A Little Validation, 20 Years Late

I just learned that a short film I wrote right after graduating from university was screened at City of Women – International Festival of Contemporary Arts in Slovenia around that time. Hah, I wish I’d had a chance to know that back then. That kind of validation would have been so good for my younger self, who felt defeated at every corner possible.

Let’s rewind. I studied journalism at university, and by the time I graduated, I knew I didn’t want to be a journalist at all. In my final year, I had taken Intro to Screenwriting as an elective, mostly thanks to my then-boyfriend (later husband, now ex-husband, but that’s another story), who was studying Cinema and TV. And I realized that this was what I had wanted to do all along.

But one course was far from enough for me. I needed to study it properly. That sent me searching the internet (and mind you, this was 2006, when there was far less to find), and I immediately fell in love with the curricula of screenwriting programs in the United States. When I first came across courses like “Creating Characters” or “Writing a TV Pilot,” I had a hard time believing they were seriously doing that. You could actually go to school and study these things?

But let’s get real. I’m from a middle-class family in Turkey, and not one member of my family had ever set foot in the United States, let alone studied there. Even the cost of flying me there would have made a serious dent in my parents’ budget.

Enter Fulbright. I had to get that scholarship. But on my first try, I realized that graduating with honors wasn’t enough to convince them. Believe me, in that waiting room before the interview, everyone seemed to have that and more.

So I locked in. I wrote the screenplay for a short film to enter a competition and won first prize. That, along with another competition I won, helped me get the Fulbright scholarship on my second try.

The promise of that competition was that a major production company would produce the winning short film screenplay, and they did. But I wasn’t exactly happy with the result. And I can’t blame the directing or acting. No. It was particularly disappointing because I had to confront the limits of my own writing.

Still unbeknownst to me at the time, that highly imperfect film was screened and found an audience in a country I had never been to. Probably it just served as a test of patience that lasted 14 minutes, but still… I wish I had known that. Maybe my legs would have been a little less shaky when I boarded that plane to San Francisco to study screenwriting on my own.

P.S. This photo is from around that time, in New York. Proof that I keep smiling, shaky legs or not. 🙂