EAVE Impact Think Tank on Producer’s Mental Health, Trieste Film Festival
By Clair Maleney, Doc Producer & Psychotherapist Trainee, Film in Mind Research & Development
“Is this really what resilience looks like?” The thought popped into my head on day two of the EAVE Impact Think Tank on Producer’s Mental Health – part of the When East Meets West film market in Trieste.
We were in a deep discussion on the question of sustainability, a word so baffling to the 20 producers in the room we could hardly even land on a shared definition.
‘Sustainability’: the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.
The problem with this definition is the question of where that “certain rate” sits on the scarcity-to-abundance scale.
You could be precariously sustaining yourself, your productions, your business, your family with the bare minimum, borrowing time and energy from here to cover the needs of there. Everything keeps ticking along, but any headwind or gust has the ability to topple the whole house of cards.
It’s a different image to sustainability built on comfortable financial margins, room for error, enough rest, enough time, enough trust.
Sitting in the cozy room in Trieste, surrounded by 19 incredible producers from all around the world, I quickly realised how many of us sat in the first camp: Continuing with co-productions and projects buffeted by headwinds of changing audience preferences, financial markets, physical safety, and available funding. We are working within a system that feels unsustainable, and yet it sustains – how?
‘Resilience’ is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness, or the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
Producers are incredibly resilient. Bouncing back creatively from setback after setback. New approaches, new partnerships, new ideas. It’s a truly incredible and beautiful quality – and it’s being exploited.
Within the film industry, too many producers are required to stretch and stretch and stretch their resilience. To put their mental and physical health on the line as the ‘extra’ that keeps a production going.
The cost may be invisible within the budget, but it’s reflected in sleepless nights, new illnesses, irritability, resentment, tension, or burnout every incredible producer experiences.
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What hit me in the most profound way at this event, was that the thing that everyone spoke about needing the most was ‘connection.’ Trusted and informal closeness with people who ‘get it.’ People who can offer both understanding and advice – something that looks a lot like what we have designed at Film in Mind: Film Supervision.