And — it’s only $50 apply and just requires a finished script, budget, artist statement, project description, a work sample, and information about relevant cast & crew.

Early Deadline: May 20, $50

Deadline: June 8, $60

Late Deadline: July 1, $75

Submissions will be capped at 200 so get your projects in stat!!

*Quietly calculating behind the scenes…*

…$50 x 200 = $10,000…bada-bing!

Thank you so much to all the applicants for funding this grant. Leftover money will go to me for my time and labor spent reading the applications and deciding who gets the application money — oops, I mean grant money. Mwahahaha.

Share Hortonioni

Whoever wins that money, I’m sure that’s really nice for them!

But this is my discussion on how insanely rare it is to “win” any film grant/fellowship/lab/festival, and how much money you will spend and others will make in your pursuit of winning any of them.

I find many these prey on young, hopeful filmmakers (🙋🏼‍♀️) who have been told “great work just breaks through!” when I mean, sure… .06% of that great work breaks through.

Maybe we can spend that time and money otherwise?

I was TICKLED to see that as I was writing this draft, shared an amazing post called I Thought Getting Picked Would Fix Everything, about his experience applying to things like this when he was young and how it takes a while to shake off the learned need for outside validation for our work.

He writes:

There is an entire industry that makes money off of this model. Screenwriting competitions, Pitchfests. Conventions. If everyone who wanted to make a movie just went and made their movie, this industry would no longer exist. They need us to want to make a movie and never actually make one. Even though they are selling something that, at best, doesn’t actually exist and, at worst, is harmful and exploitative.

Share Hortonioni

Some quick examples for you:

Hollyshorts Screenplay Competition has a prize for a Female Short Screenplay of….$1000! For the low submission price of POTENTIALLY $75. That’s almost 10% of the prize money.

This is just predatory. Just don’t apply and use that $75 towards your budget.

Film Freeway reports an estimated submission number of 1200 for their entire Screenplay Competition!!! That’s…$84,000 of submission fees, as a low estimate.

This is also really alarming — a minimum $70 for notes given by who-the-hell-knows?

As Hudson writes, this is:

A model that feeds on the desire of artists to be seen.

Here’s another one: The Jackson Wild Media Awards

Okay, so it costs between $180 - $240 to apply (late deadlines are around $225 - 275). There is seemingly no monetary prize given to winners. Plus it looks like National Geographic and Disneynature won a bunch of them last year.

So say the average applicant spends $225 on fees. And there were over 500 films entered, say 515. $225 x 515 = $115,875 made on submission fees, as an average estimation.

WOW!

In their FAQ’s it says they never give out fee waivers but recommend you apply early to take advantage of their “low costs.” This is a lie, two Film Fatales members can get a 100% discount LOL. This is also a lie because $180 is not a low cost LOL.

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They even put a call out for judges, and in exchange for being a judge you get to go to the awards ceremony? They’re not even paying the people to watch the material?

I know there is a whole industry that exists to give agencies/production companies awards and clout, that’s all they do (D&AD, Cleos, Webby Awards). But when there’s over 500 films applying you know there are so many applicants who never had a chance — so many young broke filmmakers who thinks this could be a big break for them. I’ve only won D&AD and Young Director Awards because the company I was rep’ed with paid for them. It’s not equal access by any means, it’s not supposed to be.

Here are some numbers on Sundance that I’ve always found fascinating:

16,201 submissions — 4,255 feature-length films and 470 episodic projects. 11,476 shorts

Official deadline, short = $75 … $860,700

Official deadline, feature = $100 … $425,500

Official deadline, episodic = average $88 … $41,360

$1,327,560 in submission fees, not bad!! Your chances of being selected are less than 1%.

This is part of the Golden Elevator myth, the Chose One myth that indie film props up:

If you’re a director or producer, it’s “Get financing. Get into Sundance. Sell it to a major studio. Direct a Marvel movie.”

It’s a compelling story. Who doesn’t want to be Cinderella? Who doesn’t want to be chosen? Who doesn’t want to be the exception to the rule? - Hudson

Last year I applied to the Black List’s NRDC Climate Fellowship, and I recently came across these stats: 3 winners out of 500 applicants. That is an acceptance rate of .6%…less than 1%. What?? Why did I even bother?

Again, I’m not saying that the fellows for this don’t have amazing projects or don’t deserve the support.

I’m saying that I’m over trying to win the lottery! I’m also done spending $150 for a program with a 1% acceptance fee that gives you a “semifinalist” label to make you feel like maybe you have a shot next year, so that you apply again and help to contribute to the $60,000 pot of cash they’re making on submissions (NO! I’m NOT going to do that! NO, Square Peg, NO!).

It’s simply too expensive!

This is where NonDē filmmaking comes in. Where we see the value of making a film for the resources we have. Of not waiting to be chosen from some faceless group or some “Accepted” check mark on Film Freeway. To know that the real meaning is in the MAKING of the art, not in who pats you on the back for it.

I think I would have save thousands of dollars over the years if I had not applied to so many film programs. But whatever, I’ve learned, and now I’m ranting to you all about it! Aren’t you lucky!?!

‼️ FOR MY NEXT RESEARCH PROJECT, let me know if y’all think this would be interesting:

How many original feature programming slots are available at the mid-level film festivals? For example, at Chicago International Film Festival, how many films are playing there that haven’t already played somewhere else (like at Cannes, Berlin, etc)? I’m curious how many slots are available for World Premieres, what the shots are for films without Top-5 festival premieres.

I think this would give us better insight/data into our festival strategies, where it makes sense to apply, and how to construct alternate distribution plans as well.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to head over to ’s Substack ChefBoi NonDē to follow along with our summer feature project that he’s writing/directing, Face the World with No Regrets.

K lovE ya, byE!

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Mystery glues us to the screen during a film. Mystery in all sorts of ways: whodunnit, why are they acting this way, what’s their relationship with that strange man, how are these stories connected, what’s behind the door at the end of the hall.

We want to discover things and figure them out for ourselves! We love the chase, the imagining, the anticipation!

When things are obvious and explained aka boring…why even bother, right? And right there is the “second-screen” death spiral:

When the story is so obvious and over-explained…why pay attention, it’s all being told to you. Might as well look at your phone. Wait, I was looking at my phone, what just happened? Oh, they just told me. That’s boring, I’d rather look at my phone.

By building mystery, I also mean: creating viewer participation in the film.

Here are ways to do this, from the macro to the micro:

1. Mystery as the driving narrative force

Mystery in the overall story is so much fun. This is why we love whodunnits so much and why they’ve proved to be timeless stories — there’s inherent fun in trying to put the pieces together and guess who did the thing. The Knives Out film series, White Lotus TV series, Nancy Drew, Columbo — who did it and why and how. Can you piece together the clues before the end of the show/film?

Momento is a very extreme version of this — you’re trying to piece together a tremendous amount of information along with the main character. You and the protagonist know truly zero information and have a million questions that the script skillfully answers little by little. It’s a RIDE!

A mystery script can be expository & formulaic and still keep people pretty hooked. I would say the show Bad Sisters is an example of this. You knew that in each episode we were going to see a sister try and fail to kill their brother-in-law, therefore I knew each episode’s plot set-up was destined to fail. Yet I chose to continue to the last episode to see what REALLY happened!

2. Mystery in the slow revealing of story information

By this, I mean a story that slowly drops pieces of information as to the situation, relationships and motives. The script doesn’t explain character action or plot, but drops you into the film and allows you to put the pieces together yourself. The lack of exposition makes you think: who are these people and what’s going on? I have to keep watching!!

Why is Gene Hackman spying on the couple at the beginning of The Conversation and what are they talking about? Watch and find out. Who is the man with the limp in It Was Just an Accident and why is the protagonist so afraid of him? You better stick around and see. Who are these boys and what are they plotting at the beginning of Dazed & Confused? It must be something good because I’ve never seen teenage boys this organized in my life!

3. Mystery of human behavior (Reality TV does it better?!)

When watching Love Island UK (I have seen too many seasons of this show) I would constantly pause it and turn to Ryan with something like, “OMG Georgia’s acting out like this because she thinks Robbie rejected her when actually he’s afraid of being rejected by her!” or something along those lines, and then we continue watching to see if they ever get together.

When watching Couples Therapy (I have seen all the seasons of this show) I pause it and say, “I think his tendency to shut down is directly tied to how his mother criticized him growing up and now it’s hurting his relationship with his wife and he just needs to share how he feels and she needs to not jump down his throat for expressing himself!!” This is a show trying to get to the bottom of human behavior yet I feel so excited that I figured it out for myself that I have to pause and tell Ryan!!

It’s thrilling to try and figure people out! I think Reality TV contains much less exposition than scripted narratives. People just do what they do — then you start to see the patterns and behavior behind the drama. You get to participate in the psychoanalysis of characters, in the uncovering the mystery of human behavior. Have you ever heard a group of friends dissect the cast of Real Housewives?!

In the narrative realm for example, I love how little background information is given to us about the characters in Challengers. We get a dusting of information about Josh O’Connor’s character. A passing comment that he comes from money. A passing comment about needle marks on his arm. We also know that he sleeps in his car, won’t fix his serve to be a better player, and tries to charm his way into free lodging. I understand who he is, I don’t need any more than this.

I do not like a monologue that explains past traumas. Towards the end of A Star is Born (which is otherwise a great film) Bradley Cooper explains his depression and alcoholism in great detail, telling us where his demons come from (his father!). I didn’t need that. I already get it, there are things that haunt people that drive them to do drugs and make art to share their pain. His performance embodied all that — we hear it in his singing voice, see it in his face — and I didn’t need him to explain it. It cuts off the conversation in my head that I would have had long after the movie ended.

4 - Mystery in the edit between images

Another type of mystery is an edit that doesn’t hold your hand from one frame to the next. It asks you to catch up, to piece the between information together. Asks you to contemplate why these images are placed one after the other.

The lack of exposition between images creates mystery — forces us to bring in meaning, imagine story, show up for the viewing experience:

In Decision to Leave, the film jumps abruptly from one location, or one scene to the next, without leading us in and out of scenes with establishing shots. It seems to be saying, “you can figure it out, just give it a second! I don’t need to spell out that we’re at the police department…and yes from the way they are speaking to each other you can probably gather it’s his boss.” Keep up!

