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Today’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles filmmaker .

Jake S. Weisman is a fierce proponent of the L.A. film scene. Weisman is the founder and curator of filmjourn – an expansive transmedia project including a production company, brick-and-mortar microcinema, a Substack and YouTube channel.

Over twenty years, Weisman has produced two feature films (Scrapers: A Comedy for Romantic Stoners and Clean Sheets), founded two microcinemas, managed a Chicago neighborhood independent movie theater, curated several film series, and ran thousands of shows.

He’s currently heavily involved with the NonDē/Filmstack movement.

Along with , Weisman forms The Circuit Alternative Distribution Project, developing a platform to connect microcinemas all around the world with nondependent filmmakers and rethink the culture of film exhibition from its foundation.

He currently runs the traditional film side of Movie House LA in the heart of DTLA.

Jake, tell us here at Film Soup Zine: What’s in your filmmaking tech stack?

I write about the philosophies that underpin cinema, filmmaking, and what I call “cinemaspace”,the ecosystem that surrounds a film once it’s made: exhibition, distribution, publicity, and everything in between. My essays often begin as thought experiments, loose ideas and questions that, over time, congeal into something tangible. I’ve watched abstract concepts become concrete logistics, and there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing theory transform into practice.

I’ve always preferred simple tools over specialized software. Most of my work lives in Google Drive, where ideas are sketched, refined, and eventually put into motion. Right now, that process is taking physical form in an experiment I’m actively building and evolving: filmjourn’s Suitcase Cinema. At the moment, it consists of a home projector, a soundbar, a 120-inch screen, and the proper hookups—but it’s becoming something much larger than its individual parts. I can’t wait to share more soon!

How Can People Learn More About You & Your Work?

You can learn more about Jake, his movies and his microcinema here: linktr.ee/filmjourn

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About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

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A Review of THE DRAMA in The Treatment

This review of THE DRAMA from examines how the film uses a seemingly provocative premise to explore the tension between surface-level narratives and emotional truth, arguing that its deepest insights emerge not from the scandals, shootings, and social performances that drive the plot, but from its nuanced examination of authenticity, love, and the human need to be understood beyond appearances. Once again, another banger from Charlotte, be sure to check it out!

Read the Review

Filmmaker Profile: Courtney Romano’s Tech Stack

This week’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles FilmStack leader and filmmaker . Read her interview and check out the generous information she shares regarding all of the gear that she uses to make her films and manage her projects!

Click to Read

This Week’s Film Soup Library Featured Film: DIE LIKE A MAN

A coming-of-age thriller set in a working-class Westside L.A. neighborhood, Freddy is gifted a gun on his 17th birthday and ordered to kill his mentor Solo’s old rival Boxer. Will Freddy kill or “die like a man” with a gun in his hand?

FILMMAKING TEAM:

Written & Directed by: Eric Nazarian

Produced by: Eric Nazarian, Tommy Oliver, Javier Chapa, Sean William Burke

Executive Produced by: Sam Scripps, Welland Scripps, Kimberly Miller, Rachel Walens, Kirstin Winkler

Starring: Miguel Angel Garcia, Mariel Molino, Cory Hardrict, Frankie Loyal, Berenice Valle, Cesar Garcia

OF NOTE: Pomegranate Film Festival (Audience Choice Award for Best Feature Film), Sofia International Film Festival (Bulgaria), Golden Apricot International Film Festival (Armenia), Arpa International Film Festival, Armenian Film Festival London.

WATCH HERE.

LEAVE A REVIEW HERE.

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Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

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About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

Film Soup Zine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Film Soup Zine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles Writer/Director

Everyone on FilmStack knows , filmmaker and author of the popular Substack !

Courtney Romano is a writer/director. She’s also worked as a consultant, producer, and strategist on everything from NonDē films to celebrity projects.

Under her own production company Queens Bird Films, she created the award-winning projects Kinsley Vs. (digital series) and Screen Test (short film), as well as two podcasts, Let’s Go Again: A Philosophical and Practical Guide for Indie Creatives, and The Break Breakdown. She created and runs the NonDē 50 Films Project, a coalition of now 100+ filmmakers dedicated to producing and coordinating 50 non-dependent films this year.

In addition to her own film-related Substack, Let’s Go Again, she edits and curates FilmStack Daily Digest, and writes about death/grief on Messier Objects. This year, she’s making her first feature film.

Courtney, tell us here at Film Soup Zine: What’s in your filmmaking tech stack?

I wear a lot of hats, so I have a lot of apps!

My main dashboard lives on Notion, that’s where I keep my big sprawling projects and daily task lists. It’s searchable which means I have archives of ideas going back half a decade that I can easily find, and this makes me feel great.

WRITING:

I use my Notes app and Voice Memos when I have a nascent idea I don’t want to forget. Notion to prep & research my ideas when I’ve committed to them. I do the writing part with Final Draft. But I’m currently working in Writer’s Duet with my film’s DP to work through the script.

DIRECTING:

Google sheets for shot lists, Notion for team brainstorming notes, Google Drive or Dropbox for casting, DFOS (shout out @yanceystrickler!) for production team communication.

ADMIN:

I use iCal for scheduling, Zoom for meetings, Typeform for market research or general info gathering, Stripe to take payments, Canva for DIY graphics, Harvest to track my time, TidyCal when I’m booking lots of appointments all at once.

How Can People Learn More About You & Your Work?

You can learn more about me by subscribing to Subscribe to Let’s Go Again where I write about navigating non-dependence:

Let's Go Again

A philosophical and practical guide for indie artists.

By Courtney Romano

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading Film Soup Zine ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

But first, media diary:

• My weekend plans are currently being built around Disclosure Day, which I’ll be splurging on a trip to the nearest cinema to go and see…

• But, if you’re in New York City, my recommendation is that you make time for Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky, which will be making its theatrical debut at Film Forum on June 12 before moving on to Santa Barbara, Cleveland, and other such cities. Set in Tunisia, it tells the story of Ivorian pastor Marie, along with her two immigrant tenants Naney and Jolie, who all co-foster a small refugee child, Kenza, orphaned and lost after surviving a shipwreck. It’s a deeply empathetic portrait of human resilience in the face of geopolitical strife; I hope as many people as possible get to see it.

• Recently caught up on some more high-profile releases in Wasteman and Is God Is, both of which I could see myself reviewing at some point.

• The Criterion Channel recently dropped the first three James Bond movies, so I took in Dr. No as a light first-time watch after a hectic day. Mammalian fun ensued entirely on account of my fondness for how older popular cinema tended to be blocked and shot and choreographed. I wonder how a box office in 2026 would respond to something of this style?

• I’m rewatching BoJack Horseman whenever I do yoga¹. Really fascinating to see how much more permission the show gave itself with every passing season.

• Currently reading Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind. My regular readers can imagine what my brain is getting up to in reading a novel — blind drunk in its postmodernism — about a film critic penned by one of my writing heroes.

Anyway, here’s The Drama:

One of the drums I’ve banged while building the New Film Criticism goes as follows: “Good” and “bad” are, functionally, the same thing; a sentiment that starts out describing nothing, and whose nothingness is then packaged in either satisfaction² (at which point it is “good”) or resignation³ (at which point it is “bad”) in an attempt to pass itself off as a complete thought.

What’s actually happening here, though, is the writer protecting themselves from scrutiny by hiding behind a subjective, entitlement-fundamental opinion. The opinion is, in practice, incorporeal and frictionless, invulnerable to scrutiny — and therefore irrelevant to anyone outside of the opinionnaire — in a way that tangibly observation-centric readings are not. The language of “good” and “bad” is how we get comfortable with not saying anything real.

Similar principle with drama and comedy; these words don’t describe anything except how its contents are packaged. But, where the surface of “good” or “bad” makes to obscure the nothingness of the statement, it’s possible for the packaging that is drama and/or comedy — forms of storytelling — to contain emotional and political perspectives that have comprehensible relevance to how we live our lives and understand the world. In such cases, it doesn’t matter that drama and comedy are theatre — pretend, playacting, fake — because the falsehood of the surface/packaging has no bearing on the enduring relevance of the human nutrition within.

This, of course, is all for naught if the audience — or, indeed, the artist — tends to primarily invest in the surface rather than the nutrition, and that’s without considering the possibility that the intent of the surface is in fact to obscure or dilute the absence of any nutrition.⁴ See: Style over substance, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, et cetera.

Et cetera, so says The Drama, includes school shootings and weddings; surfaces and packaging that tend to obscure or dilute — rather than expedite, so mistaken we may be — any actual, human-relevant sentiments that they may or may not even house:

• In the case of weddings, love

• In the case of school shootings, whatever the shooter wants to express.

• The Drama recognizes both as bad theatre.

School shootings are, of course, very good at making us canonize the packaging as the primacy, because that packaging can lead to consequences that are infinitely more real (i.e. dead children) than the emotions/perspective of the shooter. Of all the scars that acts like this leave, that’s probably the most elusive of them; the legitimization of human element-colonizing surface — a distinctly American consequence trailing from a distinctly American epidemic.

It’s a scar that doesn’t get talked about because there are always (understandably) more pressing matters in the wake of a school shooting. This scar is what The Drama makes to address; the emotion — the nutrition — that becomes lost and/or compromised when we’re trained to stay surface-level. And, indeed, how unprepared we are for — not to mention how isolating it is — when we go beyond the surface into something real.

I think first of the scene where a young Emma and her classmates are embroiled in the aftermath of a mall shooting that claimed the life of a boy in their class. They gather in the gymnasium for an exercise in “not running away from your feelings,” so says the exercise leader.

The exercise puts her in front of another girl, and the students are instructed to “see each other’s emotions.”⁵ Emma begins to cry. We — the audience — know that she’s primarily crying tears of guilt rather than grief, but guilt and grief are both simply packaging for human pain; a pain that her classmate — unburdened by the obscuring packaging of Emma’s pain — is able to see clearly. An empathetic hug follows.

