Taking place January 19th-29th, the fest marks some key milestones for us. We’re thrilled that Beasts of the Southern Wild, the first Cinereach Production to hit Park City, will premiere in competition. We’ll also be celebrating the achievements of the Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute, a fruitful three-year partnership that has provided $1.5 million to complement Sundance Institutes’ invaluable support of fiction and nonfiction works-in-progress.

We look forward to watching these films on the big screen with you, at Sundance and beyond!

From Cinereach Productions:

Beasts of the Southern Wild U.S. Dramatic Director: Benh Zeitlin Written by: Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin Producers: Michael Gottwald, Dan Janvey, Josh Penn EP: Philipp Engelhorn, Paul Mezey, Michael Raisler Cast: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry Waters gonna rise up, wild animals gonna rerun from the grave, and everything south of the levee is goin’ under, in this tale of a six year old named Hushpuppy, who lives with her daddy at the edge of the world. Sundance Screening Times

Films Supported by the Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute:

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry U.S. Documentary Director: Alison Klayman Producers: Alison Klayman, Adam Schlesinger The inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. Sundance Screening Times

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty New Frontier Director: Terence Nance Producers: Andrew Corkin, James Bartlett, Terence Nance A quixotic young man humorously courses live action and various animated landscapes as he reaches for self-awareness after a mystery girl stands him up. Sundance Screening Times Compliance NEXT<=> Director: Craig Zobel Producers: Sophia Lin, Lisa Muskat, Tyler Davidson, Theo Sena, Craig Zobel When a caller posing as a police officer convinces a fast food restaurant manager to interrogate an innocent young employee, no one is left unscathed. Based on true events. Sundance Screening Times

I Am Not A Hipster NEXT<=> Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Producers: Ron Najor, Destin Daniel Cretton, Trevor Fernando A young singer-songwriter with a growing local following wanders through his apathetic life in San Diego. When his dad and three sisters show up to spread his mother’s ashes, he’s reminded of the part of himself he left back in Ohio and is forced to deal with the person he’s become. Sundance Screening Times

Keep the Lights On U.S. Dramatic Director: Ira Sachs Producers: Marie Therese Guirgis, Lucas Joaquin, Ira Sachs The story of a tumultuous, decade-long relationship between two men in New York City, chronicling the bonds that keep them together and the addictions that tear them apart. Sundance Screening Times

The Queen of Versailles U.S. Documentary Director: Lauren Greenfield Producers: Lauren Greenfield, Danielle Renfrew Behrens A character-driven documentary about a billionaire family and their financial challenges in the wake of the economic crisis. Sundance Screening Times

a post by Nancy Schwartzman

Back in September 2010, I was selected to participate in Cinereach’s Reach Film Fellowship, a program for emerging filmmakers making short films. I wanted to explore technology and its impact on our intimate relationships, so I developed xoxosms, a documentary about two awkward, introverted teenagers from two different worlds. The subjects of the film, Gus and Jiyun, found each other and fell in love on the Internet (see prior Cinereach guest post for how I navigated my delicate access to their love life). The film is about to premiere at the New Orleans Film Festival this coming weekend, but as I reflect back on the early days of the project, I think one of the most valuable things I can share is what I learned from my experience crowd-funding to raise a significant portion of my film’s budget.

The Reach Film Fellowship provided mentorship and a grant towards making the film, but we needed more money for post-production because we shot in multiple  formats and needed motion graphics sequences to illustrate Skype and chat scenes. I chose to do a crowd-funding campaign to bridge the financial gap for a few reasons. First, I wanted to try online fundraising, which requires a new kind of trailer and telling the story of my film outside the immediate film and film-granting community. I felt that the topic of love and the Internet would catch peoples’ attention and help generate energy, excitement, and perhaps a community around the film.

Before production, we started a Tumblr blog called, “Without the Internet, we never would have met…” which drew inspiration from stories of long distance relationships (“ldr”) and Internet love that we found in online communities. The blog was not intended as a marketing site for the film, but as a place to highlight and explore relationships like Gus and Jiyun’s. We hoped people with a natural interest in the topic would find us.

I made a list of friends, family, and colleagues to see if I felt comfortable asking them for money—I did. I assessed the community around The Line Campaign (the multi-platform outreach component of my first film, The Line) to see if I could possibly migrate the community to support this new film. The Line Campaign includes an active blog and a crew of bloggers, 2600 twitter followers, a Tumblr blog, 2 Facebook pages with about 3,000 fans, and a newsletter with 3,000 subscribers. I had interns who could help spread the word about xoxosms, and a community of friends and colleagues in the sex-positive, youth media, new tech and feminist blogosphere that I hoped would be interested in the film. So, with a decent size network, plus a healthy dose of shamelessness, I was hoping to get the money needed to finish the film.

I chose Kickstarter as my crowd-funding platform because I knew it would be a good tool to rally potential supporters that were already in my network, but I was also drawn to the sense of community on the Kickstarter website. I spoke to Justin, who handles PR at Kickstarter about the “stumble upon” factor of their website and learned that over 100,000 new backers to Kickstarter campaigns return to support other projects. Additionally, 44% of all projects launched through Kickstarter reach full funding. There is also a weekly newsletter and snappy blog that highlights projects, and helps them stand out.

