I got accepted into the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival, one of the top film fests in the world! They loved my NASA-scavenged film “Please Don’t Send Help,” and that means I’ll be flying off to Iowa for an absolutely unforgettable week of films and fun and fantastic new friends in April.
Incidentally, that’ll be roughly four weeks into my Pacifc Crest Trail thruhike. (Which I’ll start on March 21 this time.) That’ll interfere with my idealistic purist goal of doing the whole trail with zero interruptions, but… I’d never forgive myself for not going. By that point of the hike, I’ll be somewhere between Agua Dulce and Tehachapi: in that part of California, you’re less than an hour’s drive away from Los Angeles.
And then… A ridiculously cheap flight from LAX to ORD (Chicago), and a driver waiting to pick me up, and a free homestay program, and multiple screenings, and I can’t quite believe this even as I type it in, eh.
…and then a flight back to the desert, and a bus back to whatever town I’d departes from (I’ll leave my hiking gear with a local trail angel), and getting right back on the trail, huzzah!
Fun trivia fact: I’ll need to buy a pair of jeans and at least a couple of T-shirts before my flight from LA. Thruhikers typically have no more than two outfits, and the novelty of being a wild desert dweller – compass and all – will probably wear off fast. (I guess I’ll send those clothes – and festival swag – to my very patient Montreal-based friend just before my flight back. No use for them in a hiking pack.)
Also, as promised almost eight months ago… JDIFF was the last festival on my list to respond to me. Tallying it all up, there were 28 festivals on my big ol’ wishlist. I didn’t actually end up applying to the last three (Stony Brook; Norwegian; Nevada City) because by the time their submission window opened, I’d gotten rather smitten by the notion of repeating the PCT. That left a total of 25 film festivals.
The two in Quebec have continued my funny trend of being rejected (occasionally quite rudely) from my own province. Ah well.
Of the truly huge festivals I’d dared to apply to, JDIFF was my sole acceptance – and that’s already far more than I’d ever dreamed of! That single acceptance right there is worth all the research, all the paperwork, all the planning.
The organizer of one major festival sent me a personal rejection note, saying they’re intrigued by my piecemeal style and would like me to apply again next year, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
In October, I managed to string together a mini-tour of three almost back-to-back festivals (with a couple of days in Denver in between): Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, ReadingFilmFEST in Pennsylvania, and Ridgway Film Festival in westeen Colorado. All three were fun in their own way, and Brooklyn resulted in my first-ever award! (Second place in the “comedy sci-fi” category for my “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” short film.)
…I see now that neither Brooklyn nor Ridgway were in my July post. Huh. Let’s change that denominator to 27, then.
Fargo Film Festival in North Dakota has accepted a very squished, two-minute long version of “Please Don’t Send Help” for their two-minute category. (I very cleverly named that squishie “Please… Don’t Send Help.” (A brilliant disguise – I know, I know.) Alas, my travel logistics won’t quite work out – but I hope the audiences will enjoy it!
My biggest wildcard bet for the Tampere festival in Finland didn’t work out, but there’ll always be next year. I’ll spend most of my 2026 being a feral nomad, which isn’t very conducive to filmmaking (you really, truly need an actual computer – not a phone or a netbook – to put a film together), but I’ve got two never-before-seen films up my sleeve… They should make me a contender once more.
And, finally, there’s the JDIFF in Iowa. That makes for a total of five acceptances out of 27 festivals. According to my calculator app, that’s an 18.5% acceptance rate! That is… huge. Absolutely huge. The prevailing wisdom in the filmmaking community is that getting accepted just 5-10% of the time is rather successful, but 18.5%… I am speechless, I truly am. Speechless and honoured and grateful.
I always have a few big projects cooking in the background. If one of them works out as expected (which I’ll find out within two weeks), my free time will be severely constrained, though my sense of purpose will spike. That won’t leave nearly as much freedom for film festival trips or epic thruhikes, but we’ll see.
The future is bright, eh.
Grigory Lukin.com 