On making a film with no money and too much feeling

For most of my life, I have been a student of films. I have never been to film school, never sat in a classroom learning how to direct a scene or build a story around a character. Whatever I know about cinema has come from watching it, returning to it, pausing it, sometimes thinking about a particular scene for days after the film has ended. I watch at least five films a week, sometimes more. On days when I feel particularly withdrawn from the world, when being around people or participating in the ordinary business of living feels like more than I can manage, I tend to watch even more. Cinema is my own small way of staying connected to the world without necessarily having to participate in it.

I have spent years observing how filmmakers look at people, how they make a room feel occupied even when nobody speaks, how a character's silence can tell you more than an entire conversation. I have learned to pay attention to the things that might otherwise go unnoticed: the way someone looks away when they are about to say something honest, the loneliness of a crowded street, the feeling a place carries long after the people who once inhabited it have left. Sometimes I watch a film and find myself thinking less about the story than about the person who decided to tell it that way. Why this frame? Why this pause? Why let the scene end here? It is an education that never quite ends. And for a long time, it was enough to be on the other side of the screen, learning.

Then, in 2025, I decided to make a film.

I had a script, a camera, and no money. There was no production budget waiting to be approved, no proper infrastructure to fall back on, no long list of resources that would make the process easier. There was only the story I wanted to tell and the slightly unreasonable belief that I should try telling it anyway. Looking back, I am not entirely sure whether this was courage or a lack of understanding about what I was getting myself into. Perhaps the two are not always distinguishable at the beginning of something. You have an idea, you feel strongly enough about it, and at some point the distance between imagining it and doing it becomes more uncomfortable than the possibility of getting it wrong.

So I started shooting.

One of my film friends came on board as the associate director. She helped me meet people who would eventually become part of the film, opening doors to conversations and introducing me to individuals I might not have encountered otherwise. What began with a script and an intention slowly became something shared. People gave their time, their presence, their trust. We figured things out as we went along, often without the certainty that we were doing them correctly. A kind of intimacy that comes with making something under these circumstances. You become acutely aware of what you do not have, but you also begin to notice what is available to you. A person willing to show up. A friend who believes in the project enough to help carry it. A location that works better than the one you had imagined. An afternoon that gives you the scene you were hoping for. The camera becomes less an instrument of production and more a way of asking people to spend a little time inside something you are trying to understand.

We made the film with what we had. There was no money to make the process comfortable, and there was no guarantee that the finished film would find its audience. But we kept going.

The film revolves around teenagers, their vulnerabilities, and the private worlds they carry around with them. It is about that unsettled period of being young, when you are old enough to understand that something is wrong but not always equipped to explain what it is. When you are learning to recognise yourself while simultaneously worrying about how other people see you. When the smallest things can feel enormous, and the things you cannot articulate often take up the most room inside you.

I have always been interested in these contradictions. The distance between what a person feels and what they are able to say. The versions of ourselves we construct to get through the day. The quiet negotiations we make with our fears, our anger, our need to be understood. With teenagers, these negotiations are often happening for the first time, without the vocabulary or the experience that might make them easier to navigate. I wanted to make a film that could sit with some of these feelings. I was interested in the questions more than the answers, in the things that remain difficult to explain even after we have spent considerable time trying to understand them.

Perhaps this is also why the film became such a personal undertaking for everyone involved. The people who came into it brought their own experiences, sensitivities, and ways of looking at the world. Even when we were working with a script, there was something in the process that felt larger than the written material. We were dealing with feelings that did not necessarily belong to one person or one character. They were familiar to us in different ways, and that familiarity made the work both meaningful and difficult. I think I underestimated what it would mean to make something so close to the things I spend my time thinking about.

Shooting a film, I discovered, is only one part of making it. There is the version that exists in your head, the version you manage to capture, and the version that begins to emerge when you sit down with the footage. These are not always the same film. Sometimes the material surprises you. Sometimes it resists the story you thought you were telling. Sometimes a scene that seemed important while shooting it becomes less convincing in the edit, while a small, unplanned moment turns out to hold something you did not know you were looking for.

Editing asks you to confront all of this. It requires a different kind of attention, one that is less about collecting moments and more about understanding what they mean when placed beside one another. A look changes when it comes after a particular line. A silence becomes longer, or heavier, depending on what precedes it. A scene can be perfectly fine on its own and still not belong in the film.

