10 COMMANDMENTS OF CHLOE producer/director Princeton Holt wrote a very inspirational guest piece for Film Courage Magazine called ‘How I Was Rejected by Over 35 Festivals and Lived to Tell It.’ Check it out below!
The plan was simple: We made our latest feature film, THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF CHLOE, on a small budget. The stakes were set up to be low. We would experiment with form. We would experiment with storytelling. We would shoot it with no script, no rehearsals, and no shot list. We would completely self-release, but use traditional promotion avenues like reviews, blogs, interviews and film festivals to spread the word of our release.
My partner in crime in this experiment was Naama Kates, an LA-based artist whom I had cast in my first feature. As producers, she doubled as my lead actress and I doubled as her director. We began discussing this project – this crazy 4 day shoot character piece concept with no safety net – and before we knew it, we were meeting in downtown Nashville, she flying in from LA, me from NY. With no other cast members or crew in mind, we had only ourselves and our DP (and co-producer), Christopher C. Odom, whom I had met only about a month prior.
So why not release the film in the same spirit in which we produced it?
As an indie film producer whose company has experimented with every other possible method of distribution – selling films to distributors, online VOD streaming, DVD pick up deals, and direct-from-website sales – many to varied levels of success, this would be our way of completely bypassing all middlemen and digital-rights aggregators. We would make our film directly available to viewers, and we would completely control our own release. So, we got our film reviewed (mostly positive, thank God), some bloggers wrote about it, and some interviewed us; all we needed was that final festival push where we could “piggy-back” off of their corporate, promotional engines. Simple enough, right?
Wrong.
Read the rest of Princeton’s article HERE.
– Lena