Letters Unsent: Unknown Child Filmmaker
Dear Unknown Child Filmmaker,
You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but you bared a piece of your soul to me and a group of miscellaneous office workers once. Our company held something like a talent competition; you could submit anything at all captured on video to win a cash prize. We had opera singers, trick shots, BMX stunts and belly dancers. You had two entries; we watched them both, gathered there in the boardroom with one young marketing manager ready to tally votes on her spreadsheet.
“I can make good films,” you said. I don’t remember anything else about your introduction but I can play that sentence perfectly in my head. You meant it, and you were right. I can’t describe the joy I felt, seeing a kid’s one-man production within the confines of a suburban home. The creativity you were forced into by your limitations, the delight of your young perspective. Stuff like panicking about a home invasion but grabbing some chips out of the cupboard first. Your shots were actually really good, you know? You had a great sense of timing, the editing was impressive and you cobbled together tense and foreboding atmospheres out of toys and household objects.
And you know what? You were gonna win. We all voted - there may have been some filibustering on my part - but we had the recommendation written up and ready to send off to the big boss. And that bastard knocked it back because you used a steak knife in one shot, where a teddy bear was coming to kill you. Ketchup for blood. “We can’t have kids playing with knives!” What a crock of shit.
The prize went to some grown man who definitely didn’t need it, who could already afford some flashy sports gadget that he probably rented out for a fortune over the years. Sure, it looked cool, but it wasn’t meaningful. That prize wasn’t life-changing to him, it was just another drop in the bucket. I still get sore every time I think about it: that money could have bought you a professional-grade camera. It could have paid your TAFE fees all the way through to an Advanced Diploma of Screen and Media. It eats me up inside.
Did you give up on films when you got older? I can’t find your entries anywhere, I tried every search term I could think of. I don’t know if you took them down out of simple self-editing, but I really hope you didn’t stop because you thought no one cared. You must be coming up to your twenties soon - are you doing a film diploma? Maybe you got into TikTok or something; I wouldn’t know how to check. At the very least, I hope you still make films for fun. They’re good films, and you should be proud of them.