There have been some stunning success stories for documentaries and independent films on Kickstarter. For smaller projects like mine, these heights can seem insurmountable—the bar is so high. Don’t be intimidated! There is room for you, and you don’t need a full-time team or thousands of followers to get it done.

Below I’ll present some tips based on how I navigated my Kickstarter campaign as a case-study. If it captures your imagination, I invite you to comment and ask questions about how I did it, or share tips from your own experience.

1. Study Kickstarter!
How did the successful projects conduct their campaigns? What is the language and tone of the site? How do people structure their rewards? What kind of video do they use?

While I was studying the site, I looked at a diverse bunch of projects – books, theater, art, film, and tried to gauge what attracted me to them. I was trying to find the right balance between intimate, aesthetically pleasing, descriptive and urgent. The breezy and familiar tone of Coming and Crying, the “Awkward Erotica” anthology, impressed me. The writing spoke to the reader like a friend, or a diary, and you felt invited to participate in the making of the anthology. The community of writers and supporters were sure to follow, too. Disclosure: I know the gals who created Coming & Crying, but with their 785% funding rate, you didn’t have to know them to feel like you wanted to, or already did.

2. Get Ready for Your Close-up: why you have to be in your Kickstarter video
Because your passion for the project is a critical selling point, you need to put yourself in the video. Every successful Kickstarter campaign for a film (and pretty much any project) had a video featuring the person heading up the project talking about why they were passionate about making the film. The word passion comes up a lot on the site, including here in the FAQ. It was clear to me that successful Kickstarters knew a good video was an opportunity to engage with site visitors directly about why they were making the film, show some beautiful and compelling footage, and explain why they needed the Kickstarter audience to help them complete their visions.

I scoured the site for documentary videos, and decided to merge the Angela Tucker and Jacob Krupnick approaches. In her (A)sexual pitch, Angela Tucker intros the piece and then lets the footage from the film speak for itself too. In Girl Walk // All Day, Jacob gives a brief intro, and then narrates throughout (over footage from the film, explaining what the film will do, who the character will meet along the way, and what the audience will see). Both filmmakers come off as direct and honest, with compelling film subjects. My take-away: be real, speak the truth, and keep it short.

3. Start The Presses: how/why you can get some
For xoxosms, a 21st century love story about teens, the Internet, and relationships, I targeted my existing list of sex bloggers, tech lovers and teen-culture folks, hoping they’d take interest in the story, and direct traffic to our Kickstarter page once we launched. For an extra hook for the media, I launched the project on Valentine’s Day. I sent a general press release about the film with a link to the video on our launch day to a large list of journalists who write about tech issues and young people. I also sent personal letters to folks that I know, either because they wrote about The Line in the past, or through other professional channels.

Within a week of our launch, we were profiled on IndieWire, Social Times, Break-up Girl, Kickstarter Blog, and About.com. We were also project of the day on Kickstarter (but see #8 on how we may not have maximized that opportunity). The press attention lent credibility to the project and attracted some donors that were not already part of my circle of contacts.

4. Three Touches: timing, and roll out
30 days is the average time it takes to get a Kickstarter project funded. It’s also a long-enough-but-not-too-long period that gives you enough time to email blast and pester friends, family and lists about three times (do you know that creepy marketing term “3 touches”?) without overwhelming them. I recommend personal emails first, then group emails.

30 days is also short enough to provide your potential supporters with a sense of urgency about making their donation. A 90-day campaign would just be torturous. You’d have to pester people for a longer amount of time, and wait with your stomach in knots for that much longer.

The 3 touches is very important. Be prepared to ask everyone you know and love AT LEAST THREE TIMES THROUGHOUT THE MONTH. We are busy, flakey, cheap, procrastinators.  Most of us need to be kicked and nudged. In the FAQ of the Kickstarter site, it talks about average time and duration of campaigns. Notice, in the chart below, how large numbers of backers kicked in towards the end:

Here’s what I did during my 30 days to make the most of the time:

Day #1
I begged my close friends/family first so when I launched the counter wouldn’t be at zero.

Week #1
Facebook blasts – driving friends to my Kickstarter from my personal page and xoxosms page
Twitter blasts – direct messaged everyone, asked explicitly for RTs.
Rolled out the ask on our Tumblr blog
Emailed friends w/blogs or podcasts an abridged version of the press release with the critical details, video and link.

Week #2
I recruited a friend who had offered to donate a generous sum to the project to set up a funding challenge to inspire others to give. I gave her a key list of friends, close ones, and she emailed them offering to match their contributions. She nudged and pinged and kept them engaged in funding, and got them to ask their friends.

Week #3
I blasted The Line Campaign newsletter, a group mostly focused on healthy relationships and preventing violence, about my newest project and how the film relates to their work. I was concerned that the topics were too far apart, but we received a great response from the list.

Week #4
I begged my crew to reach out to their networks as we approached the home stretch. I got an awesome intern to re-email everyone on Facebook and round out the final asks. Late in the game the Documentary Doctor (Fernanda Rossi) offered a consulting session as a gift for a $150 donation and another friend donated a photograph for $250. Both got snatched up immediately, fetching high prices.

