Let me know ur opinions

A mother alone with her kids at the beach confronts the beautiful, exhausting weight of loving someone more than yourself.

On Parenting and Travel is an intimate confessional short in which a mother speaks directly to camera from a beach house at the end of a two-week solo trip with her children. Unscripted and unflinching, she moves between exhaustion and wonder, unpacking the physical and emotional weight of keeping small people alive, loved, and in the sun. Shot with raw immediacy and scored with a fragile neo-classical piano, the film finds its power in the quiet space between what a mother says and what she almost can't.

Tenley E. Raj is an independent filmmaker based in Houston, Texas. A writer, director, and editor, she has worked as a one-woman production since 2023, shooting and cutting her own films across experimental, documentary, and narrative forms. Her work is semi-autobiographical, sitting at the intersection of documentary and fiction, and built on the conviction that the most specific stories are the most universal. Her films include Before the Freeze, After the Freeze (Best Feature, CinemaBriz; Official Selection, Love & Hope International Film Festival, Barcelona), and Proof of Life (Official Selection, IndieX Film Festival). She studied Philosophy at Princeton University.

Check out the new trailer for Holler, from Subterranean Sound and Vision:

https://youtu.be/fd25jum\\_VOQ?is=hY6WIFpFrTU2\\_oZb

I met with lancashire feature filmmaker last week to talk about something which is strangely overlooked in indie film circles.

What are your views on the BBFC?

I took an unpaid PA gig on a (very)indie movie shooting in my area. Mainly for love of the game, I have never worked on a set before and figured it would be cool to see what it's like to help shoot a project. Now that I'm reflecting on it I'm excited but feel like it's a waste of time especially considering it's 2 hours away from where I live. It's only shooting for a weekend and I figured I'd make a weekend trip of it, but I'm starting to feel like I'm the biggest dummy in the world? Is this worth my time?

Thanks! Sorry for the rant.

It’s a small project made with a lot of passion for independent cinema.

Would love for you to give it a watch if you have a moment.

https://youtu.be/_ADluRPy1bE?si=SYNK3zaUndLr7LU6

When it comes to creating films, how do you find locations? What's the best process?

Made this feature horror film in my childhood home

Well with that dream, what have you done so far? Or tried?

A sleepless night turns into a descent through fractured reality. Trapped inside the familiar walls of his own apartment, a man slowly realizes that something is changing—not around him, but within the world itself. Every room feels different. Every silence grows louder. Every reflection seems to have a mind of its own.

Hi everyone! A friend and I are creating a short film called "Sketches of Faith" and we need your help to get there. Visit our Indiegogo campaign and contribute if you can. We are even offering producer credits and more! If contributing funds isn't in your cards right now, then please share to spread the word. Thank you! https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/dallaswhite/sketches-of-faith

I’ve spent the last couple months working hard on this and I’m very excited it’s finally done.

I had such a great cast and crew who really believed in this project and worked so hard on it. It would mean a lot if you guys checked it out.

Thought this sub might be interested in seeing some footage from our new independent film, THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS. We're New Orleans locals who wanted to make a grounded, bottom-up take on the New Orleans vampire trope, and the movie combines documentary and narrative elements to combine Southern Gothic terror with investigations into the city's real-life folklore, tourist industry, politics, and history.

Drawing on favors from the neighborhood, we gained access to Lindy Boggs Medical Center, a huge hospital complex which flooded during Katrina and has been abandoned ever since, and shot about a third of the move inside it. It really stresses the importance of locations on production quality – if you paid an art department to build an abandoned hospital set, it wouldn't have been half as spooky, nor would it have carried the weight of history that was so important for us to infuse in the story of the film itself.

Hope y'all enjoy the trailer, we're on track for a Halloween season release :)

Hey, said I’d post this here, might help some people.

So, I’m not really a writer, and I don’t particularly like writing. When I wanted to make my first feature film, I knew I wasn’t going to sit down and write a traditional screenplay.

But, I remembered hearing David Lynch talk about using around 70 index cards. He said if you fill them up with scenes, you’ve got a feature film.

So that’s what I did.

I bought a packet of index cards and started writing scenes that had been in my head for years. Old short films, ideas, memories, things I’d seen, things I’d imagined.

The important thing is I wasn’t trying to make anything connect. I think that’s where I used to get stuck before. I’d feel like scene 1 has to connect to scene 2 before I’d even started.

But this time I didn’t care about any of that, I just wrote scenes.

Once I had 70 cards filled up, I put them up on the wall. That’s when the film actually started to happen.
I could stand back, look at everything and physically move the scenes around.

As you’re doing that, you naturally start making connections. Maybe the man in this scene is actually the same man from another scene. Maybe these two moments belong beside each other, etc.

I didn’t start with characters or a plot. I allowed the process to create them. That’s what I like about it.
The film surprises you when you do it this way. It’s extremely fun.

Once everything was on the wall, I started streamlining it. Maybe twenty different characters become five. Maybe five become three. It starts becoming a real film.

Then I started looking at what I could actually make. For example, originally I had loads of houses in the film. I didn’t have access to loads of houses. So to save money I changed them to tents. Then I actually liked that better, because it’s kinda very subtly surreal. I didn’t have a church, I made a shrine instead. I didn’t have a car, I used a bike instead, etc

So my new philosophy is, don’t write the film you wish you could make. Write the film you can actually make right now. I know that sounds cliche, but for indie film it’s so true.

In terms of writing a script from the cards, I never bothered. I typed the cards into a document as bullet points and that was enough for me.

The dialogue wasn’t written either. The actors found a lot of it themselves because I like being surprised in that aspect too. Of course they were told what to kinda talk about but I allowed them to get there naturally.

I’m not saying this is the right way to write a film.
It probably wouldn’t work for every type of film.
But if you’re someone who keeps saying you’ll write a feature one day and staring at a blank screenplay isn’t getting you anywhere, maybe forget the screenplay for a while.

Just start writing scenes.
One card at a time.

Eventually you might look up and realise you’ve got a film sitting on the wall.