The Brooklyn International Film Festival Overview

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Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 06 July 2009 21:09

Written by Eric Lurio

Filmmaker Marco Ursino, who had moved from his native Urbino, Italy, back in the mid-1980s discovered that the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, which had moved into one of those beautiful temples of Mammon—a bank building that had been recently abandoned—was ripe for a new film festival set in Brooklyn.

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Director Sean Claffey Tackles Income Disparity and Other Economic Travesties Through his Doc “Americonned”

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 15 June 2023 17:46

Written by Brad Balfour

At CraicFest 2023, director Sean Claffey debuted his powerful doc “Americonned.” It offers commentary by various political and sociological experts and an examination of ordinary citizens’ lives in order to address the impact that super-capitalists — the one percenters — have on the world at large and on America in particular.

According to “Americonned,” pernicious power junkies and the super rich suck the economic life out of the middle and working classes — while contributing little in return. The movie shows the struggles of American families to balance out the inequities through various means such as union organizing. With sympathy for middle-class workers, the film explores the outrageous attempt to color them as lazy. It addresses the notion that we must make sure workers are paid what they’re worth instead of being paid what’s minimally possible.

With more than 25 years in the film industry during which Claffey made features, industrial documentaries and commercials, he employs his experience to make a film which grapples with compelling and controversial issues. As Claffey explains in the following Q&A, he is drawn to emotionally challenging projects and embraces the rigors of getting the story right, even under the most arduous circumstances. 

Q: What made you crazy enough to make a movie like this?

SC: I come from an immigrant Irish family that landed here in extreme poverty. There was a path to the middle class that existed then. It was helped greatly by unions. As I see that path erode more and more, it's really important that we fight back to keep it open. We need to keep people in the middle class from falling out of it. That's what made this country so amazing. America used to be the number one [home for the] middle class in the world. Now we're at number 12 and falling rapidly.

Q: When you make a movie like this, do you consider what kind of an audience you're going after? Who do you think is the audience?

SC: We were really focused on getting our message out to everyone, not one political party or the other. We looked at it and could see that both political parties really contributed to this fall. Maybe one more than the other. Certainly, one is now moving into an authoritarian position. So we called up both parties and we showed where they failed the working and middle class in this country.

Q: When you planned this film, did you have an idea of how you were going to structure it and where you were going to go with it? Or did you just start shooting, figuring that you would tap into some lucky moments as we see in the film?

SC: We definitely had a structure. We wanted to interweave several families who were suffering with the activists who are carrying on the fight. The experts basically tell the tale of how we got here and how we might get out of it. It did take left and right turns and U turns, though. Stories that we thought would work out led to dead ends. Others that we didn’t know would be anything actually became some of the major points of the film.

Q: Was this planned before the 2020 election or during it? Did you decide to make it after?

SC: We came up with this idea in 2009. I had three companies in the film business and lost all of them. We definitely saw that banks got bailed out and people didn't. So we started then, but had a false start and ran out of money. Making these things is very difficult. But we started again in earnest about three and a half years ago.

Q: Before the election, and before COVID, did you think that Trump was going to lose? Or was that a lucky break for you?

SC: When he was first running a year before we were doing this, a friend of mine, a producer, bet me that he was going to win. She's from Italy. I was like, “No way. Absolutely not Not in a million years. From a native New Yorker: we know his shenanigans here.” Yet he won. I was hoping that he wouldn't, but he did. Then by 2020, I was hoping again that he wouldn't win. The reason we got Trump is because we let down swaths of this country. They've been trying over and over again to make it but can't. When you try everything and still can't pay the mortgage — you lose your house, you lose everything — you start to get this mindset. I've spoken to many of those people who want to burn it all down.

Q: One of the great lucky turns in this film is the situation with unionizing at Amazon. You had no idea how that was going to work out but it really did work out in your favor. At what point did you know, you wanted to try and follow it? At what point did you know, “Wow, we really hit a home run.”