In Catch 22, edits create a sense of spatial confusion at the base camp. A scene is taking place in one location that we understand spatially — then cuts to someone at a window. We cut to a wide and realize that this person at the window is a totally new space and a new scene is beginning. This contributes to the feelings of insanity and absurdity that the film revels in. As a viewer you have to pay attention and figure out where we are now.

Edits can create more meaning than a monologue ever could:

The non-linear untraditional form of storytelling employed in Hale County This Morning, This Evening demands that you read the edits. There’s metaphor and meaning in the decision to cut from a conversation between people to a wasp spinning in circles on the back of a truck. Bring yourself to the film, you have to do work.

In Black Girl, the film cuts from a devastating interior shot of the protagonist dead in a bathtub to a wide exterior shot of people on the beach. All the film’s themes play out in this edit — enslavement versus freedom. Her misery versus the sunshine leisure of the French people. The way empire continues to haunt and destroy the colonized. I didn't need to be told this — I was able to infer and think about these things based on a single brilliant edit. You feel it when you figure it out yourself.

In Look Into My Eyes, the documentary about mediums in NYC, the film cuts from an intense reading between and medium and a client to a wide shot of the city at dusk — light illuminating the windows from thousands of apartments. The edit says to you: what you’ve just seen is a single story but we are all here together searching for meaning and healing. We all have so many unanswered questions. The film never explicitly says this — the edit does it and you bring the greater meaning.

5 - Mystery within the frame

The lack of clear information in the frame encourages imagination.

This is another place where the two-screen cycle could be stopped. When the composition has the “Netflix look” — brightly lit, full information in the shadows, legible details — why would you have to look closely? You can glance up once and get the gist.

There’s a Yoko Ono sculpture that I’ve only ever read about and I’ve never forgotten it: a ladder in the middle of the room. A very small, illegible, word written on the ceiling that requires a magnifying glass to read it. You have to climb the ladder, take the journey, to read the word: YES.

What a different experience than painting a large YES on a wall.

As I’ve been watching Scavenger’s Reign I’ve taken note of how much traditional animation allows my imagination to soar. The lack of definition in the image I think allows me to fill in the details — of textures, feels, believability — and this in turn makes the world actually feel far more realized than the animators could ever do. How cool!

Shadows are the ultimate visual mystery machine. Film noir oozes with atmosphere and intrigue in large part because of the shadows. Imagine if you could see all the information in this frame. It would probably be quite disappointing, but as it stands, creates so much mystery, danger and drama:

It’s easy now to lift shadows out of black with sophisticated color correction and high-dynamic-range cameras. But that removes mystery from the frame. It’s interesting to compare the still from Silence of the Lambs with the one below from the Netflix show Sirens. Think about what more or less blacks would do to either of these frames.

When celluloid-film lovers talk about the “sumptuousness” of 16mm film, sometimes what I think they’re really talking about is the beauty of the lack of definition. How smooth things can look, how distorted, how unrealistic…you feel like you’re in a real movie because you have to use your imagination to fill in the details. You have to bring yourself into the experience of the film.

In conclusion:

Mystery in all ways keeps us engaged! Wanting to know more, to figure it out for ourselves, to put the pieces together. It adds participation to the art form: we don’t just sit and get told what to think, we are active participants.

The below excerpt is from an article that seems to since have been removed from the internet, “Image Without Metaphor” by Vicky Osterweil on their blog “All Cats Are Beautiful,” March 17, 2024. Vicky takes this idea a step further and I’ll leave you with this:

See ya next week,

Abby aka Hortonioni

BLOCK THE MERGER

You see all these signatures and you think, “who actually wants this to happen??” and I think the answer is really very few people in the grand scheme of things.

Paramount buying WB with lots of debt is a leveraged buyout (LBO). We know what happens with LBO’s from watching Private Equity companies “slash and burn” the companies they buy!

With more debt comes:

• Less risk — Paramount needs to pay back billions of dollars in loans and big swings are probably not the surest way to do that. This is bad for the film industry. Cinema needs to take risks and if the number of major studios is reduced to FOUR — there’s less possibility for anyone taking a competitive risk.

• Cut backs on spending: cutting jobs, cutting resources, making people do more with less. Will they sell the iconic WB studios to make some extra cash? License their assets to AI companies? These are all PE playbook moves aka do anything to make more money.

• Higher risk of bankruptcy: will they drown in their debt and go bankrupt? It’s happened before!

In a similar vein:

One of my biggest existential issues with PE is that it sucks economic power and self-determination up into the PE firms and owners. The transfer of wealth, the transfer of agency is enormous. The kind of power consolidation will be the same if Paramount buys WB — they will suck up so much more power and determination in our industry. They get to decide what movies get green light over a massive number of subsidiaries. What goes on the news. They own it, it’s theirs. Even if they say they’re be “hands off” now, that’s not a legally binding agreement. They can do what they want.

The Ellisons have bad politics and not an ounce of taste in their entire bodies. But it doesn’t matter who is the head of Paramount — no one company should have this much power in the industry — news, media, movies. It must be broken apart. The merger must be blocked!

On a wonderful community-focused note, I went to last night in Los Angeles and it was fabulous!! Congrats to the organizers including and the filmmakers with truly fabulous work at the screening. It was a night focused on community, genuine support, art, and just warm fuzzy feelings about what we can build together. If you are in LA, you must go to their next screening!

The films were the Oscar-winning short The Singers by Sam Davis. It deserved that Oscar. A pretty damn perfect short film. You can watch it on Netflix!

The other film was the supremely clever and LOL-inducing short film Callback by Matthew Puccini (who I met when he was an intern when I was the UPM on King Jack back in 2015). Sam Davis coincidentally also DP’d this film!

Both these films were great examples of the short film form. Not features trying to cram into 12-15 minutes, but characters in a moment. The ends weren’t buttoned-up nice and neatly (good!!), but instead explode into laughter that carries the moment past the credits.

Have a great weekend!!!!

xo Abby

I’ve been wanting to write a post about this idea for a long time and ’s recent writing inspired me to go for it. She puts it perfectly here and I’ll just add a few more thoughts to this:

Here is her full post:

Let's Go Again

64 ways to try non-dependent filmmaking & free yourself from Hollywood

Never have I ever been inspired by the refrain: “You can make a movie with the phone in your pocket…

Read more

a month ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Courtney Romano

I have seen so many Q&A’s where a young filmmaker asks the seasoned professionals onstage, “Do you have advice for getting your movie made?” and the advice is,

“Just go shoot it on your iPhone!”

I find it to be a very lazy answer people give when they don’t feel like dispensing real helpful advice, when what they actually want to do is gatekeep. What people are really saying when they give this pseudo-advice is “I have spent years building contacts within the industries and relationships with financiers that I do not want to share with you at the moment, random person.”

Plus I would bet a lot of money that the people handing out this advice have never ever shot a movie on an iPhone.

Here’s what it does:

1. Shooting on the iPhone saves you money on camera rental.

2. You still need lighting and camera movement and a DP.

3. You still need to budget for crew, cast, catering, locations, production design, post production, music, transportation, lodging, etc., etc., etc….

And then…

You still run into all the other obstacles that come with making a film!!

1. The lack of interest that will come roaring in if you’re not an established voice in the industry

2. Distributing the film

3. Marketing the film and getting people to watch it

4. Making money on the film

I just had a producer tell me “it’s really hard out there right now for indie film. Sean Baker shot Tangerine on an iPhone because he got tired of chasing financing. And if you make a great movie but you like didn't get to shoot on an Alexa, no one is going to fault you!”

That is very annoying to me.

Tangerine had a budget of 100k, was EP’ed by the Duplass Brothers, and was Baker’s 5th film. I’m not saying you can’t make a good movie on an iPhone but it’s just not the whole picture: there was a lot more that went into “shooting Tangerine on an iPhone.” Much more infrastructure, contacts, experience and strategy. There’s soooo much more.

I would much prefer a “Sorry I can’t be of help!” than what feels like advice for a high-schooler learning filmmaking, ya know? And I think this overly simplistic advice is still creating the myth of the “very special filmmaker whose brilliant cheap film will be plucked out of obscurity.”

The “if you build it they will come” myth.

Ryan and I made Blow Up My Life with the ethos of “just go out there and shoot a film!” and it was an amazing experience and we made a great movie! But again, shooting the film is just one part of the process. We still had to raise more money than I’ve ever raised (or had) to pay the cast and crew. We didn’t have that stamp of approval (like a big-name EP or Producer, big star, a prestigious lab) that makes gatekeepers perk up. We didn’t know the ins and outs of distribution, we weren’t thinking years in advance about marketing and audience-building.

I’m saying this to point out what it takes to move past getting the movie in the can. It’s important that we talk about ALL OF IT because I think that will allow filmmakers to prepare and plan for so much more than they traditionally have.

The NonDē movement (and the above post by Courtney) is doing so well at recognizing that while it’s cool that there are technologies that make it more accessible and cheaper to shoot a film — it’s just a line item and one slice of the process. That we need a sustainable holistic cinematic ecosystem that is deep, detailed, and requires years to build. Filming your movie is sort of the smallest slice of the pie in what it takes to put out a film.

If you are going to just go out there and shoot a film on your iPhone — cool! Filmmaking is a blast and let’s just go do the thing. If that’s what your goal is — simply to be on set shooting a film for less money — then shooting on an iPhone could be a cheap tool to help you get to that point.

If your idea of success is building a sustainable career, distributing your film to audiences, making money on your film…that’s going to look like something different. It takes a lot more than just shooting the film! Start getting involved in FilmStack and NonDē and learn about ALL the facets of filmmaking.

I’ve always wanted to go off on this, and now I have. Ahhh I feel better.

💓 Love ya! 💓

xo Abby

First up, I wanted to share this very cool photography exhibit that and I just finished as a part of UConn’s Breaking Bias project.

We photographed 49 people over 8 days. Aspects of each subject’s identity are revealed through the outfits, props and emotion that they chose to share. It encourages the viewer to recognize the ways in which we’re all quite similar yet unique, surprising and complicated. Did you know the math teacher was also a tap dancer?? There are so many stories within us all!

And — this is still technically an “April Media Rec” because you can go see it IRL at West Hartford Town Hall!