During all of these new pushes, I continued to reach out to friends, family and networks. I sent personal emails three times, Facebook emails three times, and twitter blasts three times, at the beginning, middle and end of the Kickstarter campaign. I made sure to use multiple platforms because everyone uses these platforms differently. Putting it everywhere (three times!) makes it hard to ignore. I promise, the self-loathing does subside! Remember to give yourself time to make the asks and do the pushing, and don’t get mad at people that don’t give. They are just overworked and/or broke, like you are.

5. Backer Updates: how to say thanks, ask for more, and keep backers engaged

People who back a project get backer updates from the filmmaker through Kickstarter. These are little messages about the project they supported, its status, screenings, and events. I kept mine short and snappy. I included comments from new backers, about how the story reminded them of their lives, and also frame grabs from the video footage of the film as we were editing. I tried to give a blow-by-blow of where we were in the editing process, and how the money coming in was actively helping. My goal in crafting these updates was to keep an authentic connection with them alive. I wanted them to continue to feel invested and proud of the thing they were helping to make as it built momentum. I wanted to make it fun and rewarding.

6. Attitude and Mental Health: how to be pushy and zen
Be prepared to go under for those 30 days while your Kickstarter campaign is active. You don’t roll out a Kickstarter campaign while your’re in the middle of tons of other stuff or really burned out. Kickstarter is not easy. I did not follow my own advice (I was editing my film while Kickstarting), and it was exhausting.

Warn friends and colleagues that you are about to be the most annoying person they know – but it will be worth it. Get excited and people will get excited. Be “that” person – the one always asking for posts, re-posts, tweets, re-tweets, and money. It will be over soon, and you can throw your backers a fun thank you party.

7. What Worked, What Didn’t and Metrics
What worked: Our trailer. Everyone loved it and got excited. Invest time and energy in pitching your project well.

What didn’t work: Image choice. My initial thumbnail photo for Kickstarter was way too dark to pop off a busy Internet page. When we were project of the day on Kickstarter, the image was too murky and had a sad vibe, I think we got lost:

I swapped out my initial shot for something bright that would leap of the digital page. Red was a better choice:

Overall Backer Metrics:
188 backers donated. We surpassed our goal of $8,000 and hit $8,538
132 of the backers were friends, family, and colleagues from The Line Campaign, twitter friends, and friends of my partner, Isaac Mathes.
56 were friendly strangers; 54 of them were backing several other projects.

Status Update:
We wrapped, locked and onlined xoxosms, in the months following our campaign. As I mentioned above, we’re excited for this weekend, when we’ll screen at the New Orleans Film Festival (opening for Angela Tucker’s feature doc (A)sexual). We can’t wait to share our Internet love story with a larger audience, and see what kind of conversation gets sparked. We plan to gather responses using Storify.

We are crafting our Internet outreach strategy with live events and festival screenings to make sure xoxosms reaches a broad audience. Check out our new website, and please to join the discussion: Can online love work IRL? Send us your thoughts about “digital intimacy,” online dating versus in the flesh, and whether technology connects us, isolates us, or both. Use the #xoxosms hashtag so we can find you on twitter.  As I learn from my adventures, I’ll be sure to check back in with Cinereach and share more tips with you.

Nancy Schwartzman made xoxosms as a Reach Film Fellow at Cinereach, working with mentor Francisco Bello. Recently named one of the “10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2011” by Independent Magazine, Nancy makes work that explores the intersection of sexuality, new media, and navigates the complexities of modern relationships. In addition to xoxosms, she is the director and producer of the documentary film The Line (Media Education Foundation, 2009). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Daily News, Gawker, Jezebel, Alternet, MTV and more. The Line Campaign, an interactive, multi-platform audience engagement campaign, has been highlighted by the Center for Social Media in Designing for Impact and by the Fledgling Fund in From Distribution to Audience Engagement. In addition to Cinereach, Nancy’s work has received funding from the Fledgling Fund and the Playboy Foundation. She is currently developing a feature documentary about young women in Kabul, Afghanistan, among other projects. Nancy lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with her partner, Isaac Mathes.

Kaz during an RFF workshop at Cinereach

Rolling with the Punches
a guest post by Kaz Phillips Safer

One of the defining moments for me in my relationship with my mentor Karin Chien, was a somewhat frantic meeting during the final weeks of pre-production for my Reach Film Fellowship short, Jolly Friends Forever More. I was in the middle of a fairly typical and yet typically terrifying pre-pro crisis. Jolly Friend’s lone location was a public park, and I had a location in Prospect Park in Brooklyn that I really wanted to use.

Having shot in Prospect Park before, I knew that permitting could be tricky, and that due to our low-budget, fee-waivered status we’d be pretty low-priority (read: if the only motivation the parks folks have to process your paperwork is that you handed it on time and properly filled it out, it may well not happen). You have to bug them and bug them, and show up in person and pester and plead until someone signs or stamps or does whatever it is you need them to do. I am not hating on the parks, this is just what my experience has been.

