So you’re an independent filmmaker and you’ve got it pretty tough. Filmmaking is an expensive business, and you have to tell your story with a limited budget. Worse, you’ve got to fight tooth and nail to find the revenue in the first place. If you work long and hard enough, you might finish your project on schedule and then it’s up to you to promote it, get it seen, take it to festivals, find a distributor and garner support. Not exactly a walk in the park, right? Try making your film in a war zone. Now that’s tough.

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Dawn Westlake’s latest project, ‘68º & Clear’, premiered earlier this month at the opening night of the New Beijing Film Fest. It has been selected to screen at a vast array of international film festivals in 2008 including the 6th Filmmor Women's Film Festival in Turkey, the 10th International Short & Independent Film Festival in Bangladesh, the Rwanda Film Festival and the Portobello Film Festival in London. Go Dawn!

'Silent Radio', the 2007 ECU festival's Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography winner has just won Best Short Subject at the 2007 Ellensburg Film Festival in Washington. The film, which is written and directed by Alan Arrivée, has screened in numerous festivals around the world, including Breckenridge and the Long Island International Film Expo where it picked up their Triple Play Award for Best Technical Integration (Cinematography, Art Direction and Original Score) and Best Actor for Eric Winzenried.

In my quest, to collect more information about the situation of Hungarian Cinema today, I came across a talented independent filmmaker, Madarász István. He was brought to my attention because even though he never went to film school his movies win award after award from the U.S. throughout Hungary to Spain. Recently, he even got a grant for pitching a new project to a 15 producer panel at the Central European Pitch Forum. I decided to ask him; what is the secret to be a successful independent filmmaker in Hungary today?! His unique insight to the country’s changing film industry gives a new perspective that is sometimes hard to hear but certainly very true. He belongs to a new generation of filmmakers who are eager and ready to take on the film world only with their talent and hard work…

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So after years of dreaming about being a filmmaker you decided to finally go for it. You begged, borrowed and maxed out your credit cards. The house had to be remortgaged and you even had to bail on the Christmas skiing holiday. You’ve seriously never been so bloody broke.

But you’ve got no regrets, you’ve made your film and the rest will be easy. But the fact is that it can be just as difficult to land a distribution deal. And after all the sacrifices and hard work, there is nothing more frustrating than the feeling that nobody will see your film.

Over the next few months in the lead up ECU 2008, I will go on an investigative mission to find out what the distribution options are for indie filmmakers today.

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