Boden Film Festival didn’t have any public screenings because of the corona virus. Only the judges watched the films and mine was one of the winners. It would have been nice of course to actually attend the screening and meet the audience and other filmmakers, specially when I won an award, which doesn’t happen that often*, and because this was in my hood, but this year things work a little differently, if at all.

*This was third time I won an award. Three different films, three different festivals.

I was interviewed for the local, big morning paper, NSD, and when I was asked to provide a web address, I directed them to my Swedish film site Slowlife Film. A site I hadn’t looked at for a couple of years so I needed quickly to make a new post about the film and I thought it was a good idea to update WordPress and all the plugins at the same time and, lo and behold, the whole site turned into one line of error code…
After I managed to fix that, soon a new problem arrived. The video players didn’t work anymore! That turned out to be a glitch on YouTube’s part not accepting external players. Maybe. But at least now it works again. For a while I was afraid I would need to do something with the API. And what’s that, you might wonder, and so did I!
And haven’t logged in for a couple of years I found some spam messages that needs to be deleted. 40 000…
I disabled the comments.

For the last weeks my Youtube statistics have gone up a lot and I don’t know from where much of the traffic is coming from. “Direct” or “unknown” isn’t very helpful. But hey, it’s okay, just keep it coming! And not only that the number of views are increasing. The time each person is spending watching the the video is increasing even faster! A similar thing happened when I was in Japan this winter and it lasted for a month. That time all the viewers came from Japan, this time it’s from America. In Japan it was mostly YouTube suggestions but now I have no clue.

Edit: all the new traffic is coming from YouTube suggestions. Before YouTube knows how to categorize the traffic correctly, it brands everything as “direct” or “unknown” it seems. I would have guessed that all the referrals come from videos that has something to do with Japan but the best performing video sending traffic my way is about brain health.

Other people too are making great documentaries and here is one I would like to recommend. The real Castaway at Top Documentary Films.

While the rest of the world has turned corona crazy, my everyday life goes on pretty much as before. I don’t go anywhere, I don’t meet anybody, just sitting in front of the computer and working by myself, and my economic situation is as bad as always.
The only real effects have been that I postponed the cinema premiere of ‘Voices from Finnmark’ and a film festival that I was going to attend (with the same film) decided not to have any public screenings.

A couple of weeks ago I talked with somebody who really liked what I had done, and my ideas about film making, and he strongly suggested that I should post an introduction video on my Toutube channel, make a Patreon page and start vlogging. It would make me tons of money!

Okay, I thought, maybe it was about time to put some effort into the community side of things.
So, I made an introduction video, which have got almost 100 views in the past two weeks, and surprisingly enough, 4 likes! I also made a Patreon page but so far no backers. There is a great opportunity here for someone to be a real pioneer!

I found the ‘community’ tab on my Youtube channel and put some posts up there too but I’m not sure if anybody has seen them yet.
I realized that I hadn’t posted anything on this blog for two years and wrote two long pieces about 2018 and 2019. This blog has been more or less a secret until now because I never advertised it, except for the links from my movie pages, but now I told everybody about it on Facebook. I got a couple of views the first two days but that has since dropped to nothing. I posted a link on a film makers forum where I’ve been a member for years and so far that post has got close to 200 views but as far as I can tell only one person bothered to follow the link.

You could easily work full time with your social media and still get very little for it and this is how it seems to work for bigger names too.

I shot a music devotional in a town nearby which was posted by the church on Facebook because the ordinary sermon was cancelled due to the coronavirus. I might actually get a little money for this and they have also asked me to make a bid for lessons to teach them how to shoot and edit.

A long list of rejections from film festivals at Film Freeway but this is exactly how it looks like for most of us, I think. This might actually be a good turnout considering that I’m far from being famous and the documentary is 2,5 hours long. I got accepted to two of them and there is still a few left at the bottom, and I showed it at two festivals that weren’t accessible through Film Freeway. Like everybody writes: it’s hard to get accepted unless you are well known, the film has a very strong connection to the festival, or you have a connection with the organizers.
Still, it is frustrating to spend a lot money and time on submission fees and to wade through thousands of festivals to find the ones that seems to be a perfect match, only to get rejected.
But that’s how it is.