The most unique feature of being a filmmaker is that you are almost never left alone with your ideas. You’ll have to pitch to a producer, then explain your vision to the cinematographer, convert the big ideas into manageable chunks for the rest of your team. To inform them, to lead them, as a visionary, as someone who knows. Filmmakers rarely have the privilege to just cuddle up with their words and pages-every sentence they write on paper will never only stay there. The director will have to answer what is the color of that sentence, what kind of location, how does this sentence translate into type of audience, or what kind of rhythm this sentence will be in the editing room. It’s so easy to feel like processed meat when you have to trust your ideas in filmmaking. And as if that wouldn’t be enough, there’s one more line of production we go through: the industry events.

Things, the way I describe them here, might have changed, and if they did, I hope for good. Yet, for more than ten years, they remained steady, and only a special encounter I recently had-one that allowed me to hone my ideas in a safe space-encouraged me to lay down on paper my experience, as now I understand how countereffective it always has been.

For decades, industry events where filmmakers gather to pitch their ideas were a crucial artery for international industries to network. For producers to meet their future directors, for directors to meet their next coproduction team, for organizations, funds and institutions to present the support systems to fund, market and distribute your films, for sales agents to pick the cherries for their catalogues, film festivals to carefully curate their programs. For filmmakers it was a way to build a legend about their future movies, enchant the industry, make them compete for your film, wait impatiently for the rough cut. If you’re lucky, maybe even get a vital flow of funding to finalize your film with dignity, and not with scarcity.

Yet somewhere, things went terribly wrong. What had to be an occasion for filmmakers to razzle dazzle turned into a platform of power games, bombarding the creativity from all sides. At every event before pitching you had to have a pitch training, so that the seven minutes during which you have a perfectly structured presentation of your story with a 3.5-minute visual cut of your film would pleasantly slide down the throats of the jury -also known as decision makers- who then would have their five minutes to ask you questions, in front of an audience of sometimes 400 people and more. Films and ideas were expected to become mini TED talks, and every filmmaker had become a tiny Steve Jobs, with a mission to sweep the decision makers out of their chairs. And were you to fail to do that, you had to answer a series of questions which was always a variation of one question: Why should I care for your story?

I’ve won three pitching awards for my projects, but every time I received a question like that, I felt like perhaps I have to stop being a filmmaker, because I don’t know  how to answer this one. Same as back then I didn’t know, I actually never needed to even try to answer. The irony wasn’t lost on me – I was good at this game I was learning to hate.

The Assembly Line Begins

While working on my second documentary about suicide prevention, I began with a blast. Just a few images of my characters got everyone intrigued and soon enough we signed with a top-tier sales company. Their previous clients – Oscar nominees. It was a dazzling beginning. A circle of industry events began for us, where I was winning awards because I simply loved talking in public and loved talking about the film. During one event, I had two days of stacked one-to-one meetings, each lasting around ten minutes. I’ve met dozens of people where, by the end, I was like a robot, repeating the synopsis of my film, and once I was done, I had then to listen to the opinions of what I should change about the film for the one sitting in front of me to be able to show it, buy it, sell it, screen it or be interested in it. I’ve heard so many expectations, of how all these people imagined what my film should look like with such conviction and entitlement, that even I thought that’s how it should be. I returned home with a bag of business cards and the same amount of alien ideas sucking on my original story, and when I complained about the feeling to one of my producer friends, I received a cold reply: This is only bothering you because you don’t know what you are actually doing.

And I believed it. She was fifteen years in the business-must know what she’s talking about.

The Rough Cut Kremlin

Somehow, in almost a year, I managed to reach the stage of the first rough cut and was selected to present my first twenty minutes yet in another industry event. In my film, I chose to show the main characters of my documentary in plain sight and express the ones in emotionally vulnerable positions through their environments, belongings, landscapes.

A round table discussion followed. I don’t remember how many people were around it, but it felt like sitting at a session in the Kremlin. Some faces I already knew and respected, some I knew because I saw them literally everywhere, but never really understood what it is exactly that they do. Comments were shared, when one man representing a channel asked me, straight in front of everyone, why do I refuse to show the faces of the people who speak about suicide – isn’t the reason why they want it written on their faces?

I took a deep breath to mask my impulse to kick this man, or reply something that would burn the bridges with everyone in the room in an instant. Looking back, I should have done that. However, it wasn’t the audacity of this man that shocked me. After all, the dynamic of the industry didn’t develop in a vacuum. The decision makers act like this partially because we filmmakers allow them. When do we ever set a boundary? When do we ever feel the boundary won’t retaliate against our chances to get our film somewhere important, somewhere where our capacity to make documentaries will be officially approved?

