Tag: Crowdfunding

Mara Adina on Producing Indie Flick ‘Chuck Norris vs. Communism’

Chuck Norris vs Communism
This is a guest post written by Mara Adina, producer of Chuck Norris vs Communism.
I started my career in film in the Middle East as after university I moved to Kuwait where I worked at the national television (KTV).
I spent the majority of the first month working there trying to find ways for the all-men crew that worked with me to acknowledge my existence, and not just turn their backs when I spoke and then to get them to listen to what I had to say.
I struggled with finding ways to keep hold of my feminine identity and not succumb to the pressure of becoming “one of the guys” in order to be listened to.
On my return to the UK, I look back to what I thought were very extreme circumstances and realise that they are actually a reality here as well. We all know it’s difficult to be taken seriously as a woman in film and broadcasting – but if you add to that a pair of heels and red lipstick, things become even more tricky.
Today, I run my own company and I am one of the few who is trying to break through the bleak statistics of female producers in the industry.

Mara Adina, producer of Chuck Norris vs. Communism
I am currently producing my sister’s feature documentary, Chuck Norris vs Communism, and we are both so proud to tell the world the story of a very strong and brave woman.
Irina Nistor was one of the only female film translators to work in the Eastern Bloc during the 1980s. She dubbed over 5,000 Western blockbusters that entered Romania illegally during communism. Their rapid spread of the VHS tapes across the country turned Irina’s voice into a symbol of freedom and allowed a whole country to subvert a brutal regime. Here is our trailer:
We fell in love with the story and every bit of the journey of making this film has been incredible. We don’t just want to make this film through conventional avenues, we want to fund it by gathering the support of those to whom the story speaks, inspires and empowers.
We want to build a community around it and bring this film and Irina’s story to you, who are also striving to break through the statistics.
So we have launched a crowdfunding campaign for the film where like minded people can join the crew and help tell this story through contributions as small as $10. Please have a look at our campaign and help however you can.
Screen shot from Chuck Norris vs. Communism
The fundraising campaign for Chuck Norris vs Communism is live until this Thursday (May 2).
Produced by Vernon Films in co production with Kloos & Co in Germany, 4Proof Film in Romania and WMM in North America.
Chuck Norris vs Communism tells the story of the transformation of a nation through a seemingly small act of resistance. In the 1980s, Ceausescu’s Romania became the most Stalinist regime of the Soviet bloc.
At the same time, hidden from the scrutinising eyes of the Secret Police, Irina Nistor dubbed over 5,000 foreign blockbusters that entered Romania illegally.
They turned Irina’s voice into a symbol of freedom, Chuck Norris, Van Damme and Bruce Lee into national heroes and allowed a whole country to subvert a brutal regime.
The filmmakers have been working on the project for the past year and a half, shoot for three months and are now in a critical phase of post production. 
The film is nearly complete but they need you to get over the finishing line! So, they have set up a campaign page where you can make pledges and become a part of this film. 
Follow this LINK for the crowdfunding page where you will find an array of exciting rewards including the chance to become an animated character in the film!
For more information go to: 

Stillbirth. Still Ignored.

Serious Trigger Warning for discussion and images of stillbirth and infant loss. 

Publicity photograph used for Peekaboo

Guest post written by Debbie Howard for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.
Google “stillbirth in film,” and you will see next to nothing come up about this subject matter. What does come up is very current, as people are starting to look at this a little more just now. I know of two or three films happening worldwide about this subject matter at the moment. At long last. There is a feature film called Return to Zero being made in the USA, and there was a documentary called Capturing a Short Life made in 2008 in Canada. I also saw a documentary a few years ago called Limbo Babies, very late at night on TV, and have never been able to find anything else about this since. There is little else other than my work.