The guilt, of course, stems from her having secretly planned a mass shooting at her school; a plan that extended out of a mythology, a character, a performance she built for herself and then bought more and more into as she rehearsed her aftermath video in her bedroom. All of it, an investment in a surface; a surface of ruthless, violent righteousness made to obscure her pain and loneliness. And after all, her classmates pick on her on account of surface matters; why wouldn’t they respect her on account of them, too? Indeed, no more Emma the Loser; here comes Emma the Badass Who Demands Respe-

But then she’s slapped in the face with the reality of her dead classmate and the emotional reverberations throughout the school. Her mythology quickly shatters, particularly when she overhears classmates talking about how they think school shooters are losers, i.e. her committing a school shooting wouldn’t make her classmates see her any differently than she feels they do now (that is, a loser).

In this moment, Emma learns that surfaces do not trickle down into who she is or who she can be, contrary to how she’s understood life up until that point. And it’s in fact because of her point of view on the issue of gun violence — nutritious substance that she developed with her personal, human, lived experience — that she winds up making real connections at school and finding community.

It’s here in the past that the meat of Emma’s arc takes place. In the present day, it’s Charlie who has most of the arc; a different one from Emma’s, and one we can track as early as their first dinner together.⁶

During the dinner, Charlie quickly admits that he didn’t actually read the book that he used as an icebreaker for their first interaction. This comes after Emma asks him what he thought about the book’s ending, which she says involved a mirror, and to which Charlie whips out some High School English bullshit by saying “I thought it was more of a metaphor for… I didn’t really realize it was real in the sense that the mirror…” while Kristoffer Borgli underlines this moment with a camera whip between them and their reflection in a nearby mirror.

A couple things happen here. First, we’re being trained — both by dialogue and the camera — to recognize the cosmeticism of surfaces, with a mirror as our example. A mirror literally presents an impression of something real, but it’s not the actual real thing, and we are in fact very liable to mistake the mirror’s reflection as the real thing; the same way that we’re liable to mistake the aesthetics of a wedding as love, or that Emma mistook the expressions (both aesthetic and consequential) of a school shooter as badassery, for lack of a better word.

That it’s Charlie specifically who states that the hypodiegetic⁷ mirror is not real reflects his current position in what we can soon understand as his arc; he’s already privy to the distinction of surface and truth (more on this later). The question is whether or not he has what it takes to honour that distinction — and thereby honour himself together with the truth of his love for Emma — in the way he behaves and interacts with people. This, of course, can be a very scary, alienating, and isolating thing to do in a culture that obsesses over surfaces as rampantly as the United States’.⁸

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that the dramatic question — whether in The Drama or any other story — is itself a surface matter. We may enjoy the long, suspenseful road to Charlie’s victory/failure as we enjoy ice cream, of course, but it is not where stories hold their nutrition; that honour belongs to the substance, which typically manifests in the subject matter implications of every plot beat, line of dialogue, and — in the case of film — visual detail.

In The Drama, these implications begin very early (as we’ve discussed above and will continue to discuss throughout), but it’s the film’s major reveal where they really start to gain momentum.

It was the moment that audiences showed up for: Emma, Charlie, Mike, and Rachel play a game during the wedding menu-taste where they name the worst thing they’ve ever done. Mike used his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against a street dog, Rachel locked an autistic child in a closet in an abandoned RV in the woods and left him there, Charlie cyberbullied an old schoolmate to the point where they had to move away…

…and Emma almost carried out a mass shooting.

The table goes quiet until Rachel — who left the child in the closet because she was “scared” and “freaked out” and didn’t say anything to the search party that formed in his absence — declares victimhood, and the night spirals from there.

Yes hypocrisy, yes second-hand dread/embarrassment, but what also happens here is an illumination of just how incapable we are of handling truth if we get too comfortable living on the surface. Everyone wants that hot tea — that good delicious drama, that scandalous surface — until it actually burns through the skin.

Indeed, there sat Charlie, getting shamed for the lack of bite in his “bad thing,” but then out comes Emma with the hardest bite of the bunch, and suddenly no one’s all that keen on — in fact, they’re even offended/defensive at the idea of — drinking the tea. Maybe they just liked the teacup; the same kind of teacup that shattered in Emma’s face when her classmate was killed at the mall.

To continue this metaphor for better or worse, Charlie — as we find out shortly after when he and Emma talk about it — isn’t put off by the tea; rather, he’s upset that this is the first time he’s tasting it. He wants to know the substance of Emma, and if he’s unaware of this part of her past, it means he’s unaware of the substance/emotions that Emma has regarding that part of her past.

In other words, Charlie is unaware of Emma’s arc. Remember this.

Now, Charlie, of course, is not entitled to this information about Emma, but remember that The Drama isn’t really interested in questions of entitlement; it’s interested in — to be as brief and reductive as possible — the relationship between surface and truth, and what it takes to honour truth in a world obsessed with surface.

Thus, it’s pertinent that we recognize how the totality of Charlie’s anxiety is rooted in the fact that he walks on eggshells that are superficial to him but important to everyone else, and so he finds himself walking on them to please everyone at the expense of his nervous system; the tension of inhabiting unalignment with oneself.

We can grok this from the film’s very first scene, when he finds himself in the middle of sheepish icebreaking jitters as he pretends to love the book that Emma is reading. Charlie, you see, is not actually nervous about talking to Emma; his nervous system is just responding stressfully to him talking to her under a contrived social pretense; a surface that exists to obscure the truth. The truth, of course, being that Charlie simply thinks she’s cute and wants to talk to her.

His nerves continue right up until their first dinner where he finally tells her he didn’t actually read the book, at which point Emma calls him a weird British freak; a surface of snide insincerity, yes, but one that transparently serves to expedite a substance of playful amicability. He sees it. She knows he sees it. Oh my god, she gets it! Charlie is safe.

Buy me a handful of caramels!

But in the wake of Menu-tastegate, Charlie isn’t so sure now. Given Emma’s uncharacteristic sensitivity about the surface that is her past, Charlie assumes that she can’t handle surfaces involving guns et al in the way that, say, polite society can’t handle any given deviation from the status quo. Thus, Charlie — again, at the expense of his nervous system — errs on the side of caution/fear by walking on eggshells in pursuit of what he thinks will be a safe surface for Emma.

Example: He throws out a mug that says “Coffee or I’ll Shoot,” because he’s worried that the surface of that mug will harmfully trickle down into Emma’s sense of self (because, again, he doesn’t know about Emma’s arc re: the surface’s non-relationship to who she is). This upsets Emma; Charlie empowers the surface with his fearful behaviour, and their relationship suffers for it — narratively speaking, this is no coincidence.

Charlie and Emma later talk it out, and Charlie gets access to the substance (i.e. her arc, her feelings on the matter), quickly quelling Emma’s own relationship anxiety with a hug soon after. Their love — their substance — is clear to them both. All they — and by “they,” I mean Charlie — have to do now is truthfully commit to that substance instead of fearfully placating the surfaces and, by extension, those around them.

But Charlie’s fear of the surface remains; he doesn’t trust anyone to let he and Emma exist unostracized, so he tries to appease everyone by speaking the language of surface:

• He attempts to make Emma’s past more palatable to Mike and Rachel by telling a mostly-false story about how she witnessed a close friend die in a car crash at a young age and never got the support she needed in the aftermath.

• Later still, he asks his coworker Misha if she would break up with her husband if he almost did a school shooting, readjusting the phrasing and hypotheticals of the question several times in search of getting an answer that would affirm his and Emma’s right to occupy the space they do.

• You see? He’s seeking permission based on the standards of surface-dwellers.

And in addition to these instances making Charlie even more anxious and causing even more problems for him and Emma, Charlie also doesn’t realize that the longer he walks on these eggshells, the more susceptible he becomes to internalizing an existence on the surface, and subsequently losing touch with who he truly is.

And indeed, he receives a book in his work mailbox called “Brainrot” and skips right past the page of written, presumably nutritious and entirely Charlie-coded analysis, and goes straight to the images of models holding guns, fantasizing about a scantily-clad Emma posing in bed with an assault rifle and admitting to Mike and Rachel that Emma is more interesting to him now.

We finally arrive at Charlie and Emma’s wedding. The climax. Charlie has cowed to his anxiety by appeasing the surface time and time again, with one such appeasement coming to an ugly front in the form of revelations by Misha to Emma at the wedding. That puts them on on rocky waters; if he prioritizes placating the surface over honouring the truth of their substance one more time, the relationship is bound to implode.

But sure enough, where he once — at the outset of the film — teased yet another appeasement to surface and social expectation by debating on whether to use “licentious” or the equally-contrived “languorous” in his wedding speech, he does no such thing here. His market-friendly spiel quickly gives way to a frank, tearful, and very graphic elucidation of his feelings towards Emma. Judgmental whispers and gossip from the crowd — a manifestation of Charlie’s oldest, surface-pleasing anxieties — are viciously shot down by Charlie, at which point he successfully locks the completion of his arc.

A slip of the tongue clues Misha’s husband into the smattering of infidelity that she and Charlie shared at their workplace earlier in the film, which leads to Charlie getting headbutted, which leads to the wedding guests amalgamating into a mob of sorts in an effort to address this chaotic spectacle. To quell it? To contribute to it? Doesn’t matter; everyone gets caught up in the frenzy of this infidelity drama, the assimilatory nature of surface-primacy culture made manifest.

The film ends with Charlie and Emma reuniting at a diner, and then slipping into a tender, reconciliatory exchange in which they pretend they’re meeting one another for the first time; “It’s nice to meet you, Charlie,” “It’s nice to meet you, Emma.” In many ways, of course, they are.

It’s a scene that brings all this thematic density full circle. It opens with establishing shots of the diner’s patrons; ordinary, unglamorous human beings tucking away into an equally-unglamorous meal and minding their business — a surface completely disinterested in calling attention to itself or obscuring any of the truth within.

Then comes Charlie and Emma’s conversation; an echo from earlier in the film when they — shouldering bedroom struggles in the midst of their overarching struggles — attempt some foreplay in the form of pretending to meet for the first time.

It didn’t work, because that playful surface was attempting to obscure the lack of sexual energy they — or at least Charlie — were experiencing at that time, and the film’s thesis is predicated on indicting surfaces/contrivancies that do that.

But in the diner, the dynamic between surface and truth is completely different. The surface — the playacting/pretending — is no less fake than it was during the foreplay, but this one is consciously making to expedite a sincere kernel of love and gratitude, whose recognition is the primacy of the whole interaction.