As a preventative measure, and to give us both peace of mind, my producer Christina King and I had reached out to the Parks Department literally months before with our shoot dates and desired location. We were told we should be fine, and that we didn’t need to actually submit the paper work until a few weeks before. A week and a half out, while making what seemed like a routine call to check on something in our permit form, we were unceremoniously informed that our location was absolutely not available for the dates we needed it, as there was a parade through the park that weekend. They weren’t sure why anyone had ever told us it would be fine to shoot that weekend, but it certainly wasn’t, and there was nothing they could do for us.

A week and a half out we had no location, and the very stomach-sinking situation I had been working for months to avoid was suddenly all up in my face.  However, it was made even worse by the fact that, literally the day before, Christina had gotten a call for a short paid producing gig, working on a commercial. Being a multi-tasking freelancer type myself, and knowing that as much as you love any project you’re working on for free, when a paid gig comes around sometimes something has to give, I gave her my blessing to go MIA for a few days. After all, everything for the shoot was pretty much in place.

So suddenly I found myself with no location AND no producer in those critical final days when we needed to re-scout, re-lock, re-shot list, etc. a brand new location. Suffice to say, we did, which is a testimony to Christy’s stellar, nay, near-supernatural producing skills, but in that moment, trying to keep myself together as I enjoyed a nerve-jangling coffee with Karin, I was feeling the weight of working on a low-budget project where the Parks people give you the run around, and your producer has no choice but to say yes when a conflicting paying gig comes up because you don’t have enough money to pay her.

Producer Karin Chien on set with Kaz

And I said to Karin, you know, I know it’ll be fine, but oh man, do I long for the day when I’m working on a project that everyone involved can be 100% focused on, and I don’t have to worry about folks having too much other stuff on their plate.  And Karin just kind of looked at me and was like, Kaz, that’s never the case.  People always have too much on their plate, always have three other projects going on the side, nineteen other places they ought to be, regardless of the size of the project. And I immediately knew she was completely right.  I had been looking at Karin as someone who was blissfully free of this kind of pitfall, and in that moment she reminded me, you’re an indie filmmaker.  It’s always like this.  Success means the MIA producer comes back, not that they never leave in the first place.

And in a weird way, it kind of gave me a bit of a thrill.  To be reminded, yes, you, for whatever combination of reasons, have chosen a career—an entire lifestyle—that is actually sort of designed for disaster.  Built to spill, as it were. And that actually, if you consider the way industries and art forms work as having a sort of evolutionary existence—having the shapes, patterns and tendencies they have for a specific reason—then it’s reasonable to say that the volatile nature of indie film production is actually quite adaptive. It can actually make for better projects, not worse ones.

Jolly Friends Forever More set in Owl's Head Park

Case in point, my location disaster did in fact require my team to shift into location hunting overdrive, but the park we ended up finding, Owl’s Head Park in Bayridge, Brooklyn, was a vastly superior location than the spot in Prospect Park that we’d initially settled on. The upheavals may not be fun in the moment, but ultimately, they make you think harder, look further, and consider more possibilities.

And I guess it’s a good thing, because as Karin reminded me, there’s no end of the tunnel where it suddenly gets easy. Thank goodness, right?  Where would be the fun in that?

Kaz Phillips Safer is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker & video designer. She studied writing at Princeton University while also taking select filmmaking courses at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  She is the video artist in residence for internationally acclaimed NYC-based dance theater company Witness Relocation. Her video work has been presented in France, Denmark, Poland, Russia, Australia and across the United States. In 2009 she was accepted into the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women where she developed and directed original HD short, Megafauna. The film went on to win AFI’s Jean Picker Firstenberg Award for Excellence and was released by IndiePix in October 2010. Kaz is currently developing several feature scripts, one of which is the recipient of a 2010 Jerome Foundation Development Grant.

Karin Chien, Kaz’s RFF mentor, has produced eight feature-length films, including Circumstance (2011), The Exploding Girl (2009), and The Motel (2005), which have won over 75 festival awards, premiered at Sundance and Berlin, and have been distributed internationally.

CINEREACH PRESENTS REACH OUT AWARDS TO 2011 REACH FILM FELLOWS

Four emerging filmmakers complete the Reach Film Fellowship
with festival-ready short films and bonus grant funds.

www.cinereach.org
www.cinereach.org/the-reach-film-fellowship/fellows-recipients

(New York, NY – April 14, 2011) – Cinereach, a not-for-profit film foundation and production company, hosted its fourth “Reach Out” event yesterday. The event marked the culmination of the 2011 Reach Film Fellowship for emerging filmmakers making vital, artful short films.

Cinereach screened films by outgoing fellows Matt Bockelman, Nick Paley, Kaz Phillips Safer and Nancy Schwartzman at Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street, and presented each Fellow with a Reach Out Award and a bonus grant of $1,000 to put towards his or her film’s festival campaign.

“Matt, Nancy, Kaz and Nick brought a lot of talent, vision and experience into the program with them,” said Cinereach’s Reva Goldberg, who runs the fellowship. They could have made their films on their own if they had to, but our goal was to create a safe and supportive space where they could comfortably take creative risks and get as much mileage as possible out of the experience. We couldn’t be more proud of the resulting films.”

