After leaving behind an annoying cold and staying in bed for 4 days last week, I started the week by reaching out to several female directors for interview requests. Two of them, Elka Sadat and Saba Sahar are from Afghanistan and were referred to me by my colleague Fereshteh Forough. These are the first steps towards our "women's empowerment through online film distribution" project here at Film Annex. I also reached out to some up and coming filmmakers in the US, including Becky Sloan and Kirsten Lepore. I think comparing the experiences of female directors living in the US to those in Afghanistan and Central/South Asia will be an interesting study and will help us define the main differences as well as the lack of opportunities for the latter.
I continued the week corresponding with several other filmmakers. Nick Fox-Gieg, a SXSW award-winning animator and a Film Annex member, will be visiting our studio this coming Monday for a video interview. I'm very excited to meet Nick and talk more about his work, strategies for social media, and upcoming projects. In fact, his film, The Orange was the first film I featured in my WACKY TUESDAYS series. Speaking of WACKY TUESDAYS, this week, I highlighted a new video, this time a music video by the artist Ewan MacLeod for CUT COPY'S song, Lights and Music. I find that this new blog series is giving me the opportunity to re-discover some of the best (and craziest) videos on Film Annex and look at the new ones with a more critical eye.
Tuesday night, my friend, actor and writer Lillian Rodriguez, who is also an Annex Press Contributor, invited me to a special event at the Cherry Lane Theater, celebrating women playwrights. I attended the event with Fereshteh and got to listen to the stories of three amazing theater & film women, Hallie Flanagan, Edna Ferber, and Sarah Bernhardt, told by another set of amazing women Milly Barranger, Julie Gilbert and Ruth Wolff. After the talk and performance, I got to meet the Director of the League of Professional Theatre Women. I told her about our women's empowerment initiative and invited her to the Film Annex Studios for an interview. I can't wait to listen to her stories. More on that soon...
Later in the week, I spent some time working on a couple press releases. The first was about the collaboration between Film Annex and Captain Edward Zellem, introducing Afghan Proverbs to Afghan students' school curriculums. The other one was about the new blog series about CBS' 60 Minutes written by a team of Afghan writers led by Roya Mahboob and Fereshteh Forough.
On a different note, I had a great conversation with Adam Rackoff this morning. He's a producer who worked with Matthew Modine on his short film, Jesus Was A Commie. Currently, he is executive producing the Academy Award nominee Bill Plympton's new animation feature CHEATIN'. I'm looking forward to working with Adam in promoting his projects on Film Annex. Written and video interviews are on their way, so stay tuned for some very very exciting content with great actors and directors.
Last but not least, my new music video for Hee Young was recently released, and now you can watch it on Film Annex! I wrote a blog about it yesterday so more info on there... This was such a great experience and I look forward to working on more video projects. Already have a crazy idea, but it's a secret for now... Shhhh.
Till next week,
Eren