I completed my short drama Peekaboo nearly two years ago, but I started writing it about three years before that. I had two friends who had experienced baby loss, one to miscarriage and one who had given her baby up for adoption. I had a dream one night that merged these two stories together; this was the beginning of Peekaboo, which is about a couple who has lost three babies to stillbirth. I wrote a first draft of the script then started researching in great detail as I developed the script. I was shocked to discover that hardly anything had been made about this subject before.

Because I had no funding to make Peekaboo, I had to crowdfund, asking for donations to help me raise the money I needed for the film. This was a blessing in disguise, because as well as raising the money, I met a great number of parents via social media who had lost babies, and I got to know some of them well. With their help, I was able to complete the film to a high standard and use two of the UK’s finest actors in the lead roles.

“A wonderfully tender and compassionate articulation of love and loss. Peekaboo unwraps the layers of grief and emotional reconciliation with heartbreaking precision and sensitivity.” –Caroline Cooper Charles, Creative England
You can watch the Peekaboo trailer here: https://vimeo.com/42260999.

I was very happy with Peekaboo when it was completed, and it was met with great acclaim from those who saw it. However, I was very disappointed with the lack of film festivals that programmed it. Compared to my previous films, this screened at far fewer festivals. The subject matter was seen as too depressing. This was very frustrating as I made the film to show people who hadn’t been through losing a baby what really happened. It told me audiences still aren’t ready to look at this. There is such a silence around baby loss. While I was in the process of making the film, many people asked me, “Why are you making a film about that?” On top of the grief that the parents have been through, there is another burden for them–to keep quiet and not upset people by mentioning their baby.

Not being one who’s put off easily, this fueled me to want to look at the subject matter again, and I felt a documentary would be more powerful. There is no one better equipped to tell stories of baby loss than the parents themselves. Due to the fantastic contacts I’d already made on Peekaboo, I had a pool of parents all very keen to take part in the film, and I started selecting the right characters and stories for Still Born, Still Loved.

Mel Scott with her son Finley
Still Born, Still Loved: The Life Within Us

Synopsis:

How do you survive when the baby you’ve been expecting for months dies before you have the chance to ever really know them? When on the day you were supposed to be bringing your baby home, you have to carry a tiny coffin and see them buried in the cold, hard ground? What happens to all the love you feel for your child? How do you move forward with your life with a heavy heart and empty arms?

This documentary goes right to the heart of the human suffering caused by the loss of a tiny life. There is no greater suffering for any parent to bear than the death of their child.

Our film is special because each of the stories within it has a powerful, life-affirming message, as the parents involved work through their suffering to accomplish something really spectacular in memory of their baby. The outcome will be uplifting and inspiring and will highlight how even the most vulnerable people can triumph in the face of adversity.

Still Born, Still Loved is a feature-length documentary, and I want it to get seen by a wide audience in cinemas and on television. I went back to our main sponsors on Peekaboo and asked if they wanted to help us get started. Through the great generosity of three women, all of whom have suffered stillbirth firsthand, and some more crowdfunding, we raised the money needed to film a very powerful pilot, which we have now completed. You can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/61217978.
Nicola Harding with her daughter Emily
An interesting question for me, when someone loses their first child, is “Can you call yourself a parent if you don’t have any children?” This is one of the questions we attempt to answer. If you ask someone what a parent is, they think of someone with one or more children, bringing up a child, caring for their needs, organising their birthday party, and tucking them into bed at night. But when you have carried a baby, spent months planning and imagining their future, gone through labour and childbirth, held your son or daughter in your arms, felt overwhelming love for your child and miss them every single day, you are definitely a parent, too. You find creative and interesting ways to spend time with your child, celebrate, and remember them.

In our film, we also use parents’ own photographs and video footage of their time spent with their babies when they were stillborn. This, of course, is both very powerful and greatly upsetting, but I feel it is important for people to really see this firsthand. It certainly makes a huge impact and shows that these babies were a real-life son or daughter to these parents who love them dearly and always will.