A unique and intensive program that spans September through April, the Reach Film Fellowship provides a $5,000 grant, production support, personalized mentorship, and industry exposure as a springboard to a professional career in film. The four participants are selected through an open application process and, once accepted, have access to the Cinereach staff and a community of highly invested colleagues as they take their short films from concept to completion.

One-on-one mentorship from working independent filmmakers is a key aspect of the program. Each fellow is assigned a mentor with a background complimentary to the fellow’s goals. The pairs meet to check in at critical points throughout pre-production, production, post-production and beyond.

This year’s mentors included producer/director/editor Francisco Bello (Salim Baba, War Don Don); producer Karin Chien (The Exploding Girl, Circumstance), director Marshall Curry (Street Fight, Racing Dreams) and producer Jay Van Hoy (Old Joy, Cold Weather).

The fellows also had access to advice from industry insiders such as Tribeca Film Institute’s Ryan Harrington and Tamir Muhammad, Ingrid Kopp of Shooting People, and author, producer and film critic Kim Adelman, during workshops on topics such as crowd funding, social media, festival strategy, post-production workflow and pitching. The Fellows had unlimited access to consulting producers Angela Tucker (Pushing the Elephant, Deadline) and Susan Leber (Toe to Toe, Down to the Bone), and to post-production consultant Jeff Marcello (Toe to Toe, Planet B-Boy).

The 2011 Reach Film Fellows and Films are:

Fellow: Matt Bockelman
Mentor: Marshall Curry
Film: You Have the Right to an Attorney (nonfiction) enters the daily grind of two young public defenders in the South Bronx as they strive to resolve hundreds of client cases in a system they consider fundamentally broken.

Fellow: Nick Paley
Mentor: Jay Van Hoy
Film: In Open House (fiction) a young man visits his grandparents and is the first in his family to realize the pair of them should no longer be living on their own.

Fellow: Nancy Schwartzman
Mentor: Francisco Bello
Film: xoxosms (nonfiction) follows the courtship of a young couple that falls in love via Skype, chat and Facebook and relocates to be together.

Fellow: Kaz Phillips Safer
Mentor: Karin Chien
Film: Jolly Friends Forever More (fiction) tells the story of a homeless man who is befriended by a mysterious little girl that seems to appear and disappear at will.

Recent Reach Film Fellowship alumni highlights include the broadcast premiere of 2010 Fellow Anthony Morrison’s Bye, a short documentary about a toddler just diagnosed with autism. The film aired on PBS’s P.O.V. in July and, following that, screened in competition at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Nadia Hallgren’s short doc Love Lockdown (RFF 2010), about a young Bronx woman who communicates with her imprisoned fiancé via shout-outs on a late-night radio show, premiered at the 2011 SXSW film festival. Gabriel Long’s The Drawing (RFF 2010) premiered at NewFest last year and will be playing at the Inside Out Film Festival in May.

Cinereach Ltd.

Cinereach is a not-for-profit film production company and foundation that champions vital stories, artfully told. Created and led by young philanthropists, entrepreneurs and filmmakers, Cinereach empowers fiction and nonfiction filmmakers from all over the world through its Grants & Awards, the Reach Film Fellowship and Productions; and through partnerships with the Sundance Institute and others. Since 2006, Cinereach has disbursed over $4.5 million in grant funds to more than 90 projects at the intersection of engaging storytelling, visual artistry and vital subject matter.

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Dragonslayer
Winter 2010 & Summer 2010 Grantee
Documentary Feature Competition
World Premiere

Director: Tristan Patterson
Producer: John Baker
Killer Films presents the transmissions of a lost kid falling in love in the suburbs of Fullerton, California. Featuring skateboarding, the usual drugs, and stray glimpses of unusual beauty.
SXSW Screening Details

Love Lockdown
Supported through the 2010 Reach Film Fellowship
Documentary Short
World Premiere

Director: Nadia Hallgren
Producer: Jamie-James Medina
Love Lockdown is a short documentary inspired by the impassioned phone calls and shout-outs made to prisoners on “Lockdown Love,” a popular late night radio show in New York City. The film tells the story of Shoshana, a young mother from the Bronx, as she eagerly awaits the fate of Felix, the father of her children, who is incarcerated and on trial facing a ten-year jail sentence. Dialing tirelessly and waiting for hours on hold, Shoshana’s phone calls tell an unconventional story of love and commitment. Will their love remain locked down or will the family be reunited?
SXSW Screening Details

Yelling to the Sky
Supported through The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute 2010
Spotlight Premiere
North American Premiere

Writer/Director: Victoria Mahoney
Producer: Victoria Mahoney, Billy Mulligan, Ged Dickersin
As her family falls apart, seventeen year old Sweetness O’Hara’s future feels uncertain. At the abusive hands of her father, her mother and sister take off, leaving Sweetness to fend for herself. Determined to correct the mistakes of the past, Sweetness takes control of her life.
SXSW Screening Details

The film, produced by Paul Mezey of Journeyman Pictures, and directed by Marston, follows the lives of a teenage boy and his younger sister when they are thrown into turmoil after a killing in a dispute over land draws their northern Albanian family into a blood feud.

