Film Projects
My decision to move to film production was logical. After software was declared by some communist or hippie “free and open source”, I could not make any money by writing decent computer software products as the business model went to hire most incompetent programmers, write crap with high budgets and sell bug fixes afterwards. This wasn’t my way.
So, meanwhile I made myself living from new technologies by putting in 1998 $2K to NASDAQ and took total $68K out of it until 2002. As music was free too because of MP3 format, I didn’t make any money anymore by producing it. Therefore I turned to film projects. People are still paying at least $1.95 to watch a movie and when producing few thousand dollar budget porn clips, you can sell those for $3.95.
All my projects are financially viable low budget – high size niche market projects, so I’m still surprised that I haven’t been able to execute those?
- “Together Divided” is a lesbian love story about two nurses, who living in remote hospice helped lonely elders to join with their loved ones in heaven by killing them. Subsequently they where convicted as serial killers. I started the project in January 2005 with professional writer – Mark Ingram working with the script.
This project seems to be moving forward finally as it has a French director interested and around 70% funding in place.
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Another feature project comes from my original idea to make movie about suicide terrorist. An Arab person, well educated in British Academy moves to career on Saddams army until his classmates will kill his family and he finds himself fighting against them. Moving to Northern Ireland changed little bit the story so being impressed by Bobby Sands and by Northern Ireland Screen suggestion to have relevancy to the Northern Ireland until they can finance it, we changed it to be “detention camp” story by dying there due to hunger strike having no future or solution otherwise. If I would have got Northern Ireland writer and Director to the project, it would have been possible to execute their low-budget (200K) scheme which they could cover up to 70%. Now it could be up to 50% when we just shoot it there.
- Meanwhile I have applied to get little bit money from Brit Docs, BBC Storyville and Channel 4 documentaries to visit Southern Estonia again. I would like to make a documentary about Setoland. Setoland is dying nation divided between Estonian-Russian border, which have own language, culture, hymn, flag and even King. Their King is elected which could be alternative to British monarchy, there is absolutely no economy there, contraband between Russian and EU plus producing their own strong spirit (over 70% of alcohol) and selling it to the black market are the main activities. There is lot of talented persons and this region could have lot of possibilities. However, when I once wanted to help them preparing projects for EU regional funding, I found myself fighting against corrupted bureaucrats from Estonian side and afraid politicians from Russian side. Brit Docs didn’t much think, that this project is relevant for British Culture, BBC afraid the political consequences and Angus Mc Queen from Channel 4 documentaries answered, that we have here much important projects going on than dealing with those kinds of small countries. With less than $10K I can produce the project. I will take a British Director with me to Southern Estonia and we will stay there around two months. Coming back with over 40H interesting material, we will post produce it in UK as 48 minutes TV program or anything else to benefit from the creation. This project have now IndieGogGo page so you could donate money from there.
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Being in Northern Ireland, I would have loved to make a documentary about the Punk culture. As not many people would know, it was born there long before Sex Pistols (who make Sir Richard Branson capital) and is still very much live there. So, how and why it was born and why there so many young people there will turn to punks could be this documentary topic. Hopefully Brits will start to understand Northern Ireland better then but as BritDocs seems to be so corrupted, they will never finance this kind of project.
- I’m trying to find a writer and produce docudrama about Mikhael Khorodovsky (ex CEO of Yukos) trial process in Russia. I got full court transcripts in Russian language and those are few months of total juridical absurd. This absurd has been continuing since 2003 to today. I have been seen that also British and US political systems, corruption and bureaucrats are moving same way destroying the democracy and rob legal businesses to satisfy their ambitions. That’s why I want to show those illegal political ways to the general public, either educate the bureaucrats and politicians or give general public something to think about.
