give them tours, before negotiating the sale and you will have something akin to what independent filmmakers do. If they are inconsistently successful, it’s less that their ‘marketing and distribution strategy feels like an afterthought’, it’s that they have too much on their plate. Distributors don’t lift a finger, and when sale time comes, ask to own the property rights for free.

Now, you sure can create boxes filled with gifts for influencers that you will pay, hire mariachi bands to play before your movie screenings, offer film-branded popcorn to your audience, and whatnot, but all that will cost you a fortune and eat up the time you need to work on the filmmaking craft. Again, it’s asking filmmakers to do other people’s jobs, and this for a minimal return.
Verdict: dishonest.

6. You have not properly researched or understood the marketplace.

I wish the ‘film industry professional’ who said that would fall sick, go to the doctor, and be told: “Sorry, I can’t receive you because you have not properly researched or understood the medical market.”
Verdict: posturing.

7. You're forgetting how much trust matters in the film industry.

Wait, I am putting you on line with the hundred filmmakers who never saw a cent from their distributors. Or should we talk about how some distributors resold entire film libraries for profit without filmmakers' consent?
Verdict: gaslighting.

8. You overestimate your film’s importance or uniqueness.

Filmmakers work 2, 3, …10 years on a project, so yes, it’s pretty unique and important to them. There are millions of children, but yours is unique and important to you. Granted, the market doesn’t care, but that doesn’t invalidate this fact either.
Verdict: not constructive.

9. You've made an art film without realising it.

This is the best compliment you can ever give me! Unfortunately, what this comment also reveals is the ridiculous fear the American movie industry has of ‘Art’. If you want to scare a distributor, just walk quietly behind his back and whisper in his ear: Aaaaaaaaaart! You will never see him again.
As an ex-artist in the ‘film industry’, I quickly learned to hide my PhD in art history and previous career in visual art. The combination of ‘woman’ and ‘art’ gets you instantly blacklisted. I guess it comes from associating art with poverty. Guess what, filmmakers today are often worse off than artists.
Verdict: crass and uneducated.

10. Your vision and decisiveness in sales meetings leave buyers uncertain.

I assume this is for presales, which are… nonexistent for American indies. Let’s face it: “Why can't my film secure distribution?” is not even a relevant question because there is no viable market for indie films in the US today. Yet, these 300+ film industry professionals answer as if there is. Either they live in yesterday’s fantasy, or they are from Europe, where government subsidies maintain an artificial market.
Verdict: antiquated.

11. You're waiting until the last minute to think about your audience.
See number 5.

12. You are producing films in genres or forms without clear marketable value.

My first narrative feature was a drama. You couldn’t make it more dramatic if you tried. In the ‘genre’ section, I wrote Drama with a big D.
Amazon Prime listed it as a comedy.
Verdict: No one cares.

13. You misunderstand the implications of streamer acquisitions.

The implication of streamers' acquisitions is that they destroyed an ecosystem where filmmakers could make a living. Thanks to them, film has been devalued so much that they are now close to worthless. On average, only 2% of indie movies are ‘sold’, whatever that means, and those are movies with big festivals’ awards and names on either side of the camera.
Verdict: funny if it wasn’t so sad.

14. Did you ask anyone what your film is really worth?

If I had a multi-million dollar marketing budget or my movie was branded A24, it certainly would be ‘worth something’, which, of course, is unrelated to its real worth as a movie. Movies don’t have a set “worth”. Their “value” fluctuates over time. On one hand, it is set by whoever has the money, the connections, or caters to the ideological agenda of the day, on the other hand, we all know when a movie is great and priceless.
Verdict: silly.

15. You haven't developed a clear business plan or financial strategy.

Why should I develop a “clear business plan or financial strategy” when I know there is no market to apply such lofty schemes? I don’t call ‘market’ being billed thousands by an aggregator who will put my film on Amazon Prime, where I will be paid back three cents per 100 hours viewed on the platform. Let me write that again: Three cents per 100 hours viewed, and 60% of this fortune will go to my ‘distributor’.
Still want to spend hours on a ‘Business plan’?
Verdict: Be my guest.

16. You've lost perspective on your own work.

If anyone lost perspective, it’s the American film industry. I find it shocking that not one of these 300+ people said at some point: ‘Maybe we, film market professionals, are the problem’.
Verdict: smug.

