Before getting to the penultimate installment in this series, we’ve got big news! While we inked our deal with them weeks ago, it has now been officially announced that Buffalo 8 has acquired Resentment. We are absolutely thrilled to be distributed by such a well-regarded and smart company.
Our official trailer also just officially dropped today—check it out here.
You’ll be able to see the film itself in just a couple of weeks: Resentment will become available to rent starting August 14th on a variety of platforms, but pre-sales begin today on Fandango at Home. Pre-ordering the film is incredibly helpful for placement on that site going forward, so if you are so inclined please pre-order today.
As always, please follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok and on X to keep up to date on where the film is available. You can also add Resentment to your watch list on Letterboxd, and if you’ve seen the film please rate and review it there. Letterboxd is the home for fans of all varieties of film, and the more attention Resentment garners there, the better its chance of finding its audience.
Arriving at the Lighthouse International Film Festival, where Resentment premiered in June of 2025
When my executive producer first read the script for Resentment, he told me it reminded him of Steven Soderbergh’s first feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I was incredibly flattered of course; I also hoped he was being prophetic. Sex, Lies, and Videotape made a huge impression on me when it came out, both as a work of filmmaking and because of the James Spader character specifically, who was someone I hadn’t seen before but who I felt I understood. It remains a very important film to me personally. But it’s also the film that put Sundance on the map, launching the indie film movement of the 1990s. I had only been to Sundance once before, with the first feature that I was involved in financing or producing: Infinitely Polar Bear, a lovely little film that got a rapturous reception at its premiere there. Of course I wanted to go back again in triumph with my own feature directorial debut.
I knew the odds were stacked wildly against me of course. Most of the films that premiere at Sundance these days are well-known quantities long before they get there. Many are Hollywood productions, like 2026’s biggest sale, Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, a film not dissimilar to Resentment in some ways (highly contained, dialogue-driven, relationship-focused), but with four big stars, a director whose feature debut seven years ago was a smash hit, and based on established intellectual property. (The Invite is based on the Spanish movie, Sentimental, which had already been remade in Italian, German, Russian, Korean, and for all I know even more languages.) Many other films that are programmed have come up through Sundance’s own labs. Sundance’s major economic function is to offer both potential buyers and the distributors of films that have already been purchased a high-profile test audience and an opportunity to create positive marketing buzz. It’s possible for an unknown film to be discovered there, but it’s not very likely.
Nonetheless, we had an old-fashioned Sundance-style indie film on our hands, a relationship-driven story about characters attendees of the festival would recognize (two of them are filmmakers, after all). We didn’t have an “in” at the festival, so were trying to do this the old-fashioned way, submitting through Film Freeway (the equivalent of the common application for film festivals), and hoping to be that one film in 10,000 that the programmers fall in love with and decide to include even though they have no idea who we are or where we came from. I labored for days over the cover letter before submitting, largely because this was one of the few elements that I could still control. And then we waited.
We didn’t put all our eggs in that basket, of course. Sundance was a moon shot, a lottery ticket. We had a lengthy list of other festivals that we thought might be good targets for our film. The primary factor that went into that assessment was the kind of film we had made. We hadn’t made a genre horror film, for example, nor an experimental film, nor a film focused on a particular social issue. We had made a film that was very dialogue heavy, which we thought would make it a good fit for festivals that also ran screenwriting competitions and conferences. It was also set in New York and starred an all New York-based cast, so New York area festivals featured heavily on our list.
Once we had a list compiled, we divided it into tiers based on the one hand on how tough we thought the competition would be and on the other how helpful the festival would be as a launching pad. There are a variety of well-regarded festivals that aren’t really film marketplaces—places like the Austin Film Festival, Raindance, Dances With Films, Sidewalk, Riverrun and many others—that can do a great deal to increase the visibility of a film even if distributors don’t actually attend the festival. If anyone on our team had a history with a given festival or, even better, had a relationship with the people running or programming it, naturally that moved that festival up the list. Finally, we organized the festivals on a calendar with our premiere in mind. Many of the more competitive American festivals would expect to be the state premier, and sometimes the American or even the world premiere, and we didn’t want to blow our shot by premiering somewhere that wouldn’t garner us any notice. It all felt much like applying to college: we had a mix of reach, competitive and safety schools in our submission calendar, with most of the safety schools bunched later in the year.
Speaking on a filmmaker panel at the Lighthouse International Film Festival
Garnering exposure for the film was only one reason for submitting to film festivals, however. At least as important was the festival experience itself, the opportunity to meet other filmmakers and to screen the film in front of a live audience composed of people who are there because they love independent film, and to talk to and hear from that audience. I knew this was likely my only real opportunity to do that with Resentment, since so few films get even a limited theatrical release, and I remembered how great my experiences had been at almost all the festivals I attended with my two shorts. I didn’t want to miss out. Even if we only got into some of our “safety” schools, I would be excited to go.
Then we started collecting our rejections—a lot more than I had expected. After we’d received over a dozen, I reached out to a friend affiliated with a New York-based film festival that we had applied to, asking her what she thought of our chances (she was not a programmer and would not actually be involved in selecting the films), and whether we needed to recalibrate our expectations downward. In so many words, she said yes. They had only five feature slots; mostly they screened short films. In a normal year, they got 25 or 30 submissions for those five slots. This year they had already gotten over 200, and the final submission deadline was still a ways off. With the top-tier festivals no longer a realistic target for most indie films, she said, the next tier down had become as competitive as those famous marketplaces had once been. This pushed filmmakers both to consider less well-known festivals and to apply to a far larger number of festivals in total than before so as to insure getting in somewhere. Meanwhile, as technology made filmmaking more and more feasible, the number of indie films made grew every year. And on top of that, that year in particular there was an avalanche of films that had been delayed by COVID and were now finally shot and edited and ready to be screened. Put it all together, and the competitive landscape was as tough as she’d ever seen it.