SC: I met Chris Smalls who organized the Amazon labor union in Staten Island before he ever thought of unionizing. They protested. Basically [Amazon] was making employees work without masks. People were getting sick and dying, so he stood up, He was a supervisor there and people were getting sick in the building and passing out. They’d just move them aside and put a new person in their place. So he started a protest long before the union. They thought about making a union. I was like, “Oh, there's a union thing going on in Bessemer. Let's all drive down.” We drove down with his whole team and we're in an Airbnb but the local union wouldn't even meet with us. They snubbed us. When the team got snubbed, I was like, “Just start your own union.” I could see that it kind of clicked with them. But, I want to say right here, that I didn't do it. They made the decision on their own. I might have been a spark but they worked like 300, almost 400 days straight –– seven days a week, three shifts. It was a huge effort.

Q: There's always a challenge in making a documentary. There's an enormous amount of competition and, certainly, a lot of films that deal with left-of-center issues. I don't even like the term left and right or progressive. Progress is not about standing still. Everything else is either standing still or going backwards. You have the challenge of convincing people that this is an initiative that concerns them without rubbing them the wrong way. Maybe it doesn't address the issues the way people think they should be addressed. How did you know that you want to continue this? 

SC: I was going to finish this film no matter what. COVID hit and it got really hard to make this film. We went around, risked our lives in the beginning of COVID not knowing what the outcome could have been. So the movie was getting made to the point where I was like, “If nobody picks it up, I will put it on YouTube.” Now, of course, you need to recoup your money; otherwise you'll go broke. But yeah -- nothing was going to stop us from finishing the film.

Q: Now that you’ve finished, what’s been the response? People seem to be getting attracted but you still want to get it into the biggest festival. What happened there?

SC: The big festivals just flat out turned us down. You know, we take on Amazon in a negative way -- it becomes the villain standing in for many other corporations. But you go around to the festivals and it's the Amazon documentary award, right? So do you think we even have a shot at that? Whether it's on purpose, or is subconscious or there subliminally. But we got very lucky and have gotten limited theatrical distribution. We're going to be in New York, DC, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle. There's additional theaters that are asking us right now as we speak, for New Hampshire and Florida. After that, we're going to be streaming on many different platforms.

Q: You've been getting good responses at festivals. The crowds come up to you. What do people want to do? Are they ready to finance the next film?

SC: We've gotten great responses interestingly enough, from both sides of the aisle -- conservatives as well as liberals and everything in between. Everyone knows something is wrong and we really expose it and dig down into the history. Once people see through it, you can't unsee it. There's a meticulous way it's being done. We expose that completely. Everyone wants the same thing — to have a house, a good job, and have their children do better than they're doing. The division is on purpose. But we're talking about somebody in a dress that's drinking a beer that they don't even like — that's becoming a divisive thing. When so much money is being stolen from the middle class, it’s all done on purpose. They pull it off -- the think tanks -- they think about it and push it out there. The talking points go out every Sunday night or Monday morning and you just hear it. They regurgitate stuff just to divide us against our own economic best interests. And they've been doing it for a while. They're really, really good at it.

Q: Do you think it's part of your Irish experience or Irish tradition that you make a film like this and support the causes it supports?

SC: I’ve always been a little rebellious. I don't have a problem standing up against powerful people for things my family has been doing for probably a lot longer than I even know, hundreds and hundreds of years. I grew up with that instilled in me: if something's not right, we need to stand up to it, no matter what. Because if we don't, then everyone else suffers.

Q: You grew up here in New York? Have you been back to Ireland? Have you tapped into a lot of your Irish community?

SC: I grew up in New York my whole life. I have definitely been to Ireland a bunch of times. I have family there. I'm part of that Irish American community and this year I got to help lead the parade as a New York City aide to the Grand Marshal. It's been an epic year for me personally.

Q What county are you from?

SC My family is from mainly Donegal but also the Midlands.

Q You’ve built up some new bonds with different people. You've continued with your relationships with the Amazon people. What new relationships were built for you?

SC: Finding the experts was challenging. But once we started getting a few of them, like Nick Hanna, they were amazing. He's a billionaire but he’s fighting for the middle class. He's really aligned on the whole thing. Once we got him, it was much easier to get the rest of them like Kurt Anderson and Jake Packer. We knew that we had to get the interview. So we hopped in my car, filled it up with camera gear and looked at the weather report. We have to get over the Rockies but there's a massive storm coming in Brooklyn. We drove 70 hours straight, only stopping to fill up for fuel and to eat, usually done at the same time. And we made it. We hit the Rockies just as snow started falling. Snow everywhere but we were able to get to Seattle where he was and it really started the journey [of the film.] We drove 3,400 miles across the country traveling through 23 states. We really got a sense of people that are suffering and what’s actually on the ground. I don't think I quite understood that just being a New Yorker.