17. Filmmakers assume the film will sell itself.
Will what itself?

18. You're overlooking the power of universal storytelling.

When nothing works, there is always this old trope: indie filmmaking = bad storytelling. This answer is the “You're ignoring mainstream tastes and audience demand” in disguise. I actually think that we have too much ‘universal storytelling’. Indie filmmaking could be a place for trying other things than just good old storytelling. Yet, no distributors would ever take a risk on this.
Verdict: misguided.

And… that’s it for the uplifting, constructive, and never-heard-before pieces of advice from anonymous market professionals!
Have I said thank you?
Thank you, thank you, I pledge to give the 3 cents I will make with my business plan and the online release of my non-art movie to these benevolent people who shared their wisdom with us. 3 cents, that’s pretty much those advices’ worth.

Dear fellow filmmakers, know what you are facing2, but don’t beat yourself up, don’t transform yourself into a marketing squad, don’t think ‘it’s your fault’ if your film cannot find distribution. It’s not. It’s just that the era when films could be sold for a living is gone. There are thousands of mediocre movies battling for attention, and yours will drown as you do not have the artificial ballast of industry connections.

In the end, none of this matters because all indie movies are pirated on the very same day of their release and watched… for free.

Maybe it’s a good time to call yourself an artist?

It’s The Fortune Teller by Georges de la Tour, but I retitled it A young filmmaker brings his first feature to the Market. I let you decide who is the sales agent, the festival programmer, the publicist, and the distributor. I taped it above my desk.

An earlier version of this text started with ‘there is no money left in the film business and it’s a good thing’. But looking again at de la Tour’s painting, I understood that there will always be some money left: the filmmakers’ own gold coin. Paradoxically, this is the root of the problem, and I’m not only talking about the mass of mediocre movies produced independently each year, because we can”.

Ted Hope candidly encourages filmmakers to take multiple jobs. He writes that “filmmaking is now a part-time gig,” but the tax definition of an activity that consistently loses money is not “gig”, it’s “hobby”. This last word deeply scares filmmakers, and that may explain why they crave professional workshops, networking events, and the array of services that festivals and film institutions sell them at prohibitive prices. Even if they don’t make money with their movies, filmmakers want to feel engaged in a profession. More than anything, they want to be part of it. But part of what exactly?

If you look closely, the ‘industry’ in ‘indie film industry’ mostly stands for selling services to filmmakers. And unless you can extract some worth from hearing that God helps those who help themselves, these services are useless. The system that existed and is now in disarray was too often working against filmmakers, even though they kept on paying for it.

Ted Hope, again, writes that film festivals “have been leading the little film lambs to slaughter for decades (…) and set all filmmakers up by not requiring filmmakers to know what they are in for when they get in. Agents and lawyers are motivated by the fee structure to get a deal done — even when it may not be in the film’s best interest at the time. The distributors want these newbies at the best price. Everyone is complicit, even if such evil is not their intent”. So why still go to pitch meetings for investors or producers who keep on ghosting you, attend wasteful labs, or submit movies to festivals that are no longer serving their core mission1? It seems that the young man in the painting agrees to lose his coin not for the tale he will hear but just to be among the fortune tellers. He is trying to fulfill an existential need.

As Hannah Arendt writes: “Everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences.”2
We want to be seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves. This is our drama, and the film business knows it.

The solution is not in rebuilding a now moribund industry. Those who try to ‘fix the system’ are also part of it, and it’s unlikely that they can change a thing. “Let’s rethink distribution,” they say, but people in the indie industry have been “rethinking distribution” forever. Indie films have always had a distribution problem. Unless it’s not a problem at all.

Perhaps solutions are not to be found at the level of distribution, and the only possibility of a change is at the source. It's the spirit that has to change, meaning our understanding of what movies are and how we create them. A new system will emerge if the ideas at the base of the creative act are new.

We could start by candidly admitting, as film producer Graham Swon did3, that making movies “is not a commercial endeavor. If you are thinking of it as one, I would urge you to stop. Your picture will almost definitely lose money, so presumably, you are doing it for other reasons.”4 It’s now a perfect time to explore and understand those other reasons. They can change the art form, the industry will follow as it always does, and who knows, maybe we’ll even make it a profession.

Nothing.

We are facing an art form that has been stalling since the mid-nineties. There were a lot of good movies released in this interval but it’s still a good twenty-eight years of nothing really new under the sun.

Wait.

Something new happened: women and minority directors were finally authorized to access financing and find their place in the film industry, literally allowed overnight to have a film career. This is a revolution and a wonderful one. It's also a shame that it came so late and was somehow forced upon the industry out of fear rather than welcomed out of human decency.

