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It's been almost a year since Heroine Films started and a lot has happened. I've been posting updates in communities from time to time, but today as I was sitting here thinking about everything I realized it says something about my, our, generation. Everyone always says that we can't get behind a cause...that we are too coddled and too lazy to do anything. But I've seen something completely different.
Not all of you know the whole story, so here it is in nutshell form:
Heroine Films is a production company started by three women. Mel wrote a script which won the New York International Film and Video Festival, at the time it was called "Heroine". In it's most recent form it is "The Gladdest Thing". Before there was ever such a thing as this production company we were supposed to make this film. We had a cast, a crew and most of our financing. Then we held a reading and to make a long, painful story short some influential people found out that the main character is a lesbian. We are in North Carolina. Our financial backers gave into pressure and pulled out. So we lost everything.
A year later, Alex, Mel and I were sitting around trying to figure out what to do. How could we get enough to make it? That's when the idea of grassroots struck. There are people who believe in women making art, there are people who believe that a lesbian voice should be heard. There are people who believe in the passion of doing what you believe in at any cost any way possible. So we started a website, made some t-shirts and undies and hit the blogging communities. And we were STUNNED. In the first week we had so many hits we had to get a bigger website to keep from shutting down. We got donations and letters from all over the world. Including sweet high school girls giving what they could from after school jobs and heartbreaking letters from parents of LGBTQ kids who had been put through hell. These people want to do something...want to change something. Some of you who are on my friend's list now I met b/c you were one of the many who touched our hearts and made us cry with your support. It's been beyond incredible. We even had a lesbian screenprinter donate her services to us. And we quickly made a trailer to help attract investors and show the people supporting us what this could be like. An example--if this is what we can do on borrowed equipment with no crew and almost no money imagine what we can do when we are able to make the film.
Now we have been lucky enough to get a great deal of the funding from a combination of donations and a production company that has put up a large portion. Not all of it yet, but enough that we are confident that finding the rest is more than possible. We have an article coming out in CURVE magazine next week and we are in talks with LOGO about a marketing strategy on their new network. We aren't where we need to be yet but we are so much farther than we thought we'd be when we lost it all...and our hearts and spirits couldn't be higher. My life will never be the same because I now know that people believe in what I'm doing and want to hear the story we are trying to give a voice. I have even more passion because I know I am not just doing it for me...as cheesy as it sounds...I'm doing it for young girls and young LGBTQ people everywhere...to show that you CANNOT silence us.
-Amanda
www.heroinefilms.net
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