This is tiresome, but I am partially retiring from filmmaking right now. I am going to finish what I can of this trans climate documentary and try to scrape up funds for my film about trans poverty. But really I have been turned down four times for grants on major projects this year and I’m just tired of it. The only grants I’ve had this year is my Indigenous Screen Office grant for traveling to Lisbon and also the artist in residence position at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity at U of T. But I have been rejected for all other project grants and another travel grant. This year I got Cows and Plows which helped me survive a bit (and get a guitar) and the other artist in residence position helped me in the winter/spring time this year.
I have a ton of ideas. I am not devoid of ideas. I could tell you any number of amazing and important stories about my community that I want to tell. But it doesn’t matter if I don’t get the funding to tell those stories.
I was thinking of maybe writing them down in prose and publishing them just so they exist in some form. I know that’s not what those stories were meant to be though. And it makes me feel like I’ve failed my ancestors because some of these stories are specifically about their lives and what happened when we were being colonized in Saskatchewan in the 1800’s. But people don’t want to support those stories. I have asked myself so many questions why it is so hard for me to get funded right now. I wonder if it’s because of the person who was slandering me last year (who I understand is now working and funded in the film Industry by the way). I wonder if it’s because I’m transgender and people don’t want my stories because of that. I wonder if it’s because people think I had too much of a good ride for too long and deserve to be humbled. I don’t know.
I do know I can’t afford to make the work I want to make. I had an idea for a three year trans climate project that I applied for a composite grant for, but I got such a laughably low score for it that I didn’t think it was worth taking it to a jury again, so it’s just going to be a feature documentary with a barebones budget. My film POOR which I shot this September didn’t get post production funding from Toronto Arts Council, which means I can’t edit it in time for the Telefilm deadline for production. And because Telefilm thinks I’ve made too many experimental films to be a worthwhile narrative director, I don’t have another chance to prove I can direct drama. So we probably won’t be applying for that deadline next year either.
I have so many ideas for films I mean it’s fucking crazy how many ideas I have. But they are worthless if no one believes in me enough to fund me. And no one believes in me right now, or that’s what it feels like considering all these arts council rejections.
I want to tell stories but I can’t without funding. And I could make scrappy punk videos again I guess but that’s not where my heart is.
I have to admit that I have to stop creating work. If there’s no money in it then I can’t tell my stories. I can still write here in this jack off blog and I probably will. But I can’t move forward on any projects except for limping along with this documentary that is never going to be what I wanted it to be, and this short film that doesn’t have funding to be finished in a professional manner so I can submit to festivals with confidence. It’s disappointing. I’m glad I got two teaching jobs next semester and hopefully if things work out I can someday get a full time teaching job and randomly make shorts in my spare time I guess.
There’s reasons my stories were important to a lot of communities. WERE. I guess they aren’t anymore. Maybe I’m too old and they want to support emerging artists. I’m not sure. I could come up with a list of 20 reasons I’m not being supported by grants right now, but I would never really know which ones were true.
This is interesting to me, as I’ve been there. Banging my head against the wall trying to get funding and wanting to give up. I know the feeling you’re going through very well.
But you know, grants aren’t the only way to make art. I’ll tell you my story. In all the decades that I’ve been applying for arts grants, I’ve only got three. One was a Sask Arts Board grant in the late 1980s, another was from the NFB (and was just free film processing) and the other was from the Craft Council for a short doc.
That’s it for external funding that I’ve ever got. Nothing more, yet…
My body of work is large. I’ve produced 68 videos and 2 films. All except two of them were paid for out of my own pocket. One video is feature length.
I have my day job, (which used to be in publishing but now is in the commercial film industry.) I use the money from that to pay for my life and buy gear and other expenses to make art. I’ve learned how to produce with just me or with myself and one other person. (To me a large crew is four people. Often the cast outnumbers the crew.)
Maybe you could reconsider what it’s all about. Why you were doing them anyway? What was the purpose? Would another medium work better, such as writing a book? How about starting a YouTube channel? Podcast? Album of your own songs?
It’s great that you have so many ideas that you can’t do them all. That’s preferable to having only one idea in your life. Write them all down until the time is right. Combine two ideas in to one if you have to. Add elements from one idea in the a different project.
As an artist you sometimes have to get creative in your life, not just in your art.
Yeah! This is true. I guess the problem is the ideas I had were too big to make into small videos. But it seems my career will only ever get so big, and not bigger. or that’s what it feels like right now. Especially being a marginalized director in a world that is growing more and more fascist.