[This blog post is taken from our newsletter. If you would like to be on our mailing list, please subscribe in the box on the right side of this page. Thank you!]
We have so much exciting news to report it’s hard to know where to begin! Let’s start with our new logo and the website. Our film company’s name is Four Nine and a Half Pictures, Inc. which is a self-deprecating bit of humor, since that’s also Shashwati’s height. We wanted a logo which captured the grandeur of our ambitions while retaining the sense of humor embodied in the name. The only person we could think of who had the necessary skill to pull something like this off was our family friend, the award winning cartoonist Mort Gerberg, known best for his cartoons in The New Yorker, Playboy, Harvard Business Review, Publishers Weekly and on the Huffington Post. We are really happy with the wonderful logo he designed for us, and have featured it prominently on every page of our new company website Fournineandahalf.com.
The new website also features links to our new Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as an RSS feed. As we prepare to release our film, we plan to update all of these with more regular announcements, so please follow us via your favorite social networking tool if you want to get the absolutely latest news.
Speaking of the new film… We are finally close to a near-final cut that we are happy to start workshopping! The working title you all know, “Hooch and Hamlet in Chharanagar” has been discarded. Not only did we not get a chance to film the production “Hamlet in Chharangar,” but the focus of the film has shifted away from illegal brewing. To better capture the new focus on police brutality, the new title, “Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!” is taken from the play Budhan Theater was preforming during the period we were filming.
Here is how we describe the film:
Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! is about a troupe of young Chhara actors using theater to fight police brutality and the stigma of criminality. The Chhara are one of 198 communities in India—now over 60 million people—labeled “born criminals” by the British. Although the British are long gone, the stigma still remains. We meet Roxy whose father was beaten to death for speaking out, and his best friend Dakxin who was thrown in prison for writing plays critical of the police. We meet Dakxin’s Dadi (grandmother), who tell us about life in the government-run prison camps. The film is about a society in transition: the older generation did whatever it took to make ends meet, but they want a better life for their children. With social prejudice blocking all exits, for some young people, theater offers the only way out. From busy street corner protests to a climactic neve-wracking performance in front of cadets at the Police Academy, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! takes us inside the lives of these young people as they use theater to carve out a place for themselves in the world.
Shashwati has cut an amazing new four minute trailer for the film, which you can see on the film’s new website: dontbeatmesir.com. The website also sports a new FAQ to answer many of the questions we have encountered in the four years we’ve been working on the project.
As I said, the film is almost done. We will be taking the film with us to India in January, where we will take it to Chharanagar to show the film’s subjects. We are also arranging a two week tour of India where, together with members of Budhan Theatre, we will be running a series of workshops with activists and other DNT communities. Because the history of DNT communities is so fragmented there is still not a strong common identity. Our hope is that our film can be used as a means for fostering dialog between DNT communities within India.
But, of course, we want everyone else to see the film as well! For this reason we now have to launch into the next, and perhaps hardest, stage of film production: marketing and distribution. We have some good news here as well. The film was accepted into this year’s Asian Documentary Forum in Kolkata, India! It is a chance for us to work with producers, funders and commissioning editors from some of the top media institutions around the world to get input, guidance and possibly (fingers crossed) even make a deal…
Besides traveling around promoting the film, we also still need to pay for post-production costs, including an original soundtrack by John Plenge, color correction, and onlining the film at HD resolution. This will be a costly process, the airfare alone will exceed our budget, so for that reason we are once again accepting (tax-deductible) donations. Our goal is to raise $50,000 in the next six months. If you can help in any way, even $20 is a big help (we raised thousand’s of dollars via such small donations last time we did this), please click the link below, or go to our website and visit the support page.
And if you’d like to help out in other ways, such as publicity, fundraising or arranging screenings, please let us know! You can also help out by forwarding this post to a friend or linking to our website or trailer on your blog.
Happy holidays, and best wishes for the new year!
Kerim & Shashwati
