Make Your Own Damn Film

Films do something to you. Melodramas make you cry at things you’d never admit to. Horror films make you press your body against whoever’s closest. Action films make you leave the cinema walking slightly wrong, half-convinced you could take someone. But none of that compares to the specific madness of wanting to make one yourself.

Someone pointed me toward the Jugendfrey Filmfest in Berlin—a competition organized by the Freygeist collective for filmmakers under 25. The concept was disarmingly simple: grab a camera, grab some friends, cover them in fake blood or strand them on a lake with only a spoon, and make something real. Prizes were involved. More importantly, an excuse was provided—an actual occasion to stop talking about the film you’ve always meant to make and just make the stupid thing.

The question I kept circling was what I’d actually put in it. Vegetarian aliens? Pirates with a saltwater allergy? Megan Fox, finally, genuinely naked in a robot film? The honest answer is probably something much smaller—one person in one room, lit badly, saying something I’ve been meaning to say. The blockbuster fantasy is just displacement. You imagine the spectacle because the real film is too close to admit.