Lightly my darling
on tiptoes and no luggage...
Hello out there and welcome to FilmStack Inspiration Challenge #80, courtesy of Ted Hope via Avi Setton & Nicole Galovski. In a nutshell, this is a daily series to build up FilmStack (since there is currently no Film/TV category Substack Team!)
The goal is to hit 100 consecutive days and you can see all the previous posts in this series. The larger aim is to create a new model for independent films called NonDē Film (ie: Non-Dependent), in a landscape where as The Label writes, “financing is stitched together from scraps, rights are surrendered for peanuts, and distribution often means disappearing into the void of platforms that don’t prioritize discovery or quality.”
I’ve written and directed two narrative features: Days of Gray, an Icelandic dystopian fantasy, and The Short History of the Long Road, a road trip drama starring Sabrina Carpenter and Danny Trejo. They are both squarely independent in style and substance, as will be my third, 5 Years, 5 Months, which I hope we get to bring to life in Paris in 2026.
In the meantime, I’ve been writing this newsletter since October 2022. It has been a real clearing house for my brain - a way of being understood, a way of understanding.
In that way, I haven’t really had to modify my contribution for FilmStack’s Inspiration Post Challenge. The prompt was to mention something or multiple things that have inspired you or are currently inspiring you. The Best Practices document specifies “your inspiration does not have to be limited to film or the art of filmmaking. It can be anything that inspires your pursuit of the art (or anything you are working on if you are not a filmmaker).”
As Ruth Gilmore says, “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, in experiments and possibilities.” Since the pandemic in particular, my ambitions for my career pale in comparison to my hopes for the larger world, which have ballooned well beyond the previous constraints of my imagination.
I still think of myself as a filmmaker, but since my last movie, I’ve also worn the hats of writer, mender, painter, organizer, teacher, doula and gardener. Here’s what is inspiring right now:
La Morada, a revolutionary space in the Bronx since 2009, is a mutual aid kitchen, an educational venue for community members and a hub where art and activism intersect. As over 40 million Americans (1 in 8!) stand to lose SNAP benefits due to the shutdown, now is the time to donate funds if you can, cook for your neighbors and keep taking care of everyone around us as our government fails to do so.
“The most anti capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself,” along with basically every other line from Johanna Hedva
Sick Woman Theory (2020)
Cackling for three days straight while writing an absolute fever dream of a show with Feel the News. It’ll be half animated, half live-action series set in a future where rats plot to take over New York from the humans who have trashed the place. Vermin with a vision, if you will.
“The worst notes try to make your film into something it was never meant to be. The best notes reveal what it was always meant to become” -
Mauro Mueller / El Suizo on how to take feedback or “one of the strange emotional tolls of filmmaking.”
The hamster scene in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Every single freak who turned out to Julio Torres’ Halloween costume party Cursed Amulet. I covered my entire face in googly eyes using a full tube of eyelash glue (imagine this) and I still felt under-dressed. Ann Friedman nails why it’s my favorite holiday: “It sits in a really good Venn diagram for me: at the center of crafting, dressing up, partying, and death.” Or in the words of Pattie Gonia, “Halloween is drag for cowards.”
Tangentially related - anxiously awaiting my used copy of The Costumemaker’s Art: Cloaks of Fantasy, Masks of Revelation from 1992. I am Slide 3.
“It’s as if someone has left a note by your bed and the first thing you see, every morning, is that the world is ending and it’s futile to believe otherwise” or how to make art In These (Internet) Times by Patrick Nathan for Entertainment, Weakly.
The history behind the Farm Security Administration’s “killed negatives” via extracurriculars Supervisor Rory Stryker took a hole punch to certain photographs to ensure they would never published... but when the archive was digitized in 1999, they became available to the public for the first time in history. “In the collection of killed negatives, we see the smiling faces of those who refused to be discouraged by the overwhelming hardships of the Great Depression. We see Black, Latino, Asian, and Native Americans who, though significantly underrepresented in the FSA’s published images, embodied the tenacity of the American spirit just as much as their White counterparts. We see a multifaceted picture of the Great Depression, a more human view than magazines or history books could ever present.”
“Doikayt”, a Yiddish word that roughly translates to “hereness” that I learned from Molly Crabapple. Her new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country is about the Bund, a Jewish socialist labor movement that arose in reaction to early Zionism. It was an organizing principle for Jews in Eastern Europe who believed in transcultural solidarity, as well as the right to stay and make home where you are.
Expanding on this, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write : “Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the ‘hereness’ of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. ‘Hereness’ can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.”
The deeply personal stories in this article produced in partnership between Columbia Journalism Investigations and Documented, co-published by The Guardian and republished by Prothom Alo in Bangladesh, and Plaza Pública in Guatemala. Climate change and migration are coming to a catastrophic head but there is currently “no clear category for protection of those fleeing climate disasters, leaving them in immigration limbo.”
Professor Rashid Khalidi’s A Short Course on Palestine, which was originally scheduled to be taught at Columbia University in Fall 2025. Due to Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump administration at the expense of its students, he found it impossible to teach his course there… and instead offered it at The People’s Forum, making it accessible to a much broader public.
As Will Durant writes in The Story of Civilization - “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry... The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.”
This passage by Aldous Huxley from Island, his final book (and utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World), read at a family friend’s memorial:
It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.
Till next time,
ASK
Thank you for your inspiring article. May “walking lightly” become more than a metaphor for us, may it become a lived art.