Share Hortonioni

Now to cinema…

FilmStack! I know you’re always on the hunt for ambitiously-authored cinema to see in the theaters. Well, have I got some for you…written and directed by my pals Meredith and Oscar no less:

Forbidden Fruits directed by Meredith Alloway and written by Meredith Alloway & Lily Houghton

This is a hilarious, campy, and supremely clever movie, based on a play written by Houghton called “Of the woman came the beginning of sin and through her we all die.” In the film, four women who work at the “Free Eden” store in a Dallas mall cast spells and form alliances in the dressing room after close. Need I say more?

The cast is fabulous. Lili Reinhart is really something special, she has wicked comedic timing and lets loose at the end in a strong dramatic burst. It’s BOLD, it SWINGS, and it has something to SAY. Go see this! (Link to showtimes here.)

And shoutout to their super lovely and talented DP Karim Hussain who I worked with on a commercial in Toronto!

Our Hero, Balthazar directed by Oscar Boyson and written by Oscar Boyson & Ricky Camilleri

Similarly to Forbidden Fruits, it’s hard to talk about Our Hero, Balthazar without really spoiling all the juicy complications that arise in the film. It’s about a rich high schooler who befriends a potential school-shooter online, and then goes to meet him in Texas. It’s amazing that Oscar pulled off this near-impossible film…and it’s funny, too. This film fits in no container: it’s about gun violence and masculinity and class and friendship and leaves you with feelings.

The two leads are fantastic. I love Asa Butterfield from Sex Education and he’s playing a completely different (but equally specific) character here.

Go see this in the theaters, they’re doing lots of Q&A’s with special guests coming up! (Link here to showtimes and a great interview with Oscar here.)

And shoutout to pal & sound genius Colin Alexander who also worked on this!

I will leave you with just those two recommendations for this month because they are in THEATERS — get thee to a cinema this weekend!

But actually okay real quick is anyone else watching DTF St. Louis?! The performances are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. It’s truly hilarious and brilliantly weird. The pummel horse at the park?? Let’s talk about it soon.

See you soon, TGIF!

xo Abby

I really like cinema and novels that circle a theme. The threads of the story feel like they’re all vibrating toward a deep, central visceral theme without actually touching that nucleus. They leave you with feelings, with questions, with multiple ideas to hold and unwind. I can’t explain what they’re about but I can feel what they’re about. Here’s a drawn attempt at explaining this:

I think this is why I love “collage films” so much (as discussed in my FilmStack Inspo Challenge). Films like:

The Square and Involuntary by Ruben Östlund

Shifty by Adam Curtis

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed by Joanna Arnow

BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions by Khalil Jospeh

Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World by Radu Jude

Slacker by Richard Linklater

Roy Andersson’s Human Trilogy

They’re untraditional narratives, a compiling of adventures, dreams, manifestos, conversations, montages or stories that circle ideas and feelings. They don’t drive straight ahead.

An essay novel like Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino weaves personal and cultural stories that leave you with a sense of how a place’s cultural values seep into our hearts and whittle us down. But of course, it doesn’t say that exactly. Tolentino tells you different stories, some farther from this idea and some closer, that make you feel it. I just finished Zadie Smith’s Dead or Alive and she writes essays about looking closely at history to see it and full and complex ways, of seeing art and our current cultural obsessions in nuanced ways that don’t have answers but incite curiosity, jumping from subjects like Tár and Toni Morrison, to New York City, her teenage years, to Kara Walker.

In a large part, to me,

these films and novels feel like DREAMS.

I’ve always been an avid nighttime dreamer. I remember my dreams every night. I wake up with an emotion, a deep feeling that I can’t name, but if I close my eyes and see the dream again, I can feel it and live in it.

Share Hortonioni

I started keeping a dream journal because they were just getting absolutely insane:

• Mirrors had been coated with an acid-like substance. So if you got your hands wet and touched it, it would fizzle and burn.

• I looked in the mirror and my right lower jaw was protruding. Thought it was dislocated and tried to push it back into place. Could feel some weird extra piece underneath my skin slide around. I thought it was a foreign object in my body.

• In a tour group going to a shrine. There are monk-like people performing their ritual for the tourists: sweeping dried lavender over a flat stone area and wafting the smell of the lavender at us and we all breathe it in deeply.

• I cut off the heads of two or three men, felt very bad about it but also felt like I had no choice. Really had to hack at their neck with an inadequate tool, they weren’t dead yet and had to finish them off.

• In the far distance I see a storm coming: a mix of a tsunami, sandstorm. I yell for everyone that the storm is coming and to run and get inside the house. We go into the bedroom and the storm comes upon us but it’s silent. We see it overtake the house through the windows, but hear nothing.

Some of the imagery is pretty cool, huh — monks wafting lavender and hacking off heads!

Recently I was telling Ryan my ideas for this post and thought aloud,

“Do I love these sorts of collage films because of my dreams? Does that type of storytelling speak to how my head makes sense of things?”

Not straightforward at all, never practical, rarely precise.

Perhaps this is true for most filmmakers, but when it comes time to write a grant or application for a film that I’m working on, I have the HARDEST time explaining what it’s about.

It’s always baffled me that anyone could really pinpoint what their work is about — how the hell am I supposed to know, it just comes out of me!? Instincts are called instincts because they’re inexplicable! I still have a hard time pinpointing what my short films Club Policy and A Few Activities are about. They circle ideas. They are feelings. They’re like dreams.

I just heard an interview with Jessie Buckley on NPR and she talked about how she uses her dreams in her work. She brings images and feelings with her to a scene that trigger something in her. I’d love to try some Jungian Psychoanalysis to see what it could teach me about the images I see while unconscious.

A discussion of storytelling and dreams feel hyper-personal, but also quite massive at the same time: The current political landscape is like a dream, a nightmare. When will we wake up from it? Our national identity is based on a democracy we’ve never had, stories about “who we are” slapped onto us like a sticker trying to cover up a leaking dam. Cries for unity on top of genocides we’ve never acknowledged. Social systems that when explained sound like jokes. We live in a dream in the most unsteady sense — because like in a dream, we stand on irrationality, on a ground that can open up and swallow us whole at any second because there was never anything there.

You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.

I write a lot here on Hortonioni about listening to yourself and digging deep for your true voice. And how hard it is to do that: there are constant pressures, voices, traditions, stories, demands put on us daily that squash that little voice. I’m trying to listen to myself more. I’ve never put that much weight on my dreams in the past, but I’m wondering if this is a place to get to know myself better for the sake of the stories I tell and how I tell them. What is more true than one’s subconscious, eh?!

See you soon!

💕 Hortonioni 💕

The film cold opens with our main character, Jason, on the run from his former big pharma employer, Furenza Pharmaceuticals.

Furenza and its product Doxie are a main plot point throughout the film.

We wanted to show Jason working at Furenza so that when he gets fired, we can feel its absence. So that we can understand the world he comes from. We also had to explain that Furenza has some heft and power behind them, so that we believe Jason would fear them.

But we could barely afford to production design ONE office to look legit, let alone an entire Furenza Pharmaceuticals.

The solution??

Sketch the information and create the vibes in the OPENING CREDITS SEQUENCE!

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A credit sequence can be so vibey. The audience accepts its intrusion: we’re accustomed to credits breaking onto the screen and into the action, at times completely apart from the rest of the story. Take, for example James Bond:

Casino Royale sets the themes of luck and fate, cards and danger with a wink to it (the bullets are hearts).

Ryan and I looked at the credits sequence of Se7en quite a bit. Though the subject matter and tone is WAY darker in that movie, we were inspired by how it uses details and close-ups:

It’s all centered around these journals, someone creating a handmade hell-on-paper. You see texture, details, mood, and just enough human interaction that hints towards a much larger story.

Okay — so you can use props to set the scene and lay down preliminary information for the audience.

We watched this credits sequence from What We Do in the Shadows quite a bit to mine for inspiration. It provides so much information to the viewer:

^ First it sets up the cast of characters as very very old. Mythic.

^ It explains why they all have European accents while placing us in New York. And it hints towards the spooky, dark stuff that they’re involved in.

^ It shows time passing via paintings —> Polaroids, which also explains their vampiric aging. And shows that all these people in the portraits are now friends.

^ And finally it establishes all these people live together in a house, like a family. And now the episode can take off without any further explanation. All told through objects!

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In the Blow Up My Life opening credits sequence, we needed to establish:

• Doxie: Furenza’s opioid-addiction recovery vape. This one was super important. We really didn’t want to have to explain in detail how the Doxie vape worked and how it connected to an app (snooze), nor could we show people using it (couldn’t hire more actors). Could we explain this via graphics, props and visuals during the credits sequence?

• Furenza Pharmaceuticals is a legit, successful company with well-known reputable products.

• Office, corporate culture. Office emails. Corporate speak.

• Shady, dark goings-on.

Here are some stills from the BUML opening credits sequence:

^ Visual information: Here’s the Doxie vape that we will see later. (Ryan Massiah made this animated image for us. He’s great — hire him!)

^ Information: It’s a opioid addiction recovery vape! Also getting the Doxie branding in there and the language they use to sell it.

^ The vape connects to an app. Okay?

^ They’re making a lot of money doing this! Sales charts and profits come back later as an important plot point, too. Nice to establish this visual here.

^ Emails, corporate work culture.

^ Office culture, desks, computers, pharma branding language, the presence of humans. (Antonio Santos made these pharma graphics for us — he’s great! Hire him!)

^ Vape + App = Doxie. “Addiction” language. Marketing language. It’s out there in the world.

Everything was shot close-up with very moody lighting that also matches the one time we see Jason in his office — hopefully this helps the viewer make that spatial connection!

And here’s some BTS to share with you, because I’m proud of what we were able to make with very little! The office shot from the beginning of this post:

Shooting the credits sequence in our office/study with the help of some props from Dunkin Donuts:

Thanks for reading, I hope this was interesting and informative! See you next week!

xo Abby

With all that in mind, I’m so excited to be working on ’s NonDē movie this summer. I’m here this week to plug his Substack that is documenting a play-by-play making-of:

Chef Boi NonDē

Welcome to Chef Boi NonDē

Howdy’all, welcome to this adventure…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · Ryan Dickie

This is why you should follow along with ’s substack:

• It’s going to be a fabulous example of NonDē filmmaking & ambitiously authored cinema

  • Here’s some of his work to give you a taste: Montana, GA, Hot Future, Threat, Sufjan Stevens “Take Me”

• He’s going to be open source about the whole process, sharing the process from the writing > prep > shoot > post > distro.