The Forgiveness of Blood was produced in partnership with Fandango Portobello, Artists Public Domain, and Lissus Media and received grants from the Goteborg Film Festival Film Fund and New York State Council on the Arts.

This recent Hollywood Reporter interview with Marston sheds more light on the story behind the film.

The Forgiveness of Blood
Writers: Joshua Marston & Andamion Murataj
Director: Joshua Marston
Producer: Paul Mezey

Cinereach congratulates Here, On the Ice, and Yelling to the Sky, which also screened in competition. On the Ice (a Winter 2010 Cinereach Grantee and supported through The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute) won the Best First Feature Award, which includes a 50,000 Euro prize. Here (supported through The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute) was recognized with the C.I.C.A.E. Prize from the Panorama Jury.

On the Ice
Writer & Director: Andrew Okpeaha MacLean
Producers: Cara Marcous & Lynette Howell

HERE
Writers: Braden King & Dani Valent
Director: Braden King
Producers: Jay Van Hoy & Lars Knudsen

Yelling to the Sky
Writer & Director: Victoria Mahoney
Producers: Billy Mulligan, Ged Dickersin, Diane Houslin, Victoria Mahoney

Photo Courtesy of Tarek Moukaddem

Circumstance, a grantee in both Summer 2009 and Summer 2010, won the U.S. Dramatic Competition Audience Award. This award followed on the heels of the excellent news that Circumstance had been acquired by Participant Media for North American distribution. In her narrative feature debut, writer/director Maryam Keshavarz follows a wealthy Iranian family struggling to contain a teenager’s growing sexual rebellion and her brother’s dangerous obsession.

Kinyarwanda, a recent grantee in Summer 2010, won the World Dramatic Competition Audience Award. This intricately structured narrative, written and directed by Alrick Brown, interweaves stories that provide a complex depiction of life and human resilience in the face of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Pariah, a grantee in both Winter 2009 and Winter 2010, received the award for Excellence in Cinematography for US Dramatic Filmmaking - recognizing the work of Director of Photography Bradford Young. Also incredibly exciting was the news that Pariah had been acquired by Focus Features for distribution! Writer/Director Dee Rees’ narrative feature debut follows a Brooklyn teenager who juggles conflicting identities and endures heartbreak in a desperate search for sexual expression.

Photo Courtesy of TJ Watt

If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, which was supported through the Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute, won the Documentary Editing Award. Directed by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, this film tells the story of one man’s arrest for his involvement with an environmentalist group charged as terrorists.

A post by Matt Bockelman

Make a Plan. Forget the Plan.  Make a New Plan.  Forget That Plan.

Producing a verité documentary is challenging work, and it can often feel like all the forces of the world are conspiring to keep you from realizing your vision.  If you’re shooting outside, it will rain.  If you’ve booked a car to drive six hours to film a scene, your subject will cancel.  If your story is contingent on having access to a specific location, you’re not going to get in. If you think you know what your film is about, but you haven’t shot it yet, then you’re probably wrong.

It can be a frustrating process, having every creative idea fall flat, get rejected, or simply not pan out.  But what I’m learning (or rather, forcing myself to believe) is that this is not a hitch in the creative process, it is the creative process.  And it seems to be a lesson I’ve learned before.

My day job is working as a freelance cinematographer.  As a cameraman it’s unusual for me to walk into a situation with much more than the synopsis of the story that the filmmaker is trying to tell.  Normally, I’ll have a pre-production discussion a day or two before the shoot, where the director and I discuss the project in broad strokes before getting into the details of the upcoming shoot.  The director will tell me what to expect and what he hopes to come away with.  I get notes on shooting style.  I get brief character descriptions.  I get location logistics.  Then, I am set loose.  On most days, although I shoot what was asked for, I almost always come up with something else as well.  That “something else” is typically a result of things not going exactly as planned or due to my own curiosity and reactions to the subjects.

I’ll give you an example.  I recently worked on a documentary entitled Gimp, about a dance group that integrates dancers with physical disabilities and conventional dancers. A major theme of the film revolves around questioning when it is acceptable to look at someone – and specifically what parts of that someone.  The director had asked me to get up close, to really zoom in on the performers and dissect their bodies, to force viewers to see things that may normally motivate them to avert their eyes.  I did that.  But soon I felt myself wanting to look away, feeling guilty about watching so blatantly.  So, I started flirting with the concept of looking away. I’d point the camera toward the corner and wait for a performer to pass through the frame.  I’d start a shot on a dancer’s face and then subtly creep down to see his “disability.”  These shots, while not as in-your-face as the director had asked for, echoed the sentiments that were expressed by the audience during a Q&A after the dance performance.  Their impulses and reactions to the performance were in-line with my own.  And as a result we had the imagery to support their experience of the production.

In Gimp I was conscious of executing the director’s vision, but my impulse to look away allowed me to cover the scene in a different way.  It was the difference between forcing the footage into a perspective and letting the natural response shine through.

Now, as I make a film of my own, as director and cameraman, I find myself tempted to plan out each detail.  I want to pre-interview each subject, block out shots, control the flow and topic of scenes, to know more than I ever asked a director for when working as a cinematographer.  The more I think about these things, however, the farther I move from that openness that I have developed on the sets of other people’s films.  I’m finding that I need to make a conscious effort to approach directing this film more like I approach shooting one. Yes it’s important to visualize what I think could or should happen, but I also need to be ready to submit to what actually does.