Of course, the irony is not lost on me that this happened precisely at a time when the whole industry started to fall apart. It’s a bit like breaking into a fortress that you besieged for decades to find nothing inside. Sure, the large Oscar table is still there,  but the food is cold, and the few drunk people left behind are prone to slapping their neighbor for a lame joke. 

Still, new people now stand around the table, and they are making their own movies and their own jokes. The problem is that when what’s new is the people rather than the art form, the art form keeps quietly getting old.

Let me explain.

What we were given as “New” is the replacement of one set of storytellers by another. In other words, a revolution happened on a social and ideological level but not quite on a creative one. While everybody has been so preoccupied with ‘new stories’ and ‘new voices’, the form itself has barely evolved. 

American film festivals played a definitive hand in that. For the last six years, they have revolved around only one question: what social evil are we healing? Every film, project, and screenplay had to answer this question. One look at the list of Sundance Awards winners after 2017 is more telling than anything. To select and greenlight projects deemed ‘adequate’, the film industry used a new metric. Let me call it “Authenticity”.

In this case, Authenticity means two things: the story must be authentic, meaning based on real facts, but even more importantly, the director of the movie must be ‘authentically connected’ to the story. The imperative of authenticity superseded that of originality. It was not enough to write a story; you had to justify filming it with your own gender, sex, race, or personal history. For example, Rebecca Hall, who looks completely white but made a movie titled Passing with a black cast, made all her promotion about her grandmother being African-American and “passing”. She had to justify her subject choice biographically for fear of being accused of stealing “someone else’s story” and exploiting the Zeitgeist. Every single article published about her movie contained a carefully crafted emphasis on her personal narrative, going as far as showing photographs of her grandmother as proof of Hall’s story’s authenticity.

Notice the double shift from form to person and from imagination to authenticity. This, in turn, led to an extreme focus on the director's persona. Who is the director? Where do they come from? What is their biographical background? Most importantly: what is their connection to the story they tell? Eventually, what the industry pushed as “new” shifted from the creation (the film) to the creator (the filmmaker).

Of course, there is a logical fallacy in making us believe that because a new director is given the microphone, what they say is new, too. It may or may not be. Most of the time, it's not, simply because true novelty is a rare creature. What is novel in this case is not what is said but this shift and the accompanying emphasis on authenticity.

The problem with authenticity, besides being a dubious notion, is that it limits directors to a very narrow range of stories. “Why are you the best person to tell this story?” is the most damning and damaging question of all American film grant applications. This shackling of the directors to their biographical data cuts off one essential part of filmmaking, which is to explore the Imaginary. It also erects invisible walls: Jordan Peele would not be allowed to make Little Women, just like Greta Gerwig cannot dream about making If Beale Street Could Talk. Everyone is presumed to stay in their own box.

 In the case of women directors, the box is labeled “female narratives” and the set of stories you find inside is pretty sad: abortion (Little Woods, Call Jane, The Glorias, Unpregnant, Never, Sometimes, Rarely, Always), abuse/rape (Alice, Darling, Promising Young Women, Women Talking, She Said, To the Stars, Revenge), prostitution (Zola, Monster), caregiving (The Kindergarten Teacher, Clemency, A Thousand and One, CODA, Nanny), bad pregnancy (Together Together, Clock, Egg, A Mouthful of Air).

Minority women directors have a little bit more wiggle room if they stay within their 'racial box'. Ava DuVernay has been ‘punished’ for making A Wrinkle in Time but celebrated for Selma, When They See Us, and The 13th. Dee Rees was hailed for Mudbound, Chinonye Chukwu for Clemency, Gina Prince-Bythewood for The Woman King, and Kasie Lemmons for Harriet or I Wanna Dance with Somebody. The American film industry gave women and minorities a seat at the table, but also told them exactly where to sit and how to behave. To be fair, women and minorities pigeonholed themselves too. They saw what kind of films were celebrated and answered with similar projects, perpetuating an artificially positive feedback loop.

If defined as the possibility to create a universe that has nothing to do with its creator, the Imaginary can be a weird place. ‘Weird people’ (women, minorities) making movies about it seems to be too ‘weird’ for the film industry. The exception is when directors are not American. Then the ‘weirdness’ comes with the package and is accepted. Jane Campion, Maren Ade, and Claire Denis have all been celebrated here.

So why is it so hard for American women and minority directors to step into the Imaginary? For one thing, it’s already packed with their male counterparts, some of whom found shelter in a very specific part of it: the Past.