In many ways, it’s a healing moment for Charlie. Just as his hug and acceptance created a safe place for the little girl inside of Emma to reside, so too does Emma go and render surfaces — the abuse and social ubiquity of which are so central to Charlie’s own anxiety — in such a way that allow Charlie’s nervous system to exist safely on them. The exact reason he fell in love with her in the first place.

All of this, and I didn’t even touch on the matter of the crack-smoking DJ⁹, the photographer, the replacement DJ, the dramatic exclamation point named Rachel, or the countless other elements and subtleties that help to unfurl The Drama’s subject matter in their own ways.

Part of me wants to talk about them. The part that I trust, though, tells me that completionist reviewing is antithetical to what I’m doing here on The Treatment. Not only do I risk bloating the topics I’m covering here (and boy did I risk it here as is), but what good is unlocking — or at least elucidating — interpretative angles for my readers if I don’t leave any space for them to chart on their own? Indeed, each and every one of us becomes by being and doing, and there’s plenty of being and doing to go around, to say the least. Remember that.

Lots of remembering to go around, too, come to think of it.

Anyhow, that’s all I really have to say about The Drama. Stay frosty, y’all. Or tropical. Whichever is more beneficial to your brown fat reserves and circulation, really.

Introducing: Indie Film News in Brief

We’re launching Indie Film News in Brief: a weekly roundup of all the need-to-know news from across the independent film world. Festival selections, screenings, premieres, distribution announcements, casting updates, acquisitions, launch events, and other noteworthy developments that often fall outside the coverage of major trades are all welcome here at Film Soup Zine.

Created as a free resource for filmmakers and film lovers alike, Indie Film News in Brief aims to be a centralized hub for independent film news, helping emerging projects gain visibility while keeping readers up to date on the latest happenings across the indie film community.

Got news? Submit it below!

Submit Your News!

The Rebellion of Choosing Slower Films

In this essay on AFTER THE ACT, filmmaker Sarah Jayne Portelli of argues that the film's meditative pacing and slice-of-life storytelling offer a compelling alternative to the overstimulation of contemporary media, using the principles of slow cinema to encourage reflection, presence, and a more meaningful engagement with human experience. AFTER THE ACT comes to platforms on June 26.

Read the Article

A Review of SEW TORN in The Treatment

In this review of SEW TORN from , a point is made that beneath the film’s whimsical surface and inventive Rube Goldberg-style storytelling lies a poignant examination of grief, inherited limitations, and the struggle for self-definition, with its protagonist’s mastery of thread becoming a powerful metaphor for both creativity and emotional confinement.

Read the Review

Filmmaker Profile: Makayla McIntosh’s Tech Stack

This week’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles prolific filmmaker and creative . Read her interview and check out her process when it comes to collaborating across thousands of miles with her creative partner in crime, !

Read the Interview

This Week’s Film Soup Library Featured Film: 18 1/2 by

A White House transcriber leaks the missing Nixon Watergate tapes to a reporter and they run afoul of hippies, swingers and nefarious forces.

FILMMAKING TEAM:

Starring: Willa Fitzgerald, John Magaro, Vondie Curtis Hall, Catherine Curtin, Richard Kind, Sullivan Jones, and voices of Jon Cryer, Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell as Nixon.

Directed by Dan Mirvish

Screenplay by Daniel Moya Story by Moya & Mirvish,

Produced by Mirvish, Moya & Terry Keefe

DP: Elle Schneider

OF NOTE: Best Director, Manchester Film Festival. Top prize at Tall Grass Film Festival

WATCH HERE.

LEAVE A REVIEW HERE.

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

Film Soup Zine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When we first meet Barbara, she’s in the middle of a strikingly maladaptive wave of grief, having built a house-spanning spider-web of pullstring soundchips that spout audio recordings of her and her mother in the middle of what sound like happier childhood memories.¹

But then we get a glimpse of the town; tiny, colourful, where its police chief has two other jobs and everyone knows everyone by their first name. Immediately, the intensity of her coping mechanisms² are accounted for. This is a safe Swiss marshmallow where nothing happens; nothing bad, nothing good — just a frictionless, G-rated hideaway where your family is both the centre and periphery of your universe. Comforting for mothers of small children, especially if they’re disinterested or actively hostile towards the notion of said child developing their own sense of self. The child — helpless in their lack of self-alignment — goes along with it because there’s nothing else to go along with, and then suddenly Mom is dead and the child is 25.

Indeed, the tragedy began at Barbara’s birth.

As we make our way through the triptych, the layers and nuances of Barbara’s grief are pulled back; she was watching her mother drink herself to death, she thought about leaving her mother but never found it in her to do so, she listened to her mother tell her that she would end up just like her, and she doesn’t even like being a seamstress — it’s simply all she’s ever known, it being a mother’s-footsteps occupation that also serves as the foundation for her inventive, thread-centric contraptions that make her competitive against drug dealers while also obviously serving as the marquee element for audience endearment.

And therein lies the hidden narrative nutrition of Sew Torn’s crowdpleasing nucleus; we may be so busy scratching our Home Alone itch, that we don’t notice the ways in which Barbara’s use of thread clue us in to her psychology.

This is a woman who thinks very mathematically, who can look at the world around her and know exactly how to apply her sewing-themed physics engine in pursuit of her goals. She knows the capabilities of these threads — these materials — intimately, and can wield them ingeniously.

But then, of course she does, and of course she can. Living under her mother in an environment with no other contexts for her to engage with, it was almost inevitable that her imagination would be entirely colonized by the threads; she knows just one thing, and knows it perfectly. Her intimacy with the threads — the film’s central entertainment hook — are a reminder of her torture, because a sewing-themed physics engine in your brain isn’t much good if you have no goals to pursue.³

Indeed, the threads leave no room in her mind for possibilities beyond them or the shop. It’s why she can’t imagine surviving any of these scenarios. It’s why she cannot imagine the head dealer, Hudson (John Lynch), maliciously greeting her in any way other than “Mobile seamstress? Not so mobile anymore.” It’s why the only other young person in this film — Joshua, the young man involved in the handoff-gone-wrong and the son of Hudson — is also trapped by the shadow of their parent, because Barbara can’t even imagine a person her age who isn’t in this position.

And when Barbara’s sewing contraptions strain credulity, you have to remember that this all takes place in Barbara’s imagination, and that physical matter (i.e. the threads) has objective limits that consciousness of possibility — alien to Barbara — does not. Each time the film tests our suspension of disbelief (which will vary from viewer to viewer), it’s bumping up against the very strict boundaries of Barbara’s imagination, defined entirely by her depth of thread manipulation, illiterate in the language of freedom.

So I ask again, what good is thread savantry if it means you can’t even be yourself? What leg can you stand on once you’ve reached the limits of the thread, co-opted here as your own limits? Coast on winning the approval of neighbours? Audiences?

In the third segment, when Barbara and Joshua are trapped at a diner table with Hudson, Barbara’s escape plan requires her to move around the diner to set the threads up in a certain way; something she can’t just go and do with Hudson watching her.

Her solution is to open her sewing kit/music box that plays a song about sewing machines sang by her mother, and use the song to dance around the diner — much to Hudson’s surprise and amusement — while discretely setting up her threads. The dance is comprised of aggressive, effortful thrashing and graceless destruction/disruption of the diner, Barbara performing it with a hardened face and initiating it with a standstill flourish, as if letting the song enter her body before it takes over. By all observations, she endures the dance.

It’s a moment that seem like an eccentric setup for another Rube-Goldberg payoff, but if you really read it, it expresses profound horror. This is Barbara at the absolute limit of her imagination, believing that the only way she can get out of this situation is if she halts all resistance and completely gives her body over to the very hereditary banalities — taking their form here as lyrics about a sewing machine being a girl’s best friend — that actively prevent her from imagining life beyond the sewing shop, the town, her mother. And the act of dancing, so often understood to us as a vehicle of dynamic self-expression, is a quality underlined here by the very absence of it; Barbara’s dancing cannot be a form of self-expression because she has no self to express. Even in death, mother’s permission is a necessary ingredient, and we see in Barbara’s face and movements how discordantly it lives in her skin, especially when she gives it carte blanche as her final lifeline.

It’s an invariably textured set piece in a film that hinges on set pieces, and perhaps speaks most directly to Sew Torn’s overarching melancholy towards the darkness that can underpin the veneer of whimsy in so many lives and families. The aesthetically-inviting colours of the town, the crowdpleasing Rube-Goldberg choreography, the quirky dance; all these surface-level expressions of Sew Torn want to win your approval in a none-too-different way that any given small-town family is eager to win the approval of their neighbours.

And indeed, it seems at first that Barbara is the product of a wholesome, loving mother-daughter bond that probably charmed all the church ladies and sparked envy in other families. But once we actually get to know Barbara, it’s clear that the ghosts of emotional stunting were ravaging her long before her mother died, and became especially ruthless behind closed doors.

And that’s mostly all I have to say about Sew Torn. It’s a shorter review living in its own post; maybe one you could read over a cup of coffee, or whatever other case-utility a short review could take advantage of and thereby justify itself in a newsletter that’s not terribly comfortable with the precedence of brevity⁴. Maybe that discomfort is important.

Weeks ago, though, I would have packaged this with two or three other films in a Doctor’s Notes post, and then spent the next week prepping another; scouring my backlog for the next cinematic equivalent of a collateralized debt obligation to my Wednesday-centric schedule, my reliably feature-length word count, and — I suppose — my readers, even if I can only comprehend their expectations in the vacuum of my self-imposed routine, which probably doesn’t amount to a very accurate comprehension.

Anyway, that’s how the The Treatment’s been rolling for this last while, but it is a playbook I will henceforth be departing from. Here’s why:

1. The weekly-post schedule creates a routine for me. Most people find comfort in routine; I, for the moment, do not. A routine creates a shape for my life, realizes some approximation of finitude within it, leaving less room for the accommodation of welcome disruptions or sudden opportunities. A lack of a set schedule gives me freedom to steer The Treatment on a dime, and — as you’ll see within the timeframe of soon-to-very-soon — it’s very important that I’m able to account for off-schedule programming on a whim. Plus, I’m always harping on the dangers of building one’s experiences around expectation; I might as well adopt a modus operandi that discourages that.

