Chicken & Egg Pictures and Rooftop Films have joined together to offer a short film grant of $6000 to women filmmakers. Any filmmaker who has ever screened at Rooftop Films, or who has ever applied for or received support from Chicken & Egg Pictures is eligible to apply. For more information on what to include in your application, please visit Chicken & Egg Pictures. Application deadline is August 3, 2010.

Whew, just back from Washington DC and the Good Pitch @ Silverdocs, where it was hot hot hot – both inside the Performing Arts Center with an amazing lineup of films and responses from funders, NGOs, and strategists, and outside, where the temp hovered around 99. Jess Search, of C4 BRITDOC, set up a time lapse camera to capture the day:

If you missed out on the pitches, you can catch a play by play glimpse on Twitter and Facebook. Also, check out these recaps from the Silverdocs Blog and the Center for Social Media.

The Good Pitch is a project of The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation in partnership with the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. It is made possible by Fledgling Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tides Foundation, the Hartley Film Foundation and anonymous donors. Campaign development and training for filmmakers provided by Working Films.

Reel Engagement participants and facilitators, from left to right: Robbie Gemmel, Josh Levin, Rennifer Redfearn, Lora Smith, Kristin Henry, Taira Akbar, Deb Anderson, Josh Fox, Emily Verellen, Judith Helfand, Jen Gilomen, Amanda Berger, Natalie Difford, Peter Bull. Photo courtesy of Peter Bull.

During Reel Engagement for the Energy and Natural Resource Revolution, we spent a week drilling down deep (excuse the pun) into audience engagement plans with filmmakers, coordinators, and non-profit organizations on energy and natural resource extraction issues. We’ll be updating you shortly on our website with exciting collaboration plans.

Below are photos from the retreat.

I’m here at the Reel Engagement for the Energy and National Resource Revolution workshop where exciting things are happening.

Natalie Difford of Chicken & Egg Pictures and Emily Verellen of the Fledgling Fund have been catching some of the excitement on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter pages.

In this video, Emily asks Lora Smith, the Appalachian Regional Coordinator for the fantastic film, Deep Down, what sustains her activism.

You can watch and read more here:

C&E Blog: http://chickeneggpics.blogspot.com/
C&E Twitter: http://twitter.com/chickeneggpics
Fledgling Fund blog: http://www.thefledglingfund.org/blog/

Last month, Working Films and Chicken & Egg Pictures hosted a screening of Nancy Schwartzman’s film The Line, for our Story Leads to Action series at 92YTribeca. After the screening, the audience discussed how the film could be used in high schools, college freshman orientation programs, sexual violence prevention programs and law school and criminal justice education.

On the panel were:

- Nancy Schwartzman (Director)
- Michelle J. Anderson (Dean and Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law)
- Neil Irvin (Executive Director, Men Can Stop Rape)
- Don McPherson (former NFL football player; current sports announcer and activist)
- Meghan O’Conner (NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault)

On her blog, Nancy gives a breakdown of the key points that each panelist spoke on.

Also, check out what Jessica at “The Love That is Strong” had to say about the screening along with their thoughts on the larger discussion of sexual violence awareness and consent.

Judith Helfand, our co-founder, is getting her due honors all this week – a testament to her passion and commitment and downright brilliance.

Honors start at the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival this Wednesday, April 7th, 2010. The night will open with a tribute to Judith featuring A Healthy Baby Girl, Ek Velt: At the End of the World, and excerpts from Blue Vinyl followed by a Q&A.

On Thursday, April 8th at noon, Judith will be teaching a master class where she will share storytelling strategies that lead to effective, resonant and riveting filmmaking and ‘call to action’ activism.

Following that at 2:30pm, Judith will lead a workshop on applying to Chicken & Egg Pictures, the other organizational “hat” she wears – co-founded with our board members Julie Benello and Wendy Ettinger. The workshop will answer many questions critical to their application process.

