Timing is Everything

Earlier this year, in May, I attended HotDocs as a representative of the feature documentary film Jesus Loves You.  After hearing people rave about the event for so many years, I was really enjoying the whole festival experience: the opportunity to overwhelm my senses with creative and inspired films, the easy camaraderie of my fellow filmmakers, and the small-world, hey-I -know-you moments that are surprisingly common in the doc world.  It was also a thrill to see Jesus Loves You on the big screen in form of a live audience and hear from them at the Q & A afterwards.  The post-screening discussion after our showing at the 2008 Berlinale in February had been very much influenced by the skeptical  view of Germans on religion - and especially on missionaries - so co-director Robert Cibis and I were curious to learn how the reactions of our HotDocs audience would mesh with what we'd heard before.  One thing that really surprised me was that the Canadian audience laughed at very different parts of the film than the German audience did.  Altogether, I had the impression that the viewers at HotDocs enjoyed the film largely because of the cultural clashes between American missionaries and German soccer fans, while the German audiences tended to feel some degree of alarm and indignation that the Americans had come to Germany at all.

Another thing that I loved about the festival was the delegates area.  A Canadian friend was nice enough to put me up in royal style for the week that I was there, but since she lived rather far from downtown Toronto, I spent quite a lot of my time between screenings in the Delegates Area - taking advantage of the wi-fi, running into friends that I hadn't seen for a while, and meeting new people.  But the best thing about the delegates area was that if I hadn't been there, I would not have met the lovely Cynthia Close, and Crossing the Bridge would likely not have found such a great fiscal sponsor.

And this is where the title of this post comes into play.  I'm sitting checking my email, and I glance up and see a cheerful-looking blond woman looking around for a place to sit.  It gets pretty crowded in that area, and there weren't a lot of choices.  Since I happened to have room at my table, I spontaneously offered to drag a chair over from another area and share my table with her.

Naturally, we started chatting - and one of the things that came up was the name of my company, Raisin Bomber Films.  What is a Raisin Bomber, Cynthia asked.  When I explained to her the meaning of our name Raisin Bomber and that my father was one of the kids who was more than eager to get some of the American candies, Cynthia said And my father was one of the pilots who did not drop candies but bombs on Berlin!  At first, I thought what a coincidence, but then I realized: no, it is not a coincidence - it just shows how even the most horrible situations can eventually lead to friendships.  And that we Germans tend to forget how closely we are related to Americans.  After all, people with German heritage are still the largest self-imported ancestry group in the United States.  Maybe the "wurst" and "sauerbraten" heritage even explains the American passion for fatty food... just kidding...

When Cynthia asked about some of the projects that Elizabeth and I had taken on, I told her about Crossing the Bridge, our film on democracy-building in Kosovo.  I told her that our next step in the film's development was to find a fiscal sponsor.  And that's when she told me about the fiscal sponsorship program at Documentary Educational Resources.

I knew of DER's reputation as one of the leading distributors of ethnographic and documentary film, of course, but I confess that I had been unaware of their fiscal sponsorship program.  But soon Cynthia's unbridled enthusiasm for our project and DER's stellar reputation put them at the top of our list of fiscal sponsorship possibilities.  We also liked that DER's mission is to support filmmakers rather than to promote any particular political agenda.  It's very important to Elizabeth and me that Crossing the Bridge present the many facets of Kosovo's very complex story and not just advocate for any one perspective.  There are films when that approach is appropriate, of course, but for this story - when so many people on all "sides" are trying to transcend their collective histories to make a democracy that is vital and inclusive... well, it just seems wrong not to show as much of that as we can.

So there you have it: a chance meeting; an odd coincidence of fathers' histories; and a new fiscal sponsor.  We are thrilled to be sponsored by DER: thank you to Cynthia and the other fine folks there for supporting our film!

And, by the way, if you wish to help support Crossing the Bridge, all you have to do is to CLICK HERE.