Nobody Wants Your Film is a documentary about low-budget filmmaking and the perils of distribution. Lir Mac Cárthaigh talked to director Peter Judson about making the film, and reaching an international audience through the internet.

If you're a Gmail user, and a vast number of us now are, you'll know all about targeted advertising. Targeted ads are what allow companies like Google to provide their services for free, and (unlike banners, pop-ups and flash movies) they can't be blocked by clever pieces of software like Firefox and its plugins. Yet. By reading through my emails, the big brain at Gmail has formed an opinion of me based on what I type, and provides me with ads that it thinks are suited to me. According to the Gbrain, I want to 'Learn How to Understand Men – And Beat Them at Their Own Game!' while choosing from 'The Top Four Sites about Cake' – and maybe that's true. Regardless, I rarely follow the links – except for one time. This time the Gbrain wasn't peddling discount projector bulbs or bouncy castles direct from the manufacturer, it was luring me to a site called 'Nobody Wants Your Film'. How could I resist?

Black and white read all over
The Nobody Wants Your Film site is as austere as the homepage of Zentropa – white text on a plain black background, as no-frills as the average road marking. The only hard-sell here is the roll call of names that runs around the page: Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, Peter Dinklage, Sam Rockwell, Alexandre Rockwell – indie darlings of the highest order. The Spartan aspect of the site just adds to the mystery – what exactly is this film that nobody wants, how are these respected filmmakers involved, and – perhaps most annoyingly – why does nobody want this film, whatever it may be? I was tantalised. After a quick perusal of the other pages (offering, among other things, t-shirts emblazoned with the NWYF logo – in black or white, of course), I paid the $3.99 asking price via PayPal and downloaded the film. A marketing guru once explained this process to me as 'AIDA': Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. In other words, it was a textbook sell.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 113.