OKLAHOMA CITY — On the hot, sweaty Friday evening of last month’s deadCenter Film Festival, a capacity crowd packed into one of the fest’s designated theaters at Harkins in Bricktown to catch — finally — the world premiere of a local film years in the making.
“Close Enough to Burn” is the long-awaited final product of nearly four years of work from a team that decided to play the long game in the hope of transcending the “local movie” tag and making something to show off their skills, but also their professionalism.
“We’d gotten too many resources and gotten too many people involved and invested for us to be satisfied with just accomplishing a task and getting it done,” writer/director Benjamin Tefera told me in an extended 2-hour sit-down interview following the premiere. “We knew we couldn’t just do that. We had to extract every iota of color and life out of this.”
“Color” and “life” are apt descriptors, in fact.
“Close Enough to Burn” is dripping with grit and character in its look and its whole attitude, hovering somewhere between the neon-soaked party spiral of “Less than Zero” and a 21st-century, purely Gen Z film noir, complete with buried secrets and slow descents into a dangerous underworld.
The action follows irrepressible screw-up Ari, who takes on a presumably simple case for his brother’s out-of-court arbitration business, mediating a contract dispute between a rising local rapper and his best friend/manager/producer. As Ari gets closer and closer to their group and deeper into their whirlwind world, well, you get the idea.
“Close Enough to Burn” was one of the standouts from this year’s deadCenter slate, a fully Oklahoman production with the style, subversiveness, and charged musical character to rival much of America’s underground indie output in 2025.
It features an explosive electro-driven hip-hop soundtrack (created almost entirely by Tefera’s producer, co-editor, and brother Slyrex,) an electric, easily believable ensemble of young performers, and even an appearance or two by Sean Gunn from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” series and “Avengers: Endgame,” the biggest film in Hollywood history.
But it began its life all the way back in late ’21 as “Defiant Vanity,” a curiously titled script that became a red-hot investment pitch and eventually a bustling, bursting OKC production. Suddenly, Tefera and his team were flying in actors from out of state (and at least one from out of country) and hitting the ground running on their most ambitious project yet.
It was a challenge they’d set for themselves following the modest festival success of 2022’s “Feel So Good,” another deadCenter selection that offered the first feather for the caps of Tefera and his Bad Faith Films team, including Slyrex and producers Ben Stillwell White and Gared Reinke.
“’Feel So Good’ was like proof-of-concept for our whole thing and how we work, and it showed what we could do without people breathing over us,” Slyrex told me. “But there wasn’t imminent demand for our next thing or promises of funding or anything. There was just a lot of commentary about potential.”
So they set out to raise some legitimate funding for their next project rather than just pooling their money or turning to simple crowdfunding schemes, all in the hope of proving that their strict, tenacious planning and professionalism – marked by meticulous recordkeeping and to-the-minute schedules – could yield world-class results.
“The only thing that we really have total control over is our preparation,” Tefera said. “So we are very intentional about that.”
But with that level of preparation also comes a commitment to making sure it all pays off, not to mention the amount of funding and investment that they’d been trusted with by the backers they’d been able to wrangle together.
So when they went into post-production and editing, they wanted to take their time and do it right.
And take their time they did, with editing stretching out for roughly two years as Tefera and Slyrex repeatedly tweaked the pacing, runtime, music, and more, determined not to simply settle just to get the film out, but to be absolutely sure that the finished product met their standards.
“We started the edit in July of 2023,” Slyrex explained, “and then we turned in our deadCenter cut to Harkins I think two days before our screening.”
While the expectation is often for local-level films to see a quicker turnaround from production to screen, the Bad Faith team buckled down to focus on the edit and to let word of mouth continue to spread, with “Defiant Vanity” growing into a big unanswered question for the OKC film world.
“So many people around here worked on it, there was always someone asking ‘how’s it going?’ and ‘where’s the process?’” White said. “And eventually, you know, they stopped asking.”
Tefera explained that, contrary to a lot of assumptions and rumors, the lengthy post-production had nothing to do with needing more money.
“When there’s a lot of people excited to see the movie, it just feels like it’s taking so much longer, and after a while people start thinking there must be something wrong,” he said. “But no, we never had to go back into fundraising during post or anything. For us, it was just about being good managers of people’s resources and people’s time and trying to make it as good as it could be.”
All that time spent fine-tuning the edit paid off in a film that feels lean and fluid without the bloat and wheel-spinning that can so often plague smaller indie productions.
And of course, it also gave them time to realize that one other big change needed to be made.
“Yeah, the title ‘Defiant Vanity’ was always something people were talking about, and deciding to change it after so much talk and so much word of mouth gave us a lot of agony,” Tefera said. “But it was like from day one, people were coming up and asking, ‘so how sold are we on this title?’”
But with the new title in place, the team has high hopes for “Close Enough to Burn.”
“It’s true, because maybe ‘Defiant Vanity’ does have all this baggage and all this time behind it,” said Slyrex, “but now ‘Close Enough to Burn’ is the future and it feels new and exciting now.”
They’re hoping to bank on that excitement to turn all of that investment, all of that performance power, all of the goodwill and word of mouth and years spent editing into something with a real life of its own.
“We’re already in some distribution discussions and we’re trying to get it set up to find where it’s home is going to be,” Slyrex said. “But it hopefully won’t be long before people can see it again.”
“And for anyone that’s seen it now, just talk about it and post about it and go review it on Letterboxed,” Tefera added. “Just show it some love. That’s the best way to help us out right now.”
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