Christmas decorations in memory of Harriet and Felicity Morris
For more information, and to support the film or buy a copy of Peekaboo (all proceeds to Still Born, Still Loved), please contact me at debbie@bigbuddhafilms.co.uk or see our website at http://www.bigbuddhafilms.co.uk/films/documentary/still-born-still-loved/.

I’m really proud of the work we’re doing around stillbirth and baby loss, and I’m very grateful to all those who are supporting us. Together we will break the silence. 

Finley Scott in his coffin
Debbie Howard is a writer/director. She set up Big Buddha Films eight years ago and specialises in making films with a strong female voice that tackle human dilemmas and show the vulnerabilities of human existence. She is a single mum and lives in Sheffield with her two teenage children.

Fight to See Yourself On Screen

This is a guest post by Joyce Wu.

I’ve always loved movies. When I was a kid, nothing brought me greater pleasure than walking across those sticky floors to find the perfect seat, the scent of stale popcorn hanging in the air. My dad, my big brother, and I would always share a box of Sour Patch Kids. I loved spending those two hours inside the theater on thrilling adventures, falling in love, traveling to exotic locales, suffering terrible tragedies.

But Asian Americans didn’t seem to go on these adventures; they didn’t seem to fall in love; they didn’t travel to exotic locales. If anything, they were merely set decoration when the real protagonists of the stories got to those places. People of Asian descent didn’t seem to exist on screen at all, and when they did appear, bucktoothed and bumbling, their fleeting presence filled me with a burning shame, as if watching a family member humiliate himself in front of someone I was trying to impress.

When you hardly ever see anyone who looks like you on screen, and when the only people who look like you don’t seem like people at all, you begin to have a very limited notion of your own possibilities. This nagging insecurity I’ve lived with my whole life (and truthfully, what will always be a part of me and what drives my work) was nagging particularly loudly a few weeks ago.

Still from Screaming in Asian

I was at CAAMfest, an Asian American film festival in San Francisco. For the last two years, I’ve been trying to raise the money to make my first feature film, The Real Mikado, a comedy about an out-of-work Asian American actress who moves back in with her parents and directs a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera The Mikado to try and save the community theater. I was at the festival to sceen the first ten minutes of the film as a short and to pitch the feature for the chance at a grant.

The day before the pitch, all of the filmmakers did a practice run-through of the event, and I was the last to present. I saw these passionate, talented people pitch their films about victims of war and impoverished children, and when it was my turn, I couldn’t find my words. All I could think was, “Why should anyone care about me or my stupid movie?” After years of struggling, I was so exhausted from pretending to be far more confident than I really was and so frustrated and hurt by the constant rejection that it all finally got to me.

Still from Screaming in Asian

I did the one thing that a woman who wants to be taken seriously is never supposed to do. I cried. I couldn’t even hold it together long enough to wait until I was in the privacy of a bathroom stall. I did it in front of everyone. Fortunately, the other filmmakers were incredibly supportive. Some of them cried too. That night, I stayed up all night revising and rehearsing my pitch. I stood in front of a mirror staring into my own bloodshot eyes and tried to convince myself that my movie was worth making.

The next morning, on about two hours of sleep, I walked up to the podium and told a panel of judges and an audience of about 70 people about The Real Mikado. I summoned everything I had from the deepest places of my soul and gave those people everything I could about who I am and why my film needs to be made. I killed it. I did as well as I possibly could have.

Short film teaser for The Real Mikado

Even though I gave it my all, I didn’t win the grant (that went to a wonderful documentary), but when I finished, a throng of young women from the Center for Asian American Media student delegate program came up to me and told me how excited they were about my film. They asked to take pictures with me and for advice on how to be an actor and whether or not I would watch their videos on YouTube and give feedback. One of them exclaimed, “Everything you said is what I feel!”

I had been feeling so defeated and so trivial that I failed to remember how powerful movies can be in shaping a person’s imagination and sense of self. These young women are yearning for the same thing I did and do: they want to see themselves as protagonists in their own stories; they want to go into a theater and see themselves.