Q: Was this the biggest challenge you've had in your life?

SC: Biggest long-term challenge? When we started filming, we filmed a few people in New York but then my mom passed away right in the beginning. I was like, “Well, I'm either going to go into depression or we're going to finish this thing.” We drove up to Seattle and dedicated it to her and a couple of other people we lost during the filming. We ran out of money a bunch of times, burned up the credit cards multiple times and I almost missed my mortgage payment. It was intense with some really low lows. But it's getting out there. So it was well worth it.

Q: Have you always meant to be a filmmaker or were there other things? Or did you just fall into this?

SC: I started out in theater behind the scenes, as a technical director, set design. Then I switched over to film and got to work with some really great directors like Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers and many, many others. I worked with some really bad directors, as well. Then I started doing TV pilots and whatever.

Q: This type of film is really a calling — to expose injustice and shine a light on problems like this. Is this what makes you tick? Once you make a film like this though, does it mean that you’re either going to go further mad or you're going to change the course of the world?

SC: I think you have a little of both. I have an idea for the next one. It's going to be about democracy and if you have a tool right now or whatever you can do [to maintain it]. The authoritarians are on the rise if we don't stop them. And we can't wait for someone else to do it because no one's going to do it. It's got to be all of us.

Q You've done the festivals and met some people. What is the best or most interesting experience you've had as a result of touring the festival circuit?

SC: Having a full house, watching them cry, get angry, have hope and stand up and applaud. That made me think that it was all worthwhile.

Q What was the most interesting question you've had so far?

SC: People don't really comprehend that this was all done on purpose — it was planned. I'm talking about the financial organizations [extraction of money] from the middle class. They're looked upon by a few tens of thousands of people as just something to extract from. Audiences are blown away by that. They want to know more about how we all let this happen and how do we not know about this.

Q: It risks making them and you cynical, because capitalism isn't going away. Can we fix capitalism?

SC: The most important thing is democracy. We get confused with capitalism and democracy and when these are just economic systems. I think there should be a blending of them. If just extreme examples -- if there's a depression, there should be more socialism. If there's a natural disaster, then we should turn the socialism up. If it's boom times, you raise taxes. There needs to be this constant balance. But most importantly, it needs to be a democracy for the path to the middle class that’s maintained. It will change with technology if we don't make it more fair. We talk about this in the film. Curt Anderson says, if we don't make it fairer now, with AI and robotics which is slated to take place, about 46 to 47% of all American jobs are at high risk. We're talking about doctors, accountants, radiologists. I mean, this is like the white collar thing. What happened with NAFTA to the blue collar [workers] — it's still happening now. The CEO of IBM said that he's going to get rid of every single human job he can this year.

Q: They can't get rid of film journalists. I'm sure of that anyhow. On that note, how do you envision things moving forward for you and for the future of America?

SC: About half of Americans between 18 and 65 medium wage is $10.35 an hour. That’s insane. With most places in the country, you have to drive to work. How do you afford a car, rent and food on $10.35 an hour? You can't even buy a burrito. It's insane. The price of eggs is more than that. I’m going to keep fighting and exposing injustice wherever I can. And for America, we're at a turning point, we may swing authoritarian or fascist with these high levels of income inequality. 

[This award-winning documentary opens theatrically in New York (Cinema Village), Los Angeles (Laemmle Monica Film Center) and major cities this June with a VOD release in the US and Canada on major platforms to follow. Not Rated/ 96 Minutes/ Feature Documentary/ USA]

Social Media/Website:
https://americonned.com

@AmericonnedDoc
#americonneddoc

Surviving 33 Minutes to Live: Hargrove's Tips on Guerrilla Filmmaking

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 04 November 2019 17:51

Written by Donna Cheng

It’s disarming to encounter gentle giant Kenny Hargrove for the first time. Sender of cheery “Happy Monday” and “exciting news” greetings, retweeter of film industry feeds to his @peaseblossom7 22.4K Twitter followers, popping up all over L.A. film openings, multi-hyphenate title bearer of filmmaker/producer/director/screenwriter/playwright—it’s a wonder that he has the time to focus on politics. Under his calm, humble, and genial manner, there is a thoughtful scholar (Princeton undergraduate, Columbia Masters in International Affairs) and a sincere emerging filmmaker. His ongoing film project is Snow, a woman’s journey toward love, destiny, and self-knowledge. “33 Minutes to Live” is his second project, a webisode with a pilot already shot that will hopefully turn into a television series about how people cope with the threat of nuclear war. FilmFestivalTraveler.com interviewed Hargrove when he crowdfunded on Indiegogo for his first project. We are back three years later to catch up on his dramatic arc toward his own film destiny.