Why the past?

Because "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The Go-Between’s opening line has never been so appropriate. Move a story to the past and you can show anything from rape (The Last Duel by Ridley Scott) to psychological or physical torture of a woman (Seberg by Benedict Andrews, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Tarantino), and no one will object. The past is the perfect safe place.

And this is how over the last few years…

David Lowery made The Green Knight, set in medieval times.

Robert Eggers made The Northman, set in the Viking age. His previous film, The Light House, took place in the 1890s.

Damien Chazelle made First Man, set in the early 60s, and then Babylon which was period Hollywood. Even Lalaland oozed the 50s and Chazelle seems to love the past so much that I nicknamed him The Gravedigger.

Barry Jenkins made If Beale Street Could Talk, set in the 70s., then a mini-series, The Underground Railroad, set in 1850.

After a failed Sci-Fi (another way to escape the present), James Gray made Armageddon Time, set in the 80s.

Paul Thomas Anderson made Licorice Pizza set in the 1970s. His previous film, Phantom Thread, was set in the fifties.

Wes Anderson made The French Dispatch, set in the 1950s, and then Asteroid City, again in the fifties but this time somewhere in America.

David Fincher made Mank, set in the 1930s.

Andrew Dominik made Blonde, based on Marilyn Monroe’s life from 1933 to 1962.

Joel Coen made The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Quentin Tarantino made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, set in the 70s.

Pablo Larraín made Spencer, mostly set in the 90s, and is now finishing Maria, based on Maria Callas's story.

In the same biopic vein, Benedict Andrews made Seberg.

Ridley Scott made The Last Duel, set in 14th century France, next will be Napoleon.

Steven Spielberg made West Side Story, set in the mid-1950s, and then The Fabelmans based on his memories from the fifties to the sixties.

Michael Mann made Ferrari, set between the 20s and the 60s.

Paul Verhoeven made Benedetta, set in the 17th century.

Martin Scorcese made Killers of the Flower Moon, set in 1920.

Christopher Nolan made Oppenheimer.

Even Noah Baumbach abandoned his habitual contemporary New York with his adaptation of Don DeLillo's White Noise.

The Past is also a box, but it’s a very solid one.

The Imaginary is also where money is. The Imaginary not only protects, but can also make a film director rich, while Authenticity not only limits your story range, but also makes you disposable. Film festivals want “new” and authentic stories, but film directors cannot go back to the same well of their biographical trauma again and again without tiring the audience.

To sustain the audience’s attention on “authentic stories”, festivals speed up the turnover of film directors. It’s a bit like fast fashion: once an ‘authentic slice of life’ has been told, let’s move to another, which means another director. This is how the very same tool that women and minorities used to break in also makes for short and undervalued careers.

So you know what you have to do: step into the Imaginary.

The feeling of being left out by gossiping ghosts is everywhere from Hollywood to the farthest indie circles. I still remember this New York filmmaker group which started collegially before becoming the usual opaque money-grabbing machine. After a few monthly meetings, I received an email saying that I was now part of the ‘insiders’, a secret group with no special privileges other than knowing you were in it. I had the feeling of having passed some kind of College sorority ritual that I haven’t asked for. The sheer stupidity of it made me leave this group on the spot.

The fear that there is a secret group or a by-invitation-only party somewhere and you’re not invited is never as acute as in major festivals. In a pandemic panic, the first online Cannes film festival offered a meeting platform where anyone with an accreditation could connect with top players. All of a sudden, the traditional hierarchy was upended but the rumor quickly spread that said top players moved their discussion to a ‘secret’ CAA platform. It doesn’t matter whether that’s true or false - what does is the American love for secrecy. Where does that come from? Is it political and tied to fantasies of a deep state? Is it religious and linked to some atavistic memory of late 17th-century Protestant secret meetings? Is the need for clubs, lodges, and private groups a logical counterweight to the feeling that everything in this country is somewhat flat, hence the constant fantasy that there must be something more to it? And if there is nothing, let’s pretend there is for the privilege of ghosting others as a sure mark of status.

Ghosting quickly became the film industry’s social etiquette. In no other field is it this prevalent. Send an email to the banking, law, medicine, academia, engineering, or biotech industry and you will receive an answer within two days. A canned answer maybe, but an answer. Meanwhile, in the film industry, people keep parroting: no answer is an answer, no answer is an answer, no answer is an answer.

No.

No answer is no answer.

