DIY Filmmaker Digest 9 -- Week of January 5, 2026

Welcome to this week’s DIY Filmmaker Digest — part syllabus, part mixtape, part fever dream of cinema’s shifting ground. Below you will find: essays and interviews that ask what artists are tinkering with, what systems are breaking, and how you might improvise your own way forward. There’s a mild New Mexico bias, plus podcasts, videos, and trailers to keep your queue weird and your outlook restless.

But first, a little congratulations: our friend Melissa Flores got her fantasy western short film Tethered Girl funded! Melissa is a Mexican-American filmmaker and Tethered Girl is her latest movie, performed entirely in Spanish with an all-Spanish-speaking crew! We're casting right now -- if you speak Spanish and live in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area, we'd love to have you on board! Submit!

Also, we have other friends making films that need your support, including:

Becca Elbrecht's Whodonut

Niamh Khan's Tether

And a new, rather mysterious experiment ... more on that next digest! For now, follow The Worst Movie Ever on Instagram.

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And without further ado:

Articles

How Bi Gan Pulled Off the Most Technically Impressive Movie Scene of the Year

“As a rule, I tend to try to subvert a lot of preconceived notions or concepts about films.”

Hollywood Insiders Unite to Launch Creators Coalition on AI

“The biggest fear here is we can't let the tech industry set the terms for our industry again because last time that happened, we had a streaming war and that became a bubble that popped.”

How a $65K Indie Film Used Startup Strategy to Secure Distribution

“Everyone knows the drill: fewer buyers, slower deals, shrinking risk tolerance, and a talent pool stuck waiting for a system that isn't correcting itself.”

The Promised Land Is One of the Great Films About Capitalism

“Wajda looks upon the burgeoning capitalism of Łódź with a profound sense of ambiguity, equally appalled and fascinated by it.”

The Secret Agent Network

“Some say that trauma builds character; in Brazil, our historical trauma has built a dark sense of humor.”

Mamoru Hosoda's Scarlet Turns a Shakespearean Tragedy into a Message of Hope

“It's a confusing directive because after everything done to her family, Hosoda says. “She wonders how it can be so easy to forgive.”

Oh No, a Tech Company Is Buying a Movie Studio

“And Hollywood not only loves the status quo, the industry thrives on it.”

How Lauren Tsai Made the Year's Most Beautiful Animated Short

“It's not that Tsai was boring (which at least might have served the hyper-manufactured coziness of a show that aspired to feel like a gentle and naive riff on “The Real World”), but rather that the self-consciousness of her screen presence threatened to expose the soul-flattening bullshit of everything around her.”

The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World, 2025

“You might not expect a rural mountain town four hours east of Portland to be a haven for indie filmmakers with big dreams, but that's exactly what you get when you attend the Eastern Oregon Film Festival.”

Cover-up Follows Seymour Hersh's Life Uncovering Secrets

“The United States, as it does and continues to do, was supporting an opposition organization in Chile that were thugs and murderers, because they wanted to overthrow democratically elected President Allende.”

Marty Supreme Bears Us into the New World

“As if to stonewall against this ugly truth, he raises his standards to delusional heights.”

Podcasts & Videos

1x

The No Film School Podcast - How a Film Score Actually Gets Made (Step by Step) & Pete Ohs' Distribution Experiment of 2026

“The films are a table made of bubbles. They cannot support anything -- do not put anything on it, do not put your hopes, your dreams, your expectations, your budgets, because that is not what it is for.”

1x

The Lack - Ordinary People

“Wealth will not protect you, your social standing, [it] won't protect you from suffering.”

Who's Winning the War for Warner Bros.?

“I don't think there will be a credible regulatory process here.”

1x

Eye of the Duck: The Black Cauldron

“Regardless of how you feel about the film, it is important to the arc of history despite it being a massive bomb.”

1x

Song Exploder - Air - Playground Love

“The end credit song is so important because it's the feeling that the audience leaves with.”

Portrait of God

“While most viewers see nothing, some insist they see a person in the darkness.”

Trailers

And that's this week's digest. Shout out to all of Dust Wave's amazing filmmakers -- we have a special group of creative folks that make movies no matter what. Beauty and joy is our pursuit.

I also want to give a special shout out to all of our supporters and partners. 2025 was awesome, and your support is what makes everything we do possible.

A hearty good luck to Jeanette Aguilar Harris on her upcoming film shoot for Dancing Through the Darkness, taking place in Albuquerque in a few weeks! So stoked for what you and the crew create!

And as always, everything we share is chosen with the same compass: collectivity over ego, experiments over formulas, access over gatekeeping.

Keep making what only you can make, keep passing the torch sideways, keep stitching together the world we actually want to live in.

Alonso Indacochea

Dust Wave co-founder