Dear Friends and Supporters,
We’re excited to announce that we’ve been accepted to participate in the Hot Docs Documentary Forum in Toronto! Regarded as the most effective international documentary market in North America, the Hot Docs Forum is a dynamic pitching event that stimulates international co-production financing (aka - the money we need to finish!). At the forum, we will have 7 minutes to share our trailer; JR, Luke, and Deris’ stories; and the significance Street Fighting Man will have on dialogue about poverty and equity. No small task, but we feel ready for the challenge. Our audience will be some of the world’s top broadcasters and distributors. The Hot Docs Forum’s intimate and intense format has proven extremely successful in building international partnerships and raising additional financing for projects in need (like ours!). We are honored to be selected to participate and hope this will garner some international attention for the film!
Read the full press release here: http://www.hotdocs.ca/media/press_releases/hot_docs_forum_announces_19_canadian_and_international_project_selections
As we head down the final stretch of post-production, we have made some vital additions to our team! Thanks in large part to your generous support, we’ll have the help of these talented folks as we head toward the finish line.
Meet our new team members:
The editor who will help us craft this story is Jason Tippet. Jason most recently directed and edited Only the Young, which premiered at the True False Film Festival in 2012. It was named one of the Top Five Films by The National Board of Review and nominated for the 2013 Independent Spirit ‘Truer Than Fiction’ Award. It also won the Silver Docs Sterling Award, Camden's Emerging Cinematic Vision Award, AFI's Audience Award, and Cinema Eye's Best Debut Feature. Only the Young was picked up by Oscilloscope and POV for broadcast. Jason earned his undergraduate degree at CalArts where he directed his thesis, Thompson, a short documentary, which screened at Sundance in 2010 and won the Jury Award at SXSW in 2009. We’re very excited to be working with Jason as we move toward a rough cut of Street Fighting Man.
Jamila Wignot is joining our team as a Story Consultant. Jamila is an award-winning documentary producer and director who has made films on subjects ranging from the American outlaw Jesse James, to the poetry of Walt Whitman, to the devastating 1911 fire at a leading garment factory, the Triangle Waist Company. In 2009, she was awarded WGBH Educational Foundation's Peter S. McGhee Fellowship, which honors an individual whose work reflects excellence, intelligence, fairness, passion and scholarship. Her 2008 documentary film Walt Whitman, produced for WGBH’s American Experience, was nominated for a Creative Arts Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Non-fiction Filmmaking. Prior to Walt Whitman, she produced The Rehnquist Revolution. This one-hour film was the fourth episode for Thirteen/WNET’s series, The Supreme Court. Her episode won a 2007 Cine Golden Eagle Award for history and a 2008 NYf Silver Medal for International Television Broadcasting for History and Science. The series was the 2007 IDA Limited Series winner and also garnered a 2008 Silver Gavel Award for Documentary from the American Bar Association. Her other producing credits include Jesse James and Massie Affair, which aired on WGBH’s American Experience. Prior to her work as a producer and director, she worked on other PBS programs including Reconstruction: The Second Civil War and on the series Race: The Power of an Illusion.
Jennifer MacArthur will be invaluable as our new Outreach Director. Most recently Director of TV + digital media engagement at the National Center for Media Engagement, Jennifer spearheaded the organization’s National Impact Partnership with ITVS Community Cinema. She trained producers for the 2011 CPB/PBS Producers Academy and co-produced the 2011 Firelight Media Producers Lab seminar “How to Develop Community Engagement Strategies for Your Media Project” at the Open Society Foundation. Jennifer is currently spearheading the engagement campaign for the upcoming HBO documentary Gideon’s Army (2013) and is consulting on ITVS’ Online Video Engagement Experience. Past projects include POV's Traces of the Trade (2008), Arts Engine, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Alaska Broadcasters Association.
The good news keeps rolling in and we’ll have even more to share in a few weeks. Thank you so much for your support of the project and thanks for sticking with us!
Andrew, Sara, Katie and the whole Street Fighting Man Team