What hit me the hardest: in the room with about fifteen people or so, no one thought to tell this man that what he had just said was incredibly disrespectful. Not only they didn’t – I felt my reaction was observed as a film scene, and my capacity to navigate the tensions was a film they were much more interested to watch. But why would one expect them to react? They only claim to be a crucial part in the history of documentaries, you know, that genre where we treat humanity with dignity. Oh sorry, my mistake-I think that’s just my opinion. I didn’t have a scripted comeback that would serve as a charming punchline. I wabbled and said something submissive to avoid further conflict and moved forward. Which probably marked me as a weak woman, and probably a weak director.

This is the classroom dynamic at its worst. The so-called decision makers who come in from channels, festivals, sales agencies, distributions or what not, they occupy the position of power without giving it a second thought and act from it, expecting the creatives to look at them from a step lower, like children who continuously have to look up to see their teachers. With a false pretense to improve you, improve your story, indoctrinate you about trends, help you shape your story to reach a bigger audience, they, without second-guessing, destroy the fragile, nourishing connection that should be between the authors of film and those that help them put it out on the screens. Unless you have tricks up your sleeve and act as a circus contortionist to distract them from what they think is wrong with your film, and make them believe your freakishness is what will make it genius.

The Day Wasn’t Done With Me

Later on that day, during the ever-charming cocktails where everyone squeezes around a plate of dinner much like around an actual decision maker from Netflix or Amazon, another very respectful commissioning editor approached. He charged right toward me, grabbed me by the elbows. He pulled me towards him. Determined, he spoke: I know what you have to do to make your main character not so boring. His delivery had the urgency of someone about to tell me I inherited six million and a villa from an uncle I never known and now had to transfer one hundred dollars to unlock an inheritance.

He then continued on his strategy, which I wasn’t listening to, because I was still questioning why would he find my character boring, and even more, why would he think I care he thinks it’s boring, and only then, trying to focus my vision on his face-as he was blurred due to too close proximity to my eyes-why would he think I’d ever take into serious account whatever his suggestions were. If he was bored by my characters, he wasn’t my audience, and he was the one that needed a lecture about what deserved to be on the screen, not me. But then again, why should I waste my time explaining these things to someone who is so convinced of himself?

The event also served as an occasion to meet with our sales company, which, after rewatching the film, told us we have to completely remake the film so it would be about something else. I told the producer, I’m not doing this. I’m not gonna betray the ideas that got me through four years in the making, that allowed me to build trust with my characters, that permitted me to film people’s fragility. The sales agency withdrew. Turns out, they are only interested in selling films that sell themselves.

What Happened After

I’ve never participated in the top-class events, so perhaps my experience comes from smaller, yet important events, and perhaps what I’m describing is like complaining about wearing Prada versus wearing PRABA. Nonetheless, it’s widespread enough to take notice. That said, I finished the film and it was a fantastic success. And it wasn’t thanks to the industry, but rather support of a few people in particular that helped me by seeing me and my film, and elevating what was mine. A sort of rehab buddy. It won awards internationally, traveled in festivals in Europe and the US, but most importantly it became a source of support for first responders in Lithuania, a country that back then had the biggest suicide rates. Since then, I worked with companies that make films for the last thirty years, and that make their pitches directly to those who are actually interested and capable to acquire or fund you. I witnessed Oscar nominee directors sell their films without two-pagers, without teasers that had to be made in separate workshops for which you had to be selected-they sold their films with only two components: directors respecting their story, and industry members respecting the directors. Since these experiences I never worked as a director on documentaries, and I wonder if I’d still be making films if I had the courage and the environment where I could incubate my creativity enough to weather the storm of expectations from people who pretend to have power over the future your creative product might have.

For years, I thought that was simply how it had to be.

Until recently, I had an experience where I could shut myself from the world in a remote village in the south of France and dedicate myself to writing. Writing that is not yet obliged to carry the weight of being a product, but rather to root itself and take shape without forcing it-like forcing a watermelon into a square shape in order to pack them in a more ergonomic way. Now, years away from the last experience in the film industry event, my tender wish to all filmmakers is to find a place like that where they can spend at least a week just with their ideas, without being exposed to any opinion, any object of comparison, just them, so that before they get out into the world they feel stronger to defend their narratives, to market and sell their products without compromising their connection to it. I wish filmmakers would have access to places like this, to foster original voices. Voices that later make all of us, the consumers of creativity and art, spiritually richer. Voices that don’t lose their essence while trying to get through the gatekeepers.