At 5:00pm, Judith will be hosting a filmmakers’ panel discussing how STORY LEADS TO ACTION! Panelists include Christie Herring (The Campaign), Sally Rubin (Deep Down), Dawn Valadez (Going on 13), Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday (Barber of Birmingham), Gabrielle Mullem (The Music’s Gonna Get You Through) and Lynn Hershmann (Woman Art Revolution).

It doesn’t stop at the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival, though. Judith is headed to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham NC, where they are screening The Uprising of ’34, the film Judith co-directed with George Stoney, on Sunday, April 11 at 1:40pm. Part of a series about labor programmed by filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert; Judith will be at the Q & A.

On Monday, April 12th, the United States Green Building Council, New Jersey Chapter (USGBC-NJ) will be presenting a panel discussion about the sustainability of PVC called “Blue Vinyl, Green Vinyl?… Nice Vinyl, Mean Vinyl?” Please visit USGBC-NJ to register for this event.

We know Judith would love to see old and new friends at all these events. I am joining her at Full Frame, if you’re there, say hello.

The call for submissions for the Good Pitch Forum at Silverdocs 2010 is open! The Good Pitch is a one-day forum set to take place during the Festival (June 22-27, 2010), bringing together specially selected foundations, NGOs, social entrepreneurs, brands and broadcasters to maximize the impact and create powerful alliances around groundbreaking films.

The Good Pitch is a project of The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation in partnership with the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. It is made possible by The Fledgling Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tides Foundation and anonymous donors, with campaign development for filmmakers provided by Working Films on June 19-20.

photo by BRITDOC

Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation and the Sundance Documentary Institute have announced the lineup for the Good Pitch @ Tribeca, hitting the screens in NYC on April 27 during the Tribeca Film Festival.

For three years and running (we were there at the very first Good Pitch in Oxford UK), Working Films has provided a two day workshop on campaign development for the Good Pitch filmmakers. Our allies the Fledgling Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, the Tides Foundation, the Hartley Film Foundation and anonymous donors provide additional support.

From an impressive 220 submissions, eight outstanding filmmaking teams will pitch their projects and associated engagement campaigns. The goal is to create a unique coalition of non-profits, NGOs, for-profit brands and foundations around each film to accelerate its impact and influence. The filmmakers in the Good Pitch 2009 can attest to successes: immediate funding from unexpected sources, strategic partnerships with organizations to reach new audiences, savvy and unique audience and community engagement tactics from allies “on the front lines”. And it keeps getting better, watch for some highlights from us in future blogs.

The selected filmmakers are Tom Rielly (Moving Windmills), Jennifer Arnold (A Small Act), Michele Stephenson & Joe Brewster (An American Promise), Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady (Detroit Hustles Harder), Michael Collins (Give Up Tomorrow), Alexandra Codina (Monica & David), Lee Hirsch (The Bully Project) and Eugene Martin (Anderson Monarchs Soccer Club). Congrats to all of them, and we’re off!

Find out more about the event and the selected projects. Announcements on how to apply to the next Good Pitch will follow shortly.

by: Lindsay Gibb, Reelscreen

This past week the women behind Chicken and Egg Pictures, a New York-based hybrid film fund and mentoring production company for female filmmakers, were given the Loreen Arbus Award at the New York Women in Film and Television’s (NY-WIFT) Muse Awards. Realscreen spoke with Judith Helfand, Julie Parker Benello and Wendy Ettinger (pictured, left to right) about the meaning of Chicken and Egg, what they’re looking for in the projects they support and what plans they’re hatching for the future.

Last year the Loreen Arbus Award for Those Who Take Action and Effect Change was given to Kodak for its support of female cinematographers. This year Wendy Ettinger, co-founder of Chicken and Egg Pictures, says she’s thrilled the NY-WIFT acknowledged her organization because it meant the awards show, which usually focuses on women in fictional films and television, was giving a nod to women who work on documentaries.