Maybe this is too simple or wide-sweeping a generalization about white male privilege, but I doubt that Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach ever wondered if their stories deserved to be told. The fact that I was filled with so much self-doubt speaks to a vicious cycle we’re all in, and we need to work together to stop it. How can we expect young girls (especially those of color) to grow up with enough confidence to be filmmakers when everything they watch is telling them that they are not valuable and that their stories don’t matter?

My film, like a lot of first features, is a personal one. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I’m acting in and directing a movie that I wrote based on my own life. It feels more than a little self-involved to put myself on screen for all the world to see. But I realized a long time ago that if I don’t do it, no one else will.

Joyce Wu grew up outside of Detroit. Her short films have screened at festivals around the world. She was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to attend New York University’s prestigious graduate film program, where she completed her course work and is in pre-production on her first feature film, The Real Mikado. To find out more about the film, please visit: http://www.seedandspark.com/studio/real-mikado.

 

Foreign Film Week: ‘The World is Ours,’ A Feminist Film

Guest post written by Eugenia Andino Lucas. 

[Original post en Español follows English version.]
Last summer, a Spanish film had a modest success at the cinema: El Mundo es Nuestro (The World Is Ours), directed by Alfonso Sánchez, starring himself and Alberto López. The origin of this film is in a series of shorts released on Youtube, produced in the simplest way and showing the solid education in independent theater of the performers; one fixed camera and two guys, sitting in iconic places of Seville, chatting about this and that and nothing in particular. The one thing setting them apart from regular stand up comedy was that in each of the first three shorts, the two friends were characterized as a local stereotype: in “This isn’t what it used to be,” canis (somewhere between working-class and petty criminals), 
The first of the original shorts (unsubtitled Spanish).
That’s the way it is stars upper-class, conservative men with a very distinct set of local idiosyncrasies, and It was different, back then has hippies, for lack of a better word (in a different country or year they would have been hipsters: guys of middle-class origin with a snobbish mix of liberal values). As I write, the original video has more than 1,268,000 Youtube views and the second one, more than 2,625,000. The canis and the posh guys appeared in different sequels, and after some intensive and creative crowdfunding, Alfonso Sánchez directed his film, with the original petty criminals, Culebra and Cabeza, as protagonists. 
The World Is Ours
The plot is not the most original in the world: Seville’s favorite crooks plan a bank robbery that goes wrong when a mysterious third man takes the entire bank office hostage, including them, and demands to appear on TV to give a very important message. As a fan of the original shorts, I went to see the film. And at the box office, I took a look at what other options the multiplex was giving:
  • A woman wants to kill another one because she’s younger and prettier.
  • Two men save the world from the evil plans of another man.
  • A prison mutiny. It’s a man’s prison and there is one woman as hostage. Naturally.
  • A war flick with big macho guys.
  • A handful of brats give a party.
  • If he stalks you, it means he loves you.
  • Girl is infatuated with guy who still remembers his ex. Said ex is baaaaaad and meeeeeeean.
And The World is Ours, a film that I was looking forward to, but which didn’t seem very promising from a feminist perspective. In fact, I assumed the film worked on the premise that I don’t exist, because in the Youtube videos, women are entirely absent, as characters and even as mentions. Luckily, I was wrong. If feminism is the radical idea that women are human beings, The World is Ours is a wonderfully feminist film. 
When was the last time that you saw a film that didn’t just pass the Bechdel test, but also had female characters that were not victims of sexual violence? How many films do you remember in which some of those female characters were simultaneously kind and clever? How many films with supporting female characters that aren’t the hero’s girlfriend? 
A woman enjoying lunch. It is not a major plot point.
In The World is Ours, you can find almost anything you could wish in a comedy portrait of women in Southern Spain. First of all, quantity: male and female roles with dialogue are in a 13:8 proportion. Not bad!
Characterizations show a bit of everything: people are kind or disgusting, clever, naive, or stupid. People, men and women, do their jobs with varying levels of honesty and efficiency. The problems shown are human, and often universal. Consider these; some of them feel particularly local to me, but anyone could relate:
  • An exploited intern.
  • Unemployed, on the dole, with bits of illegal work on the side (think British social comedy).
  • Working for two because your partner is unemployed. Being partly proud and partly resentful of your head-of-the-family position.
  • Queer and gradually out of the closet.
  • A wormy, servile coward; bully to the weak.
  • A good, rational professional adjusting badly after a transfer at work. It’s not really their fault. A bit like in Northern Exposure.
  • Friendship from the cradle, passionate and unconditional.
  • Someone whose grey, boring job is embittering every aspect of their lives.
Five hostages.
Can you guess the sex of any of the characters from my descriptions? You can’t? That’s the best test of this film’s feminism: if we took all of them and switched, it would work just as well.
It’s not perfect, but it’s so enjoyable that I don’t care. In the words of my husband, who saw the film with me and doesn’t have any gender studies on his CV, “it’s a film with real women, who are human.” Thanks, Alfonso Sánchez, and the rest of the team.
Culebra and Cabeza.