   1. A shape, by the way, would be less scary — even preferable — if I had a life that was my own, but I don’t have that yet. Most everything I do is derivative of an overarching scramble in pursuit of establishing some station for myself that I haven’t really had since I got laid off and had to move home last year⁵. I am, for the record, possessed of the most ferocious faith that the trajectory I’m on will lead me to the life I want. But until that happens, my body will continue to be the site of a very mammalian and equally existential anxiety that will only skyrocket if I entrench myself in the complacency of a routine right now.

2. I choose to see the inside of my head as charmed, but it is an exhausting place to live, especially when I’m juggling the storytelling nuances of multiple films every week while also trying to save some neurons for all the other things I’m working on behind-the-scenes/off-Treatment, not to mention the fact that my main leisure activity is reading, which draws demands from the same space. And all of that — the charm and the game of neuron management — is multiplied by the factor of my bipolarity. Bottom line: Dedicating more frequent, seat-of-my-pants posts to one film at a time will simply make me infinitely happier (for lack of a better word) at the most marginal cost to my aggregated content output. With time, I believe this will benefit the writing itself.⁶

So yeah, this is me now. I suppose — reading this post back — this approach has a third boon in that it gives me space to just riff with a more directly personable edge or veer into other topics if I feel like it. Given how much I dislike Notes as a forum for expressing myself, I can see this happening often.

The Drama is coming soon, but it probably won’t be my next post.

In any case, see you in the stitches,

— C

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Upcoming Releases:

Above the Line, coming to platforms June 26.

From director Jeffrey Scott Collins’ ‘Above the Line’, stars Gregg Henry, Cedric the Entertainer, and Sophia Ali. The film will be Available on Digital & On Demand June 26th.

And Through The Portal We Go Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Relay from

Award-winning indie fantasy comedy And Through The Portal We Go is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Relay following a successful festival run across the U.S. and internationally. Directed by Mike Hayhurst and produced by Evening Squire Productions, the microbudget feature blends dark comedy and fantasy, following three cult members who become trapped reliving the same day after stepping through a mysterious portal.

Audiences can now stream And Through The Portal We Go on Amazon Prime Video and Relay.

After the Act coming to all major US platforms on June 26 from

After the Act is a new experimental feature from the team behind the hit documentary Cats of Malta. Set over the course of a single day and night in Berlin, the film follows two writers, Sam and Mia, whose quiet domestic routines unravel after a casual conversation exposes a devastating betrayal involving their friend Becca.

Shot in an improvisational style and inspired by the deliberate pacing of French auteur Eric Rohmer, the film transforms intimate observation into a meditative cinematic experience. Early audiences have described it as “76 minutes of pure meditative ASMR,” praising its hypnotic atmosphere and emotional honesty.

Available June 26 on Amazon Prime, Google Play and Apply TV+.

Festival Announcements:

The ASSET is premiering at Dances with Films on June 22, 2026.

The ASSET is a high-stakes humanitarian and medical documentary following renowned trauma surgeon Dr. Anna Goldenberg as she races to fulfill the dying wish of a young colleague battling cancer: to bring a lifesaving trauma training program to hospitals in Israel at a moment of immense crisis and urgency. From director and Audience Award-winner .

After The Act is launching on all major platforms on June 26th. Click here to watch the trailer.

In a world that is fast-paced — where humans are expected to do more, absorb more, hustle harder, and take in as much information as possible — there’s a small but growing group of us who’ve cottoned on to something: in the end, stillness and slowing down might actually be more productive. More grounding, more interesting, and better for us overall.

Living a slow life, even just enjoying a slow morning, feels like an act of rebellion. And damn, does it feel good.

I’m one of those people who feels off when my brain is in “all-tabs-open” mode, juggling so many tasks that I border on meltdown. That was my default for years. My M.O. was “busy” and it used to be my normal for what seemed like forever. Until I broke.

As I age, I’ve learnt that softness, and moving at a slower speed in everything I do, isn’t laziness. It’s being present, which allows me to think clearly and appreciate the moment, rather than racing toward what’s next.

And when it comes to storytelling, filmmaking, and the films I choose to watch, I feel the same way.

Give me long, quiet shots of absolute “nothingness.” Characters sitting in silence, looking out over cliffs, quietly applying makeup, moving through their room looking for a favourite pair of shoes. Couples glancing at each other with nothing left to say. And my personal favourite – Rooney Mara eating pie on the floor for six uninterrupted minutes — no music, no camera movement, no sound design — just grief, just time, just presence.

This is slow cinema.

In his 2014 book Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, Ira Jaffe perfectly explains slow cinema:

“Slow movies differ from most commercial films in offering viewers time for extended attention and contemplation. They use long takes, often static, and may feature limited dialogue, subdued performance, and minimal narrative. These films emphasize duration, waiting, and a kind of stillness or emptiness rarely seen in mainstream cinema.”

A huge majority of mainstream cinema right now is flooded with maximalism. Visually more is crammed into the frame, congesting the shot, shifting the viewer’s eye away from the main character, instead making the audience scramble to take in every detail presented.

During production the size of cast and crews are larger, budgets often more inflated, and of course the marketing is also colossal to justify the whole process.

With the rise of CGI-heavy blockbusters and studio-driven showcases, we’ve traded stillness for spectacle. Not only are these films packed with visual noise, but the stories themselves are predictable. They feel more like themes being played out rather than actual relatable human stories unfolding in real time.

A cacophony of action for action’s sake, shock, explosion, loads of quick takes, wordy dialogue, plot twist, repeat.

So when I watch a film that dares to pause, to breathe, it hits harder.

When discussing slow cinema, these films come to mind — either as true slow cinema or deeply influenced by the aesthetic of the movement — Melancholia, Phantom Thread, Priscilla, Paterson, The Outrun, A Ghost Story, Past Lives and Aftersun.

Each of these films lets you sit with the character’s discomfort. With deep feelings of loss or shame. With beauty. With time. With a character’s daily routine or ritual. With crippling feelings of isolation, alienation. These films don’t force meaning — they invite audiences to find it.

I write, produce and direct slow films. Budget and working within my artistic means aside, mostly I choose to create slow films because I like writing and bringing flawed, real and gritty characters to life on the screen.

For me it’s exciting and the process of working closely with my actors for months before getting to set interests me deeply. I live for it. It’s my passion and one of my creative outlets.

With that in mind, our recent feature film After the Act starts with a slow film vibe — and continues that way throughout.

After Ivan and I watched the edit, we noticed the first scene runs for around fifteen minutes. A simple opening showing a couple preparing breakfast and discussing what they’re going to do on their weekend. We turned to each other and said, smiling, “We’re going to bore the shit out of distributors with just the first scene!” I even joked that if this played at an actual cinema, for sure we would get walkouts early on.

But only if we didn’t find our target audience, because this slow approach was deliberate from the concept stage right through to filming. Our vision was to have the audience become a fly on the wall as a real couple goes through the motions of a regular day, before a revelation changes their relationship.

While attending the European Film Market earlier this year, I had to be careful about how I talked about After the Act. When I first introduced it to a buyer as a “slow film,” it quickly became clear that using the word slow to sell a feature film was a deterrent. So I switched it up and started calling it a “slice of life film.”

The same person even said something along the lines of, ‘‘there are not many buyers here who are buying those films. They are a hard sell”.

Ouch!

Selling aside, After the Act has also been a tough film for festival analysts to place. The collective advice so far? The film likely won’t be selected for the larger, top-tier festivals, but instead for smaller festivals better suited to “true indie films.”

For me — as an empathic human, a writer of relatable stories, and a detail-focused director — I love holding off on calling cut right after a character has said their final line because I want what was said to sit and simmer. This choice feels like a quiet act of trust: trust in the story you’ve written, the concept you’ve put forward, and what your actor has brought to the moment you envisioned.

Slow film has other merits too, of course.

The visuals and character nuances are more deeply appreciated in slow cinema. The audience is subtly fed breadcrumbs of information, details and subtext that they may or may not notice, but their friend might. That creates space for conversation… maybe even a rewatch.

Sometimes, what isn’t said in words can speak volumes through the lens.

So I am going to continue to embrace, and make, slow cinema. One that invites patience, reflection, and a deeper connection to storytelling. There’s room for all kinds of films, of course, but in a world that often moves too fast, sometimes the most powerful thing a filmmaker can do is simply let a moment breathe.

After The Act is launching on all major platforms on June 26th. Click here to watch the trailer.

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Got a review? An interview? An article idea? Pitch it to us! Film Soup Zine is a newly formed indie film publication dedicated to all things indie film. We’re open to writer submissions at this time but bear with us because we’re building the plane as it’s taking off!

Use the Google form below to send us your idea.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Pitch Film Soup

Today’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles multi-hyphenate

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Meet Writer/Director/Actress Producer

Makayla McIntosh is a dynamic U.S./Canadian artist based on the West Coast, originally from the small town of Newton Falls, Ohio, known for pushing boundaries as an actress, performer, producer, and writer. She is the founder of Siren of the Pacific Productions, where she champions bold, female-driven storytelling rooted in raw, edgy authenticity.

Makayla shaved her head for the feature film Cul-De-Sac, marking a transformative chapter in her on-screen work. In 2024, she produced and co-wrote her first feature film, Shredded, which she also starred in, is available on Tubi, Amazon Prime, Apple and more. Her original pilot, co-written with Cat Yudain, was an official selection of the 2025 SeriesFest Pitch-A-Thon, and the story is being released chapter by chapter on Substack and Wattpad as a serialized novel.

Before transitioning into film, Makayla toured internationally with Disney Cruise Line and performed in productions of A Chorus Line and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. She received a Broadway World Award for Best Choreography for her work on Chicago.

Makayla, tell us here at Film Soup Zine: What’s in your filmmaking tech stack?

The Notes app on my iPhone and MacBook is probably my most-used creative tool. I dump everything in there: notes from film festival panels, snippets of dialogue I overhear in real life, scene ideas at 2AM, random emotional observations, podcast concepts — anything that sparks something. It’s basically my external hard drive for storytelling, and later I organize it into projects.

For writing, I use Final Draft. For collaboration, Cat and I use Google Docs while working on our novel, The Mercy Cage.

Note from FSZ: we love this!!! There’s something about the immediacy of bouncing ideas back and forth in real time that keeps the work alive in the best way.

I also use Canva religiously for pitch decks, look books, and series bibles.

For podcasts, Riverside has been a game changer.

Agreed: the amount of time it cuts down in editing is honestly incredible, especially when juggling multiple creative projects at once.

