Wanted to give a special plug to our new friends, Punta Sal restaurant, who served up the great food at the cockail party. Here's how assistant editor Angela Fuhrken put it:
"Those guys were awesome! And the yucca rocked my house..."
Punta Sal serves up authentic Peruvian cuisine in Forest Hills, Queens, with live music on Thursday nights.
On the 6:05 Amtrak train to Washington for the Sunnyside of the Docs conference, where invited producers mingle with international television execs to try to get TV deals and finishing funds. Feel like I'm stepping up to the Big Leagues here. Sunday is the Big Day, it seems, for independent producers like me. Here's what's supposed to happen:
A number of independent Canadian, American and French producers will have their names randomly selected from a hat and be given the opportunity to pitch their projects. The total amount of time for each pitch slot is 10 minutes. This includes screening of any clip/visuals, your verbal presentation and then feed-back from the audience. It is suggested that your presentation be no more than 6 minutes — clip and verbal...Clips will be shown at the beginning of each presentation with no set-up.
For past two weeks, Ingrid and I have put aside editing the final film to make a new video clip for this presentation. That was a challenge! Fortunately we got great feedback from our smart friends/advisors Jonathan Skurnik, Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy.
Ingrid did a superb job. In a five-minute piece, you've got to make every shot, every cut count, and as usual she was up to the task.
She didn't even yell at me when I kept changing my mind about certain shots ("Yes, add Neli's voice when she's walking up the hill. No, take it out. Wait, how about a title card before the shot? No, too long. Or we could write "Peru" on screen during the shot... ").
OK, here's the public announcement for the conference we've been invited to, including a list of other filmmakers.
Sunny Side of the Doc Rendezvous in Washington, DC
January 27-29, 2006
SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival is partnering with Sunny Side of the Doc for the Washington, DC Sunny Side of the Doc Rendezvous, a co-production conference uniting French, Canadian and US broadcasters with select filmmakers.
Over this three-day period in January, each broadcaster, paired with a filmmaker, will pitch new projects seeking financing to their international colleagues. In addition to the broadcaster/producer pitches, SILVERDOCS will present a select group of independent documentary projects that have at least 20% of their financing in place. Three of these projects will be selected at random and their filmmakers will be given 10 minutes to present their projects to the assembled group.
Sunny Side of the Doc brings buyers, commissioning editors, and producers from all nations together for one of the world's most prestigious documentary co-financing markets each June in France.
Congratulations to SILVERDOCS' selected participants:
Continue reading "Sunny Side of the Doc conference in Washington, DC" »
By now many of you know that our two heroines met through the Internet — Cynthia was searching for a place to learn Peruvian dance and found our website, where she read about Nelida's story. That was 2-1/2 years ago. This week I received the following letters from a Patterson woman named Celia. Will history repeat itself?
I loved these letters because they speak beautifully to the movie's capacity for connecting people and making a difference. This isn't just a fundraising cliche or a someday/maybe vision, it's been happening since we started production. Cynthia's story is obviously the most visible but there are countless others, in the USA, Peru and elsewhere. And we haven't even finished the movie. One of the reasons I started the blog was to create a space to preserve and share at least some of these stories, like Cecilia's:
I know, it's the holiday season and your presence is already in hot demand. But here's why you should come to our
Peruvian Pisco Cocktail Party/Fundraiser on
*****POSTPONED TILL NEXT YEAR*****
Another old friend and donor has made a third donation(!) to the project - Shobha George Giordano, National Education Products/Projects Manager for USA TODAY. Even better, USA's parent company, Gannett, will match the gift.
Really grateful for this - and also appreciated the reminder of the mechanism for matching corporate gifts.
To date we've gotten donations from 129 individuals and 3 matching corporate grants: J.P. Morgan Chase, XL Insurance and now USA TODAY/Gannet Co.
My old University of Pennsylvania/Wharton classmate Howard Zeprun has just pledged another donation, which I'm very grateful and excited about. Plus he had a bunch of new fundraising ideas and sources which I'll get cracking on.
So I wanted to thank him here - but equally, his lovely daughter Mei Mei - adapted from China, the treasure of his life, and a big reason why Howard shares our interest in building bridges across cultures.
When I came back to NY I thought there was no way I'd want to organize another fundraising event until we had a rough cut finished. I'm a distracted enough person as it is, just trying to focus on the editing is tough enough.
But I'm changing my mind after two meetings in past couple of days.
One with Lina Srivastava, the founding executive director of the Kids with Cameras project attached to Born into Brothels.
The other with Ian Shapolsky, publisher/editor of Spibooks, who co-hosted our party last year at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery.
For both meetings I was accompanied by my friend and new advisory board member Leda Duif, former director of South American Explorers-Lima who's recently moved back to New York. (Her new husband David is a stuntman and I just found out he doubled for Ben Bratt in Piñero. I've been trying to meet with Bratt for nearly 2 years because his mother is from the Peruvian Andes. He's seen an earlier trailer and we've been in touch through his agent but haven't been able to get closer to that. But wierdly, it seems like almost every week I meet someone who knows him. Even wierder, he shares exactly the same birthday - day and year - as Nelida, which suggests some kind of fateful connection, if you believe in that sort of thing.)
Oh yes, we were talking about fundraising. How much more fun to be talking about movie stars.
So anyway, the feedback from both meetings was, let's do another fundraiser, keeping it simple - a cocktail/house party with 15-20 guests who have the capacity and interest to give a four-figure donation. In early December.
I'm going to call the Mission of Peru to the United Nations tomorrow and see if we can use the ambassador's home again - we did two events there last year.
Here we go again!
OK, I pulled the trigger - we resume editing with Ingrid Patetta next week. The plan is to get a rough cut done by the end of the year. This is big news. Here's what happened:
Nice succinct recap from Carole Dean about what filmmakers should give to sponsors.
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