Jason Lapeyre is a Toronto-based director, blogging from the Berlinale Talent Campus during the Berlin International Film Festival. Read about day five here.

Six Lessons From the Berlinale Talent Campus – #6:  You are not insane.

I didn’t wake up today, the last day of the Talent Campus, until noon, because I didn’t go to bed last night until 7 a.m.  I was at the Serbian-sponsored Berlinale party until 4 a.m., and then had to come home and write a blog with a head full of Jagermeister, Jim Beam and beer.  Did you know it takes three hours to write an 800-word blog entry when you’re nodding off every 20 minutes?  It’s true.

So I missed a couple of panels this morning, but got the scoop from some of my fellow Canadians, writer/director Randall Okita and director/producer Chris Agoston.  They attended a talk about the Berlinale Residency, a program that allows directors with a well-developed script and a producer attached to come to Berlin for four months, on a grant, and receive script polishing, project packaging and “script to market” mentoring and consulting.  It’s only open to directors who have had a feature play at a world-class festival, or to directors who have developed the script through the Talent Campus programs in the past. It looks like yet another amazing set of opportunities.

The other program they told us about was the Berlinale Co-Production Market.  Every year before the festival, they select 25 projects from around the world and hook them up with companies interested in doing an international co-production.  Alongside the 25 projects, 10 projects from Talent Campus participants are also presented in what’s called the Talent Campus Market – so 10 people from among the year’s 350 participants are selected to bring projects with them and try to find co-production partners.

The final panel of the week came at 4 p.m. today, and it was called “Things To Take Home”, an overview of the week that was and a reminder of all the ways that the participants will be connected moving forward.  Everyone’s profile will stay on the Talent Campus website and will be updateable and searchable, so we’re encouraged to keep our profiles updated with our latest projects and keep in touch with our fellow alumni.  It’s not intended to be the end of our relationship with each other – we’re encouraged to maintain what is now essentially a global network of contacts throughout the film industries of all the nations we connected with in the last seven days.

One of the participants took a moment to thank the organizers for the unbelievable opportunity of coming to the Campus, saying very eloquently that we sometimes feel like we’re going insane as filmmakers – the isolation, the constant struggle, the endless obstacles that try to tell you not to continue – but that the past week had made him feel sane again, and inspired him to keep going by showing him 349 other people who are going through exactly the same thing.  Huge round of applause afterwards, so it was clear the sentiment was shared.

We squeezed in one more screening before the Closing Party, which featured a DJ playing exclusively vinyl 45s, a dance floor and an open bar, and we got one final chance to circle around and say goodbye to all the new friends we’d met.  There were lots of promises to connect on Facebook – which seems like a more efficient way of maintaining the network than the Talent Campus website, it has to be said – and it was a conflicting bunch of emotions.  Happiness that you had met a new friend and sadness at leaving them after only a week and excitement about where the new friendships would take you and wistfulness that maybe you would never talk to them again.

It’s impossible to put into words how I felt about my week, but I’m able to tell you without a doubt that it’s drawn a clear line between the work I’ve done up until now and the work I’m going to be doing moving forward.  have a new network of people who inspire me and a new determination, reinforced by those who I heard speak and those who I spent time with, to work in a new way.

And in case this hasn’t been explicitly clear over these six blog posts: if you’re a filmmaker, you need to apply for the Berlinale Talent Campus.  Now.  Thanks for listening.