• I (me, Abby! Hello!) am going to be running the marketing, and directing the behind-the-scenes. I’ll be shooting a BTS doc, spearheading the social media, and cross-posting on Substack about the making-of day by day. You KNOW it’s gonna be a good time!

  • Loved The Florida Project making of mini-doc and want to do something similar

• He’s positioning it as part of the NonDē 50 movement that’s taking off via FilmStack!

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Ryan is my husband, btw. 🥰 OOH LA LA! We met working on the crew of Blue Ruin and together we wrote, directed and edited Blow Up My Life. We love movies! I’m super stoked to be on this new adventure with him, as he makes a film that is 100% Chef Boi RD with zero outside creative compromises (besides the inherent compromises of filmmaking like time, money, resources, people, weather, etc.).

So follow along with over on ChefBoi NonDē, I dare ya!!!

See ya next week. I am thinking about writing about dreams & films, what do you think? Our reality is pretty unbelievable, so I think it makes sense to dig into the surreal and subconscious.

Love ya!

Abby

P.S. Did anyone else watch the pilot episode of DTF St. Louis?? HI-LA-RI-OUS. The comedy is SO strange. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

P.P.S. Did anyone watch Industry Season 4? While the plot twists and turns to get there are generally confounding, I do love the themes that close out the season. I think sooo much more art and stories should be about finance, the dark systems that support it, and the very few that profit from it!!

Hope For Film

The Machinery of "No": Five Things We Learned About Why Projects Stall

Thanks Ted for the Takeover time. Our podcast Films Not Made launched today and we’re here to share insights from pre-recording a stockpile of episodes over the past two months with guests including Michael Tully, Loren Hammonds, Effie Brown, Robert Edwards…

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2 months ago · 16 likes · 5 comments · Amy Hobby, Avi Zev Weider, and Films Not Made

It got me thinking about all my unmade work tucked away and organized in Dropbox folders. Ryan and I are both writing new films as bigger-budget ones marinate (aka look for $$$) and have been talking about those scripts that haven’t yet been filmed.

We’re both in a moment where we’re not mad about it (that moment may/will change). Instead those scripts truly feel like huge learning wins, even if they took us years and years. Writing forces you to parse out your ideas, to research, to learn about the world. There’s always something valuable in that, I think.

If we hadn’t both been writing shorts and features for years, we never would have been able to write Blow Up My Life so quickly together. See, everything happens for a reason!!!

I’ll be teaching a class on short film screenwriting in the fall and have been thinking about how to relay to students the amount of difficulty and failure there is in screenwriting. How many years and repetitions it takes to figure it out, and to figure yourself out. To me, looking back on all the un-made work is certainly evidence of that.

My first attempt at a feature screenplay was called Life’s a Peach about a woman in finance who does something bad (I can barely remember what it is! Some kind of SEC violation maybe? Pshh, whatever. Now we can gamble on elections legally. She’ll have to do something really awful for it to matter now.) and then runs away to a small village where her best friend is a talking peach pit.

It was my first time writing 100 pages! I knew it didn’t work but I was proud that I had moved my fingers around on a keyboard for that long. But the focus on women in finance was there, and I followed that thread in Gestures. Looking back it’s clear that I had to write Life’s a Peach before I could try to write Gestures. And I certainly pulled ideas from the first attempt into the second.

It’s amazing (-ly cringey) to read through old scripts. It’s like getting a screenshot of where your head was at the time, what you were into. I was recently going through old notebooks trying desperately to find some good ideas hidden in those handwritten pages and had a similar experience. “Oh yeah I was really obsessed with that movie!” “Oh yeah I kept trying to make something out of that idea, and it just didn’t work!”

Me, Ryan and Mike wrote a draft of a totally wild, completely unproduce-able film together, in which teen detectives get sucked into an animated world and horrible things happen to them. We finished writing it, so it was a great exercise in completing things as well as a great lesson on the need for outlining!

More recently I’ve written a draft of a film called Birdies about a drone strike pilot. I’m currently writing draft two of Heartfart — interwoven stories about health insurance. They both are quite unfinished and need so much work. I love the idea for Birdies but I’ve realized I need to concentrate on a really produce-able NonDē film at the moment. I’m glad I got it out, though. After the first draft I could see that I actually want to write something more surreal, follow my heart more and write less of what I think is supposed to happen (will always struggle with this?).

I find that just getting a draft on the page allows it to float around in your head, and for inspiration to strike regarding how to fix the damn thing! I like the cycle of active work <> subconscious problem-solving.

^ These are the short film scripts that maybe I will make one day! They are films that I’m so glad I got out of me and onto the page. They’ve helped me hone my voice, craft, etc. But right now I want to concentrate on long-form work, or at least not be siphoning all my money into my short film projects. (…For the time being!)

👀

On a similar and final note, I just finished reading Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive, which I’d highly recommend — especially if you’re in the mood to read about writing fiction and/or writing about culture and history. She approaches everything with so much thought and nuance, she’s the best!

You may have noticed that your inbox was missing a post last week…I got swept up in the freelance juggle! Ryan and I were installing a photo exhibit that we’ve been working on for a few months (I’ll share about it soon, it’s v cool!), as well as working on a new Romance Retrospective. Today I’ve handed off the edit to RyGuy to work his magic and I’m back to writing — phew! I know you were worried.

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Welcome BACK to the 2nd Annual Hortonioni Oscars, where I just tell you about all the movies I liked the best this year. Excited to hear what your favorites were, dear reader!

BEST PICTURE: Hamnet but also non-nominees: Sirât, No Other Choice and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Unlike last year in which I simply could not choose my favorite child among the nominees, I thought this year left out the best films that I saw! Hamnet was a gorgeous film, with a transcendent ending and fabulous performances across the board.

Sirât for me was a religious experience — I haven’t felt so overcome and transported by a film like this in a very long time. No Other Choice and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You were so morbidly hilarious and sharp (my fav!), anchored by unmoored lead performances. I laughed out loud many times during both of them while also covering my eyes and being very concerned for their well-beings. NeverWins: F1. Please do not nominate a car commercial for an Oscar, thanks.

BEST ACTOR: Timothée Chalamet absolutely knocked it out of the park. His embodiment of Marty and his electric charm keep you glued to his side even as he’s an immature asshole. And he’s funny. When he wins the final ping pong tournament and breaks down crying…you feel his whole life flashing through this body. The catharsis, the shame of all he’s had to do to get there, the sweet relief. I also thought he totally sold the end beat — it’s not moment of a character vowing to change his ways and be a good person/dad. No, no. It’s a young man overwhelmed by the beautiful possibilities world and everything it can throw at you.

BEST ACTRESS: Rose Byrne and Jessie Buckley but also Amanda Seyfried for The Testament of Ann Lee (major snub say the pundits aka me)! All these actresses portray women stretched to their absolute breaking points — in others’ hands I think these performances could have gone on the sour side, i.e., too intense, too anxious. I was very moved by these roles, their commitment, and how they powerfully carry their respective films.

BEST DIRECTOR: Mona Fastvold for The Testament of Ann Lee - I said it’s MY Oscars, I do what I want! I think the nominated directors did really lovely work, no doubt. But the fact that Mona held together a feminist Shaker MUSICAL seems to me a true feat of directing. She held the tone, the choreography, music, gorgeous cinematography, intense performances, epic storyline, cultural deep-dive all together for the entire film. Yeah it’s a bonkers movie — and I think it really works and damn I don’t know how she did it.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Inga Ibsdotter Lileaas gave a quiet and powerful performance as the sister who “got away” (from depression) in Sentimental Value. She anchors the bigger stars — Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve — providing the strength and sturdiness that they need. There’s really nothing flashy about this role — she is just so real, you lose yourself in her work.

BEST ANIMATED: K-Pop Demon Hunters.

We're goin' up, up, up, it's our moment
You know together we're glowin'
Gonna be, gonna be golden…

…like a goddamn Oscar statue! This movie is working on all cylinders. It’s a MustWin, says I.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: The work in Marty Supreme is just so spot on. The details are out-of-control, the scope is mind-boggling, how many more hyperlatives can I dig up? Every part of the production design feels like it’s working at full-throttle yet is perfectly seamless. It’s a joy to live in these scenes, there’s so much to look and marvel at yet it never distracts from the story.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Sean Penn. He was hilarious. Self-hating and repressed to the point of physical alteration.

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BEST ORIGINAL SONG: “I Lied to You” from Sinners. The sound perfectly matches the act of “summoning” that is happening in this scene. The song is so in service of the story here, which is why I think it’s a winner for this category. (I don’t like when the nominated songs are just in the credits! Feels unfair.) The song is gorgeous, powerful, and Miles Caton is so talented with a voice that gets into your bones.

BEST INTERNATIONAL: Sirât is my pick although every single movie in this category is truly stunning! I loved the political exploration of The Secret Agent and thought the performances were fab — from Wagner Moura but also the unique ensemble cast. The film creates a world that you live in for 2.5 hours.

It Was Just an Accident has a brilliantly sharp script that takes massive ideas (torture, forgiveness) and packs them into a small story about a few people in a van over the course of one day. The film at times feels absurdist…with a dash of Hitchcock’s Rope. The film is mysterious, asking you to fill in the story blanks, therefore involving your intellect and then your emotions.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is pretty phenomenal as well — it retells the real murder of Hind Rajab by the Israeli military in a cinematic reenactment that places the audience in the position of the helpless workers doing everything they can to save a 6-year-old. The fury you feel watching this!!

Sentimental Value was another fabulous international feature this year — it envelopes you completely into the story of this artistic Norwegian family, their house, their ancestry. All while feeling very fresh and even funny at times.

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BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: It Was Just an Accident gets my vote here, as discussed above! It’s really f’ing brilliant. And I also give a hearty hoorah for Sentimental Value as well! The way the script fuses the house’s history into the film elevated the story of a feuding family to something deep, historical, societal. Joachim gives a great interview on Scriptnotes that’s worth checking out.

Big snubs in this category! For If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Sorry, Baby. The NeverWin here goes to Blue Moon: If I have to watch one more film with older men obsessed with young beautiful women, specifically Margaret Qualley…well, I’ll just turn it off. Which I did.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: WHERE IS MARTY SUPREME ON THIS LIST?

