u/tylarframe

hey guys! i’ll try to keep this relatively short.

three of my friends and i shot our first short film almost two years ago. we just finished editing in october and the final cut is about 19 minutes long. it’s an experimental music-driven short film that my talented friend made 8 original songs for. obviously it’s not perfect - none of us had ever been on a set before and we didn’t have any connections. we just had an idea and wanted to bring it to life. we submitted it to four festivals just for fun, and we got into two. one of them was a larger festival in a city a few hours away. i asked to see the notes we got from judges at that festival and there were some really nice comments as well as some great constructive criticism in line with what we already thought we could improve. my favorite comment was “tremendously uneven with flashes of brilliance.”

the second festival we got into was a newer (this is the 5th year) smaller festival in our hometown. it had probably about 50-60 people in attendance at any given time, some people left between blocks and new people arrived. 10 selected short films as well as 4 or 5 of the judges’ own shorts. we’re a smaller town so that didn’t feel super weird to me. it was all local/regional films and we were quite excited for the event. when our film was up, i stepped out into the hallway for the first 10 minutes. i’ve watched it too many times in the past week and if i watched the whole thing any more i was gonna start to hate it. i watched the last 7ish minutes from the doorway, and i noticed that several of those minutes, the film felt weirdly sped up? then the credits rolled and they were double speed. i thought, maybe technical difficulties. that stinks but shit happens. we got up to do the q&a and when we sat down, my friends were like “dude, they cut a bunch of stuff in the intro and some parts were really sped up.” we were all so confused because i KNOW i didn’t submit the film that way, and we couldn’t understand why it only happened to our film

several hours later as we were getting up to leave, the founder of the festival stopped me in the hallway and said he wanted to talk to me before we left. we chat with him and he basically says “okay, i have to fess up. i’m not sure if you guys noticed but i made a few edits. i cut about 30-60 seconds from the beginning, i gave the guy like half of the lines because it just felt like too much. there was a shot in the middle where, i saw what you were trying to do, like a wide establishing shot, but it went on for 20 seconds so i cut that. and then…oh, yeah, i sped up the credits. if you want me to send you the link to my version so you can consider those edits for your final cut, i can do that.”

we were all stunned. a few important things: the dialogue in the intro is entirely important to the context of the rest of the film. the establishing shot he was talking about was NOT 20 seconds, it was a 7 second shot in which we panned along with a car as it arrived at a building to set the scene for where the characters arrived to. and speeding up our credits which were already fast??? he said he “really had to save some time” since the schedule was so tight, meanwhile they had a host who wouldn’t shut up between each showing. shaving two to three minutes off of ONE short film wasn’t going to save the entire day. he only edited our film. he also made a comment that implied he only selected our film because after now being heavily involved in the local film community since making that first short, we had come to know two of the judges, and they were really rooting for our film. so we think this guy just didn’t like our film or want it to play but he felt like he had to include it because of the other judges. he didn’t have a single nice thing to say about it. he told us this in front of a bunch of other people and we were so floored we didn’t really know how to react. my musician friend was able to get out a “i disagree with your edits. it really affected the flow of the film and since the music is so important to it, speeding it up removed a lot of the effect,” something along those lines. the guy just kind of brushed off the comment.

this was a huge bummer. we’ve slept on it and we’re still pissed. why just us? we spent so long on this project and we had finally come to terms with the fact that, for a first film with NO experience, it’s really not bad. we’re all perfectionists and of course as artists we’re going to be way too hard on ourselves for our mistakes. but we had FINALLY started to really take pride in what we made. then, this. i’m trying to not let it get to me but honestly it’s all i’m thinking about. for extra context, we were some of the younger filmmakers there by a couple years (mid-twenties). i’m a first time female director and the guy who edited our shit is a 50+ year old white man. i can’t tell if this is a weird power trip thing or if this guy is genuinely just so stupid that he doesn’t understand how NOT OKAY this is. people we had come to know and trust in the local community were a part of this festival and we thought, alright it might be a little scrappy, but that’s okay! we love local art!!! we just feel like our trust has been violated and obviously we’re not going to go back to this film festival in the future, but i would really love some advice on how to handle this situation. i don’t feel like we should just silently accept that this happened and not do something about it. i asked a seasoned filmmaker friend for advice, and he said we should demand a public apology for this. i don’t know if that’s too extreme? i’ll definitely be leaving an honest review on film freeway, but what would you do in our shoes?