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They Want To Fund Your First Feature (& Take You To Venice, Italy)

Launched this year by the Biennale di Venezia in partnership with Gucci, the Biennale College – Cinema is an initiative to support teams of directors and producer to make their first audio-visual work. A community of selected filmmakers from around the world will work alongside an invited team of international experts and tutors to explore the aesthetics of micro-budget filmmaking and the new integrated models of production, which engage with an audience from the outset.

After a first 10-day workshop in Venice for 15 selected projects in January 2013, up to 3 teams will be invited to a second 15-day workshop between February and March and supported with 150.000 Euros in order to produce and screen the projects at the 2013 Venice International Film Festival. The Call for Applications is open from the 30th of August 2012 to the 22nd of October 2012 only to teams of directors at their first or second feature and producers with variable degrees of expertise who must have produced at least 3 short films distributed and/or presented at Festivals.

For more information go here, or email college-cinema@labiennale.org

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Truly Free Film

Indie Film in South Africa Part 2

By Jon Plowman

How do you turn your passion for film into a profit? How does one take all that experience built up on non-paying indie projects, and turn it into a career? I’m glad you asked. Welcome to the second part of a two-part article on indie filmmaking.

It seems to me that a lot of filmmakers are chronically losing sight of a very simple fact: there has been a total revolution in the film industry in the last few years.

Categories
Truly Free Film

Indie Film in South Africa Part 1

By Jon Plowman

Ted asked me for this article last year. I agreed, because there are a couple of important points I’d like to put out there to encourage filmmakers in the same kind of position as I find myself. But before I could actually get around to writing the damn thing, I found myself retrenched. That’s “laid off” to most of you. I lost my job. Yeah, you know the one I mean, the one that actually pays the bills while I work on movies. My boss gave me a sob story about how he couldn’t afford to keep me on because the business was struggling. He has a wife and two small kids, and his business was their sole income. I couldn’t blame him. We feel the global recession here just as keenly as the US or Europe. So there I was, out on the street with R150 in my pocket. To put that in perspective, R1 = US$0.15, give or take.

Welcome to life as an indie film maker on the southern tip of Africa.