So we expanded our list. We already had dozens of festivals on it that we had thought were “safety” schools—now we recalibrated to think of them as more competitive, and what we had thought as competitive as more like “reach” schools. And then, a couple of months after that exercise, and after sending off a raft of additional submissions, we got our first acceptance: to the Lighthouse International Film Festival (LIFF). That festival turned out to be our premiere.
LIFF takes place on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, so the festival is a “destination” that people travel to—like Sundance or Telluride, just on a smaller scale—as opposed to a festival that takes place in a big city like Tribeca or Toronto with a large local catchment area to draw audience from in addition to the people who travel in for the event. I’d never attended LIFF, but I had a number of friends whose short films had screened there. They all spoke very highly of it, both in terms of the programming and in terms of how they treated their filmmakers. I was thrilled to get in—and now, a bit belatedly, we were racing to get materials together for our first screening, which would be happening in a few weeks.
We had already hired a graphic designer with considerable experience working in indie film to design a poster for us—actually, two posters; of his five first-draft ideas, two really stood out, and we couldn’t decide between them, so we wound up moving forward with both. Now we needed to get posters printed (and decide which one it would be), and we also needed to get cards designed based on the poster with screening information on the back that we could hand out. We also were trying to think of other ways to raise awareness of the film in the vicinity of the festival. We decided that one cool marketing tactic would be to make coasters that looked like they were from the bar in the film, with film screening information on the back, and hand them out free to bartenders at bars in the vicinity of the film festival. Making those rounds was one of the first things I did when I got to Long Beach Island.
LIFF turned out to be a delightful experience surpassing my highest expectations. The festival had a large staff of capable volunteers who were consistently helpful. They threw many fun parties and mixers where I met dozens of other filmmakers. They held panels in the morning where the directors of films in competition got to talk about their films, and the panels were both phenomenally well-attended and exceptionally well-conducted, with smart, probing questions. (Because they were hosting a 25th-anniversary screening of his feature directorial debut film, Just Looking, Jason Alexander attended the festival, and I freely confess that being on a panel with someone of his artistic stature sitting right below me in the very front of the audience was both exciting and terrifying. He was absolutely charming, by the way.) I was delighted that Jen Ponton, our Trish, was able to be there for the premiere and share the stage with me for the Q&A after our screening; I was delighted as well at the number of friends and family who made the schlep there to be present at Resentment’s first public screening. I even connected with the representatives of a couple of distributors who were there to judge the competitions.
But what impressed me most was the quality of the other films being presented. I saw eleven feature films at the festival, most of them true indies and many of them world premieres. They varied widely in terms of genre, style, tone, and budget, but the level of filmmaking was consistently high. It felt very good to be in such good company. It also felt really humbling to realize the level of competition we faced in our search for distribution, and for an audience beyond the film festival circuit.
Shortly after hearing from Lighthouse, we got our second festival acceptance, from the Manhattan Film Festival (MFF). I’d been to MFF before, with my second short, Public Speaking, and I knew lots of other people who had screened there. MFF is the home turf for a chunk of New York’s truly independent filmmaking community; at their opening night party, I saw many familiar faces. They screen at a wonderful old-school movie house, Cinema Village, located in the heart of downtown Manhattan. Most important from my perspective, since most of my cast and crew and my friends and family are in the New York area I felt confident that we’d have a good house, and I was looking forward so much to finally sharing what we had made with people who were with me when we were making it. I wasn’t disappointed.
At the Manhattan Film Festival with Erik Gullberg, who played Christian in Resentment
And after that, we waited. No more acceptances came in. We had had two wonderful screenings, and our festival run was over.
I can’t pretend that I wasn’t saddened that our festival run was so brief. I’ve asked myself what we could have done differently. The most impactful thing would have been to have a sales agent or distributor involved earlier on; either would have been heavily involved in lobbying for their films with film festivals. Since we didn’t have a major production company behind us, though, we felt our best bet was to do the opposite: use a prominent festival acceptance as the launching pad to get a sales agent excited and then land a distributor. Before the start of our festival run, we did approach a couple of sales agents that I was introduced to by producer friends, and their feedback confirmed our approach; they didn’t want to commit any time until they knew where we would be premiering.
After our premiere at Lighthouse, we reached out to the sales agents we had contacted earlier, plus we got reverse inquiry from a handful of other sales agents who were interested in Resentment based on its inclusion in Lighthouse’s slate. One of them, Blood Sweat Honey, seemed like they could be a good fit; they understood the film, had handled straight dramas and other similar sorts of films before, and they had a very straight, no-nonsense attitude. I reached out to half a dozen indie filmmakers whose films had been represented by them to get their reads, and heard uniformly positive things. While we negotiated with Blood Sweat Honey, we waited to hear from the last few festivals that we thought might give us a meaningful push if we got in. When they rejected us, we signed with Blood Sweat Honey, and began the process of looking for distribution.
Previous entries in this series can be found here:
Resentment is now available for pre-order on Fandango at Home. The official trailer can be seen here.
To keep up with the countdown to our release, please follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok and on X. You can also add Resentment to your watch list on Letterboxd.