And then there is the problem of knowing when to stop.

I have spent the better part of a year editing this film. There have been stretches when I have returned to the same material repeatedly, looking at it from different angles, trying to understand what is missing or what I might be forcing it to become. There have been decisions I was certain about one day and doubtful about the next. The film has lived with me for much longer than I expected it to, following me through ordinary days and finding its way back into my thoughts when I was supposed to be doing something else.

A year is a long time to spend with something you have already made. At some point, the distance between the work and the person making it becomes difficult to maintain. You begin to forget what it was like to encounter the story for the first time. You become too familiar with every hesitation, every cut, every small imperfection. It is hard to tell whether you are making the film better or simply making it different because you have been looking at it for too long.

I have had to learn that finishing a film is not necessarily the same as reaching a point where you have nothing left to question. There may always be another edit, another adjustment, another version you could try. At some point, you have to accept that the film can only be what you were capable of making at that particular time, with the knowledge, resources, and emotional capacity you had then.

For a self-taught filmmaker, this process has been a series of lessons I could not have learned by watching films alone. Cinema had taught me what was possible, at least in the abstract. Making something of my own has shown me how much uncertainty exists between having an idea and finding a way to express it. I have had to learn by doing, by getting things wrong, by sitting with material I did not know how to fix, and by making decisions without the reassurance that I was following an established method.

I am still a student of films. I suspect I always will be. The difference is that I now understand a little more about the distance between loving cinema and making it. There is also something humbling about making your first film without money. You become aware of how much of filmmaking depends on things that cannot be purchased, and how much of it depends on things that absolutely can. Resources matter. Time matters. Access matters. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A lack of money does not automatically make a project more authentic or its process more meaningful. Sometimes it simply makes things harder than they need to be.

But when the resources are limited, you learn to recognise the people who make the work possible. You remember who showed up, who offered their help, who made an introduction, who trusted the process before there was anything finished to show for it. The film becomes a record of more than the images captured on camera. It carries traces of the people who helped it come into existence.

I think about that often when I return to the footage. The film belongs to me in the sense that I wrote and directed it, but its existence is not mine alone. It required other people to believe in a story they had not yet seen, to give their time to something that could not promise them much in return. I am grateful for that in ways I probably have not expressed adequately.

The film is still waiting to meet its audience. I have yet to release it or screen it, and I am hoping to do both before the year ends. Writing that sentence makes the whole experience feel suddenly more real. For months, the film has existed in a private space between the footage, the edit, and my own understanding of what I wanted to make. Releasing it will mean allowing it to leave that space.

I know that once it is out in the world, people will bring their own interpretations to it. They will notice things I did not intend them to notice and perhaps miss things that felt particularly important to me. Some will connect with it; others may not. That is part of making anything that asks to be seen by someone other than yourself. You can spend a long time trying to get a feeling across, but you cannot determine exactly where it will land.

For now, I am trying to make peace with that uncertainty. I want the film to be finished, to be watched, to exist beyond my own hard drive and the endless familiarity of the editing timeline. I want to see it in a room with other people, to experience the strange transition from something I have been carrying privately to something that can belong to an audience in its own way.

I began this project with a script, a camera, and an idea I could not quite leave alone. I have ended up with a film that took a year longer than I anticipated to bring into shape, and a better understanding of what it means to make something when you are still learning how.

I do not know if the next film will be easier. I imagine there will be new problems, new uncertainties, and a fresh set of things I do not know how to do. There will probably be moments when watching five films in a week feels considerably more appealing than trying to make one of my own. But I also know that I want to continue. There are stories I want to tell, people I want to spend time with, and parts of the world I want to understand through the act of making films.

For someone who has spent a lifetime learning from cinema, making this first film has been an attempt to enter that conversation in my own small way. Not with any certainty that I have something extraordinary to contribute, but with the willingness to begin before I know enough, to work with what I have, and to keep learning in the process.

Sometimes you make a film because you have the resources, the experience, and a clear understanding of what you are doing. And sometimes you make one because the story has stayed with you for long enough that not making it has begun to feel like its own kind of failure.

This was the second kind.

We made it with almost nothing, except for the people who showed up and the feelings we were trying to understand. I am still learning how to finish it, how to let it go, and how to live with the fact that making something personal does not necessarily mean knowing what to do with it once it is made.

But the film exists. After everything it took to get here, that feels like a reasonable place to begin.