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Last week Working Films, The Fledgling Fund and Chicken & Egg Pictures hosted a 3 day workshop where 6 filmmakers came together to create audience engagement plans so that their films result in Reel Change.  All of the films tell the stories of and touch on issues that affect girls and young women. During the first 2 days, the filmmakers worked on their “community engagement mission statement” so-to-speak. Each filmmaker answered the question “What impact do you want your film to have?” We challenged filmmakers to get specific about the outcomes they wished to see from their film, prompting them to also answer the question, “So what?… So what if your film is broadcast and many people see it? Or, so what if you have community screenings? What will the measurable difference in the lives of girls and young women be when you film is used strategically?

By the end of the two days filmmakers had drilled down to much more specific answers to these questions. Here’s a sampling of some of the concrete ideas.

Jesse Epstein of Body Typed wants to use her series of short films on body image to engage men and boys in a conversation and shift their attitudes about the role of the media in shaping our perspectives on beauty. She believes that we not only have to build girls’ media literacy skills and self esteem by deconstructing false images of themselves but that boys and men have to be challenged to do the same. One idea she has for reaching this audience is to hold community screenings in neighborhood barbershops.

Stephanie Wang-Breal’s film Wo Ai Ni Mommy is about more than just Chinese adoption, it is about questions of identity as well as a redefinition of exactly what is the new  Chinese American family. Through Fang Sui Yong (who is renamed “Faith” by her Jewish-American family) we see how quickly shifts in culture and identity can happen for young adoptees and other immigrant children immersed into a completely new culture. Stephanie wants to use her film to educate adoptive and potential adoptive parents of the cultural gains and losses that result from their adoption and their impact so they are better prepared to work through the questions of identity that their children face. She also wants to work with organizations to set up workshops for adult adoptees based around the film. Interestingly over the course of the residency Stephanie began to think about immigrant families as an additional potential audience for her film that could also benefit from structured workshops or Q&As around cultural and ethnic identity questions facing their children.

Selena Burks, of the film Saving Jackie, used her time at the residency to focus in on how her film can be a tool to serve youth who have experienced many of the same abuses that she did growing up in a home with parents addicted to drugs. To date Selena has had success using the film as an educational tool for foster parents, social workers and other adults that work with youth in these situations. But at Real Girls, Reel Change she came up with some solid ideas about creating a screening toolkit that organizations working with youth in the foster care system or other at-risk groups could use so that the film becomes a prompt for young people to share their own stories of hardship and resiliency and to get access to resources that they might not have known existed. In particular Selena was introduced to the idea of targeting youth that are aging out of the foster care system and using the film as a jumping off point for them to learn about resources available to them. Selena had a chance to test out this model of using the film with youth immediately after Real Girls, Reel Change, with a screening for young women at the Lower Eastside Girls Club in Manhattan on the same night as the workshop.

These are just a few examples of ideas that came from the Real Girls, Reel Change workshop. And this is only the beginning of a much larger collaboration among these films and NGOs. You would think with all these filmmakers in the room there would be competiveness, but the 3 days were nothing but a supportive and encouraging environment. All of the filmmakers shared their experiences of what works and hasn’t worked for them and learned much from one another. There were talks of how all of the films can be used in one big collaborative effort, an idea that was also championed by the NGOs and foundations that participated on the final day of the residency.

On the last day held at 92YTribeca, the filmmakers did a marvelous job of presenting their ideas and pitching their films to numerous NGOs and foundations. A group of young women from NYC based writing program Power Writers were also present to observe and compose poems to summarize the things they learned over the course of the day. The poems were extremely powerful and were a testament to the impact that these films can make in the lives of girls.

Everyone left the day with concrete ideas on how to incorporate media and film into the current work they are doing and with some specific goals to start working towards with these films and filmmakers. And the best part of it all is that this is only the beginning!

More Real Girls, Reel Change:

All related posts about Real Girls, Reel Change on Working Films’ blog
Facebook Photo Album
Twitter #RealGirls
Chicken & Egg Picture’s blog: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Chicken & Egg’s YouTube Channel
Katherine Broendel from the American Association of University of Women’s blog
Kathleen Sweeney from Reel Grrls’ blog