In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.

Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.

It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.

“If you want to be a filmmaker, grab a camera and go out and shoot something, anything.”

This is advice I've heard multiple times during my decade plus long involvement within the indie film scene. This very same advice I have given, and still do give to new filmmakers, however the camera element can now be a phone and the filmmaker part can also be broadened to include 'content creator' and such. How times, technology, and thinking have changed.

Luckily, what has also changed and evolved over the years is my mentality towards the value of short films, as myself and most others once shared the idea that you made shorts early on in your career, then you graduated to features. Now you are a 'real director' – whatever that means. But this kind of thinking is limited.

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