By Peter Sawka

June 9th, 2014

 

Today was a strange day. It was filled with a type of odd, mixed emotion that I can’t say I’ve ever felt. The only way I can truly describe this feeling is bitter-bitter-sweet. Allow me to elaborate…

 

For those of you who have made a film and have participated in the festival circuit, you can attest to the fact that this experience, although in many ways very rewarding, can be utterly frustrating, stressful, expensive, exhausting, and overwhelming at times.

 

Without getting into too much detail, completing DIVINE ENMITY, our first feature film, was in of itself no small task, especially when it had to be done twice! Not because we lost the film somewhere in the digital universe or anything like that, but because the audience reaction to the first version was not satisfactory. Hence, we listened to our audience and re-edited the film. This of course was a colossal headache, but we endured. Self-imposed deadlines were helpful, but a festival deadline was even better. 

 

In January of this year we were striving to apply to the Houston International Film Festival - Worldfest 2014. We’ve had previous success at Houston with NOTHING PERSONAL so we figured this was a great place to start our festival run. Things literally came down to the eleventh hour with the export of the film being done two days before the final deadline. The encoding was done the morning after (we didn’t have time to watch it) and the Blue Ray itself was shipped in the afternoon. On top of that, the film was not actually finished (some colour correcting remained incomplete) but we felt it was strong enough for consideration.

 

On the day of the deadline we waited with baited breath to hear whether our film was received on time. At first we were told that the post office was closed, then the employees at Worldfest were not in the office when the Blue Ray supposedly arrived, then finally, somehow, the film was received.  Confusing? Yes. But we made it.

 

Feeling good about our luck we decided to watch the new, recently outputted, version of our film before completing the remainder of the colour correct. To our horror we discovered that something went wrong during the encoding. Ike attempted to contact Houston to inform them of this error but could not get a response from anyone.

 

Six weeks later we learned through an online posting that DIVINE ENMITY was not amongst the films selected for the Worldfest 2014 roster. This was obviously very disappointing because we assumed that it was due to an improperly encoded Blue Ray. Funny enough, the film itself was still incomplete because of complications that had arisen with our post facility. Ah, the joy of making a self-financed feature.

 

After several frustrating months, the film was finally finished in early July. We called a meeting for the following week to discuss our festival strategy, and that’s when it happened. An email was sent from Worldfest asking us how many copies of our Remi Award would we like. Huh?

 

It turns out that whoever was responsible for notifying the filmmakers FORGOT to let us know that DIVINE ENMITY had been accepted into Worldfest 2014!

 

So, we did in fact win an award with our first submission, but we missed an opportunity to shop our film at one of the biggest festivals in North America because someone forgot to press “send”!

 

Bitter-bitter-sweet indeed!