Another day, another grift

A, I got a scam for you here!

For every post I make, there are several dozen I contemplate and don’t get around to, and the moment passes. In another world, I have become addicted to this and send several paragraph updates daily.

Yesterday, I intended to write about LinkedIn, and their involuntary opt-in on using your data to train AI. I have a lot to say about LinkedIn - about the weird doppelganger* sense that I have when people who I know in life in a certain way suddenly talk about their excitement for partnering with a megacorp to elevate their brand strategy, about the sheer lack of usefulness it has for the one thing I need (finding a job), and about how it seems like nobody apart from the bloody AI actually reads what I post there since I haven’t work out how to hack past the algorithm. (You’d think “hey, here’s the teaser to my feature film that I’ve worked on for seven years” would get at least one pity like in 24 hours. You’d be wrong.)

(Oh, by the way: that teaser. That’s not what the whole film is like, btw. You’ll get more of a sense of that when the trailer drops.)

Speaking of Gut Instinct: I’m trying to get it into film festivals, and that’s hard, and expensive. And so far, unsuccessful. There’s another piece that I intended to write about normalising and re-framing rejection, and probably another about the supply/demand ratio and what it means for curation (something Michael Sicinski touches on in his excellent TIFF Wavelengths wrap-up).

I don’t expect much to come from even getting into film festivals in 2024, truth be told. It’s unlikely my feature will get conventional distribution off the back of one, or major attention. It’s simply a chance to share my art with people the way it’s meant to be seen - big and in 5.1 surround sound - and some of my people are near my hometown of Farmington Hills, Michigan.

So when I got a solicitous e-mail from the Birmingham Film Festival of Michigan offering 25% off an application fee, I took notice. Admittedly, it’s an awkward name, but Birmingham is close to my people, and the application fee is relatively cheap!

Immediately, opening the FilmFreeway** page sets off a few red flags. There’s the graphic, for one:

It’s one thing that the two logos don’t match. It’s another thing that in the small one I can’t work out what the hell the graphic to the left is supposed to be - an origami bull? (That just raises more questions. To be fair, there was a hockey team, back in the 1970s, called the Birmingham Bulls - in Alabama. Also a team in Birmingham, England.)

It’s much more telling that the bigger graphic is for the “Birmingham Film Film Festival Michigan”, which is the typographical equivalent of six fingers, even if we grant the possibility that the “of” is off screen because of this merciless crop.

The Birmingham Film Festival of Michigan has zero reviews, and zero humans, listed on its FilmFreeway page. But it does have a website!

Which, jeez.

The images here are downright bizarre - from the deeply pixelated, to blurry Kevin Costner, to what I am 99% sure is not the skyline of Birmingham (Michiganders, advise me if they’ve added a freaky-ass pyramid when I wasn’t looking) - as is the command to “SENND »”, which goes to a contact page.

If you scroll down, you’ll get a statement of intent -

- albeit, one illustrated by a cinema with the lights up, somebody looking away from a stage, and the concept of “film art” represented by … an advertisement for Progressive Insurance.

But they have awards! And award winners! I decided to check out some of the 2023 winners, to examine the calibre of films that received awards in this bizarroworld festival.

Ignore, or don’t, the brain-breaking descriptions. The fun fact is: these films don’t seem to exist. They’re not on Letterboxd. They don’t come up in Google. They don’t seem to be by real filmmakers. There is an Ava Thompson who talks about film, and there is an album called The Silent Shore by Robert Scott Thompson (it’s ambient, and on first listen it’s pretty good, and the discovery of it is probably the only worthwhile thing I’ve gotten about this absurd enterprise, but I’ve started so I’ll finish). But these films seem to be hallucinatory AI creations. There’s plenty more telling details in this awards page, if you care to entertain your self by looking - from the “The National Board of Review Award for Best Actor Award” to this praise for a Best Editing winner: “Introduce: with fluent clip style will complex story line cleverly combine together.”

It’s no news that film festivals engage in predatory behaviour. David Farrier wrote about this years and years ago. And if I had more time I would focus on how to report this festival and destroy it from the face of the Internet.

But ten more will spring up in its place. It’s the grey goo scenario. And it’s an opportunistic parasitic growth on what itself is an opportunistic parasite, by and large. Most film festivals fund themselves in large part through submission fees, while largely doing their programming through pre-existing relationships - with filmmakers, distributors, and sales agents.

Are there festivals that seek out original work? Yes, and they’re doing the lord’s work - because the level of supply is overwhelmingly vast. At Fantastic Fest, for example, I was one of 900 applicants for 70 programmed features.

Those odds may sound terrible, but wait: it’s worse! Of those, only 28 are world premieres. Of those, at least half*** are from either filmmakers with previous ties to the festival or feature starpower (Julia Garner, Michael Jai White, Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow). So, call the odds 14/850. All other things being equal.

Which, of course, they never are. And desperation is a signal flare for scam artists.

And AI will only make them infinitely more productive.

Excited about the future yet?

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*Another thing I didn’t write about: Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, which is fantastic and impossibly richer than its premise (her getting confused with Naomi Wolf) suggests.

**FilmFreeway, for those not in the know, is the main portal for applying to film festivals. It’s not the only one: some European fests use FestHome, and others have bespoke procedures on their own website. But it seems to have the lion’s share of the market.

***That’s an eyeball calculation, but if anything it’s low. I have no idea whatsoever how many of those features where I don’t recognise a name come from a filmmaker who had a short there previously, or from a producer who they know, or so on. I just Googled the World Premiere film Bone Lake by Mercedes Bryce Morgan, and it turns out she’s an alum, for a feature, 2022’s Spoonful of Sugar. Which I’d never heard of, despite 12 of my Letterboxd friends having seen it and it being on Shudder. Which says something about what “success” means in these contexts.