Matt Bockelman on location for You Have the Right to an Attorney

My new film, You Have The Right To An Attorney, is about public defenders and their clients in The South Bronx.  Much of the story hinges on the tenuous relationships that develop between public defenders and their clients.  Much of that development takes place in institutions notoriously difficult to access with cameras (courtrooms and correctional facilities) or under the protection of attorney/client privilege. Arraignments, the process in which defendants are first introduced to their court-appointed attorneys, were high on my list of scenes to shoot.  I intended for the arraignment scenes to illustrate the unstable ground on which the relationship begins, as well as introduce the massive caseload that the attorneys carry.  Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more likely that I won’t get the access to film in this context. This is disappointing but not terminal to the story.

Instead I’m now looking into using the police reports filed for the clients and finding visually compelling ways to base scenes and sequences on the text of these documents.  This approach, based upon what we are able to access, will introduce the clients as the court system sees them, as statistics on a page. From there we’ll cut to our attorney back in the office as he combs through stacks of files, sharing hints of detail from one after another with us. Then, when we meet the clients later in the film, it’s a rewarding reveal because we get to see them as human beings for the first time.  Effectively, we’ve taken a roadblock and turned it into an expression of a key reality of the world in which the film is set.

By spending the time to develop ideas of what the film should be, I’ve created the mental space to see what the film will be.  And as ideas fall through, new ones are born to replace them. The more I’m able to do that, the better prepared I will be in the field when I’m shooting.  If something unexpected happens, by this point I’m practiced in dealing with the unexpected and can quickly adjust.  That’s the theory anyway.  I’ll let you know how it works out.

Matt Bockelman is a New York-based cinematographer and producer.  His most recent projects include The Unofficial House Band, about a music and arts program at Sing Sing Prison (commissioned by Rehabilitation Through The Arts), Communitas, an experimental documentary about theater director Richard Schechner’s famed performance workshop, and Meet the Gardeners, a series profiling the employees of Madison Square Garden. Matt founded Fly’s Eye Films in 2010 with the goal of creating substantive documentaries, objectively rendered but with a strong visual aesthetic.

Matt’s mentor during the Reach Film Fellowship is Marshall Curry, is the Director, DP and Editor of the feature documentary Racing Dreams, which won Best Documentary at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, and the Academy Award and Emmy-nominated Street Fight.

A post by Nancy Schwartzman

I’ve been obsessed with the concept of consent for the past few years. My first film, The Line, and the accompanying blog Where is Your Line?, examine closely the nuances of sexual consent. What does it mean to give or gain consent? What does coerced consent mean vs. enthusiastic consent? How does context influence decisions about sex? What are ethical approaches to asking for consent?

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of interesting crossover between the idea of negotiating consent and the documentary filmmaker’s relationship to her subject. The Line is a personal film; I chose when and how to reveal my story, and wrote the voice over carefully and strategically. I also made the choice to capture footage of someone else in the film with a hidden camera. He did not give consent, but I protected his identity on screen. That was a fraught decision, but the right one for the film and the context.

Now I’m making a film in which I’m not the subject; instead two young people are handing over their trust to me. xoxosms is a 21^st century love story, documenting the kind of love that plays out online and blooms on digital media platforms. In this world, distance shrinks and intimacy grows over signals, wires and pathways. Thanks to Skype, AIM, and the internet, months and months of my subjects’ chats are archived… their secrets, their confessions, their stuff.

… and lucky me, I get to read it all!

There’s this idea that “kids today” or to use jargon, tweens, teens and emerging adults, have no boundaries. The stereotype says they share everything with everyone, and naively think the internet is their very own “private” playground. The access-hungry filmmaker in me might at first think Whoopee! They’re gonna give me everything! But knowing that pieces of my subjects’ video, script, text, chats and images will live in a film, online and all over social networks because of my film, gives me pause. Yes, they signed the consent forms, but do they know what that really means? I want them to give me everything, and I want everything to go everywhere, but I want to make sure I don’t hurt anyone.

Before telling a story based on on-line communication, but with the potential to have a powerful influence on my subjects “IRL” I wanted some guidance about how to carry out my role and these evolving relationships during the shoot. Thinking about my young, self-described “introverted” subjects Jiyun and Gus, and all of the intimate details they shared via chat, and would now share on camera, inspired me to revisit the study Best Practices, Honest Truths. This collection of lived experiences from documentary filmmakers working today was collected by the Center for Social Media (the people who brought us the Fair Use principles). It is an excellent, informal set of guidelines on navigating these complicated scenarios.

“What is the nature of my relationship to my subjects,” I had wondered. “Am I a friend, the cool older sister, or the boss?”

The study provided some useful precedent, based on interviews with filmmakers:

[Filmmakers] usually treated this relationship as less than friendship and more than a professional relationship, and often as one in which the subject could make significant demands on the filmmaker. “We want to have a human relationship with our subjects,” said Gordon Quinn, “but there are boundaries that should not be crossed… You always have to be aware of the power that you as a filmmaker have in relationship to your subject.”

