The end of the year is here, and as cliche as it sounds, it is the perfect time to reflect. I think we all do it, and it is a healthy ritual for learning and growth. What did you achieve this year? What could you have done better? Did the year live up to your expectations? What do you want from 2024?
This year we released our first feature documentary, Cats of Malta, after a successful festival run. We secured two distributors for the film (one in the USA and one in France), launched across multiple digital platforms and had the film trending on a few. We were granted a marketing budget from the Creative Europe Media programme, the first time we had significant money to play with in marketing, and it made the launch so much easier. We also managed to sell the film to platforms in Australia, Israel and Japan and are aiming to make more deals in 2024.
We finished our second documentary, No Woman is an Island, this year too and the film screened as part of the Women Deliver Arts & Film Festival in Rwanda, and also had an educational screening at the University of Malta followed by a discussion. We already have another major screening booked for 2024 and plan to release the film widely in the new year.
Ivan and SJ on the set of Roniti.
We filmed a new improvised feature film in Berlin called After the Act, packing all our gear in the car and taking a fun road trip from Croatia to Germany for the shoot. After the struggle that was filming ForeFans the previous year with only a three-person crew, we expanded the team for After the Act and the process was so much more enjoyable and simple. We also completed a short film on the stunning Croatian coast called Roniti, a beautiful looking film we will be very proud to share in 2024.
The year was a positive one overall, filled with growing success. But there were also failures. We didn’t secure all the underwriters we wanted for the PBS broadcast of Cats of Malta, and as a result we had to push back the broadcast in 2024. The Australian platform which was streaming Cats of Malta dropped the film after only a couple of months, and it became apparent to us they were only using the documentary to encourage subscribers to their fledgling platform while the film was brand new, which left us feeling somewhat used. We failed to land a distributor for No Woman is an Island. More festivals, as always, rejected us than accepted us.
So we learnt lessons as we do every year. Failure is a better teacher than success. One of my favourite quotes about this is by music teacher and author Eloise Ristad:
“When we give ourselves permission to fail we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.”
This desire to excel led to a realization – we want to go bigger in 2024 and work towards a breakthrough in our careers. This dawned on us after producing After the Act, our sixth super low, micro-budget feature. Though we love telling these small stories on small budgets, we have more expansive stories in us we want to share, stories which require larger budgets. We have learnt so much about the business side of filmmaking since we relocated to European shores six years ago, so why not go bigger? We feel ready to expand. We may fail, but that fear has never stopped us before.
So our focus for 2024 is to utilize what funding resources are out there in Europe and Australia, to build relationships with other production companies and start to develop stories which require a larger budget, involve a co-production, or are partly funded by government organizations.
Collaborating with our team on After the Act. But we want to expand in 2024.
It’s no secret that collaboration is what drives the filmmaking industry. Most of the time filmmakers get ahead when they are working with people at a higher level than themselves, or when a funding body has recognised their work. In other words, we are looking to work closely with respected co-producers and cultural bodies for future projects, as despite some scattered success with grants in the past and some offset money for Choir Girl in 2021, we have also operated in relative obscurity in whatever country we are calling home, be it Australia, Malta, or Croatia. We want to change that. We want more people to see our work. We want the countries we call home to promote our work. So we need to make them a part of the team.
We preach that the love for the work and the passion we have for telling stories and doing so on a micro-budget level in the indie film sphere is what drives us to keep going. And that remains true, we still love telling small human stories, but we want to begin mixing the micro-budget work with fully funded films. So as 2024 rolls up we're excited to see where this mindset, our experience, and our desire to collaborate can take us in the new year.
What about you? What is your creative goal for next year? How do you want to grow?
Maybe you have your creative flow and you are happy to just keep going as is. That is fine too. In a way, that is also growth because unconsciously when we’re focused on creating and not trying to sell a product, growth can magically happen. That’s another thing I want to take into 2024 – creating without getting ahead of myself and expecting immediate success. Creating simply because I enjoy creating.
No matter what your plans are for the new year, I hope you go into 2024 positively, with a head and a heart open for future opportunities that will make you reflect happily once December comes around again in 2024.
Written by Sarah Jayne