The power of hope... (film festival update)
Hope is a very powerful thing, do you agree?
I mean hopes has been known to save lives, if only for the sake of hope. In the book Man's Search for Meaning. Author Viktor Frankl survives 3 nazi concentration camps while holding out hope to see his family and finish his book. What more powerful example of the power of hope is there than that, however I have not regarded hope with its full esteem in my life overall. Now looking back over the past 15-years I have given little thought to how much hope has driven me to complete the process between the shooting of my newest film to the completion of its edit (learn more here: Reaching Reality). Nights, weekends, evenings, and the sacrifice of time away from family and friends are all things I compromised for the hope that someday this unique story of the search for surf and self exploration would be told. Being recognized as a legitimate member of the documentary film community has played out in my mind over and over. And ultimately the idea of sitting in a crowded theatre with a list of my closest friends and colleagues have all been a driving force inside me, however I have not recognized it as hope until now.
Three amazing places from the film, Reaching Reality (learn more here).
At this moment, I am excited to say I am on the door step of seeing those hopes become a reality and honestly it scares the shit out of me. Questions of being worthy and good enough or rejected and turned away loom in my mind. As I enter my first list of festivals (see below), I sit nervously in waiting for word to come of whether I will get in or not. So while I wait, I write to help calm the nerves and share a little of that excitement with my friends. Do you want to know more about my plan of attack? I like to think of going into a festival like being in a garage band trying to crack on to the scene. My goal is to find people that are passionate about the subject matter, build a grass roots movement and connect with the audience. To do that I think about the genres of surf, adventure, sailing, and exploration. Then I think about the scale of the event to suit a small independent film screening. And finally I pay the application fee (between 0$ and $100), submit my film, and cross my fingers.
These are currently the top six of the fifteen I have in my mind (in blue are festivals we've applied for currently):
Santa Cruz Film Festival and/or Santa Cruz Surf Film Festival (top two films I want to premiere are in Santa Cruz this is where this all began).
Ottawa Adventure Film Festival (small festival in Canada, but they are passionate about their filmmakers).
Auburn Adventure Film Festival (located south of Seattle this is the region the captain of the boat Dan currently resides so opportune place to do this).
Ocean Film Festival World Tour and/or (take this baby on a national tour)!
Traverse City Film Festival (of course it's in my backyard and a great venue to screen in).
Adrian Film Festival (it's my freaking home town of course I wanna screen here).
So what is my hope now? I hope to see all of you at my opening night and/or one of the additional festivals that we screen at in the future.
Hey, wait! Do you have ideas/advice/insight about films festivals I can attend? Please share. Got a personal story of hope? Send those too. Go forth and do great things!
Barry