On recent shoots for xoxosms, I had an opportunity to balance this power with my desire to respect my subject’s boundaries. Gus expressed that he didn’t want any part of his house on camera in consideration of his family. I could have insisted we needed that particular setting, promising to protect family details in the editing, and really pushed him past where he was comfortable. He’s incredibly accommodating, and probably would have said yes, but he was already revealing personal information that had the potential to disturb his family, so I decided to back off. We chose instead a neutral setting (a motel off route 66). He was relaxed and we could go deeper into the discussion without sneaking around or jeopardizing his relationships.

Another of my questions was “What kind of collaboration is this, how much material do I share with my subjects, and at what stage?”

From the study:

The decision to share material in advance with subjects was, typically, an informal decision. Only one respondent, Jennifer Fox, said that she offered fine cut approval in a legal document, with the caveat that the subjects couldn’t object to the film because they didn’t like the way they looked but could object to things on the grounds of hurting their family.

When I showed Jiyun the production still I wanted to use to represent the film, her initial response was “I look HORRIBLE IN THAT PICTURE. OMGZ. NOZ.” I knew she’d probably hate any photo of her chosen that wasn’t far away or blurry, but giving her a heads up was the right thing to do. I reassured her that she looked great but more importantly; that I was going to use this photo, and it was “out there” online. No stumbling upon, no unpleasant surprises. She trusts that I’m not intentionally trying to make her look bad, or to upset her, and when I asked her recently how she felt she wrote: “hahaha I moved on a while ago : )”

Another filmmaker discusses the finished product:

“I often think, ‘Let me be this person (the subject) watching the film.’ Would they hate me? Or would they think it’s fair? I want to always be able to send the DVD to them.”

Jiyun and Gus are already asking me where else the film will live. In addition to DVD, xoxosms will also have a life on the internet, which we all know means parts of the story can go anywhere. During filming, I made it clear to my subjects that we were there because we believed in their relationship, were taken by their words and wanted to do their love story justice. The same applies to our approach to editing, and every stage of this project.

Maintaining my subjects’ trust is critical – not only because we need continued access to their private lives in order to finish telling their story, but also because I want them to be creative participants in the social media and outreach components of the film. Already they’re active on various blogs and online spaces, so I want to give them the option of being part of the dialogue that may bloom around issues of digital intimacy and love online when the film is complete.

It’s in our mutual interest that my subjects trust the process, that we share the same goals, and that they feel truthfully represented.

Now that I have consent, my guiding mantra when questions of filmmaker subject/trust arise will be: talk about it, and do no harm.

Photo Courtesy of Tarek Moukaddem

Circumstance
Summer 2009 & Summer 2010 Cinereach Grantee
U.S. Dramatic Competition

Writer/Director: Maryam Keshavarz
Producers: Karen Chien & Melissa Lee

A wealthy Iranian family struggles to contain a teenager’s growing sexual rebellion and her brother’s dangerous obsession.

Sundance Screening Details

HERE
Supported through The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute
U.S. Dramatic Competition

Writers: Braden King & Dani Valent
Director: Braden King
Producers: Jay Van Hoy & Lars Knudsen

On assignment to create a new, more accurate satellite survey of Armenia, an American cartographer forms a powerful bond with an Armenian expatriate and art photographer.

Sundance Screening Details

Photo Courtesy of TJ Watt

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Supported through The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute
U.S. Documentary Competition

Directors/Producers: Marshall Curry & Sam Cullman

Daniel McGowan was arrested for being part of the Earth Liberation Front, a group responsible for arsons against timber companies and SUV dealerships. Through his story the film sheds light on two of our most important and timely issues–terrorism and environmentalism.

Sundance Screening Details

Kinyarwanda
Summer 2010 Cinereach Grantee
World Cinema Dramatic Competition

Writer/Director: Alrick Brown
Producers: Darren Dean, Tommy Oliver & Ishmael Ntihabose (EP)

Based on accounts from survivors, Kinyarwanda tells the story of Rwandans who crossed the lines of hatred during the 1994 genocide, turning mosques into places of refuge for Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis.

Sundance Screening Details

Photo Courtesy of Sebastian Mlynarski

On the Ice
Winter 2010 Cinereach Grantee & Supported through The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute
U.S. Dramatic Competition

Writer/Director: Andrew Okpeaha MacLean
Producer: Cara Marcous

On the snow-covered Arctic tundra, two teenagers try to get away with murder.

Sundance Screening Details

Pariah
Winter 2009 & Winter 2010 Cinereach Grantee
U.S. Dramatic Competition

Writer/Director: Dee Rees
Producer: Nekisa Cooper

When forced to choose between losing her best friend or destroying her family, a Bronx teenager juggles conflicting identities and endures heartbreak in a desperate search for sexual expression.

Sundance Screening Details

In addition to these features, a previous film written and directed by 2011 Reach Film Fellow Nick Paley will be shown in the U.S. Narrative Shorts program.

Andy and Zach – When Zach decides to move out, his roommate Andy tries to set up a new life without his best friend.

Sundance Screening Details