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Hamnet. Films about grief, depression, sadness are sooooo hard to do in my opinion. There is a lot of…nothing…that happens with those emotions. Internal/Stasis/Apathy. That this screenplay took a story about grief and turned it into a film that moved along quite well — that’s a real testament to the writing!

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Marty Supreme simply for the lighting in those amazing giant ping pong scenes! Just kidding — for all of the scenes. It looked insanely good, it created a time and a place. It was textured, the lighting reflected economic class, it drove the energy of the story. Even in the giant chaotic scenes, you always know where you are in the space and how characters are relating to one another. I can’t wait to watch it again just for the visuals (and the score and the performances!).

Big snub here for Testament of Ann Lee — another example of cinematography that created a time and a place, full of texture. The camera was another worshipper in the film, at times weaving like a dancer.

BEST EDITING: When watching Dead Man’s Wire I said aloud — this better get nominated for Best Editing! Alas, it is only being nominated in Hortonioni Oscars, but hey. The editing is electric, complicated. It cuts together different footage formats to recreate the experience of an event that was actually captured on broadcast news cameras. I thought it was very exciting!!

BEST SOUND: Sirât! Sound is EVERYTHING in Sirât. The score is phenomenal and the diegetic music drives the themes and atmosphere. Music and sound is a way to connect to something higher in this film. Setting this film in the desert allows the sound to overwhelm as it does because it’s filling this empty landscape — it pairs like a fine wine.

xoxo!

You too can get a super nice shoutout by becoming a paid subscriber to Hortonioni. Now wouldn’t that be nice!!

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Now onto today’s programming, an overview of how we created the movie poster for Blow Up My Life:

We finished Blow Up My Life! We’re independently distributing the film, so the poster design is all up to US! 😅

A poster is a very important part of your movie marketing — maybe it’s printed, maybe it’s shared online, but wherever it is, you want it to make people stop in their tracks and think, “oooh this movie looks great!”

They can be expensive — looking around, we were quoted upwards of 25k for some!! We had about 3k that we could spend on artwork. A really easy way to save money would have been using a still from the film itself. But we just didn’t have that one frame that really worked, that said everything about the movie. This was actually a hurdle that we ran into a lot, and something that I plan to capture on the next film — what scene really captures the spirit of the film, and let’s take some stills!

This is an amazing example of a poster that uses a still from the film:

The title contradicts wonderfully with the emotion in the poster, it gives you a taste of tone/wink, and it draws you right in!

I love this one too:

So much DRAMA in this poster: is that violence between them? Are they actually the most beautiful couple or is something sinister afoot? It makes you want to learn more!

But as I said, we didn’t have that ONE STILL that said it all. What did we want say? What did we have going for us that would get people to stop and click?

Our very smart and design-savvy friend Phil wrote us this advice:

you want someone to go, “Wait, is that the funny guy from Instagram? Blow Up My Life?! Whaaaa! What IS this? [RENTS NOW]

Yes, that’s exactly what we wanted! We wanted the thriller/action elements to come through in the poster, along with a sense of the dark comedy that’s in store. We also wanted it to look LEGIT and PRO AF. It seemed like a drawn poster or a heavily-photoshopped poster was going to be the way to go.

So, now to research and find references”

This Casino poster caught our eye, especially because of the burning car which is also in BUML. You get such a sense of darkness, sex, fleeting success, Vegas. It brings you right in.

This poster for our friend Macon’ fabulous film I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore was a great reference for BUML. While it’s structured like a familiar action/adventure film poster, the characters are unique and bring so much personality (those nunchucks! There’s something weird here, I wanna dig deeper!).

We loved these 70’s paranoia movie posters, how strong the graphics were:

BUT! The names “Warren Beaty” and “Robert Redford / Faye Dunaway” are a HUGE reason these posters work. You don’t really see faces otherwise, they lean more on the fame of the actors. We didn’t have Robert Redford in our film (!), and had to keep that in consideration.

This poster felt like a good reference for us:

There’s tone and dissonant drama between the lead character (banged up, whiskey in hand) and the cheeky tagline. We also liked the strong colors against the clean backdrop — it catches your eye. I tried a few mock-ups myself, just to try and get the creative juices flowing before we hired anyone:

We eventually decided to work with Robert Sammelin, an amazing poster artist from Sweden that our Distribution Producer Carly Reicho spotted on Instagram! We also really loved (and still love) the work of Rafa Orrico Díez but felt like we needed a more “commercial” look for BUML (next film, Rafa!).

We sent Robert the film as well as our folder of poster inspiration to get him started. Then we had a Zoom call to talk about what we wanted to include in the poster, what was important for us to convey to audiences: humor, energy, action, personality, genre.

He sent over a super rough draft to make sure we were on the same page, to kick us off:

Fab! We wanted the colors to be more autumnal to match the palette of the film, include the burning van and coding elements into the design, add Priya’s investigative journalist character, as well as situate it in space with the Furenza building. It led us to this:

And with the finishing touches, we got to the final poster:

Robert was amazing to work with, highly recommend getting in touch with him for your film! He really listened to what we wanted to accomplish, watched the film, and carefully considered our references.

Spending the time to figure out what you want for your poster, and collecting very specific references — I think this is key! And a huge timesaver when it comes time to collaborate with your poster artist.

And damn it takes TIME to figure out what you want from a poster, how to represent your film and market it as best as you can. There are 1,000,000 ways a poster could be, and I sure am not a marketing or design whiz either. Just digging through images, asking for advice, opinions, experimenting on our own, all took weeks if not months. It was a whole new skill to learn and develop.

Going into the next film, I am already thinking about the marketing assets I want to capture on set. What’s that KEY image that says it all?

I will leave you with one of the greatest movie posters, IMHO:

Um, DRAMAAAA!

Thanks for reading, I hope this discussion of creating the poster for Blow Up My Life was super helpful and informative and also just a little bit delightful as well!

Besos!

Abby

I few comments on my Ted Hope TakeOver post said they appreciated Filmstack’s willingness to talk openly about the realities of making a living as an artist. Opening up about the economics, the numbers, and not trying to be cool and elusive (couldn’t be that if I tried!).

I’m happy to hear that it’s helpful — let’s dive in!

Every year since I started working in film in 2013 I’ve done many different types of jobs to puzzle together an income. It’s never been tidy, much to my CPA’s dismay. Which was something of a insecurity for a while (hard to answer the question, “So, what do you do?”), but now I see it’s simply a truth and I embrace it! It’s like I have a varied portfolio, so when the market goes down not all my stocks crash, hopefully.

The last 2-3 years has been a smattering of:

• Directing comedy commercials

• Editing social media videos and webinars for nonprofit

• Taking photos/video and editing highlight reels for nonprofit

• Making Romance Retrospective videos for soon-to-be-married couples

• Directing & producing shoots here in CT for a local agency and local universities

• Day playing as PA/assistant on small shoots locally

• Photo shoots & exhibitions

• Return on investment from Blow Up My Life sales

I enjoy best the jobs that get me on set and working with new crew members and people. Commercials are hard to book but a great way to keep the filmmaking muscles in shape and work with people you’ve admired from afar (aka pay them to be my friend for a few days).

2025 was a hard year for me financially, and I know it was hard for a lot of people. There frequently exists the push-and-pull between “weathering the storm” and “facing reality that I am broke and need to do something about it.” The latter is eeking out the win atm. However, like clockwork, I just got a text about a job opportunity that would really shake things up for me by creating stability — which is throwing me into an existential crisis. I don’t DO stability! It’s my whole thing! I feel like I’ve worked so hard to have a freelance life that gives me freedom and flexibility and a body of work — would a stable job be a loss? Or did all that hard work get me to this point…and that’s a win? Or just try it for a few months Abby jeez chill out, everything is fine, not every choice has to be existential and permanent!

I’m just ruminating. I don’t have anything really specific to say about this — but it’s what’s on my mind right now, so maybe it connects with you too. Let me know.

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Okay, back to the economics of all this. I thought it also might be an interesting exercise to tally up all the programs I shell out for to do freelance/filmmaking work:

Movie Magic Budgeting - $280/year, raising to $300 in the new year (oofta)

Dropbox - $120/year

Adobe $30/month = $360/year (oooooofta)

• It’s supposed to be like $60/month. Go into your account to cancel it, click through like you’re going to cancel, then they will offer you discounted rates to stay on. Thank you to my friend Eric for this tip!

Lab/Grant Applications in 2025

• Square Peg - $135 (was $175 w/o discount code yeesh)

• Gotham Week - $125 Membership required, then $50 for 2 project applications.

• Film Independent - $65

• That’s $425 of rejections right there! I should stop applying to these sort of things…

Vimeo - $108

• I was thinking about cancelling this, but knowing that YouTube is 20% AI doesn’t make me want to hang out there either.

Squarespace - $212 (what?!)

• I’ve transitioned to free GoogleSites recently so this should go down significantly.

Film Fatales - $150

That’s a lot. Yikes!!

I do feel like I’m getting a grasp on what’s worth applying to, or spending money on, and the things that aren’t. I’ve cut down significantly on the grants/workshops I apply for, since my acceptance rate is about .04%.

Also…

I have a suspicion that most festivals/competition/residencies/grants are ponzi schemes. If a competition costs $50 to enter, and the prize is $10,000 and 300 filmmakers apply…well did the applicants all just fund that prize?! Is that a ponzi scheme?? Don’t even get me started on Sundance application costs vs. percentage accepted!!!

Well that’s my little overview on income and expenses this week. Of course economics is everything and it completely affects how and if we can go for our dreams of making art. Please drop a comment if you relate, or have any hot tips on how to save money on budgeting/storage/file hosting etc!

💋💋💋

Thanks for reading, love ya!

xo Abby

P.S. Really enjoying Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive!

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I just finished reading CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders. Thanks to my friend Margaret for loaning me this book and for my first Saunders experience! I absolutely loved it (and I’m not usually so into short stories). It was LOL funny, clever, disgusting, brutal and absurd. Hooked from the first sentence.

