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Truly Free Film

10 Things We Learned About Sustainable Filmmaking While Working on the Documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists

by Stephen Eyer

For the past five years, my wife and producing partner, Daneen Akers, and I have been working full-time on a social documentary film called Seventh-Gay Adventists (http://www.sgamovie.com) about three gay and lesbian members of a conservative church and their challenge to reconcile their faith and sexuality. We spent the last year on the road traveling with the film in the U.S., Canada, and Australia at film festivals, churches, and community centers. Our last major festival screening will be on Dec. 5th as part of Frameline’s Encore series (http://www.frameline.org/now-showing/events/frameline-encore-seventh-gay-adventists) in San Francisco. Although we’ve been asked at filmmaker gatherings before if we’re selling marijuana on the side to make rent, we’ve actually been making enough to both pay for our expenses and fund the film primarily through cultivating an engaged and motivated grassroots community that believe in this film.

The following are 10 things we learned about how to sustain yourself as a filmmaker while making films that can have a positive impact on the world.

Categories
Truly Free Film

The Cinema Giants Agree: The Film Biz As We Know It Is OVER. Now What?

Perhaps this blog is now obsolete (now wouldn’t that be excellent!).  Or maybe blogging just doesn’t work the way I hope it would (man, that would be a real shame!).  Perhaps change in the film business just about impossible. I am growing afraid it might well be — at least the kind that comes from positive and strategic influence as opposed to spontaneous or reactionary disruption (that kind of change that always is constant).  So what is the next step? And why the bleep do I have to ask?

What is going on in this world when everyone agrees that something is totally f*cked but no one with power appears to be doing anything substantial to improve it?  Are there secret plansof a new cultural infrastructure hatching and