It either means: ‘You are unimportant and can’t bring me anything so I won’t lose my time on you’ or ‘You are not part of my club so you don’t really exist’. This is entirely different from ‘I hear you, but this is a no’.

I have been ghosted more than once and I still can’t get used to it.

My first reaction is disbelief (He didn't answer me? Surely he must be traveling or in an emergency room), then I somewhat feel annoyed at myself for having misjudged the person (Still not answering? He must be dead), quickly followed by a mix of anger (hope no one shows up at his funeral!) and mortification (Let me lie down in my own grave and be done with this).

Joseph Conrad's quote comes to mind when he writes about “the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits- together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity”. This is what ghosters throw away. ‘Their loss’, I think to myself while knowing too well that this is our loss and that every time someone is ghosted, a knot in the human tapestry gets undone.

Yet something is changing. The recent corporate cultures of Amazon and Netflix brought new behaviors. It’s quite hard to reach high-up execs at Netflix but once you do, they don’t ghost you. They know how to deliver a courteous ‘nope’ which, in contrast with Hollywood’s brutish culture of holding and dumping, feels almost aristocratic. I’m not clutching at my pearls here, let’s not forget that the brutish culture I am referring to panned from ghosting to abuse and sexual assault. With the latter kind of violence no longer acceptable, maybe ghosting will become the next discreditable behavior.

Recently some players started to openly talk about the ghosting curse, and so did journalists. And then, there is this recent phenomenon which I call ‘ghosting up’.

A few months ago I auditioned a young inexperienced actor. Since he was auditioning facing the lead (his brother in the script), I taped and edited the scene to see how their characters matched. Turns out this actor was not a good fit for many reasons but I wrote him an email saying that since he just started acting and had no demo reel, I could share the audition scene with him. Having a good demo reel is essential to obtain auditions, so offering professional material to this actor was pure generosity on my side. It’s also never done.

No answer.

Welcome to a world where one can be ghosted both ways.

I suspect that dating apps like Tinder and the like made a whole generation okay with dismissing people in one swipe. But it would be too easy to put the responsibility on millennials as it’s the boomers who built this ghost industry. No wonder also that Gen X ends up ghost-sandwiched between the two. In the end, ghosting up, meaning ghosting people who can do something for you, might be the saving middle finger given by the young generation to the behavioral decay of their elders. A valid answer to the boomers’ tradition of ‘fucking-up’.

“If you’re going to get anything done in this business, you’ve got to start fucking up,” said Paul Schrader while remembering his start as a screenwriter1. “Don’t talk to anybody unless they can do something for you. Don’t waste your time on losers.” In other words: ghost the people who cannot serve you. From the so-called friend who asked for all of my festival contacts but would not say “thank you”, let alone reciprocate, to the producer for whom I volunteered my time who would not return my emails, I’ve met my share of these ‘fucker-uppers’. They somehow all have the same traits: sickly ambitious, sometimes shrewd, often vulgar, but what they really share is this blissful unawareness that the way they deal with others colors and limits their work. This is not a question of morality. It’s just that who you are seeps through your films in ways you cannot control. In the end, everyone with a bit of acuity can see it. It’s particularly fascinating that Schrader, an intelligent man concerned with transcendentalism and spirituality, did not understand that. His entire filmography shows how his “fucking up” attitude gradually dwarfed something in him, preventing him to reach the level of his favorite film directors: Bresson, Ozu…

And it’s not as if he was blind to what “paying attention to a looser” could do.

"I had a series of things falling apart”, he wrote, “a breakdown of my marriage, a dispute with the AFI, I lost my reviewing job. I didn’t have any money and I took to drifting, more or less living in my car, drinking a lot, fantasizing. The Pussycat Theater in L.A. would be open all night long, and I’d go there to sleep. Between the drinking and the morbid thinking and the pornography, I went to the emergency room with a bleeding ulcer."2 Schrader turned his failure into a screenplay titled Taxi Driver but this would have gone nowhere if someone did not waste his time on an unknown loser named Paul Schrader. "I sent it to a couple of friends in L.A., but basically, there was no one to show it to [until a few years later]. I was interviewing Brian De Palma, and we sort of hit it off, and I said, “You know, I wrote a script,” and he said, “OK, I’ll read it.”3

OK, I’ll read it.

De Palma read then shared Taxi Driver with Michael Phillips who would go on to produce the movie. I sometimes wonder what would happen if De Palma had ghosted him: no film career for Schrader, for Scorsese, for the many others who emerged thank for this one person who did not ghost.

