Meetings galore!

Meeting great new people has been the theme for this past week.

1. First, there was Elissa, who I originally met almost a year ago during a mass interview with Brooke Allen. In mind-blowing fashion, she had made the decision to pick up and pursue her dream the year before, by spending 6 months in India filming a documentary on a girls’ vocational school. Now, she has 25 hours of un-translated footage, and a burning desire to see her documentary completed.

            Being engaged to a native Hindi speaker, I brought Ajit (my fiancé) to our meeting. While 25 hours of translation was too huge a project for him to take on alone, we later got on the phone with Ajit’s mother in India, who recommended a Hindi institute she’s familiar with. The next step is to look into whether or not the folks there can help Elissa out. This, coupled with a few other folks that Elissa has helping to translate smaller chunks of the project, should help her to get the job done. Once we get Elissa squared away with translation, I’ll be helping her to edit her project, learning about documentary film-making and how it works, as opposed to feature films.

2. I also had a fascinating lunch with Brooke and three other folks that he’s working with: Sam, a girl about my age who has been involved with film-making all her life, and Norm and Joan, a dynamic acting couple.

Sam is fantastic. The daughter of a cinematographer who has worked on such documentaries as An Inconvenient Truth, she knows pretty much all there is to know about film-making. She’s also interested in doing a No MFA Project of her own, focusing on writing and philosophy. She’s very generously offered to help connect me with others in the film industry, to help me learn the things I want to learn, and I will be trying to help her with her writing. I feel like we could create sort of a co-No MFA Project support system, helping each other out along our paths.

As for Norm and Joan: Norm I recognized as the dad from a famous Citi Card commercial (you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xvUkHqEDX4). Together, Norm, Joan, and their friend Jon Freda formed the show “50 to Death.” (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=50todeath&aq=f). They’re interested in opening the development of the show up to a larger team, including people such as myself who want to learn about the total process of putting something like this together. (The show, btw, is absolutely delightful, and a great concept – and couldn’t have more charming stars.)

I’m incredibly excited about getting to know all of these people better, and to move forward on all of their/my respective projects. I feel this week has been a true testament to the number of fascinating, helpful people you can come into contact with – if you just ask!