On the production side, I shoot with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and use a Sennheiser mic setup.

At the end of the day, ’s tech stack feels like it is really about mobility — being able to capture emotion, story, and inspiration wherever it happens.

How Can People Learn More About You & Your Work?

Connect with me on Substack at or on Instagram here.

Also check out my podcast Gate Crashers with here!

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more

Thanks for reading Film Soup Zine ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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A Guest Post from composer : Scoring Without Words: The Music Behind Unspoken Lines

Lumi Luo’s insightful guest post explores the emotional and psychological power of film music, examining how composers can use intimacy, character, and classical instrumentation to deepen cinematic storytelling. Drawing from her award-winning work on Unspoken Lines, Luo reflects on the role music plays in shaping emotional experience, subtle human connection, and the interior lives of characters on screen.

Click to Read

A Review of HANDLE WITH CARE in The Treatment

In this review of Handle With Care, critic explores how the romantic dramedy uses one man’s post-divorce unraveling to interrogate the “marriage industrial complex,” arguing that the film’s emotional resonance comes not from cynicism toward love itself, but from its nuanced examination of happiness, uncertainty, storytelling, and the human tendency to mistake structure and convention for genuine connection.

Click to Read the Review

Filmmaker Profile: Mel Pellicano’s Tech Stack

This week’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles writer-director-producer-editor . Read their interview and check out the gear they use to make their projects!

Click to Read

This Week’s Film Soup Library Featured Film: My Best Friend’s Famous

An insecure New Yorker moves to Los Angeles and grapples with jealousy when his less-talented best friend becomes a star on a hit television show.

FILMMAKING TEAM:

From the writer/director team of Nick Psinakis and Kevin Ignatius, starring Nick Psinakis, Darryl Gudmundson, Anne Akhila, Mindy Sterling and Ryan O’Neal.

WATCH HERE.

LEAVE A REVIEW.

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

Film Soup Zine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today we’re reviewing Handle With Care, an upcoming romantic dramedy written and directed by newly-minted Filmstacker MJT, and starring The Umbrella Academy’s Justin H. Min as Cole, a recent divorcee who spares no cynicism towards the marriage industrial complex, especially after it tasks him with reselling a pile of unopened wedding presents. During this Craigslist-spanning odyssey, he happens upon buyers with love stories of their own, and they may just shake up Cole’s perspective for the better.

You’ve heard it before. The marriage industrial complex (henceforth, MIC) doesn’t sell diamonds or wedding presents or gowns; it sells a story about happiness and forever and whatever other nebulous ghosts may resonate with the specific-but-universal pursuit of human fulfillment. Attach that story to a diamond ring, and watch the dollars roll in.¹

But, gross as it is to abuse the power of stories for an icky endgoal, what’s less-talked about is how this enterprise has also compromised our ability to access that power for ourselves. One can sniff out the game of the capitalist and still — even subsequently —wind up the sucker via souring themselves on actual human nutrition so often packaged in a story.

Cole (Justin H. Min) is in one such position. The film opens to him monologuing about the conceit of the MIC, how “happily ever after” is nothing more than an advertisement, how partnership is pointless because you can never actually know all of what your partner is thinking, and how our investment in this story of love is a concession to our cultural programming at the expense of our free will.

And the thing is, nothing he says is incorrect. The MIC absolutely does use our emotions for profit, it is absolutely not possible to fully and completely know what your significant other is thinking at any given time (and therefore can’t know you completely), and we are all absolutely looking for happiness that the MIC — that slick predator — insists it can provide at $35k a pop.

But the fact that these things are true spares little thought to the implications of Cole’s fixation on them. When Cole says it’s not possible to know what your partner is thinking, he sees it as proof of happiness being an empty promise, but another might see it as an unwillingness to inhabit uncertainty or embrace curiosity.

Moreover, if you insist on dismissing happiness on the basis of its inability to be a promise, that harms the idea of happiness way more than it harms the MIC’s geometric veneer of a promise, and you in fact grant primacy and power to this very veneer you claim to loathe. That’s like dismissing a David Lynch film on account of it not adhering to Three-Act Structure, as if the endgoal of a story — or art, or happiness — is to give it a canonized, expectation-soothing shape rather than express a perspective rooted in relevance to the human element’s evolution and diversification.

And indeed, Cole’s opening monologue plays over an end-credits roll that scrolls up in reverse order over scenes from happier days in his marriage, also played in reverse. This, as though both the marriage and the film itself are being studied, scraped for details for proof of their deception, Cole taking no time to acknowledge that, by doing so, he’s looking at things backwards.

The plot immediately kicks off with the inciting incident: Cole and his wife Reese (Nicole Brydon Bloom) are divorcing, and he’s being tasked with the tedious job of reselling all of their unopened wedding presents. Right away, the story has broken structural tradition, and Cole finds himself treading water in the deep end for it; in one swift beat, the geometry of both story and MIC promise are dissolved, and it proves to be profoundly inconvenient for him. Vindicated re: “It’s all a lie,” but at what cost?

Throughout the film, Cole breaks the fourth wall to explain background information about his life, and give impromptu history lessons on where certain marriage practices originated (spoiler alert: most all of these things — wedding gifts, diamond rings, surprise proposals, and even non-wedding stuff like smiling for photos and red velvet cake — were born out of marketing schemes), in hopes, of course, of disillusioning us.

In other words, here’s Cole, proving how totally free will-pilled he is by stepping outside of the diegetics to address us directly re: the lies that underpin so many of our conventions, further sticking it to the spectre of programming with all the objective truths he knows.

But then, while still talking to the camera, he recounts to us a story from his days as a copywriter for a banking company:

He was to write promo copy for a banking product, but he wasn’t quite sure what the product did, and so he did some research and found a really good copywriting example of it; “good syntax and punctuation,” as Cole says. But then he looked closer, and realized that it was all “just fluff,” and that this piece of writing didn’t seem to know what the product did, either.

Turns out, Cole was the one who had written it; neither he or his boss had any recollection of Cole penning these strong, shapely bones that had nothing to actually say, nothing to actually enrich our ability to engage with the item (the shape) so that we may benefit.

Later on, he ostensibly doesn’t even realize the response he has while watching Royal Wedding, a 1951 Fred Astaire movie in which a dance number sees Astaire’s character start dancing on the walls and ceiling. The choreography is totally illogical, and yet, Cole understands it. Later still, he recalls some happier memories with Reese that appear to him as dream sequences, because no matter how hard he insists being a bastion of objectivity, we inevitably confront the fact that imagination is ground zero for the human experiences.

And as the customers start rolling in, so too is Cole’s buried relationship with the human element’s triple-decker — stories, imagination, and experience — further challenged to unearth itself:

• A sommelier purchases his wine fridge and reads some history on wines from Cole’s birthyear, and he can’t help but realize how much he resonates with the misfortune experienced by said wine.

• A meat plant manager purchases Cole’s Ulu knife and tells him how he’ll pass this meat plant down to children that he does not have yet, displaying a total lack of concern with the current, external shape of truth (him having no kids right now) — importantly, without denying that said shape is the truth — and instead committing to the story that matters to him and that he wants to be true.

  • Nearby, the manager’s mother watches reruns of Slavic Jeopardy whose answers she’s memorized. When asked why she watches them, she says “Who cares about the answers? I change. We’re changing all the time.” Indeed, what do we have to gain from canonizing objective geometry as the foremost relativity instead of ourselves? The truth is the truth; it doesn’t need our permission to occupy the space it does. Why not give that permission to ourselves?

• Lexie — who takes Cole’s mixer off his hands before matching with him on Hinge later — quantifies baking less with the ingredients and mathematics and more with the way it warms, sets, what have you; the empowering act of quantifying something by what it does rather than what it is.

And then Cole pays his friend and landlord Ardie (Peter Gerety) a visit, and finds a photo of Ardie when he was a young man, posing with a young woman. “This your wife?” asks Cole, but Ardie tells him that it’s Edie, an old fiancée from Nebraska that could have become his wife, if only Nebraska had been for Ardie. They shook hands, went their separate ways, and kept in touch via letters.

Cole is baffled; not only did Ardie and Edie have The Spark™— that widely-coveted plot beat in the story of happiness — and not only did Ardie turn his back on it, but Ardie’s wife didn’t even seem to mind that he was exchanging letters with another woman.

Cole shows his own programming here; the idea of happiness as something to get or have or collect, as though it were a product you could pick up at the store like a burrito or a diamond ring. Turns out, he’s trapped by the same geometry-centric mindset abused by the MIC, lambasting the capital-serving lies yet incapable of comprehending love without them. So much for free will.

But Ardie knows better. Happiness is a transitory byproduct of inhabiting trajectories and circumstances that make sense to you and you alone. A spark with Edie doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t make sense for Ardie, specifically, to be in Nebraska. You can know most everything — or at least as much as Cole does about the world — but if that doesn’t include knowing yourself, it won’t do you much good.

A handful of satisfied customers later — sporting products that have left the discordant circumstances of Cole’s storage unit and are now in their own not-Nebraskas of said customers’ homes — we make it to the wedding of Cole’s best friends Will (Jon Rudnitsky) and Taryn (Elizabeth Paige), where Cole steps up to make the best man speech.

And it’s here — together with the closing moments of the film — that the film tees up what I consider to be its most striking detail.

Without giving too much away, the nuts and bolts of Cole’s character remain unchanged by the film’s end. He still holds the same opinions and approaches life with the same habits, but where his detail-hoarding brain once sabotaged his ability to tap into the self-determining nectar of life, it is now his superpower, enabling him to clock the most life/love-affirming sentiments out of the most mundane of details, and store them in his own toolbox so that he may evoke them in others down the road.

In the final shot, Cole walks out of the frame of a now-stationary camera, departing from geometry, as one with himself and himself alone.

—

Really rich stuff here, Matthew; can’t wait for the rest of the world to get their eyeballs on this.

Buy me a handful of caramels!

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You can listen to a sample of the music at the end of this article.

About the Film:

Unspoken Lines is a short film without any dialogue, directed by Sasha Gitin and composed by Lumi Luo. The story is a lyrical meditation on love, creation, and a woman’s quiet reclamation of her own power. An artist sketches a woman who comes to life. As he dives deeper into his work, she begins to question the limits of her existence.

