I Thought I Had Made It. Two Years Later I Am Starting Over

I have been getting panic attacks. There are moments where I am hyperventilating because I cannot see a way out of this. I want to say that first, because everything else I am about to write only makes sense if you know that part.

This is not a story about defeat though. It is a story about rebuilding, and it is the story I want to tell on this channel.

Two years ago I thought I had made it in filmmaking. I had just finished shooting my first two feature documentaries, two years of work all around the world, and there were international projects lined up behind them. It felt like the beginning of something that only goes up.

Two years later, I am coming out of a year with exactly one paid job, which barely covered the investment I had put into it. Almost no profit. Nothing else. I spent that year marketing myself: cold calls, reaching out to production companies, trying to get hired as a DP, meeting after meeting, rebuilding and optimizing my website. Not one inquiry came through that website. Not one call from anybody wanting to hire me. Professionally it was the hardest year I have had.

So this is the point where I have to start over. Not because the work was wrong, but because I have understood something I should have understood earlier: the jobs I actually want do not come to me. They will not knock on my door and pay me lavishly. I have to build them myself.

There is a Werner Herzog masterclass where he describes a filmmaking career in eight year blocks. The first eight years are pure pain, you hustle and nobody wants to see your films. After eight years you start to see the fruit: you get hired, you get paid, you get some recognition. After sixteen years you reach a kind of freedom where you pick the jobs you want and get paid anyway.

I am about twelve years in. And that first block was exactly what he described. Videos for gyms. Holiday homes. Small jobs I did not enjoy. At one point I was building websites for people so that they would then pay me to make the video that goes on the website.

Then came the jackpot: two real feature documentaries, at the same time, and travel to places only a handful of people ever get to see. I came out of it a different person, and not because of the traveling.

Before those trips I was one of those cinematic guys. I cared about cameras, technology, beautiful images. I wanted everything to look larger than life. I did not really care about story, I cared about frames.

It took about a year and a half on the road to break that. On the last trip for The Last Places, I met a woman who had traveled halfway across her own continent for one reason: to get the chance to tell her story in our film. She sat down with two men she had never met and shared the deepest and most painful things she carries, because she wanted other women to be able to own and speak about their own stories, and because she wanted something in her society to change. She told me things about a world I had been too comfortable to know existed.

That woman is Diaka, and she changed how I work. From that point on my craft was not there to look beautiful anymore. It was there to carry a story that does something. I had been calling myself an artist, or at least reaching for that word, and what was actually missing was impact. Nobody's life improves because of a beautiful advertisement for a gym. There is no deeper meaning in it. It is sales.

So I came home convinced that this was it, that now I would work with NGOs, now the meaningful jobs would come. They did not.

And that is what has been getting to me, because my personal life in these two years has been everything I ever wished for. I became a father. I am happier at home than I have ever been. It is the professional side that keeps pulling me down, and I have to change it. I have to get back into the state I know how to be in: functioning, working, solving problems in front of me rather than in my head.

Because that is what I actually did wrong. I sat at home and I thought, and thought, and thought about what I could do. I took tiny incremental steps that I told myself would attract somebody to pick me up and put me in their production. Essentially I was standing at the side of the road hitchhiking, painting a bigger and bigger sign that said pick me up. That is not how you get the work you want.

I am telling you this for one specific reason. Our feed is full of successful people living their best life and explaining how you get there. There is one coach, and then the next coach, and everybody is selling a program. There are very few people describing the middle of the struggle, while they are still in it, without knowing whether it works out. I do not know whether it works out. I have not given up.

Here is the plan.

This channel is where I take you along the journey, honestly, including the stupid things I do and the parts that do not work. The other channel is where the documentaries live.

I am developing a documentary series with the working title Dreaming Against the Odds. It follows people I feel connected to, people who have dreams that look impossible from the outside, and who are not interested in whether it is possible, only in getting it done. We start shooting soon. I have refined it for a long time and now I mostly have to start doing it.

And the road with Diaka did not end in Cameroon. We are building a non-profit organization right now, based in Germany and in Sierra Leone, working against female genital mutilation and creating opportunities for women and girls. My part is the storytelling. Getting people engaged in something good is exactly what I need in my life right now: telling significant stories that are not about me but about people who deserve the attention far more than I do.

If you are somewhere in the same situation, write me a comment, send me a message on Instagram, or use the WhatsApp link on my website. Not for coaching, I have nothing to sell you. Just if you need somebody to talk to who is currently in the same hole. I am here.