The part I want to discuss is the Author’s Note at the end of the book. Saunders writes about finding his voice — the years and years it took him to do this:

I’d always loved Hemingway and all throughout grad school had been doing some version of a Hemingway imitation. I got tired of that, I did a Carver imitation, then a Babel imitation…Following my Hemingway/Babel/Carver years, I embarked on a few James Joyce years, and then a Malcom Lowry half year…

While he was imitating, nothing he wrote worked. Nothing was alive. (“The author can choose what he writes about,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”) Then, after much toil, Saunders absentmindedly doodled some silly poems and his wife read and loved them — the first thing she’d really loved of his in a long long time. He writes:

Suddenly it was as if I’d been getting my ass kicked in an alley somewhere and realized I’d had one arm behind my back. All of my natural abilities, I saw, had been placed, by me, behind a sort of scrim. Among those were: humor, speed, the scatological, irreverence, compression, naughtiness. All I had to do was tear down the scrim and allow those abilities to come to the table.

And writing might be fun again.

For many years I was part of a directing trio. I learned so much and we made some really amazing work together! Hybrid animated/live-action shorts with portals and mythology, VR with giants, music videos with singing baby aliens. The work was very rad, people thought we were on loads of drugs, and they really loved it:

We won awards — someone even got a tattoo of a character from one of our music videos!

I had this itch, though: I knew what we were making wasn’t really ME. Sometimes that’s the result of collaboration — there’re going to be compromises. But I finally let myself admit that left to my own devices, my taste — what I think about and choose to read, write, and watch — was almost completely opposite!!

So if this trippy, wild stuff wasn’t me — what was exactly? What did I actually want to say, spend my time on, share with other people? Uhhh…good question! I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t really thought about that in a long time — I got swept up (and it was fun!) in the other stuff.

I decided I needed to make a short film to re-establish myself…to myself. To learn what it was that I loved. To work on finding my voice again.

I spent a summer exploring “things I like.”

I went down rabbit holes watching every Mike Leigh short film I could find — it was exhilarating! It just lit something up inside me. Abigail’s Party was a revelation! I watched all of Roy Andersson’s movies and his short films. I took notes about what I loved about them. I discovered Aki Kaurismäki. This odd AF web series by Dean Fleisher-Camp called Catherine. I sat midday at my laptop, headphones on, studying Les Rendez-vous d’Anna and trying to figure out how Chantal Akerman made a movie where nothing much happens, or how Antonioni keeps us glued to L’Avventura despite the characters just sort of wandering around and not doing what they set out to do. Turns out I love this stuff!

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I was recently looking through my old notebook (mining for good ideas I might have had in the past, haha!) and I literally have pages from that Summer O’ Exploration titled “Things I like: Images/ideas/etc.”

• running

• carrying around a peach pit that talks to you & is alive

• lifting weights [???]

• romance

• getting tattoos

• the classic hurt person (physically) who needs to be nursed back to health by the person who eventually falls in love with them [have since written that into a short film script WOW I cannot escape myself]

I was truly trying to rediscover…who I was! As Saunders writes:

Then one day — maybe age has something to do with it, or something difficult happens that brings him to a boil — he snaps. No more imitation. That’s it. Something breaks. He starts sounding…like himself. Or at least he doesn’t sound like anyone else, exactly.

That Summer O’ Exploration led to writing things that were extremely different than anything I’d ever done. Yes there is a feature script about a woman

• carrying around a peach pit that talks to you & is alive

I also made my short film A Few Activities which, whether the viewer likes it or not, I can proudly say is 100% ME and when I look back I’m really proud of that YAY!!

Now when I write, I try to let my gut and heart guide me. I ask simple questions like, “Do I like this scene? Do I want to shoot this scene? Do I want to live in this world with these characters?” If the answer is no, then it’s time to find another route. Time to make myself laugh, thrill myself, break out of what “supposed to be” I was writing toward.

That’s always a battle, to be completely true to yourself. I think this will be a lifelong battle, but it’s vital one in creating art: to give the world something that is truly 1000% you.

So anyway, thank you to George Saunders for that lovely Author’s Note.

K bye love ya!

Abby

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Last week I put it all on the page (and in your inboxes) with a Ted Hope Takeover post as well as a FilmStack Daily Inspiration post (#145 of as many consecutive posts in the Filmstack community, awesome! Go team!). Hope you enjoyed them!

And FilmStack keeps giving: Tuesday’s NonDē Financing Webinar with Ted Hope & Keith Ochwat from Show & Tell was extremely inspiring and informative. So exciting that Filmstack is openly sharing information & ideas about how we can have sustainable careers and take control of our distribution. They talked about making sure your film is part of the larger community, it’s not just this one film product — it’s a contribution to a bigger movement, a vital conversation, a new way of doing things. That really struck a chord with me because I really believe that!

So to start off this year’s movie-making push, here’s where things stand on some projects:

Gestures

• The lead role is cast! I am so excited to be working with this actress, she is my dream for this role, an absolute genius and a dedicated artist.

• The aforementioned webinar renewed my energy in the Gestures Impact Campaign. There is so much we can do pairing the film with education on the ills of Private Equity: how to protect yourself from these companies, what they even are and how they function in our economy. We could partner with economic justice groups, housing advocacy, and/or politicians who are working on PE legislation, authors & journalists who cover PE and finance. Tons of potential here! And of course, please reach out if you have interest or ideas in people/orgs/groups who are working to battle PE.

• We are sending the project out to a handful of companies — some for financing, some as production companies who could help us find financing. Please keep your fingers crossed perform a sacred ritual for us (incl. crystals, goat, blood, etc). Thank you in advance.

Heartfart

• I am writing the next draft of this NonDē project. Buzzin’ about the experimentation and creative freedom in this script that revolves around the health insurance industry. Screenwriting remains a humbling process in which you face your deficiencies as an artist every time you look at the page. 🤓

• I’m going to break the story up on note cards so I feel free to rearrange order and beats. When writing in Highland I can become apprehensive to move things around — I get lost in the amount of words and pages and can’t keep track of what I’m working on. 😵‍💫

• I like this title, but I recently remembered what I consider to be a faux pas: Titles that claim a large swath of ownership (Heartfart is a take on Hartford) or claim to speak for a place/group, i.e. Girls, In the Heights, Men. I think they set themselves up to dissapoint. “That’s not how girls are! This isn’t what Washington Heights is like! Not all men!” I am not an expert on life in Hartford so I don’t want to claim that this film will be (it won’t)! Titles set expectations.

Ryan’s movie currently titled Face The World With No Regrets:

• Ryan is shooting his NonDē project this summer and I will be there!

• I’ll (at least) be directing the BTS content and spearheading the marketing and distro campaigns (dynamic! slow! bespoke!). I’m really excited to take new ideas I’ve learned on FilmStack and start to apply them to this film. Time to NERD OUT!

• You can follow along his journey at Chef Boi NonDē (what a name) and read step-by-step how he’s putting the project together:

  Chef Boi NonDē

  Ryan Dickie, writer/director/cinematographer documenting the filming of the NonDē feature FACE THE WORLD WITH NO REGRETS in 2026!

  By Ryan Dickie

Thank you for reading!

See you next week!

Besos! 💋

xo Abby

This post is my contribution to a series called FilmStack Inspiration Challenge started by in his post: What if FilmStack mined inspirations on a daily basis? It has since grown into a monumental community project with more people signing up daily and no end in sight! Check out this Inspiration Post Challenge doc to get involved, and/or DM !

TGIF babes! Here are a few inspirational things (movies, IG’s, books) that give me a creative spark or help me to stay focused and committed to an artistic path. I hope they spark something in you, too! 🐬

1. Dust to Digital (Instagram Account)

This account shares videos of music and musicians from all over the globe. You can’t watch it without smiling. I swear. Humans are so talented and inventive and surprising and this account takes you on little travels to see them. It’s just the best.

When you feel dark and negative about how the world works…here is something that will automatically make you remember how vast and fascinating it can also be!

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2. Collage-y Films

The official terms is indeed “Collage-y Films,” which means films that use all sorts of techniques, formats, mediums and organizational structure to relay their ideas. These types of films shake me awake and remind me that cinema can be anything. They say to me: Why not use this clip to illustrate this idea? Why not cut to this new section? Why not make a film this way? Why not? Why not? Why not?

Ryan and I are making our way through the documentary series Shifty by Adam Curtis. It explores Thatcher-era Britain in the 80’s through a collage of archival footage. Again, it’s not telling a linear story but exploring the feeling and ideas of an era. You, the audience, bring the meaning to the edits that Curtis decides to make. When I attended that Rammel Ross talkback that I’m still talking about, he said something like, “a film that’s nontraditional or nonlinear makes the audience take part — they have to bring their own meaning. It’s more like reading images than being a voyeur to a story, or being told what to see or think. Metaphorical and/or quotidian images, back to back, create meaning.”

BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions directed by Kahlil Joseph was the most recent film I’ve seen like this. It uses text, a fictional news channel, futuristic narrative scenes, documentary footage, still images, re-creations, etc., to paint the story of the film. And I wouldn’t even necessarily say there’s a singular story in this film, but it’s an exploration of African American and African diaspora past, present and future life. This interview with Joseph also digs into how the making of the film, the collaboration of many artists/directors, was also a collage-like approach.

I also really love the film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn by Radu Jude. The film follows a teacher whose personal sex tape gets leaked, but the middle section cuts to a series of mini political essays. These vignettes explore different ideas and words that ultimately connect to the greater themes of the film, but stand alone from the plot. Absolutely loved that Jude went there. Hell yeah!

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3. Walks (Daily Rituals) & Naps (The Nap Ministry)

I am a Horton, therefore I come from a long line of nappers. My dad’s parents took a nap every day after lunch in their later decades, and yes, other countries literally have SIESTAS where this is the norm but we do not have this wonderful culture here in the USA, so it was always something that stood out. Anyway, I am a prettyyyy sleepy person and discovering the ideas of (The Nap Ministry on IG) played a significant role in accepting my demanding sleep needs, and re-framed taking the time to rest as something powerful and not weak, a small act of resistance against the capitalist grand culture. Rest and quiet that also encourages daydreaming and reflection. I am excited to read her book, which my friend Katy just told me about:

A nap AND a walk in one day? Now that’s a perfect day. Ryan and I try to walk after lunch when we work from home (harder in the winter of course!). And wouldn’t you know, it’s the way lots of artists across history have gone about their work days.

