I got some great news this week!The last film I produced, The Good Neighbour, finally got selected for a film festival. The Blue Mountains Film Festival to be exact.
It has been a long journey.
We shot the film almost a year ago now.
We completed all of the post production by January this year, and finally we had a finished film.
Then we started distribution; sending our pride and joy out to film festivals around the world, in order to get our work seen by as many people as possible.
Since then, it has been many long months with many rejections.
While the feedback for the film has been positive, our two sticking points kept undermining our film festival selection chances.
'Length' and 'Subject Matter'.
The Good Neighbour is 15 minutes long, well over the optimum 7 to 10 minutes festivals want. The Good Neighbour also thematically covers the physical abuse of a child. Hard to program in a festival, apparently.
And so the months passed.
Every so often, I would hear something oddly inspirational that kept my motivation up. Like a random Facebook post from a friend:
"Met crazy man out the front of a court building this morning. He babbled something vaguely psychotic. I backed away. As I walked off I wished him luck. He called out: "remember, there's no winners and losers. Just winners and learners." quite profound. Even for man who smelt of wee..."
Nine months passed. I got so sick of the inside of the post office, mailing DVDs to the corners of the globe to be judged.
The rejections kept coming. They were polite. The one from Korea was the funniest.
And finally, this small breakthrough.
I thought I would jump 5 feet in the air if we finally got a breakthrough.
Instead, faced with a small piece of long awaited good tidings, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of...............relief.
Yes, relief. Such a strange reaction, but true.
Success, small or big is highly mythologised.
In truth, from personal experience and also from talking to people who have enjoyed far greater successes than I, the cliche actually happens to be true.
The journey really is the most rewarding thing. By the time any sort of reward or recognition comes around, you are more likely to be overwhelmed by relief that the hard work paid off, than obscene levels of joy.
That's why the first thing an athlete, public figure or oscar winner does when they win is stop and take a deep breath.
Relief.
Then, after some form of alcoholic drink, happiness.
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