Film Annex is an online film distribution company that has 300,000 registered users. Of those, 40,000 are registered as professionals of the film industry, and 5,000 are girls from Afghanistan registered also on the Examer Vocational and Educational Software.

 

 

Eren Gulfidan, Film Annex's Artistic Director, said, “We share our revenues with independent filmmakers and we distributed over 1.5 million dollars in revenues. Why not including the students of developing countries like Afghanistan?” She also added, “Why not tell stories from the prospective of the students?” I suggest you follow Eren on her Twitter account: https://twitter.com/mumfus.

 

Semeyon Maltzev and Alexey Levchenko, Film Annex's cinematographers and film editors, suggested inviting film celebrities like Matthew Modine and Abel Ferrara to produce films in Afghanistan, starting from a great script.

 

Photo by Angela Shah.

This morning, during my subway ride to my Judo training with Gary St Leger, I got inspired to combine the two concepts and structure this:

 

The first step is to invite Film Annex's best filmmakers featured on Eren's Picks to write a few pages on how they produce their Film Treatments. Wikipedia mentions the following: "A film treatment (or treatment) is a piece of prose, typically the step between scene cards and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture, television program, or radio play. It is generally longer and more detailed than an outline (or one-page synopsis), and it may include details of directorial style that an outline omits. Treatments read like a short story, except they are told in the present tense and describe events as they happen."

Then we would take the filmmakers' advice and publish them on the Examer, share them with the students and invite them to create their own treatments. We would ask the teachers in Afghanistan to rate the best written treatments in terms of grammar, and from those, we would select the best and share them with Eren's Picks' filmmakers so that they can vote for their favorite story. We would offer the production of the story to the independent filmmakers and also share with film celebrities like Matthew Modine, Abel Ferrara or Amir Khan.

The young student will be rewarded with a small scholarship. They would be part of the production team and would also benefit from a percentage of the revenues generated by the advertising and sales of the film.

The movie could be produced in Afghanistan and/or other countries.

Film Annex has the human and financial resources to pick the brains of thousands of young Afghan women and students from many other countries in the world. And as Spiderman says, “With power comes responsibility."

 

 

I am looking forward to Eren Gulfidan's and Fereshteh Forough's, Film Annex liaison to Central and South Asia, feedback on this project and the parameters proposed by Eren's Picks' filmmakers.