Who gets to speak about the future of film?
Things overheard in LA // part 3 of 3
I only had 48 hours at Slamdance.
(A childcare thing.)
But no matter how unreasonable the trip, I like an adventure. I like listening to an unfamiliar world around me.
The world speaks to you on Sunset Blvd, sitting at Superba, sipping on a Pecan Cold Brew, as you listen to the patrons chat about parenting advice, and business deals, and which angle is the best to post.
The world speaks to you on Hollywood Blvd.
You take a stroll and pick up on the conversations of tourists vs. the conversations of workers, you notice the general maintenance of the buildings, the urban planning of the area.
If you simply tune in to the world around you, a story always emerges.
The material world tells us which kinds of ideas are governing it.
And sometimes the world doesn’t speak in metaphor, but with direct, on-the-nose, to-the-point language.
Sometimes, you might hear two young men (young to me at least, so… 20s?) who came to the morning NonDē Day sessions at Slamdance. They may seem generally neutral about the principles of non-dependence, or at least, they don’t overtly disagree with the day’s speeches.
But, you hear this general overall question on repeat: What’s in this for me?
You may also hear them say “why should I be listening to you” about non-dependence if:
a) You have a ton of experience in the old industry.
or,
b) You don’t have “enough” experience in the old industry.
An interesting conundrum. A true story.
Even though it seemed to me their logic had significant holes, I also completely understood why they’d get stuck on the refrain: what’s in it for me?
Remember: the material world tells us which kinds of ideas are governing it.
That IS the way the dominant culture thinks. And the film industry is certainly under the thumb of that thinking.
The dominant culture around these two men is filled with corrupted ideas of rugged individualism like “manifest destiny” still taught in children’s text books.
It’s filled with the hypocritical simping for “market forces” and “market corrections” as reasoning for cutting out diverse voices, even though the market leaves, as Franklin Leonard cited at Slamdance, tens of billions of dollars on the table by doing so.
It’s filled with people in consistently defensive stances, protecting their own powerful, privileged positions, based on the belief that everything’s a zero sum game.
The air is thick with: what’s in it for me?
Our world is filled with posturing learned from this patriarchal system we live in, which prizes dominance above all, where you winning will always be about me losing.
bell hooks calls this psychological patriarchy. In her book The Will to Change she says:
“Psychological patriarchy is a "dance of contempt," a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation.”
But NonDē Day was a disruption to that mode of thinking.
It was a day to create an energetic, forward-thinking, blue sky conversation between like-minded artists who value collaboration over competition.
I’ll stop here to underline: it’s ambitious to think like this under a patriarchal system, where the practices of dominance, submission, collusion, and manipulation run insidiously through everything we do.
Which is why I do hold a certain amount of compassion for people who project that thinking onto this non-dependent movement, even though it misunderstands everything we’re doing here.
For the NonDē Film Movement, “what’s in it for me” is a better future for all of us.
Our world is built from the ideas that govern us
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the characteristics of dominant/patriarchal/white supremacist culture.
I’ve noticed these characteristics in particular infiltrating even the most casual interactions:
sense of urgency
only one way
either/or thinking
defensiveness
individualism
“I’m the only one”
progress is bigger, more
objectivity
I’ve been on the receiving end of conversations with these characteristics1, but I’m not immune to this kind of thinking either. I often catch myself with an unnecessary sense of urgency. I often think I need to prove myself or my ideas by demonstrating bigger, more or think I’m missing some objective truth.
It is easy in our culture to internalize these characteristics as our baseline operating system. I do my best to root them out at their core level in me because they are offensive to human life.
They do nothing for art.
And not only do they actively harm the people around you, they make you the asshole.
I don’t want these ideas governing my art or my life.
Community devotion in the age of domination
Truthfully, I second-guessed the value of sharing the above Slamdance anecdote because, in general, my experience of the non-dependent filmmaking movement has been nothing short of supportive, generative, and positive.
It’s decidedly dominator-averse.
I had 26 meetings in February alone. Sure, I’ll do public math: that’s almost one per day. That’s (at least) 15 new connections I made in one month because of aligned values and visions for the future.
Some folks in this movement make micro-budgets, some make multimillion dollar films, some make narratives, some make docs.
And the people building this movement do not have the same career paths or pedigrees or pursuits.