In the lovely little book Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, it’s so inspiring and charming to read how painters, composters, writers, etc., have structured their days to do their work. And a very large number of them take long walks during the day to clear their heads, work out ideas, talk over problems that need solving. This tidbit from the book makes me feel like perhaps when I am walking, I am also in step with every other artist out there working on a project, trying to crack it, hoping the fresh air might help!

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4. Film-Grab.com

This is my very practical and literal Source of Inspiration. I love this website where you can flip through ~50 key film stills from thousands of films! Whoever runs it is doing a public service and I thank them.

https://film-grab.com/

The homepage is a smattering of random films (changes constantly) and their stills that you can scan though. I like ShotDeck as well, but I use Film-Grab for inspiration-mining. I open it when I’m stuck, looking for ideas, just need something to get the wheels turning. I love seeing a visual overview of an entire film, ones that I’ve never heard of before or didn’t think to look to. It’s a birds-eye-view on color palette, the film’s cohesive visual language, a vibe-check, an inspiring burst of composition and story!

And that’s it for Day 145 of the FilmStack Inspiration challenge! These were some art works, ideas, and writings that I turn to and I hope they do something cool for you too. And most importantly I hope you can sleep in this weekend!! 😴

xo Hortonioni

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The happiness comes from the doing, not the validation from corporations!!!

Nouvelle Vague directed by Richard Linklater was a fabulous call-to-arms in this regard. It follows the making of Breathless by Godard, and his attitude towards capturing the imperfections of real life and the beauty of the moment, was truly invigorating. The looseness, the playfulness, the ability to follow inspiration when it hits— it makes me want to take part in a new New Wave. He also is constantly under pressure to do things the “normal way,” and fights against that at all turns. So yes, the subject matter is wonderful but the filmmaking of Nouvelle Vague is also tremendous. Gorgeously shot and composed, it embodies the edit with the same feeling of playfulness and spontaneity of Godard making Breathless — which I would imagine actually takes some seriously exacting preparation!!

Ryan and I watched Folktales last night, a documentary directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, about an alternative gap-year high school in Norway that teaches kids skills how to survive in the arctic wilderness. They camp overnight in the snow, drive sled dogs, knit, and learn how to rely on themselves. It was a lovely, sweet, beautiful documentary that was a reminder of the beauty in simplicity, in slowness, in quietude.

As someone who now lives in the woods — while my industry and things I consumes typically happen in big cities — it felt nice to celebrate this life experiment that I am on. When I walk back into the woods behind my house, there is so much to be found and experienced — it’s exciting and invigorating in ways that are not always celebrated in culture. Folktales was a wonderful reminder of this.

A few nights ago we went to see BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions at the nearby art cinema (one I have been going to since I was in high school! Where I saw my first Almodóvar film!). I, perhaps like many of you, have been a fan of the film’s director Kahlil Joseph since his groundbreaking work on the short film/music video for Flying Lotus’s Until the Quiet Comes. BLKNWS is an experimental documentary about the past and future of Black life and the African diaspora, using the Encyclopedia Africana as a grounding point for it’s “narrative” structure.

The film opens with a title card, prepping the audience for the film’s untraditional format, imploring us to sink into the film and expect it to feel more like an album. I thought this was a fabulous touch…it guides us into the experience…hopefully opening up the audience to experience this new form of cinema (could this be a way to get audiences to try other challenging forms of cinema as well??). I was surprised how much the film really clips along, the edit was great — at times in frantic collage-like bursts, and sometimes smooth and contemplative. Joseph uses all different types of media and cinematic forms to paint his story — it’s incredible creative, playful, somber, funny and daring. A powerful example of CINEMA CAN BE ANYTHING.

Have a happy New Year’s Eve and restful start to 2026! Thank you so much for reading Hortonioni I love you!

🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛

BUT there is SO much hope to be found in NonDe and FilmStack! It fills me with joy to know that so many filmmakers see the same problems and are taking the power back into their hands. Attending the NonDe 50 Zoom meeting led by Courtney Romano was wonderful — seeing all those faces and knowing that we’re all together building a new way of making and distributing films. Warm and cozy.

I call 2026 the Chrysalis Year because I started calling this summer My Chrysalis Summer and it just…never stopped lol. Each summer since 2020 has been marked by filmmaking. Here’s the recap:

2020 - Summer of writing and stressing and prepping Blow Up My Life

2021 - Summer of editing Blow Up My Life

2022 - Summer of waiting to hear back from festivals about Blow Up My Life, panicking over what the heck was going to happen with our movie, and starting to furiously google “what is film distribution?”

2023 - Summer of distributing Blow Up My Life

2024 - Summer of fun, resting from putting out Blow Up My Life (v important)

2025 - Summer of working to get Gestures made, waiting to hear from people…and writing other film projects in case I never hear from those people and instead pivot to my NonDe project next!

The chrysalis period is very important though. And I imagine a painful transition, too, if we could talk to the butterfly and find out. Turning one’s body into a new form must take a lot of energy and it’s probably lonely inside that sac, eh?

Here are some lines from the Chrysalis Wikipedia page that I will use on myself:

“…chrysalis stage in most butterflies is one in which there is little movement!”

Ah, from the outside it might appear that way, yes! But small things are churning and changing.

“Within the chrysalis, growth and differentiation occur.”

YES! I am honing my voice (differentiation) and growing (even looking back at all my posts/diary entries on Substack this year is cool to see how my ideas have shifted and formed).

“The adult butterfly emerges from this and expands its wings!”

HUZZAH! Wikipedia is essentially prophesying that in 2026 I will be soaringgggg. We will all be!

Francis Tiafoe (TENNIS PLAYER) also has a great quote about this that I have referenced before on Hortonioni:

“What you do in the dark will come to the light.” - Francis Tiafoe

I keep reminding myself of this when it’s tough to have faith and patience — all this work will come to the light.

Thanks for following along on Hortonioni this year! I’ve written 46 posts, each one more captivating than the next, and I hope you’ll continue with me on this journey into the new year. My original post almost a year ago predicts a pretty accurate view of what Hortonioni is/became:

*Bonus Section:

At this year’s holiday party, you are sure to find yourself in a group where the the chit chat turns to movies (best chit chat)!!

A casual line like, “What good films have you seen this year?” will be dropped and then the opinions will fly, the teeth bared! Get in the game with a few of these:

K-Pop Demon Hunters: [semi-unironically] “Best film of the year. Free is the best song of the year.”

Wicked For Good: “The leads were great, as expected, but don’t you think it could’ve been one film? Where’d the dancing go?”

One Battle After Another: [precariously waving glass of red wine] “It’s not my favorite PTA but it was definitely solid. Politically I’m not expecting anything truly radical from Zaslav’s WB…though was that Sean Penn’s best performance ever?”

Weapons: [precariously waving glass of white wine] “It was about authoritarianism, obviously.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You / Urchin: [precariously waving two glasses of wine] “Talk about a great pairing! No coincidence that these two stories about people feeling out of control and begging for help both came out this year. Let’s talk politics!”

Sirat: “Blow it up, amirite! I want to listen to that soundtrack on repeat. Let me go get the DJ…”

Left-Handed Girl: “Well did you know they shot it on the iPhone? Yeah, uh huh, they had to do that so they could film in real night markets in Taipei.”

Hamnet: “Lemme just say, go in stone cold sober and bring tissues!”

Hortonioni: “Do you subscribe? WHAT?! You have to, it’s where I discover the best movies to go see and it’s occasionally quite entertaining and thought-provoking!

Refer a friend

See ya next week!

xo Abby

P.S. Bonus to the bonus: Paul Horton(ioni) recommends this line when chatting about movies: “Huh…interesting!”

Thanks, Paul!

*I’ll admit it’s not really a bonus section if I’m the only one deciding what to write each week.

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In college I teetered the line between majoring in two terribly-paid career paths: filmmaker or painter. (Practicality has never been my strong suit 🤷🏼‍♀️) Filmmaker won out, but the time painting in college sparked a lasting love of looking at paintings and dabbling in the medium myself.

This weekend I visited the Yale Art Gallery and saw a piece by one of my favorite painters, Henri Matisse:

Drooool! 🤤 More Matisse:

Matisse was a part of the Fauvist movement, and I can look at these paintings for hours on end. I try to emulate them in my own painting. If this painting ^ were a film, it would be colorful, experimental, messy.

But my film work isn’t like that at all! If my films were a painting, and the films I really love were paintings, it would look more like this:

See, it’s just like this:

Or this:

Which brings me to something that I think about a lot when admiring artists and considering how they impact my own work:

The tension between what we aspire to create and what naturally comes out of us.

It’s really hard to escape yourself! I think of stories in a certain way. I compose images in a certain way.

I really admire work that is opposite of mine, I wish I could pull off what others do, I wish it came naturally to me:

This image looks INCREDIBLE. But I cannot imagine myself ever writing and directing a scene that would look like this. 😂 It just ain’t me babes. The writing, tone, imagery that comes out of me is just different (see: yard hose).

I was talking to my friend Winnie about her husband’s films, she describes them as non-linear and experimental since he began making films. It’s just what came out of him. I think that is fascinating!

When a piece of art is fully and completely of the artist — that’s the thrilling part. This is what moves us!

“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognize him or herself in you and that will give them hope.”
― Charlie Kaufman

If we could let what naturally flows out of us to be pure and unadulterated — that would be pretty amazing. If you’re not letting that happen, are you just fighting yourself at every turn?

The little description under the Matisse painting at the Yale Art Gallery ^ contained this:

Painted one year after Matisse had caused a scandal with is wildly colorful work at the Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris — where critics first used the term fauves (wild beasts) to describe his work, giving birth to the name of Fauvism to describe the art of Matisse and fellow artists — this painting illustrates his innovative and modern approach, in which he abandoned traditional perspective and insisted instead on the expressive form of pure color while integrating non-European influences to his work.

It struck me while I don’t make films like Matisse makes paintings, when I read what Fauvism is about, it speaks to me! I want to take an innovative approach, abandon traditional perspectives, integrate non-European influences into my work.

Is there something in that? That the work I admire perhaps comes from similar values, but we just express it very differently?

Then there were Les Nabis: “The artists shared a common admiration for Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne and a determination to renew the art of painting, but varied greatly in their individual styles.” (Wikipedia) Admiration, but a different expression.

