Oak Park filmmaker captures kudos at Sundance




JURY PRIZE—Oak Park resident Jordan Michael Blake, seated above lower right and at left, collaborated on the award-winning short film with the crew from American Standard Film Co.

JURY PRIZE—Oak Park resident Jordan Michael Blake, seated above lower right and at left, collaborated on the award-winning short film with the crew from American Standard Film Co.

Jordan Michael Blake had to give up on his dreams before he could achieve them.

For years his goal had been to enter a short movie into the esteemed Sundance Film Festival, but his entries were rejected. After reconsidering why he was making films in the first place, he decided the joy was in the making of the movie, not the recognition.

Then, earlier this year, one of his shorts not only got accepted into the festival, but won the Short Film Jury Award.

Blake, who grew up in Oak Park, is the editor of “The Touch of the Master’s Hand,” a short film about a young man serving as a missionary in Mexico City who is struggling with sexual urges. He made the project with writer-director Gregory Barnes and other collaborators, who together make up the American Standard Film Co.

“After 10 years of an insane amount of rejection, which you have to face when you’re trying to make movies for a living, it’s a really stunning and strange experience to actually have a concrete goal achieved,” Blake said. “I was happy with the idea that my work would never really pay off. I’d come to peace with that recently. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to sit with myself and think, ‘Well, you do this for yourself more than anything else, so why concern yourself with what happens outside of your own life with it?’”

Courtesy photos

Courtesy photos

Blake, 30, said he’s glad to have won at this age because if he’d found success as a younger man he would be “a worse person” for it—that the win would have gone to his head.

In the film, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has to reckon with the guilt he feels over his sexual urges. He confesses his behavior to an elder member of the church, who advises him to turn to Scripture.

Blake is a former member of the church; he left in 2008 after the community’s push to uphold a ban on gay marriage in California, which he said he disagreed with. Other members of the project also grew up in the church and drew on their experiences in making the movie.

Blake said he felt “an enormous amount of shame” about anything to do with sex when he was a teen.

“What’s funny about the movie, to us who made it, is you can read it how you want to. We’ve had active Mormons watch the film and think the missionary character made the right choice to confess to his mission president. Then there’s ex-Mormons or non-Mormons who think it’s a completely absurd or inappropriate situation that this young boy is telling all these things to this older man,” Blake said. “We hope that there’s a satire that shows how silly that is, especially because the ‘pornography’ is the movie ‘Avatar.’”

Blake said the project wasn’t an overt attack on the church, but he and his collaborators hoped it would normalize sex for members who watch it and might be facing their own struggle.

The road to winning Sundance was long and full of disappointment. Blake spent years filming music videos for wedding bands, which he said was an unfulfilling use of his skills but one that allowed him to keep making short movies.

For the longest time his only goal was to successfully enter the festival. He didn’t even have an eye on winning.

After submitting the project, the key members of the production team holed up in an apartment together to await the results. When they got a phone call from one of the festival’s programmers, they thought it was bad news.

“We thought maybe the Mormon church had reached out to the festival with a complaint about our movie and that it was going to be taken out of the festival or something. We thought there might be a legal action from the church. . . . We were terrified. . . . Our winning was a really absurd feeling.”

When they realized they’d won, Blake and his friends spent “several hours dancing on the roof” and then ran to the beach, where they jumped in the ocean.

The only problem was they couldn’t tell anyone they’d won yet. They were notified a few days beforehand so they could film an acceptance video to be aired on the last day of the festival.

Winning the festival has opened all sorts of doors to financing, networking opportunities and other professional support.

One of the biggest benefits is that it’s given him and his partners at the American Standard Film Co. the fuel to keep making movies.

“It was getting harder and harder to get people behind making these movies. Everyone’s getting into their 30s, getting married, their expenses are going up, so it’s harder and harder for everyone to chip in on these projects,” Blake said. “I’m just really stoked that this happened because it kind of gives us some momentum for continuing the same process that got us here.”

Follow Ian Bradley on Twitter @Ian_ reports.