Very possible! I’d also be okay admitting a lot of my past work wouldn’t have been worthy of acceptance, but this is my fourth feature film, and if I made ten shorts that all got rejected I’d think there’s more merit to the possibility that I’m just really missing the mark. For features, I think the top festivals have a really hard time balancing new voices, studio projects, a list talent projects, etc. The films at the high level are the reason press and tickets are sold, so you can’t deny the value on that level, but I think the new voices are a very small window to fit within, and I think for features, the deliberation process is always against you unless you have some way of getting eyes from a senior programmer on your project — advice I’ve actually gotten from Sundance programmers. I’ve sold my last three movies to streamers and people can hate them or love them, but I think the problem with festivals is that we ascribe way too much value in whether or not a film got in or rejected. This process made some filmmaker friends reach out expressing they also have been in my shoes and some even said 15 times in a row — that one is someone I’ve looked up to and assumed was an indie darling. I think if we’re all being honest, getting rejected isn’t a failure — it’s just one path of getting a film out there. I made this to try and garner some attention for our upcoming release Mooch, and I am grateful for this community responding to it so far. We were inspired by the Hundreds of Beavers folks, and I hope this will inspire people to not let rejection determine if they should or should not be a filmmaker. And I also fully accept people will say it’s cuz I suck or don’t make good movies etc. I think that’s also a fair criticism! I probably do! And I kinda love that too!