If you’d like more information, please contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or his website http://www.33minutestolive.com.

Follow him on Facebook (www.Facebook.com/33MinutesToLive/) and on Twitter (@33MinutesToLive). Subscribe to his YouTube channel 33 Minutes to Live Webseries https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6AwI_CShuO_SZw98GTu2vA.

So what's the good news, Kenny?

“33 Minutes To Live” just had its second public screening [after the Silicon Beach Film Festival] at the closing night event of the Broadway International Film Festival at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles on October 25. It was a standing room only event with a nice reception. (Our project features actors from Argentina and Mexico and crew from Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina, among other parts of the world.) I was honored to receive a Certificate of Recognition there from the U.S. Congress. That was a nice surprise!

To go back, what happened to your Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for your previous film project, Snow, since FilmFestivalTraveler.com last interviewed you three years ago?

We didn't get anywhere near what we needed, but it was great for building a social media presence of the project online. The results of the Indiegogo campaign: We were trying to raise a minimum of twenty-five thousand. We got to just over $9,000 from about 115 unique contributors. After fees and campaign expenses we netted about $6,000. We did well on many levels. Successful campaigns average about $75 per person and we did that. We just had far fewer people than we needed. The campaign was very successful in rebranding me as a filmmaker and letting the world know about Snow.

You know, there's never been a better time to make Snow because of all the push for diversity in Hollywood, with a lot of female-centric projects. As producers of film projects about women now say, their pitch hasn't changed. What's changed is the reception. People actually listen and there are more and more female-centric films being made. It's a good environment to be in compared to five years ago when people would react to Snow by saying “Oh, a chick flick!” and lose interest. Now people take me seriously. It's really a wonderful change.

What it's like to be a black filmmaker, and do you use that identity as a filmmaker?

I think it’s fantastic and long overdue that the ranks of directors of color are rising. I’m very excited about the work of black directors like Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Antoine Fuqua, Tim Storey, and Steve McQueen. So much has changed in the last few years that benefits us all!

As for me, I just want to make films. Some will have subject matter and cast related to the African Diaspora but some will just have that sensibility of an “other” and an awareness that the world traditionally shown in Hollywood films may not represent the real world in which we live or that we want to live in. That would impact hiring on both sides of the camera but would not exclude or marginalize anyone.

There are so many great stories that cross cultures that have yet to be told which I think that many people can relate to. Great examples would be the films of Hong Kong director Clara Law about the Chinese Diaspora in the run-up to the 1997 Hong Kong Handover, films by Mira Nair, novels by VS Naipaul, or Jennifer Kent’s new film The Nightingale about the brutal conquest of Australia in the early 19th Century and the unlikely alliance of an Aboriginal man and an Irish convict woman in that dangerous world (my favorite film of 2019 so far). However, my personal role model is Ang Lee, who excels at telling stories that cross cultures and races and geographic boundaries.

I definitely have black stories to tell (some of which may be somewhat autobiographical or historical) but maybe they are best set on the stage where a smaller more engaged audience can enjoy them and explore their ideas and concerns, and I won’t have to worry about the commercial pressures of making an expensive film that might appeal to a mass audience. That said, I’m thrilled that Denzel Washington is filming the plays of August Wilson and finding a wide audience to enjoy them so I guess anything is possible.

Kenny, can you talk about what your pilot is about? Why you chose a webisode format?

I was taking a class at Chapman University, and it was called the Advanced Video Production Workshop. It was geared more toward the internet, more towards YouTube and YouTubers, which I'm not. I really wanted to take it to practice more on narrative filmmaking so I got an okay to do a web series pilot, so that's what I did.

