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Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened (Or Why I Still Make Independent Ultra-Low-Budget Films in a Time of Media Oversaturation)
Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened I’ve been making films for many years now, at the unusual intersection of US independent and East-European cinema, and teaching at a university in New York. When COVID hit, it made me re-evaluate everything I was doing. I stopped the projects I was working on as they seemed superfluous in that reality. To me, the global response to the pandemic demonstrated like nothing before the shocking inability of international and national institutions to cooperate and deal efficiently and equitably with a planetary crisis. And now, it almost seems as if nothing had happened; it’s just “business as usual.” But it’s not. We have arguably reached a point where several global crises are converging, yet a disturbing sense of cognitive dissonance has allowed for the continuation of a numbing status quo.
I searched for a way to make a film that would portray the disruption in our lives and the systemic dysfunctionalities that the last years have laid bare. I finally decided to enlist the help of filmmakers from around the world – many of them my former students, now emerging filmmakers in their own right — to create a shared, intersecting storyline, centered around the issues that, in one way or another, affect us all: economic inequality, political instability, the climate crisis, migration, wars, fading trust in politicians and institutions, harsh societal divisions, and the increasingly alienated and distracted individual. The aim was not to create a narrative of despair but to gain a deeper understanding of this unique global moment we are living in through personal stories and interesting characters from around the world. It was also important to me to create a process-driven, joyous, collaborative cinematic experiment that could explore the boundaries of form and content at a time when many question the future of cinema as an art form.
I wrote the script for the central New York story, which would be the connecting tissue of the film — about Alice, a young doctoral student who collects these global stories for her dissertation, while battling her own emotional detachment. Her life takes a turn when she meets an enigmatic stranger, igniting a transformative journey through the “here and now.” For the world stories, the other filmmakers would come up with relevant stories that would be of interest to them, set in, and reflecting the conflict of a character, specific to their locale. We would discuss their ideas and scripts, making sure that the themes would fit with the overall narrative thread. Once the scripts were agreed upon, the filmmakers had creative control over their shorts, casting, shooting and directing their films. We collaborated again on the edited version for the feature, with the idea that each short could also have a separate, extended edit as a stand-alone short film outside of the feature, after the feature was completed. This way, Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened would become a project that also extends beyond the feature film, united by its thematic concept.
The feature developed spontaneously and was forming as it was being created. Instead of waiting for funding sources, which could take many months, possibly years, and would be very difficult to get for such an unusual, open-ended concept, we decided to form a co-op with the principal filmmakers. Supported by a small amount of money by a benefactor, the film was willed into being by a slew of service deals, a lot of passion and everyone’s willingness to contribute their time and effort to the project, from New York, Beirut, Mumbai, Paris, Caracas, Hong Kong, and many other places around the world.
In 2023, supported by more co-producers and a passionate crew of over 20 young as well as experienced filmmakers I had worked with before, the New York part of the story was shot within a week with three RED cameras, and some quite spectacular drone cinematography. Before that, and after, the shorts were coming in from all over the world. We started by contacting filmmakers we knew, but soon the network grew exponentially; filmmakers from around the globe contributed remarkable footage and stories to the project. Some of the films were shot clandestinely with small crews, while others developed into ambitious productions – most notably, Shireen Khaled’s short, set in Beirut, which she directed over Zoom from New York, battling black-outs and outages in Lebanon, with a 30-person crew and some of the finest Lebanese actors. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian filmmaker Anton Soroka captured the devastation of the war in Ukraine, and Syrian filmmaker Osama Naser recorded haunting yet poetic images of the refugee experience in his country.
The film premieres this week at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in its Rebels With A Cause Section.
Why still make difficult low- and no-budget films in these times of media oversaturation? I would argue that it is about the joy of filmmaking. Many – if not all- filmmakers would agree that we spend most of our time trying to get funding or distribution, and the least of it on making the films. I started shooting my first feature, Burn, in the late ’90s on DV prosumer camcorders and some 35mm film, after a bigger project fell apart. Three years of development, options, attachments, and packaging, and all those feverish activities we pursue to get a film made led one that fell apart in pre-production. Luckily, DV appeared at the same time. It was the perfect tool to make more personal, less industrial films.
To me, the most interesting digital films were made during those early days – the second half of the ’90s into the 2000s, before the technology became ubiquitous. While the biggest low-budget commercial success of that time was The Blair Witch Project, many filmmakers pushed boundaries and explored new ground, from the Dogme 95 films – Thomas Winterberg’s Festen or Harmony Korine’s julien donkey-boy – to numerous documentaries (remember The Cruise?). Of course, the industry absorbed these trends quickly, while the technology moved forward at breakneck speed. Online streaming seemed like the next possibility for small indies to reach audiences worldwide, until that got absorbed as well, and now we are faced with AI, while the glut of content seems to be drowning out the smaller, more difficult independent films.
Arguably, independent filmmaking – especially of the low- and no-budget kind – was never about a career choice. It was a choice made from necessity. For a young filmmaker making their first feature it is still a possible steppingstone to something bigger; perhaps it is an opportunity to work with great actors and collaborators, and often it’s just a story that the filmmaker must tell, no matter what. I still hold the old-school view that not all value is reducible to money. The technology to make low- and no-budget films look great has never been better and more accessible. In my view, the most important aspect is to find collaborators who share the passion and have the will to create together. All you need is some time and energy. Instead of being on social media or doomscrolling the news, you could be making a movie. Why not?