Because there is no dialogue at all, the music carries a heavier weight — it must not only support the story we see, but tell it entirely on its own.

This essay is as written by composer for .

The Moment I Knew

When Sasha (Gitin, director) first sent me the film, I was immediately excited. Within moments of watching it, the idea came to me: two instruments, two characters. One for the woman, one for the artist. I knew right away that this was the approach — and since I play the flute myself, I was especially eager to bring this concept to life.

Using flute for the woman and cello for the artist may sound like a cliché choice, and honestly, it is. But in a film with no spoken words, being direct and emotionally resonant matters more than being unconventional.

These are instruments that audiences instinctively feel, even those who are not familiar with classical music. When you hear the flute, you feel something delicate and alive. When you hear the cello, you feel something deep and searching. That contrast was exactly what the film needed.

Building the Themes

Sasha sent me a few musical references to guide the direction, and I used those as a starting point — following his vision while finding my own voice within it. From there, I developed three distinct themes: the artist’s theme, the woman’s theme, and a love theme that would emerge between them.

At the beginning of the film, we meet the artist alone in his world. The cello opens the score, its bow moving like a pencil across a page — searching, driven, obsessive. But the artist is also struggling internally. Both the cello and synthesizer work together to capture his mental state — the cello carrying his character forward while the synthesizer amplifies what is happening inside his head. Together they reveal who he truly is: a man whose mind lives entirely in his art. Even when he is not drawing, he is still drawing. That is his nature — and everything that follows in the story grows from it

Then he creates her — and the flute enters for the first time. This is where the love theme begins. On screen, they are simply together, falling into each other, sharing the kind of quiet intimacy that needs no words. In the music, the flute and cello play a gentle duet, intertwining the way two people do when they are new to each other and everything still feels sweet.

When the Music Falls Apart

But things change. After they have a child, the artist retreats. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, the woman is holding their baby and offering him a cup of coffee — reaching out, still trying — while the artist sits drawing, completely closed off, refusing any interaction.

This is where the score becomes deliberately strange. The cello returns to the artist’s theme, now weighted with a grumpy, withdrawn feeling. The flute continues playing the love theme — still reaching, still hoping. The two lines run simultaneously but they do not belong together anymore. They pull in completely different directions, two people in the same room who are no longer in the same world. It is so musically uncomfortable that you can hardly forget it. That dissonance is the emotional truth of the scene, and it says everything the characters cannot.

The Woman Finds Her Voice

The film’s most powerful moment comes at the end, when the woman’s mind becomes clear and she finally sees the truth of her situation. Here, I stripped everything away. No cello. No love theme. Just flute — alone.

But the melody she plays is not her own original theme. It is a variation of the artist’s theme, transformed and reclaimed. She takes the music that once belonged to him and makes it hers. In that moment, without a single word of dialogue, the score tells you everything: she has found herself again.

Letting the Instruments Talk

Scoring Unspoken Lines taught me something I now carry into every project — how to think of instruments not as sounds, but as characters. The flute and cello do not just accompany the story. They speak for the people on screen. They argue, fall in love, drift apart, and find resolution. Learning to let instruments truly talk to each other, the way people do, changed how I approach composition entirely.

I recorded the flute myself at my own studio, and traveled to my cellist’s home to capture her part there. There was something fitting about that process — two musicians in two separate spaces, coming together to tell one story.

I am deeply grateful to Sasha Gitin for the creative freedom he gave me on this film. He trusted me with an enormous responsibility — to be the voice of his film — and that trust gave me room to create in a way I had never experienced before. Unspoken Lines reminded me why I became a composer.

Unspoken Lines has won Best Music at the Top Indie Film Awards, was selected at the New York Indie Shorts Awards where Lumi was invited to participate in a post-screening Q&A as composer and performer, and has received a nomination for the Horizon Award at the International Sound & Film Music Festival — one of the three largest film music festivals in the world.

Lumi Luo, a composer, flutist, and filmmaker whose work centers on emotional storytelling through music. Her score for Unspoken Lines has received multiple festival honors, including Best Music at the Top Indie Film Awards and a nomination at the International Sound & Film Music Festival.

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Today’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles filmmaker Mel Pellicano

is a writer and director who grew up in the suburbs of New York City. Their dreams of directing came early on when they got ahold of their family’s camcorder.

Before making their way to Los Angeles to produce their short film, Moment x Moment, they built a community of like-minded filmmakers looking for their own access points into the industry. Their unwavering dedication to community eventually led to a flourishing career in digital media.

Mel, tell us here at Film Soup Zine: What’s in your filmmaking tech stack?

When writing, I primarily use WriterDuet for screenwriting, alongside extensive use of Google Docs for outlining, research, brainstorming, and production notes. I also use Google Slides to build pitch decks, visual treatments, and presentation materials for projects in development and financing.

For design and branding work, I rely heavily on the Adobe Creative Cloud suite to create marketing assets, social media campaigns, logos, key art, and promotional materials. During pre-production and production, I use Scriptation on my iPad for script revisions and annotation, along with Shot Lister for shot planning, scheduling, and on-set organization.

In post-production, my workflow centers around Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, Adobe Audition for audio cleanup and mixing, Adobe After Effects for motion graphics and visual effects, and DaVinci Resolve for color grading and finishing. An honorable mention also goes to DCP-o-matic, which I use for creating DCPs for festival and theatrical exhibition.

How Can People Learn More About You & Your Work?

People can learn more about me on my website at the link below.

Visit Mel's Site

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About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

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A Guest Post from Letters from the Front: Why Indie Filmmakers Are Losing the Film Festival War

Stefan Van De Graaff’s searing essay examines how the modern film festival circuit has drifted away from discovering independent voices, why many filmmakers feel increasingly exploited by the system, and how creators can still strategically navigate festivals without relying on them for validation or survival.

Click to Read

A Review of DARUMA in The Treatment

In this review of DARUMA from , the critic explores how the groundbreaking film rises above performative representation by grounding its characters in thoughtful narrative and thematic detail, arguing that its emotional authenticity comes not from simply rejecting stereotypes, but from examining identity, masculinity, and purpose through the lived experience of its protagonist.

Click to Read the Review

Filmmaker Profile: Amanda Sweikow’s Tech Stack

This week’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles prolific filmmaker and creative . Read her interview and check out the generous information she shares regarding all of the gear that she uses to make her films! Pro-tips are abundant in this week’s post!

Click to Read

This Week’s Film Soup Library Featured Film: Shredded

A chance encounter at surfing lessons brings together Riley and Logan, both escaping their traumas, as they forge a healing bond neither anticipated.Feature Drama

FILMMAKING TEAM:

Director & Co-Writer: Adam Michael

Producer & Co-Writer: Makayla McIntosh

OF NOTE: Best Feature Film at Couch Film Festival

WATCH HERE.

LEAVE A REVIEW.

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

Welcome to the film festival circus *ahem* circuit, the single most emotionally exhausting and increasingly meaningless ritual in the indie filmmaker’s calendar! If you’ve just submitted to your twenty-first festival this year after receiving your umpteenth “not selected”, then congratulations! You’re doing it right…?

I’m Stefan van de Graaff, and I have been scouring the globe, talking to indie filmmakers, programmers, and anyone I can, gathering stories about what’s actually happening out there right now, because the smoke you’re smelling sadly isn’t Roger Deakin’s fog machine, it’s the torched social contract between indie filmmakers and film festivals!

The Contract We Thought We Had

I’ve been thinking recently about what delusions I have held, perhaps unfairly, about the film festival circuit and have arrived at what I think many other indie filmmakers hold.

There was an implied agreement that went something like this: you make something bold, raw, and maybe a little financially inadvisable. It has to be good. We never expected festivals to program bad work. Then you package it up, pay the entry fees, and hand it to a programmer whose job is to sift through them, and if it’s a fit, they put your film in front of an audience hungry for it.

They get money, access to talent, and the opportunity to further the good art in the world. You get discovery, an audience, some validation, and if you’re lucky an award. But most importantly, you were sold that you’d get that all-important meeting with a producer, or sales agent, or distributor in the bar at the networking event on the third night who’s seen your film and can’t stop thinking about it and is going to help you expand your short into a series, or buy your feature, or finance your next one, or introduce you to the people who might.

Both parties seemed to play their role. The filmmaker brought the art. The festival brought the platform.

But maybe you, like me, are waking up to the fact that the contract is being quietly rewritten. The new terms, if anyone were honest enough to publish them, would read something like this:

Pay the ever-increasing entry fee for the privilege of being considered—either by a volunteer with zero context, qualification, or mandate other than a vague brief of “what we’re looking for” or worse, by an algorithm. If you are rejected, expect zero feedback because “we simply have too many submissions and not enough volunteers to care” and just ignore the fact that only 10% of your unique Vimeo link was watched by our team. And if you are selected, congratulations!!! Do not expect any meaningful support in attending beyond a 15% discount you can redeem at an expensive hotel. And when you arrive don’t expect any of the industry infrastructure that used to attend the festival. No press, no sales agents, no distributors, no financiers, no film commissioners or governmental institutions. You will not be “discovered”. Instead, plan on meeting throngs of other lost artists, desperate for support just like you. Oh, and if you have more money to burn, you can pay to submit your work for an award. But as a reminder, the award means nothing except something you can put on your website that no one will look at either. Deal?

“Deal!” rings the chorus of indie filmmakers around the world.

Now let me pause here to say two important things. Firstly, I know this is a broad stroke. So if you’re a festival director that feels unjustly called out by this, then the problem might not be you, but know that your peers are doing this and that if you’re not like them, then you should start to say it publicly and explicitly. That way you don’t get painted with the brush while calling out its realities, and so indie filmmakers know where to find and support you!

Secondly, do not discount meeting the other lost artists. It’s an awesome experience and probably what we filmmakers should have been attending for in the first place…but more in a revolutionary “let’s band together and share secrets and resources” kind of way.

Now back to the point…why has this happened?

The Concertina of Money

What nobody will say on a panel (so I will here) is this: the top 20-30 festivals in the world are no longer discovery platforms…they are marketing platforms that do some discovery on the side.

After COVID financially decimated both filmmakers and festivals alike, there was a structural shift. There was an oversaturation of creators (ie. supply up). Consumer attitudes had changed (ie. demand down). And most importantly, festivals basically had a full year of zero revenue (which few businesses can survive). They couldn’t cover their nut anymore by offering world-class programming. So they had to go where the money was (re: the studio-adjacent “independent” films that needed a festival marketing campaign before their awards run).

