I wrote, directed and edited a 5-minute existential sci-fi short called We Were Here Once. Shot over 2 days in the Dutch countryside with a small crew and around €10,000 of my own money.
It came from a simple question: if humanity had one final message to leave behind, what would be worth saying?
The biggest filmmaking lesson for me was how much casting can expand a tiny film. I somehow convinced Gene Bervoets and Johanna ter Steege, the two leads of my favorite Dutch film The Vanishing, to reunite 37 years later. That gave this small film an emotional weight I could never have built on my own.
After a year of festival rejections, I put it online last Friday. Numbers are small, but the responses are not. YouTube comments, DMs, Letterboxd. People from different countries writing about grief, loneliness, love, why the film stayed with them. For the first time, it feels like the film is meeting the people I made it for.
It made me wonder how much power we hand to festivals to decide whether a small film gets to exist. I still believe in them. But sometimes online viewers give a film a more honest life than any laurel ever could. When did your short actually feel seen? At a festival, online or somewhere you never expected?