My Dog Does All the Work

We are so pleased to announce that 4Culture has awarded us a Heritage Grant. Our film has been in a holding pattern the last few months while we secure funding for the post-production process. This grant will allow us to obtain archival photographs to use in the film to create dynamic, visual bridges between the interviews and the historical reality to which our subjects are referring. 

We’re still pursuing other grants and hopefully, by early this summer, we’ll have enough funds to finish post-production and submit this film to festivals this fall. We have some exciting news to announce about the creative approach we’ll be taking to the final cut of this film and we look forward to announcing them in June!

Read more about what we’re up to on the film and our continuing search for funds at http://www.promisedlanddoc.com/news/4culture

In the meantime, Vasant and I are taking a moment to celebrate this great news with a little light switch rave….

We might be doing a little bit more than light switch raves. It’s been a hard road finding funding for this film from the right sources that align with the film in the right way. We really needed this win and hopefully, more grants will follow. We’re also waiting on a currently unfolding political situation as well as a really exciting artistic partnership we get to announce in June. 

We’re really pumped to tell this film right and get it submitted to festivals this fall. It’s been a long road but this gets us geared up for the finishing stretch.

Big news last week; bigger news this week (but we can't announce it until June.)

It's been a long two years, and partnering with 4Culture is much-needed wind in our sails.

BOOM!

I’ve watched the Oscars, as ridiculous as they can be, since I was nine years old. No one watched them but me in the house back then, so I had to watch it on our old bunny ears TV upstairs by myself, wearing my mom’s dress-up clothes, pretending that a tumbler of Sprite was a flute of champagne and with eyes full of stars, I’d get out my notebook.

I would take note of who designed what, write a note to find out what cinematographers did (beyond what I could guess from the presenters’ explanations,) guess at what the clips presented of each nominated film for “Best Editor” denoted about why that person was up for that award. I’d write down what movies they homaged during the In Memoriam portion (back when they showed clips of great artists work rather than making room for a song at the end) so I could rent them from the store (this makes me old) or library. I learned about all the parts that go into making a movie at an early age from this overhyped production, and I’ll always be grateful for it.

In those days, I’d sit two feet away from the TV and hope that one day I could be there too, not to attend a party or wear a dress, but just to be in a room with that many other storytellers who played with lights and shadows, well-written words and sonorous voices, to create such good cinema. To quote tonight’s Best Screenwriter Graham Moore, to be in a room full of people like me who had “stay(ed) weird, stay(ed) different” and got to spend their lives like I had hoped to and still hope to: telling stories.

Tonight I had to skip out on parties and work on grant applications. I had the show on in the background while I, hunched over my laptop, worked on spreadsheets and essays so we can find the funding to finish our film strong. And while weirded out by John Travolta’s face touching, bored by the jokes that fell flat or disgusted by Sean Penn’s racist remarks, I must confess: I’m still inspired and may have just caught a second wind to finish all the budgets and proposals that are making me go blind this evening.

My beautiful wife. I love telling stories with her.

There are a lot of great films that didn’t win Oscars tonight, but if I were to wholeheartedly recommend only one of them, it would be Isao Takahata’s magnificent swan song, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.

This profoundly Japanese film is more than just a masterpiece of animation, it is a masterpiece of the art of film. Period. This is a movie that I think deserves a place among the very best of Japanese film, alongside the work of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. 

If you like animated films, see this one. If you don’t like animated films, see this one.