There are folks in this movement who:
have decades of institutional experience.
have been forced to operate outside of the system due to systemic barriers.
have always chosen to operate outside the system for personal reasons.
enjoy being in the system but still actively help to activate a better future.
feel ambivalent about where they fall in the insider-outsider spectrum.
And a million more folks along that continuum in myriad ways.
As Julian 🕶️ said in his recent post about the voices he heard at Slamdance NonDē Day, there were:
“A mix of people completely outside the traditional independent system and people who know it intimately but are actively redesigning it. That tension is healthy. That tension is the point.”
In all of this diversity of thought and experience, I have never, not once, heard any of those folks I’ve met with say their way is the way, or ask me to qualify my credentials before sharing my ideas with them.
Because in this movement we all understand the assignment.
Will there be times we mess up? Yes. But we’re not trying to be perfect, we’re trying to learn and grow.
Will there be times we fall short? Yes. But progress comes as much from failing (if not more) than from creating bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more.
Will there be moments where the next step doesn’t feel clear? Certainly. But none of us have to figure it out alone. We each have a piece of the next step. We each have something we can contribute so we can collectively figure it out together, over time. Sometimes admitting that you don’t know is the door knob you need to turn.
THIS is the kind of atmosphere from which NonDē operates.
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So, the question at the top: who gets to speak about the future of film?
Well, you do.
You get to show us your vision for the future. It doesn’t mean everyone will agree with you. Those two young men didn’t agree with me.
And guess what? More power to them.
I hope they find a path that works for them, because I want for them what I want for all of us: a sustainable future where they can have artistic and economic safety. A future where collaboration feels more appealing than what’s in it for me.
For my part, I believe the future is non-dependence2 and it belongs to all of us
Why shouldn’t you share your ideas if you’re new to the scene?
Why shouldn’t you share your ideas if you’ve been on the scene for decades?
Why shouldn’t you offer your version of a better way forward?
What’s the harm in speaking?
Well, there is harm being done to the old dominantor mode of thinking.
We know, historically, many good ideas have been systemically oppressed into oblivion if they don’t fit a narrow, dominant way of interpreting the world.
My dad, a lover and student of history, always taught me that whoever holds the pencil last wins. He taught me the winners write the history books and that history is a subjective account. My dad, a public school teacher, taught me to never take a text book as gospel.
And so, I know it’s vital to fill the atmosphere with the counter-narrative of non-dependence.
Actually: not just vital, but the keystone to actualizing the future many of us want.
Speaking the story of non-dependent film fortifies the labor3 each of us are putting into it. And I want the workers to hold the pencils last.
It’s about time the people get to write the future into existence.
It’s about time we show up with our full chest to say we reject these dominating, controlling, predatory ideas about who’s invited to the table.
It’s about time we recognize the power we have to shift the culture.
We are NonDē Filmmakers. We come from everywhere. Not just New York and LA, not just the coasts, but the midwest towns, the small cities, the local communities all across the globe.
We have something to say.
We are building upon Dr. King’s idea of the beloved community.
We are building upon Shirley Chisholm’s idea that “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”
We are standing on the shoulders of every people-powered movement that came before us, giving us the language, history, and imagination to build our way out of the past and into a beautiful, shared future.
We have imagined that better future already.
And we will speak it, with feeling, until it exists.
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Start talking about it. Let’s bring these ideas into the conversation. At first people will say we can’t do it. That’s fine, let’s talk about it. Let’s bring these big ideas into the rooms with us.
Discuss with your team. Be the leader on your production team and bring non-FilmStack filmmakers into the fold. Share resources and posts with them about how to do things differently.
Share about the NonDē Film Movement far and wide. A better world is inevitable if we make it so.
Read the entire NonDē series:
Went to Slamdance, and all I got was renewed faith in the future of film
The (not so) hidden agenda of non-dependent film (part 1 of 3)
The love of the game is a power move (part 2 of 3)
Who gets to speak about the future of film? (part 3 of 3)
For what it’s worth, (and this is a tangent neither you nor I have time for right now) I see a lot of this kind of language in AI writing.
And to be clear: it’s non-dependence on a broken system and interdependence with my fellow film workers.
I will keep calling it labor, because it is. Many of us participate in unpaid labor every day. Many of us put ourselves in service of someone else or something else every day and don’t think twice because it’s just what needs to get done. Unpaid work is real work.
This post aged like fine wine, Courtney… from first draft to now. SO wonderful and necessary framing.