At the time, the summer of 2017, Washington and Pyongyang were going at it, talking about who had the bigger button in terms of nuclear weapons. North Korea was launching intercontinental ballistic missiles, and so the whole world was on edge. I thought well, I loved all the old nuclear war feature films like Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach, and Hiroshima Mon Amour so I thought that maybe it's time to go back to that and do it in the web series form. So I created “33 Minutes to Live” because I read online that that's how long it takes for a missile to get from Pyongyang to the American heartland (which is not a lot of time).

Is your film set here in Los Angeles?

It was just because we were here and that's what we could afford. We actually shot in Malibu, because one of my classmates, Brian Nahas, who became an actor and producer for the project, offered his relative’s compound. So it is an L.A. story, but a very international story at its heart. It's got a lesbian relationship between the daughter of the South Korean ambassador to the UN, a wonderful actress, Kat Kim (whose parents are from Korea but she's actually from New York) and a wonderful Argentinian actress, Marina Bakica, who plays her lesbian lover who is also a poetess. We had an international cast and crew.  We had a good representation of the world on both sides of the camera.

How important is networking to produce a budget pilot? How did the cast and crew work for free or exchange for favors?

With any film project, there's a whole web of relationships. I had really good producers and a producer brings in their people with them. So it's really important to have a network, actually a bunch of networks. Some of these people might be working with me on future projects, so I wanted to test them out and maybe they wanted to test me out as well.

When you are an unknown with no budget you have to call in some favors. Being a student project at a top film school helped. Being a SAG New Media project helped. Shooting only on weekends helped, as some people have day jobs and could come out to help for fun in their leisure time. Having a rising star cinematographer, Pietro Villani, who’d just shot a feature film starring Oscar winner JK Simmons, helped.

Having in-demand actors like Genia Michaela, Alexandra Hellquist and Abe Martell helped. Unfortunately, it was difficult to schedule additional shooting dates for Alexandra and Abe because they were both involved with plays. So, I had to rewrite a key scene (the opening pool scene) with new characters. Fortunately, Zuri Alexander and Michael Joseph Carr, wonderful actors who’ve participated in several of my play and screenplay readings, were available.

Having four amazing producers helped, including two friends from Filmmakers Alliance (Emily Beach and Todd Howard) who are calm and efficient and quite familiar with putting together and managing quality crews for no and low budget projects. Kimberli Wong, who attended the filmmaking program at Santa Barbara City College (the top junior college film program in the entire country), brought an amazing crew and worked tirelessly to dress the set and buy all of the props. Brian Nahas, an actor who was new to producing, was amazing. He got us the free location in Malibu as well as discounted and free meals from his restaurant-owning friends in the area. These four phenomenal people collectively made my job much easier.

You have to work it to get the money to rent the lights and to rent the camera. Our sound guy, editor, post-production re-recording mixer, and sound editor were paid. However, they offered discounts.

Fortunately, our award-winning cinematographer brought almost everything, and the location had a two-story glass wall that maximized natural light so that’s primarily how people were lit. He and the actors and the crew volunteered their time. Hopefully, that begins a good long collaboration on a variety of projects.

Still, we needed extra money for things like food, computer drives, props, and incidentals. The problem with Malibu is that it isn’t cheap, and you can’t get people to deliver there because it’s so far. Still, I was hoping to shoot everything in one long day but costs kept creeping higher. 

I was thinking of either postponing or canceling. Four days before the shoot, I went to bed depressed thinking that I was going to have to make a big announcement about either postponing or canceling the shoot.

“I was thinking of either postponing or canceling. Four days before the shoot, I went to bed depressed thinking that I was going to have to make a big announcement about either postponing or canceling the shoot.”

I understand that you then got some funding from previous donors to your Indiegogo campaign social media? The big lesson is that the people that actually gave, give again because you asked them to.

Yes. I woke up the next morning and said, “Hey, we had a big crowdfunding campaign last year and people gave me money. Why don’t we go back to a few of them, and say, if you give me $200 at least by Friday, I’ll give you co-producer credit?” I think I sent out emails to 16 people and 4 people did respond, so we got a $1,000 bucks. The rest came from me. The total budget, excluding festival submissions and appearances, was about $4,500 (including tuition).

Can you tell me about your LGBTQ couple and your success with that audience?

