I attended Marche du Film virtually for the second time. For all the discussion about how it would be so much nicer if the festival was 100% in person, I was struck by the thought that I wouldn’t have been able to attend the market if it was. It’s a very expensive conference in France and UAKC is currently entirely self-funded. Without a virtual option, I wouldn’t have been able to meet so many wonderful people from around the world and learn from them.

So, what did I learn?

The most important thing that I took away is to take a step back from the films that we’ve made. At a session on short films, the speaker put it really well. She asked us to think of a film as an individual pearl on a necklace. The necklace represents a career. Each film, each project, will create that necklace, but no single one is going to dominate the whole necklace.¹ You should have goals for what you want the film to achieve, and what you, personally, want to achieve. Make plans A, B, and C for them,² and follow the plan. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of having brought a film to life, and to show that to the world. But it’s all too easy to get disheartened if the response isn’t thunderous.

It was nice to see people acknowledge something that I’ve felt while we’ve been figuring out a festival and release strategy for Josef – Born in Grace and The Salon – submitting films to a festival can become addictive. It’s far too easy to add a bunch of festivals to the cart on FilmFreeway and throw it all on the credit card. This is where plans and goals come in very handy.

I did see some opportunities to teach other filmmakers what we’ve learned over the last few years with UAKC. Things like how to create a website for a film, how to create a press kit and marketing material for a film, and how to apply to festivals. We’ve been hacking away at this and have been slowly figuring out that part of the process. I can only imagine how many people get disheartened once they’ve made a film and then don’t know what to do next.³ Watching sessions where everyone was there to share what they knew, and learn from one another was really invigorating!

It was also really nice to see that a lot of the people who spoke on stage were running companies that were not as large as I expected. Yes, there were a few there whose company libraries were hundreds of films deep, but there were many, many others that were small just like ours. What united everyone was a love for cinema and telling stories.

At the end of Marche, I felt excited. The road ahead looks incredibly hard, but there are a lot of other people on it and I can’t want to move ahead on it along with them.