El Mundo es Nuestro, esa película feminista.

Estaba yo en la puerta del cine para entrar a ver El Mundo es Nuestro y me fijé en lo que había en la cartelera. Os doy un resumen rapidito:
  • Una mujer quiere matar a otra porque es más guapa.
  • Dos hombres salvan el mundo del plan de otro hombre.
  • Un motín en una cárcel. De hombres. Con una mujer de rehén, claro.
  • Una de guerra con soldados machotes.
  • Unos niñatos dan una fiesta.
  • Si te acosa es que te quiere.
  • Chica pierde el culo por un muchacho que todavía se acuerda de su ex. La ex es mala y tontita.
Y El Mundo es Nuestro, una película que no prometía mucho como reflejo de que yo existo. Porque en los vídeos on Youtube de mundoficción las mujeres están ausentes, como personajes o como menciones. Afortunadamente, me equivocaba. Si el feminismo es creer que las mujeres somos seres humanos, El Mundo es Nuestro es una película maravillosamente feminista.
¿Cuándo fue la última vez que viste una película con más de dos personajes femeninos, ninguna de las cuales era víctima de violación, ni de maltrato doméstico? ¿Cuántas en la que algunas de esas mismas mujeres son listas y buenas personas a la vez? ¿Cuántas en las que los personajes femeninos son algo más que la novia del protagonista?
Pues El Mundo es Nuestro tiene casi todo lo que se podría desear en un retrato cómico de las mujeres en España. Para empezar, la cantidad: los personajes masculinos y femeninos con diálogo están en la bonita proporción de 13 a 8. No está mal.
Sobre sus caracterizaciones, entre ellos y ellas hay de todo: gente indeseable y encantadora, gente lista y tonta, gente que hace su trabajo con dosis variables de ética y de eficacia. Los problemas son humanos, y universales: ser un becario explotado. Estar en paro. Trabajar por dos porque quien está en paro es tu pareja. Salir del armario. Ser un pelotillero cobarde y miserable. Sentirte fuera de lugar en una cultura ajena, después de un traslado por motivos de trabajo. ¿A que no adivinas cuáles de estas situaciones corresponden a un hombre o a una mujer en la película? Ese es el mejor test: con todos los sexos cambiados, la película funcionaría igual de bien.
No es perfecta, pero se disfruta tanto que da igual. En palabras de quien me acompañó al cine, “una película con mujeres de verdad, que son personas”. Gracias, Alfonso Sánchez, y a todos los demás enteristas.
Eugenia Andino Lucas is a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Spain. She’s also working on a PhD on Gender Violence in the novels of Charles Dickens. You can follow her on twitter: @laguiri and on her blog: eugeniaandino.bachpress.org.