After I finished the Intensive Directing Workshop at NYU in 2004, I was at the Los Angeles Film Festival closing night party, and I met a couple of actresses from Denmark. They asked if I could come up with a film idea that featured a lesbian couple. That’s how Snow was born. As “33 Minutes To Live” was practice for Snow, it also features a lesbian relationship at its center.

Snow has a lesbian subplot, but it's really about a woman's journey toward love and destiny. It’s about her trying to recreate her life and having a personal epiphany. She's pregnant with the child that her husband may not want. She's a struggling artist trying to find her voice, trying to find herself. She meets this woman who becomes a champion and her lover, who's a poet. That kind of helps her to completely change her belief system about herself so that she's suddenly able to move on, try new things, and break out of her comfort zone.

You've had some success on YouTube, with “33 Minutes to Live” featured on an LGBTQ YouTube channel, OML (One More Lesbian).

I've had a lot more success with “33 Minutes to Live” there, even though I've been posting like mad for over a year on the @33MinutesToLive Twitter handle and the “33 Minutes To Live Webseries Pilot” Page on Facebook to get views on my own YouTube channel. Yet, I’ve had fewer views, about 1,500 compared to about 13,000 on OML.

Thanks to a friend, I was able to get in touch with some lesbian media for the Snow campaign. One of the people that I contacted has her own lesbian media site called One More Lesbian with about 500,000 subscribers that are very enthusiastic about watching lesbian-related short-form stories and documentaries. She said that even though “33 Minutes To Live” isn’t really about romance (like much of the media on that channel) it features a lesbian couple at the center so they were enthusiastic about having the webseries pilot on the channel. When Snow comes out I will definitely approach them again.

Congratulations. So what are your plans for the future of the Snow feature film and the “33 Minutes to Live” webseries pilot?

I want to turn the webseries into a television pilot. It's a one-hour TV pilot scripted drama which contains most of what you saw in the pilot (and a lot more). Some of the characters are gone. There are some interesting new situations, some really good scenes at this point. It kind of centers around the three main characters: the two lesbian lovers, and the crazy next-door neighbor. One of the many characters gets killed off in the first season. I won't say who. Also, we've changed the military buff who tells exactly how long it takes for the missile to arrive from being an American of Middle Eastern descent to being a Russian.

The U.S. and Russia have the two biggest nuclear arsenals in the world. We want people in the room to be able to react to what's happening when the missiles get launched because we won't have government officials there. So a Russian to give a Russian perspective, just as we have South Korea to give the South Korean perspective, and Americans with the American’s perspective. So we don't have to cut to the U.N. or cut to this government or that government. All the key countries are represented there in the room through ordinary people.

I’ll apply to a few more festivals but this may have been the last opportunity to see it on the big screen with an audience. As it’s a webseries pilot, my focus has been getting people to watch it online. So far it has received about 15,000 views on the two different YouTube channels. Hopefully, it’s brought more people into the conversation about nuclear war and the new Arms Race. As we head into an election year, I hope that’s something that voters will ask candidates about.

Now it’s time to pitch the “33 Minutes To Live” television series and to get the “Snow” feature film project moving. Snow is still my main project. I’m very excited that Snow finally has found a lawyer who doesn’t need to be paid until all funds are raised. That means that we can now structure investor agreements and finally move forward without having to worry about paying a retainer or the high hourly wages (at least not immediately) that many entertainment lawyers require. He simply wants to help get the film made, as he did for a friend’s feature film project.

I wish I’d found him before embarking on the Indiegogo donor crowdfunding campaign in late 2015/early 2016. That would have made that less-than-successful campaign unnecessary, as paying legal fees was to have been a major use of funds from that campaign. Nevertheless, the campaign very successfully created an awareness of “Snow” and forced me into the social media world, which is an important skill for a director to have.

Now I have to find equity investors and decide how to structure their participation, whether it’s using fiscal sponsorship or an SEC-registered equity crowdfunding campaign or a more traditional approach. Hopefully, we can get that started before year-end and finally raise funds and shoot the feature film next year. It’s an exciting moment. Everything should be finalized by year-end.

One of the first uses of funds will be to cast a “name” actor or two to increase the chances for commercial visibility and success of the project. Hopefully, having a “name” actor will make the indie film a much more exciting opportunity for potential equity investors too.

Well, good luck, Kenny. We'll check back in a year or two and see what's happening with your progress. It's been a long road, but you've kept at it.