It dawned on me that VR and AR are but the continuation of a very long human effort to get rid of our ‘reality’. We want to be somewhere else, anywhere else but here. I am not sure where this uniquely human impatience to get out of what surrounds us comes from. Maybe it’s boredom, or maybe we keep in our DNA the notion of a hostile world that we have to control or evade by all means.

If what defines humanity is its relentless quest to move away from its own reality, making films is part of the effort. The interesting thing is that filmmakers have to move away from the world to create the media that will move the population away from it too. Space has to be contained into ‘locations’, time is corralled by production schedules, and trees are cut if they cast unwanted shades on a set. When shooting outdoors became mainstream a whole military logic seeped through, and filming became a kind of war. There is a keen similarity between the jargon used in the military and in film production. There is brutality in filming. But does it have to be so?

With major festivals running again, everyone is rushing back to “normal”. Yet, this “normal” appears incredibly outdated and even strange now that we could see it from a distance. If there is anywhere we should go back to, it’s to try filming differently. For that, we have to change the way we produce movies. Maybe it should stop being a war, maybe we could mesh it with everyday life, and let the filming ebb and flow.

Claude Monet, The Studio Boat, 1874, Kröller-Müller Museum.

I feel his pain.

He must have dreamed all his life of a grand cinema for a grand country, only to find cold bodies when stepping into the holy temple. Yet, if America’s glorious past can’t be revived, count on him to do the mortician's job: Whiplash was a shrine to Jazz, Lalaland the funerary pyre of musical comedy, First Man a grand memorial to the space race, and Babylon is the Pharaoh's tomb of early Hollywood.

It’s a bit as if Chazelle is taking a stroll in the nation’s cemetery, frantically excavating its best remnants to show us how their excellence once emerged. “That’s how they did it”, he says, “and so should we!” He exhorts us to go on with the American dream at a time when hesitation is in the air. While neither devoted eulogies nor lavish budgets can bring life back, his enthusiasm for the task certainly makes his films fun-eral.

What kind of fun, though? Nothing light, it’s either pain and sacrifice (Whiplash, Lalaland, First Man) or debauchery and self-destruction (Babylon). What matters is the effort to go on. All of Chazelle’s characters endure something.

Babylon reminds me of The Romans in their Decadence, a 19th-century Neo-classical painting by the now-forgotten Thomas Couture. Big, messy, and over the top, it was highly praised by the Parisian academy as a piece of bravado.
No such fate for Babylon as our own academy almost entirely ignored it. If there is something Hollywood detests, it’s hearing nails banged on its coffin.

Grandiose ambition is almost a must today as the industry has been repeating to its incoming directors: “go big or go home cinema”. To justify their claim to the big screen, filmmakers’ strategies range from using ultra-wide lenses for ultra-wide spaces, as in Nomadland by Chloé Zhao, to filling the screen to the brim with a cacophony of senses, as in Babylon.

It’s as if films have to be big in image and in sound to have a shot at theater screenings. This correlation always existed, but in the past, it was an exhilarating exploration of the medium rather than a justification for its existence.

Speaking of the cacophony of the senses, I made the comparison with Couture’s The Romans in their Decadence, but could, all the same, have mentioned The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix. Same outsized ambition, same ruthless decadence, same recording of an imminent collapse.

But Chazelle is definitively more of a Neoclassic film director, even his orgies are clean and his ethos is closer to Calvinism than Romanticism. Sacrifice, yes, but only after a hard day’s work.

Couture's The Romans in their Decadence was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1847. A year later, the revolution toppled the July Monarchy and Courbet painted A Burial At Ornans, the drab and realistic depiction of a commoner's funeral.

Again, we are in a cemetery, but Courbet chose to give his simple man’s burial the proportions traditionally reserved for mythological or historical subjects. His canvas is massive, something unthinkable at the time for the inhumation of a nobody in a provincial town. Think Chloé Zhao giving a central role to forgotten drifters in her epic Nomadland.

Rather than use professional models, which was normal practice, Courbet chose to paint the same townspeople who had been present at the burial, thus emphasizing the 'truthful' character of his painting. Nomadland, again.

Zhao’s star-led foray into America’s crumbling corners catches something dying too. But while she uses Courbet’s trick of making the peripheral grandiose, she lacks his humor. Remember the dog in Nomadland?

Zhao got rid of the mutt to avoid a film cliché, while Courbet kept his, making him an incongruous but much-needed reminder of how dumb and stubborn life can be, even in the middle of the most tragic loss.