We've launched an exciting new project of our own! Introducing the Kickstarter app for iPhone!

Funded! This project successfully raised its funding goal on September 4, 2010.

HOT DOCS RECAP & 10 TO WATCH

Update #42 · May 13, 2013 · comment

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Quick update here. Director Andrew James and Producer Sara Archambault just returned from the Hot Docs Forum in Toronto where they successfully pitched STREET FIGHTING MAN to a group of international commissioning editors and broadcasters. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and the exposure the film received has already yielded exciting results. Stay tuned for more details surrounding these developments in the coming weeks!

This week, the STREET FIGHTING MAN team was featured by The Independent for their annual 10 to Watch series! Andrew, Sara, Katie and Jason were all listed as filmmakers to watch in 2013! We are honored and thrilled to be included with so many other wonderful filmmakers. Read about it here: http://www.aivf.org/magazine/2013/05/andrew-james-schleiffarth_sara-archambault_jason-tippet_katie-tibaldi_10-to-watch-2013

As always, thank you for your continued support!

Andrew James and the rest of the STREET FIGHTING MAN team

  • Image-256589-full
Comment

SHIGETO

Update #41 · Apr 2, 2013 · comment

Dear Friends and Supporters,

After a long search, STREET FIGHTING MAN has found the right musical partner in Zachary Saginaw (Shigeto). Zach is an Ann Arbor native and current Detroit resident. His background and unique sound make him the perfect fit for this film.

Here’s a little more information about Shigeto:

Artists take on pseudonyms for a multitude of reasons, but in Zach Saginaw's case, those reasons run deeper than most. Zach records under the name Shigeto. It's his middle name; it's also his grandfather's name, a tribute to the Japanese branch of Zach's family tree. Today, Shigeto stands for Zach's vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven but given to richly textured sound design. Zach was brought up on a steady diet of Michigan-bred music, as his father spoon-fed him old Motown and jazz records by the crateload. Zach picked up the drums at an early age, spending much of his childhood playing in the Detroit/Ann Arbor music scene. Zach spent three years studying jazz at the New School in NYC and three more in London, where he began learning electronic production.

Keep up with Shigeto on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/SHIGETO/349930070025?fref=ts.

And here:
https://soundcloud.com/shigeto

In addition to buidling our team, we’ve been hard at work preparing for the Hot Docs Documentary Forum in Toronto, which we’ll be attending in late April/early May. We are proud to be one of only 6 U.S. films chosen to participate this year: http://variety.com/2013/film/international/hot-docs-unveils-full-slate-1200325637/.

Lastly, collaboration with our editor, Jason Tippet, is now under way! If you’re curious about checking out Jason’s previous film, ONLY THE YOUNG, you can find more information here: https://www.facebook.com/onlytheyoungfilm. We’re very happy to be working with Jason on STREET FIGHTING MAN, and look forward to arriving at a rough cut in a couple of months.

We’ll be sharing more updates as they come in! Thank you for joining us on this incredible journey!

Best,
Andrew, Sara, Katie, and the entire SFM team

Comment

HOT DOCS!

Update #40 · Mar 13, 2013 · comment

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

Comment

Independent Film Week Recap and More!

Update #39 · Nov 7, 2012 · 1 comment

Dear Backers and Supporters,

We have a lot of news to share – thanks so much for sticking with us for all of this time! Here are some updates about our progress – feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Recently, Street Fighting Man was accepted to the Spotlight On Documentaries at Independent Film Week in New York City. Independent Film Week is designed to help eager filmmakers take their projects to the next level. Here we had an opportunity to speak to interested funders, broadcasters, agents, and festival programmers about Street Fighting Man. We got a lot of great feedback and met with some significant potential partners (though we can't name names yet!). We were deeply honored for Street Fighting Man to be among the excellent projects selected for participation! Producer Sara Archambault blogged about the experience and you can read about it here: http://www.lef-foundation.org/NewEngland/Blog/tabid/193/EntryId/88/Independent-Film-Week-A-New-View.aspx

We were also recently featured on Jon Reiss’ website: http://jonreiss.com/2012/10/street-fighting-man/. Jon Reiss is a fixture in the independent film community and his blog is widely read, so this was a really great way to continue to get the word out about the film.

We also want to let you know that, after much deliberation, and partly out of necessity, we have decided to extend the post-production process. As many of you know we were all set to start work with an editor last summer, however schedules shifted and inspired us to rethink our approach. We decided to slow down our pace and take the time we need to tell this story both well and right. We feel this decision is vital to producing a final product that is worthy of the excellent material that we have gathered so far. Our current goal is to complete the film in April of 2013 and start our festival run thereafter.

We will do our best to continue to share news and clips with you as often as possible. Thank you so much for going on this journey with us – your participation makes the process that much more meaningful!

Your friends,

Andrew, Jolyn, Sara, Katie, Torben, Brady, Dennis, and Joe

P.S. You may be interested in another documentary, currently in post-production, that also features Detroit. Lean, Mean, and Green is inspired by the award-winning book Reimagining Detroit by Detroit Free Press writer John Gallagher. The one-hour documentary will look to Detroit’s future, and, by extension, to the future of post-industrial cities around the world. In addition to Detroit, the production includes Youngstown, Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Torino, Italy and the Ruhr Valley area in Germany. Click here for more information or to contribute to the project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hotshotlezotte/lean-mean-and-green-post-production.

  • Image-178629-full
  • Image-178630-full
1 Comment

ARE YOU IN THE DETROIT AREA? JOIN US FOR A PREVIEW!

Update #38 - For backers only · May 24, 2012 · comment

For backers only. If you're a backer of this project, please log in to read this post.

153
Backers
$8,151
pledged of $6,500 goal
0
seconds to go

Funding period
Jul 19, 2010 - Sep 4, 2010

  • Pledge $1 or more

    3 backers

    For $1 or more, you'll receive a personalized thank you letter from the director.

  • Pledge $5 or more

    16 backers

    For $5 or more, you'll get everything mentioned above as well as a special thanks credit once the film is complete.

  • Pledge $10 or more

    29 backers

    For $10 or more, you'll get everything mentioned above as well as a limited edition still frame from the film. Not bad for ten bucks.

  • Pledge $30 or more

    50 backers

    For $30 or more, you'll get everything mentioned above as well as a special edition, pre-release DVD of the film. Be the first person to see and own a film festival hit.

  • Pledge $50 or more

    11 backers

    For $50 or more, you'll get everything mentioned above as well as exclusive web access to a 20 minute sneak preview of the film.

  • Pledge $150 or more

    16 backers

    For $150 or more, you'll get everything listed at the $50 level, have your DVD copy of the film signed by director Andrew James, and receive an honorary producer credit once the film is complete. Who knew that producing a film could be this easy?

  • Pledge $500 or more

    0 backers

    For $500 or more, you'll get everything listed at the $150 level, including an associate producer credit once the film is complete. Your contribution gets you a legitimate credit on an important and socially conscious documentary.

  • Pledge $1,000 or more

    2 backers

    For $1000 or more, you'll get everything listed at the $150 level, including a co-producer credit once the film is complete. Your contribution gets you a legitimate credit on an important and socially conscious documentary.

  • Pledge $2,000 or more

    0 backers

    For $2000 or more, you'll get everything listed at the $150 level, an executive producer credit once the film is complete, and vip passes to the world premiere of the film at an international film festival. This is by far the best value if you have the money. Come party with the filmmakers and get noticed. (airfare and lodging not included)