Every New Year’s Eve millions of people design their future film career. They set themselves ambitious goals: Write my screenplay. Direct my short film. Produce my debut feature. Get into a festival. Find an agent. Build a career in film. By February, many of those ambitions have quietly slipped away. Not because people aren’t talented. […]
Not long ago, distribution was the finish line. How film distribution has changed. You wrote the screenplay, raised the money, made the film, premiered it at a festival and hoped a distributor would take it from there. If they said yes, your film found an audience. If they said no, your options were painfully limited. […]
When Maxin Jago of the Creativity Conference asked me to do a keynote speech on why I am creative I thought long and hard. Here is the text of the speech I gave at Raindance on June 26,2026 Good morning everyone. When I was invited to speak today, I was asked a deceptively simple question: […]
Today the 34th edition of the Raindance Film Festival begins. Explore the programme here And every year when the lights go down and the first frame hits the screen, I’m reminded why festivals like this still matter. Because independent cinema was never meant to be safe. It was never designed to fit neatly into algorithms, […]
The connection between human and machine lies at the heart of riding a motorcycle. The machine brings you places, physically, and emotionally that you alone could never reach alone. The same is true for independent filmmakers. The machines (cameras, recorders, computers) allow us to capture a vision, shape a story, and, if we’re lucky, move […]
If there is one documentary at the 34th Raindance Film Festival that feels less like entertainment and more like an alarm bell, it is Ghost in the Machine. Following its world premiere in the NEXT section at Sundance Film Festival, Valerie Veatch’s documentary arrives at Raindance carrying exactly the kind of conversation independent cinema was […]
Horror is no longer a side genre whispered about by outsiders. Horror is independent cinema. It is where filmmakers take risks, break rules, invent styles, and say the things polite cinema is often too frightened to say. And appointing Catherine Corcoran as the new horror ambassador for Raindance sends a very clear message: this festival […]
Seven is a useful number for horror. Seven days trapped somewhere you should never have gone. Seven bad decisions. Seven bodies. Seven secrets nobody talks about until it is too late. And perhaps that is why Australian horror often feels so primal. It strips cinema back to instinct. Survival. Fear. Isolation. Emotional collapse. Films like […]
Independent cinema does not survive by accident. Every breakthrough filmmaker, every daring first feature, every unforgettable screening experience exists because somewhere, someone decided that new voices matter. Independent film has always depended on communities of artists, audiences, mentors, donors and believers willing to support storytelling before the rest of the world catches up. For more […]
Film festivals are supposed to be about cinema. They are not. There are so many types of people you meet at Raindance They are about caffeine, social anxiety, tote bags, existential collapse, and people pretending they “absolutely loved the pacing.” After thirty-plus years of standing in festival foyers, here are the seven species guaranteed to […]
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