Featured Watch
There Are No Children Here
a film by Shehrezade Mian @shezzym / Pakistan, Canada
Sixteen year old Saima is excited to attend her cousins multi-day South Asian wedding with her family. While attending the dholki at her cousins house, Saima experiences a sudden, traumatic event, and she turns to the women in her life for guidance before the wedding the next day. What follows is the realization of what it means to be a woman in her world.
#PlayGIFF - A new screen for Short Films
Presented by #GandharaIndependentFilmFestival
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Bits and bobs from Naples 🌋
Lungomare di Napoli - Castle Sant’Elmo - Museo Capodimonte - San Gregorio Armeno - Palazzo Reale - Quartieri Spagnioli - Cafe Gambrinus - Galleria Umberto l
#napoli #italy #naples
It’s been exactly one year since @concretevalleyfilm premiered at @tiff_net and at that time I had no idea what the next year had in store for me.
I began a wonderful new job with the fiercely inspiring producers at @hawkeyepicturesinc , and Concrete Valley went on to screen in Berlin, South Korea, Spain, Mexico and Brazil. I directed my own short, Executive Produced a feature and a short and produced another short and lost count of all the labs I attended along the way; I was completely swept away by the tidal wave of the industry. Little did I know that I’d be so inundated with work that somewhere along the lines I forgot what it felt like to be human. Life eventually caught up with me and I was forced to take a breather over these last few weeks. After having been so busy for so long, having time to myself felt unnatural. But idle moments are crucial for creativity, and hustle culture is the death of it (there is countless research on this).
Our industry unfortunately feeds us the idea that in order to be successful you need to operate at full speed, but nobody talks about how damaging it can be for their mental health and how their projects and relationships suffer when they take on so much.
This year, I’m hoping for a better work life balance not just for myself, but for all my friends and colleagues in this industry who have expressed to me how exhausted and overwhelmed they are. Overwork in this field begins at the top: starting with how films are financed and the structure of the industry. The need to feel relevant, to succeed and to be able to survive financially leads to long working hours and repetitive burnout. This is no way to live life or for cinema to flourish.
I hope that a new generation of filmmakers will join me to influence decision makers to develop new policies that allow their filmmakers to thrive and create their best work. Until then, I wish us all strength along the way.🤎