At a Sundance panel I attended a couple years ago, a programmer let slip that only 60% of their programming came from submission. Think about what that means. The remaining 40%, nearly half, came from other channels. Just look at the films that are premiering at the biggest festivals and you’ll see that many of them are entering the festival with the distributor already attached… Pause here…think about it…wasn’t that supposed to happen after the screening when critics raved about the film? Why would Netflix and A24 and Neon and Mubi strike deals before premiering the work if the platform, the festival, wasn’t just a marketing tactic? It makes sense. Festivals need money. They sell more tickets when a celebrity is in a film or it’s their directorial debut than you do with a no-name actor and director.

And the concertina effect crushed everyone below them. A film that would’ve had a genuine shot at a tier-one festival ten years ago gets pushed to tier two. The tier-two festivals, facing the same financial pressure, start programming safer bets—the film with the recognisable name above the title, the thing that sells passes. A festival that would’ve taken a creative risk on your formally challenging debut is now calculating the Instagram reach of your cast.

Recent reporting found that only about 2% of films are accepted into top-tier festivals — and of those, only around 11% manage to sell worldwide rights. As one industry observer put it bluntly: “Anyone who believes it’s a sustainable model to bring a film to Sundance and expect it to sell for a profit is kidding themselves.”

The Rise of the New Scam Festival

And lurking at the edges of all this is something even worse: the festival that has no intention of doing anything but taking your money.

Filmfreeway has seen a massive increase in festivals and many of them are fly-by-night scams. You probably know them. Submission windows that never close because they’re not really curating, they’re harvesting. The same festival in 15 different countries that all are in their first or second year. You pay the entry fee and six weeks later you get a digital certificate and a laurel designed in Canva. Congratulations! Your film has officially won the New York Independent Cinemafest’s prestigious Golden Hockey Puck Award. Nevermind that the festival has no physical location, no audience, no programming history, and is probably just a guy in his bedroom sponging up your money.

Let me be clear. If the social contract is moot, then what prevents these types of scammers from arising and flourishing in the confusion of opaqueness? The answer is nothing and it’s why it’s becoming a big problem.

The Homework to Do

This article would be useless to you if I left it there. You already know it’s a bloodbath out there and probably don’t need to be reminded. So here’s the sliver of hope in all of this.

There are still great festivals. There are still programmers who care, who are genuinely hunting for the film you made, who have maintained the original contract in good faith. They’ve just become harder to find and they don’t necessarily have the marketing budgets of the festivals you already know. So finding them takes some work on your part. It will be unglamorous. It’s the research-heavy, spreadsheet-building work of finding the right home for your film. But it is what is required now.

One place worth starting: Director’s Notes. I’ve met Mar Belle and Sarah Smith who run it. They’ve not only been doing this for twenty years, they’re firm advocates for truly independent cinema and are unbelievable curators too. I believe they are true champions of the film festival spirit we all crave. And there are others like them. Dig into the programming history of any festival before you submit. Watch what they selected last year. Find the festivals that are punching above their weight on curation. Those festivals exist and the original contract still holds.

The War Isn’t Over

I’m not telling you to give up on festivals. We need them to meet each other. We need them to be introduced to audiences. And maybe we need them to impress our parents. But I’m also telling you to stop fighting the war on their terms.

The indie filmmakers who will survive the current collapse are the ones who understand that the festival circuit is a tool, not a destination. Use it tactically. Be selective. Do the homework. And never, ever pay $80 to a festival that’s been “accepting submissions” since 2019 with no closing date and a laurel that’s been awarded to 4,000 films this calendar year. Be careful out there! And as always, long live independent art!

Stefan Van De Graaff is a filmmaker and co-founder of The Jung School. His debut feature One of Us, starring Kit Connor, premiered at the Manchester Film Festival (yes it’s one of the good ones!) Follow him on Substack at .

Write for Us

Got a review? An interview? An article idea? Pitch it to us! Film Soup Zine is a newly formed indie film publication dedicated to all things indie film. We’re open to writer submissions at this time but bear with us because we’re building the plane as it’s taking off!

Use the Google form below to send us your idea.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Pitch Film Soup

Speaking as someone of an underrepresented demographic in cinema1, I tend to have a problem with movies that — and this is the key word — primarily make to break stereotypes and commit to authentic representation. What this prerogative often results in is a film that defines itself by what it isn’t, meaning of course that it’s not defining itself by what it is, and subsequently ends up assimilating into a language of breezy suburbia that only really allows the presence of who’s being represented on the condition that they aren’t really themselves.

Luckily, there are ways to rise above this, such as making small narrative investments that build thematic interest as the plot unfolds. Daruma does exactly this, and as a result pushes its envelope beyond the degree it lays claim to on the tin.

It can be as simple as writing the film’s main character as a man and army veteran. In Daruma, this very act allows us to infer that Patrick has probably spent his entire life being taught that his value — first as a man and then especially as a member of the military — is tied to how much and how efficiently he can provide for the infrastructure of his country, whether that’s overseas imperialism or his pseudo-designated slice of America’s domestic dimension.

And when you’re taught that your value is closer to that of a steel girder than a person, you run the risk of believing that you’re incompatible with or useless to the arena of emotional intelligence, the results of which are neatly encapsulated in Patrick’s rampant pursuit of feeling “good” all the time via booze and strippers and cigarettes. Robert alludes to these cultural psychological enforcements as well, with a pair of sneaky lines:

• He admits to Patrick that he was never that good of a father (parenthood is the purview of emotion and is even arguably measured by your ability to make yourself obsolete), and, conversely…

• …he tells Camilla that he lost his arms because he was “a little too good at his job”2 (being good at your job is the purview of hegemonic masculinity, triply so in the context of the military).

Then there’s the matter of the film’s namesake; the Daruma doll tattoo that Patrick notices on Robert’s back. Robert tells him that, when you get the Daruma tattoo, you only get one of the eyes filled in to represent a wish or a goal (such as, say, forgiveness), and then once said wish/goal is made true/achieved, you go and get the other eye filled in.

At a glance, this is just a soft narrative device, but it ties into the position that these two inhabit as men and soldiers far more deeply than it may seem. Traditionally, Daruma dolls are used as yearly charms of good fortune whose providential abilities are believed to expire by the end of the year, after which they’re put through a ceremonial burning before getting replaced with new Daruma dolls for a new year.

Prior to surrendering these dolls to the flames, the folks who used them for that year express gratitude to them.

A “thank you for your service,” if you will.

Tip your Film Soup writer!

Patrick’s accident, then, brings this pseudo-ordained cultural il/literacy to its natural conclusion: He becomes effectively cut off from the place he was taught he was useful, and is now confined to the (in his case) unkempt jungle of emotion. This is, on the most elemental level, where his bitterness is coming from, and it was always coming to this.

Because, really, it wouldn’t have mattered when Patrick was cut off from said place; at some point, everyone stops being empirically useful, but the emotional aspect of one’s humanity is relevant to each corresponding person until death.

What’s more, even if you’re both empirically useful and emotionally literate like Camilla’s grandfather Horace — who intends to give his dying wife round-the-clock care once she’s out of the hospital — that’s not going to protect you from the decidedly human pains that accompany every decidedly human miracle. Indeed, love begets loss, greater loves beget greater losses, forgiveness begets the uncomfortable process of living up to it, and you’re probably going to send Camilla — the kid who somehow, someway, saw the best in you — off to college one day, and boy is that gonna wallop you.

You see, Patrick? Literate or not, the pain’s going to find you, so you might as well forsake the mathematically disproven idea that you’re not compatible with the only element of your life that will be with you until death, and work to put your stock into those miracles while you still can. In many ways, they are all their own Daruma dolls, taking singular, temporary shapes in the clay of our humanity and then leaving equally-singular holes as both proof of learnedness and the starting point for even more learning, even if the impact they leave you with isn’t quite what you had in mind (i.e. Anna).

All in all, three spoons for Daruma:

• Breaking ground on casting conventions without making the casting the point

• Tucking whole worlds of subtext into the tiniest details

• Some tough love that turns out to be the sweetest love of all

Film Soup Zine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today’s Filmmaker Tech Stack profiles writer/creative

is an award-winning NonDē cinema-maker who graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University. She began her career with Filmmakers Alliance, where she quickly rose to the role of Executive Director.

Since then, she has built a dynamic career across the film industry, holding roles at Light Iron Digital and HotHouse Productions, and serving as a programmer for the VisionFest Film Festival.

Her work includes films such as Plus or Minus: A Few Things I Thought I Should Consider and That’s Not My Mother, in addition to producing numerous other projects. She is currently developing the omnibus project Red, White, and Blue and is in development on her third feature, Unclaimed, which is part of the NonDē 50 Films Project.

Amanda, tell us here at Film Soup Zine: What’s in your filmmaking tech stack?

As a writer/creative, I am obsessed with physical notebooks. If starting a new project I often procrastinate and want to find the perfect notebook to keep all of my ideas/notes/to do lists in. I have do different typed there’s the smaller notebooks full of random ideas, thoughts, and observations that I may never go back but I like to think that the writing down of these things makes it stick in the back of my mind more so I can remember them.

Then there’s the dedicated project notebook, where all notes, to do lists, for specific projects go, these ones I do refer back to and use through production (should it be large enough).

If I’m doing something like driving and unable to grab one of my handy notebooks, I’ll use the Notes app on my iPhone, especially handy for driving with the voice memo option, and as anyone in LA knows, we are often sitting in traffic which provides ample time for ideas to surface.

Notes is where most of the notes I that I actually do go back to live.

When writing my screenplays, it’s always Final Draft. It’s the one industry standard software that I feel is always worth buying.

For pre-visualization, I love Shot Deck. Worth the monthly subscription to be able to look up specific shot types, especially for creating decks, or even storyboarding… since I can’t draw to save my life and I’ve found stick figures aren’t the best, thought I did impress Beth Napoli, my extremely talented Cinematographer on “That’s Not My Mother”, when I storyboarded a scene using photographs that I took of my daughters Barbie dolls. As artists we always find a way!

