Special 08 | Live from PROOF
PROOF Festival Producers and Directors’ Advice for Making Your First Feature
I recently moderated a live recording of a panel at the PROOF Film Festival in LA, featuring producers and first-time feature filmmakers. These directors and producers have lived through the full journey: Timothy Petryni and Lizzie Goodman of F*cktoys, Alex Burunova and Helena Sardinha of Satisfaction, and Alex Russell and Alex Orlovsky of Lurker. These are people who've navigated Sundance premieres, major career setbacks, and decade-long journeys to get their first features made.
Naturally, the resounding theme that emerged was… delusion.
You have to be somewhat "delulu" to pursue this industry. To believe your story needs to be written and told. To believe your film will be financed when only 1 in 50 submissions make it into Sundance. To believe you'll find collaborators willing to push immense boulders uphill with you for years, sometimes a decade. To believe your film will resonate with audiences in a market where independent filmmaking has contracted by 45% in five years. And to believe that once audiences find it, they'll spread the word, tag their friends, and maybe even make TikToks about it.
In this candid conversation, we pulled back the curtain on what it actually takes to make a first feature: the financing puzzles that require tax credits, grants, and creative hustle; the producer-director relationships that become intensely personal over years of work; the emotional toll of setbacks and the resilience required to keep going; and the uncomfortable truths about working for little to nothing while betting everything on a dream.
More about the Panelists…
Timothy Petryni - Producer at Trashtown Pictures. Executive producer of Annapurna Sriram's debut feature F*cktoys, overseeing development through distribution.
Lizzie Goodman - Executive Producer with 15 years of experience producing commercials, films, and music videos globally. She produced James Rouse's debut Downhill and F*cktoys.
Alex Burunova - Director at Perfect Circle Films. Her debut feature, Satisfaction, was nearly a decade in the making and premiered at SXSW.
Alex Russell - Writer and Director of Lurker, which premiered at Sundance 2025 and was released theatrically by MUBI. Emmy winner for Netflix/A24's Beef.
Alex Orlovsky (p.g.a.) - Independent producer whose films include Roofman, Lurker, The Last Showgirl, and His Three Daughters. He is also the founder of Case Study Films.
Helena Sardinha - Producer at Driven Equation. Sundance Producing Lab and Film Independent Fellow. She produced Satisfaction and is Head of Development at Simbelle Productions.
If you're thinking about making your first feature (or you're deep in the trenches of one right now), this conversation will remind you that you're not alone in the beautiful delusion of believing it's possible.
Happy listening… exclusively on YouTube!
xx cg
“The Producer/Director Relationship is like a relationship. It’s all-consuming, so I think it’s a lot about meshing personalities.”
- Lizzie Goodman
Episode Transcript
