Award-winning director David William James Elliott’s cult short film I Forgot to Unsubscribe from a Stock Footage Service is set to debut on YouTube on July 24, 2026, on the newly launched channel of production company RIOUGA. The film, which has screened at festivals in Mumbai, Tokyo, Paris, Cannes, London, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York, follows a filmmaker who, after forgetting to cancel a stock footage subscription, devises increasingly desperate schemes to reclaim his money using the footage itself.
The piece has been described as part memoir, part metatextual documentary, and part existential horror film for aging millennials trapped in the service industry. During its festival run, it accumulated dozens of awards, including Best Stunt and Best Female Director—despite being directed by a man and composed entirely of stock footage. It also earned recognition for voice work, writing, editing, and a homage to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive recreated with stock clips. This eclectic award haul has inspired an upcoming project exposing scam film festivals, though Elliott remains tight-lipped until filming concludes.
Elliott—an MIT and Stanford graduate, alumnus of Second City, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Steppenwolf, and The Annoyance, and a BJJ Black Belt—famously walked away from an opportunity to write for Saturday Night Live in 2012 to build sustainable farms in developing nations. He credits the subscription incident with reigniting his artistic career, which has since yielded five other film projects and a poetry book in six months. “A combination of being stuck with that subscription and receiving a free waiver from the Milwaukee Film Festival inspired this project,” Elliott said. “That, in turn, inspired a variety of other projects, including exposés on the art industry and the film festival vanity press machine.”
One such project, Hypernormalization 2: Revenge of the Titans, began as a throwaway gag in I Forgot before evolving into a 60-minute documentary. Despite legal hurdles, it won several awards, including “Most Likely to Be Cancelled” from a dubious festival with no digital footprint. The film’s YouTube debut marks the launch of RIOUGA (Royal Institute of Objectively Universally Good Art), a startup production company co-founded by Juan Sebastian Carcosa and Elliott. Described as “PBS meets Adult Swim, for burnouts, by burnouts,” RIOUGA plans to release three interview series and a collection of short films and documentaries through summer and fall 2026.
RIOUGA is positioned as an independent arts and culture production company focused on creativity, the surreal, and the human, intended as a counterpoint to both AI and corporate polish. Its mission is to inspire people to pick up old hobbies and return to their dreams.