I use Keynote to put my decks together. I’ll use Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom for editing photos or graphics, plus Canva at times for design stuff. Another go to for me is Unsplash, when I’m in need of photos I do not have.

Another incredibly useful tool I rely on is StudioBinder. I go to them for a wide range of resources, from free templates (ie: budgets, deal memo) to their affordable, easy-to-use production management software. When I’m actively in production, I use it for script breakdowns, scheduling, and generating call sheets.

Beyond the software, StudioBinder also offers an outstanding educational blog that covers nearly every aspect of film production. Their content is clear, practical, and incredibly helpful whether you’re just starting out or already working in the field. They also run a fantastic YouTube channel filled with in-depth videos on filmmaking craft, topics like camera movement and shot sizes are broken down with real film clips, so you can see the techniques in action as they’re explained. It’s all the film school you’ll ever need.

I’ve also found Giggster and Peerspace useful when looking for locations.

And for editing, I now use DaVinci Resolve, I went to them once I lost access to my Final Cut 7 and the transition was really easy, as they function mostly the same and the interface and fairly intuitive, and the best part is, it’s free.

How Can People Learn More About You & Your Work?

People can learn more about me and my work at my website, linked below.

Learn More About Amanda

Here’s a list with links to the tech Amanda uses, for those of you looking to learn more:

1. Apple Notes

• Built-in note-taking app on iPhone

2. Final Draft

• Industry-standard screenwriting software

3. ShotDeck

• Visual reference library for filmmakers

4. Keynote

• Presentation tool used for decks

5. Adobe Photoshop

• Industry-standard photo/graphics editor

6. Adobe Lightroom

• Photo editing and organization tool

7. Canva

• Easy-to-use graphic design tool

8. Unsplash

• Free high-quality stock images

9. StudioBinder

• Tools for scheduling, call sheets, script breakdowns

10. Giggster

• Platform for finding filming locations

11. Peerspace ()

• Rent spaces for shoots, events, productions

12. DaVinci Resolve

• Professional editing + color grading software

13. Final Cut Pro 7

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading Film Soup Zine ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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A Guest Post by : This Is What Filmmaking Looks Like Without Permission

Robert Godwin’s essay details what NonDē filmmakers are building outside the traditional system, how they’re redefining success on their own terms, and why a growing movement of creators believes the future of cinema no longer depends on permission.

Filmmaker Profile: ’ Tech Stack

Anna C Bastos is a Brazilian-born, NYC-based sound mixer and designer working across film, television, and theater. Read her interview to learn about the tech stack the busy engineer depends on for her projects!

Click to Read

Today’s Featured Film in the Film Soup Library: PRESENCE

After her business partner goes missing, a woman finds that she has mysteriously reappeared and brought an investor onboard for their company which will require them to travel to Puerto Rico to finalize it, forcing them on his yacht for the trip where she believes a dark spirit is haunting her.

FILMMAKING TEAM:

Written by Peter Ambrosio & Christian Schultz

Director Christian Schultz

Produced by Isaia LaBorde

Co-Produced by Donny Broussard

OF NOTE: Panic Fest select, Distributed by XYZ.

WATCH HERE.

LEAVE A REVIEW HERE.

Access the Film Soup Library

Want to get featured in Film Soup?

Use the link below to submit yourself to be featured in the Filmmaker’s Tech Stacks. Publicists, you’re also welcome to submit. Please do your best to mirror the format above for your submission and send complete answers. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Click Here to Submit Yourself

About Film Soup Zine

Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

Click here to learn more.

The NonDē movement is not theoretical. It’s underway. Filmmakers are already working inside its loose but urgent principles. They do it without permission, without waiting, without the safety net of industry approval. From the trenches. Real people. Real work. This is not a manifesto written after the fact to explain what just happened. It is happening now.

organized a series of Filmstackers Roundtables. Thirteen sessions where these ideas were tested, challenged, and expanded. Nobody agreed on everything. Everybody listened. Everybody contributed. The result wasn’t consensus. It was clarity. That’s the point.

This article puts those filmmakers on the record. How they are making films. Why they make them. What they are building outside the familiar systems that have defined “success” for decades. If you care about where cinema is headed rather than where it has been, this story matters. These voices matter.

A Look at the NonDē / Film Stack Community

makes films for a specific community: medical marijuana users. Not in a vague, demographic sense. In a direct, lived, day-to-day sense. He writes to their concerns, their challenges, their humor, their frustrations. He produces work that reflects them back to themselves. Built­-in audience. Relevance guaranteed because it’s not guessed at. It’s known.

makes feature-length films by raising money from people who want the work to exist. Not abstract investors chasing trends, but supporters who understand what he’s trying to do. He is active in the loosely connected NonDē community and is driven by a simple proof: start it, finish it, get it out into the world. Repeat. The long shot remains what it always was, a studio opportunity with a real budget. But it’s no longer the starting point, it’s a possible byproduct.

and both operate across features and shorts, and both understand that making the work is only half the job. The other half is getting it seen.

Courtney’s features live across streaming platforms, navigating the existing channels without waiting to be discovered.

Jen works differently. She integrates her Appalachian community directly into the process. They don’t just watch her films. They participate. They act. They crew. They show up. The line between filmmaker and audience starts to blur, and something more durable takes its place.

Sasha builds from Portland, Oregon, using the same principle, start local, stay relevant. He pulls local businesses into the narrative. He draws actors from his own workshops. The films reflect the community they come from, and the community supports them because they recognize themselves in the work. This isn’t theoretical engagement. It’s direct. It’s immediate. It works.

How much further can filmmaking be democratized? That question used to be rhetorical. It isn’t anymore.

This is the core of NonDē: a movement without a central authority, without a single leader dictating terms. helped articulate the idea and continues to act as a kind of guidepost, pointing toward what filmmaking can be when stripped of its dependency on permission. This is not a top-down system. It doesn’t need one.

Not bitter. Realistic.

Every NonDē filmmaker understands a basic truth. If their story is going to exist, they are the ones who will make it exist.

First, have something to say. Not a vague ambition, not a half-formed pitch. A story. Then have the nerve to tell it.

Second, gather whatever resources you can scrape together and build it. That’s it.

There is no third step where someone shows up to validate you.

If you have a cell phone you have a movie studio. If ‘they’ have a cell phone, you have a theater.

What NonDē filmmakers are doing amounts to a declaration of independence. They are not waiting for permission or asking to be let in. That doesn’t mean they’re naïve. They want recognition. They want their work seen and would like to make money doing it. They are not anti-success. They are anti-stagnation.

This is trench-level creativity. And yes, it’s hard. There is no version of this that isn’t difficult. There are no excuses built into the system because there is no system to absorb them. What you need is the willingness to grind through it anyway. No excuses. No permission.

The NonDē Playbook: Four Rules That Actually Matter

The hierarchy of guerrilla filmmaking looks like this:

Perfection. Forget it. It will slow you down and kill the work before it breathes.

Communication. Essential. If the audience doesn’t understand what you’re saying, nothing else matters.

Relevance. Know exactly who you’re speaking to. Not “everyone.” Someone. A real audience.

Revenue. Plan for it. There are more distribution channels now than at any point in history. Use them.

A lot of people still chase the traditional theatrical experience. The darkened room. The fixed seats. The massive screen taking over your field of vision. It’s seductive for a reason. It works.

But the NonDē approach recognizes something simpler and more immediate: the real venue is the audience you can reach. A rented ballroom. A back room in a coffee house. A local theater. A pop-up screening. The location is secondary. The connection is the point.

This is not “build it and they will come.” That idea has burned more filmmakers than it has helped. NonDē flips it. Know what your audience wants. Know where they are. Then go to them and give them something that matters.

Simple. Not easy. But simple.

If you have something to say, say it. If you have a story, tell it. If you have a network, use it. If you don’t have one, build one. None of this requires permission.

That’s NonDē. And it is where cinema is going, whether the industry wants to admit it or not.

It’s also worth stating plainly, the traditional Hollywood system is not built to support this kind of creative autonomy. That’s not an indictment. It’s a description.

Studio filmmaking is driven by layers of decision-makers, each putting their career on the line with every greenlight. Risk is managed first. Money is the primary metric. Story and creativity can rise to the top, and sometimes they do in remarkable ways. But they are not the priority. They can’t be.

Money drives the studio system. Warner Bros. Discovery initially cancelled Coyote vs. Acme in November 2023 to claim a roughly $30 million tax write-off, viewing it as a financial asset to be “shelved” rather than released, despite having tested well with audiences. The point is money first, relevance and story second.

Studios ask audiences to come to them.

NonDē filmmakers go out and find their audience.

That’s the difference.

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Today’s Filmmaker Tech Stack Profiles Sound Mixer & Designer, .

is a Brazilian-born, NYC-based sound mixer and designer working across film, television, and theater. Holding an MFA in Media Scoring from CUNY Brooklyn College, she brings a multidisciplinary approach to every project, moving fluidly between production sound mixing on set, sound design in post, and live sound operations in theater, each demanding a distinct and specialized toolkit.

Her credits include Firebird, a stop-motion animation with documentary photography supported by two NYSCA grants and PSC-CUNY funding; Late Bloomers, an independent series that premiered on FOX Soul; and The Passion According to Janair, an off-off-Broadway production by Group Dot BR at HERE Arts Center that received institutional support from NYC Cultural Affairs, LMCC, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others.

Anna, tell us here at Film Soup Zine: What’s in your filmmaking tech stack?

For Sound Design, I use Pro Tools for editing and mixing, iZotope RX 11 for audio repair and restoration, iZotope Insight 2 for metering and loudness analysis, and Soundly for sound library management and sourcing. The films I work on usually request I deliver mixes targeting festival and streaming loudness standards.

For Live Theater Sound Operations, I use QLab for playback and show control, and Pro Tools for additional mixing needs.

As for Production Sound Mixing, I have my Sound Devices MixPre-10 II as primary recorder/mixer, Sennheiser MKH 416 for boom, Shure SLX-D wireless system for talent, and run my kit out of an ORCA OR-30 bag and ORCA OR-444 harness for field recording setup.

How Can People Learn More About You & Your Work?

People can follow me on Instagram here or visit my portfolio at the website below.

Check Out Anna's Portfolio

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Film Soup Zine is a new indie film publication born out of the need to make more space for independent films and filmmakers. Film Soup Zine features reviews, interviews, and more from the indie film community.

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