I love Fauvism, but I LOOOOVE Les Nabis:

In my own paintings I think you can tell that I admire Les Nabis, but that I am searching for my individual style…still in “emulate mode.” —>

Finding your voice in painting seems so much harder than in film. In film you have dialogue to make arguments, compositions that hide and reveal and then shift as the camera moves, characters to debate life’s ideas, light AND color AND time to express the aesthetic.

In painting, you have color, light and composition. How does a flick of your wrist onto the canvas express your personal philosophy? The tools are limited.

Matisse’s exploration of cutouts at the end of his career feel like an expression of his voice in its purest form. And that’s not to say it’s easy or simple. He distilled and articulated his voice without all the bells and whistles to distract from the core expression. He distilled it to shape and color.

Are there examples of filmmakers making simpler and slower work as they age, as they REFINE the one pure note to their voice? (A real question, I do not know the answer.)

To refine one’s voice is an inherent & beautiful exercise in low budget filmmaking - you’re forced to send your voice through just as strong but with less bells and whistles. Can your voice shrink in scope but hit even harder? It’s like cutting this now lengthy Substack essay down to 1 sentence (impossible lol)!

Maybe, in two decades, my paintings will look more like this and I will achieve The Artistic Singularity:

This is potentially just post saying “be yourself!” But as I write a new screenplay (working title: Heartfart), I’ve been trying to really let myself just be ME to the fullest. It’s hard because you have to figure out what that even IS, first of all!

As I work that out, I leave you with this singular voice:

But let’s get started nonetheless on our end-of-year DUTY to watch as many fabulous 2025 releases as possible!

Sentimental Value (directed by Joachim Trier)

I enjoyed Trier’s previous film, The Worst Person in the World, but I REALLY enjoyed Sentimental Value. It’s gorgeously crafted — he plays with family lineage, time and memory in a really interesting way that makes it hit harder than Worst Person did. The film is about this one family, but it manages to be about all families and all the families that came before them. It reminded me a bit of Mike Leigh’s film Another Year that poses the question, “why do some people get to be happy and some don’t?”

Also this frame ^ reminds me of the end of Toni Erdmann…and Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann director) was a producer on SV! >

No Other Choice (directed by Park Chan-wook)

This film almost feels like Park Chan-wook’s companion film to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite — though the original material is a 1997 American novel called The Ax. No Other Choice is one of the funniest and darkest films I’ve seen in a while. It’s absolutely genius. The filmmaking is so funny. The tone is WEIRD. I don’t want to say too much about this film, because the ending reveals a brilliant thematic moment, as well as a “holy shit” final segment. Have I said too much?! Maybe, but if this makes you want to go see it, then it’s worth it!

Left-Handed Girl (directed by Tsou Shih-Ching)

Shot on an iPhone…and wonderfully performed! It also looks fabulous — the iPhone choice allowed the filmmakers to shoot in a real Taipei night market. It’s a really solid drama, to me about how shame will eventually rear its ugly head no matter how far you try and stuff it down. I loved the focus on this female story, the little 6-year old who is the titular “left-handed girl” is incredible, and there are wonderful moments of levity. A really beautiful film.

Roofman (directed by Derek Cianfrance)

If they removed the voice over from this film, it would be an A+…but even with the VO it’s a real blast. The film is funny, wild, sweet, tough…and Channing Tatum will blow you away. All the characters are real, funny and full of personality. It looks great, too. Watched with Ryan and our friends Alisha and Andrew and we all had a great time! My one word review: “Fun!”

The Voice of Hind Rajab (directed by Kaouther Ben Hania)

This one, not fun. But incredible. This is a narrative reenactment of the 6-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab on the phone with the Palestinian Red Crescent, trying to get help after her family was murdered in their car by the Israeli army. Not fun at all. It’s an infuriating and heartbreaking film. I saw a talkback with the director, who spoke about putting the audience squarely in the position Red Crescent workers, and how both feel like the position of much of the world watching the genocide in Gaza unfold: devastated and feeling helpless. Besides this being essential viewing for the importance of the subject matter, the performances are mind-blowing and the cinematography and edit are really clever. Masterfully constructed.

Sirāt (directed by Oliver Laxe)

Watch this film in the theater, if possible. Or at home with the lights off and the sound blasting. It’s just like…pure cinema. I’m obsessed with this film. I shall say no more. I didn’t know anything going into it, and I hope you don’t either!

Hamnet (directed by Chloé Zhao)

I woke up thinking about this film the day after I saw it — Hamnet will stick with you. It’s a tremendously grounded film, meaning that it feels really connected to the earth and the human body, which is so cool to see and feel. It’s also about the power of art to connect, heal and bring people back from the brink. Jessie Buckley is on a whole other level here, I would imagine she will certainly be nominated for Best Actress for her performance in this!! Between this and Grand Theft Hamlet from last year, I have renewed my commitment to memorizing “To Be or Not to Be….” That soliloquy is all the rage right now!

The Secret Agent (directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho)

This director also made the film Bacurau (2019) that was one of my favorite films that year!! The Secret Agent is about Brazil in the 1970’s under the dictatorship and the violent moves to privatize the economy. It stars Wagner Moura but it’s really made of a wonderful ensemble full of fascinating characters and incredible faces. (Long live real faces!!) The film plays like a thriller or a caper, keeping it a fun ride despite it’s dark subject matter. Also pay attention to the opening scene: lays out everything you’ll need to know about this world without explaining anything.

Cover-Up (directed by Mark Obenhaus & Laura Poitras)

Whenever I see anything about investigative journalism I’m like, well, this is the only thing that matters in the world. What heroes! Cover-Up is about the journalist Seymour Hersh who broke the stories of My Lai and Abu Graib, to name just a few. It’s so inspiring what he’s done to uncover the truth and the strength he’s needed to push through it all. But like he says in the film, “I’m just the messenger.” We need the messengers!!

Hersch himself is a character!! My friend Sabina and I LOL’ed quite a few times while watching this, despite Mi Lai, Abu Graib, tragedy, horrors, etc. The end is perfect. These directors know what they’re doing.

Marty Supreme (directed by Josh Safdie)

The film lives up to the marketing campaign! Similarly to Uncut Gems, as I was watching this, I thought, ‘well this is the only way that movies should be. THIS is a movie. THIS is a musical score. Throw everything else away and do it only like Marty Supreme!’ I have since calmed down from this outrageous statement, but the film sure grabs you and keeps your jaw glued to the floor.

Also similarly to Uncut Gems, it’s a relentless roller coaster, helmed by a totally charming and infuriating lead. Timothée Chalamet is incredible in this role, nails every moment, including the ending that completely rides on his emotional reaction. It’s a RIOT, too. I saw this with pal Hope and we were hooting and hollering the whole way through. Obviously go see this in theaters, if just to hear the soundtrack and score at full blast!

What have you seen in theaters recently that you’ve loved? Let us know what we simply must go see! 🍿

I am beginning to hone in on my pseudo-theory that: New art experiences can carve new paths in our brains, new paths that open our minds to rethink the world. Art can break us out of the chains of our own imaginations, push us to reroute new brain synapses (I’m a doctor, yes this is how the brain works). So that we can consider other ways of being a human, other ways that we could exist together in society.

You see a screening of Sirāt and think “huh, cinema can really be all sorts of things I’ve never seen before…” which then, as you walk out of the cinema into the world you think, “huh, the world could really be all sort of things I’ve never thought of before.”

And as Rammel Ross said that time I saw a talkback with him: Our imaginations are actually quite curated.

There are so many possible ways of being, of living, of making cinema! We are only at the beginning.

My friend Kevin gave me the book The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow & David Graeberand, and it’s charting new paths in my brain. The beginning of the book discusses how humans have organized themselves in countless of interesting and surprising ways throughout our history. One of my favorite sections so far has been about how 17/18th century Jesuit missionaries and Europeans in America were mind-blown, and then deeply influenced, by the freedom that many native American societies were living in.

“That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed that was the case.” (pg. 40) In speaking about indigenous political systems that Europeans encountered around the Great Lake region, they observed: “Everything operated to ensure that no one’s will would be subjugated to that of anyone else.” (pg. 48)

That’s quite different from the American idea of “freedom” that we have in the current day! (Me = 🤯) We are constantly following orders and laws we don’t agree with.

The book quotes a European primary source that wrote, about Americans, “They think it unaccountable that one man should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor. In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.” (pg. 52)

And regarding the Wendat people, a Frenchman wrote, “From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, [they] have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequences as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.” (pg. 44)

Our imaginations are actually quite curated by the societies we live in, and just reading these pages from Dawn of Everything has sparked something within me.

I think I’ve been searching for a freedom since I was young. I distinctly remember waking up at 6am in high school, senior year, looking at the blaring alarm clock and saying to myself “I will live my life in pursuit of never having to do this again.” The injustice (!!!!) of having to go somewhere at the same time everyday…I knew then that I would be a freelancer for my whole life.

I’m not saying I want to be an island with no responsibilities. But I’ve tried to my best to avoid having a boss telling me what to do, when I can eat lunch, where I have to be. In my early 20’s working as a PA for a week would send me into an existential crisis about what I was doing with my life (I also have a flair for the dramatic).

Learning about other ways that people have lived in freedom in The Dawn of Everything of course brings my thoughts to filmmaking and cinema. Cinema can be ANYTHING — not just what we have seen before. Not just what we’re taught it can be. There are so many ways to make cinema (or run a studio, release a film, or distribute a slate!) that we haven’t even considered. Cinema should be a place of total freedom and boundless imagination.

Why 3-Act structure? Why a protagonist and antagonist? Why an ending, or a beginning? 2-hours?? (I know, I know, we have to consider the exhibition format. Very important. But you see what I’m getting at here.) Corporate conglomerations shouldn’t dictate what we make. Genre shouldn’t dictate how things must go. How it’s been done before shouldn’t dictate what we do now.

I think the NonDē film movement is very much about freedom in not just film but in art-making in general.

You could apply its general themes and principles to any artistic medium. Freedom from corporate rule, freedom from people telling you that “this is how things work,” freedom from people telling you “this will never work, you can’t do that” (things we internalize and say to ourselves). You can make pretty much anything you want to make. You can live however you want to live.

Sean King O’Grady brought my attention to this great quote from Daft Punk that I have on my bulletin board now:

I hear NonDe in this quote! The main idea is to be free. Reach for freedom at every turn! With every word you type, with every shot you frame up!